Miss Thing
posted by Tim Walters @ 4:01 PM After flirting with a couple of library cataloging applications, I've settled on Library Thing. Rather than a desktop application, it's a web application, which means anyone can see my library. From this we can see that I have 2,414 books (although there are still a few hundred I haven't catalogued), which sounds like a lot until you get a load of this guy.I can also see all the books I've read since the last time I blogged one:
Ken Macleod: Learning The World (see Hugo commentary)
John Varley: Red Lightning (not as good as Red Thunder, but then again that was pretty damn good)
Neil Hanson: The Confident Hope Of A Miracle: The True Story Of The Spanish Armada (fascinating)
Kate Wilhelm: Storyteller (see H.c.)
Michael Moorcock: Between The Wars (Byzantium Endures/The Laughter Of Carthage/Jerusalem Commands/The Vengeance Of Rome) (This long, vexing masterpiece deserves a real essay. Fortunately, John Clute has provided one.)
John Varley: Millennium (very grabby, wild ending)
Harry Partch: Bitter Music (his hobo journal, and many essays; reminds me of The Motion Of Light In Water, and it's almost that good)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (prescient 20s dystopia, beautifully done)
Lin Carter, ed.: Flashing Swords #1 (the Anderson story is excellent, the Vance good, the rest so-so)
Ian Watson: The Embedding (more thriller-y than I remembered, but some good SF aspects as well)
David Deutsch: The Fabric Of Reality (mind-roasting epistemology/science weirdness)
Roger Zelazny: Roadmarks (mid-grade Zelazny; there are worse things to be)
Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker (we are devo!)
Conjunctions #39: The New Wave Fabulists (very nice slipstream anthology, almost every story is good-to-excellent)
Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (his magnum opus; one of the best books ever)
1 Comments:
Gad, I am seething with envy at the number of books you read per unit time.
Wife - the other person in my life whose reading speed just infuriates me ;-) - just read Varley's RED THUNDER and tells me I need to read it because there are railroad tank cars (my professional field) launched into space. I generally enjoy Varley, though I seem to be the only person dense enough not to get much enjoyment out of the TITAN series.
The true story of the Armada is indeed fascinating. So many decisions on both sides that could easily have been made differently, to vast effect.
Speaking of Clute, there's an anthology out there called POLDER that appears to have been structured around some of the concepts in the Clute and Grant ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY. Art imitates criticism.
Curious what sent you back to FLASHING SWORDS #1. I read the series in high school, and now looking at the contents, I can't recall most of the stories.
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