30 Books

10. Dead Until Dark

2009-10-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

9. The Electric Universe

2009-10-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

The Electric Universe by David Bodanis

8. Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire

2009-09-18T14:18:00.001-07:00

I'm re-reading the Harry Potter series. Love this book. I was up till 3 am last night finishing.

7. Holy Fire

2009-09-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

6. Wetware

2009-08-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

Wetware by Rudy Rucker

The anarchic robots, the boppers, are back in Wetware, the second novel in Rucker's groundbreaking cyberpunk series. I enjoyed this novel as much as the first.

5. the Color of Magic

2009-08-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

This is the second Pratchett book I've read. It was fun and an enjoyable read but I did set it aside on several occasions for other books. It was Pratchett's first Diskworld novel and served as a tour of Diskworld. A tourist, the forst tourist to ever set foot on Diskworld arrives and chooses the incompetent and cowardly near-wizard Rincewind as his guide. The evade Death and take many snapshots as the hop from one continent to the next.

4. Parable of the Sower

2009-08-19T13:13:00.001-07:00

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

This was a brutal second installment of this brilliant series by Octavia Butler. It continues the epic tale of Lauren Oya Olamina and Earthseed, her burgeoning religion and community Acorn. At the end of the first novel Olamina, her husband Bankole and their fellow survivors had just arrived at Bankole's sisters land only to find it burnt to ground and Bankole's relatives murdered. This novel picks a couple years later after the survivors had rebuilt the land into the community Acorn.

After a hopeful, but difficult few years of growth, the community is attacked by Christian Extremists and the tale turns brutal. During the ensuing struggle Olamina never gives up her vision of the Earthseed Destiny.

3. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

2009-08-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

The content of this book was interesting, unofortunately all of the jocular asides of the author began wearing on me real fast, and they just kept coming one per paragraph. Eventually I began skimming the book and later set it aside and found other sources for basic physics, chemistry and science literacy.

2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

2009-08-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Book 3 of the Harry Potter series, sees the slow transformation of the series from Children's literature to full blown kids-and-adults fantasy. I decided it was time to re-read the series and this book was a great treat. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed this book.

In it Harry first meets his godfather Sirius Black,
his favorite defense against the dark arts teacher Professor Lupin and the dread Dementors.

1. Dr Bloodmoney

2009-08-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

Dr Bloodmoney by Philip K Dick

This novel by P K Dick is a bit of a change of pace for the author. The setting for the story is just before and after a Nuclear Apocalypse. There are some familiar Dickian elements: the Gnostic vision of a world ruled over by a false demiurge with a distant, helpless Deity looking on from beyond the planet. In this case the demiurge is the phocomelus Hoppy Harrington and the deity is an orbitting astronaut, the witty radio voice of Dangerfield that people all over the world tune into every night when the satellite he is stranded on is within range.

After the Nuclear anihilation, the novel follows the survivors as they first escape the city of Berkeley and then head into the countryside of Northen California. All of the small towns have a doctor and a handy. A handy is someone who can fix the old technologies that still remain, such as the refrigerators or the radios the towns use to tune in the orbitting Dangerfield. One such handy is Hoppy Harrington, a man without arms or legs who can fix technology with his mind. He is also a brilliant impersonator who often entertains the town by imitating dangerfield and others.

The title character Dr Bloodmoney, or Bluthgeld, is the nuclear physicist responsible for the nuclear armageddon. Afterwards he escapes from Berkely and becomes a sheep farmer in the town of West Marin, a town he shares with Hoppy. Bluthgeld suffers from paranoia and in West Marin believes he is able to fire off another volley of nuclear weapons. Before he is able to finish this task he has a confrontation with Hoppy whose powers of telekinesis are increasing, he and this leads towards the end of the novel.

I quite enjoyed Dr Bloodmoney, is satisfied my thirst for paranoid Dickian stories and post-apocalyptic tales. Highly recommended.

starting 30 books again in 2009

2009-08-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've decided to start the count over again for 2009. I didn't quite make 30 books in 2008, but I've got a bit more time now in 2009. Bring on the Sci-Fi!

17. Twilight

2008-12-26T13:15:00.000-08:00

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
The last 150 pages of this novel earned 4.5 stars, the first 300 pages were pretty 2 stars.

Every time the main character describes the MV, (main vamp) its some trite description of his beautiful alabaster face. Makes you want to hurl after the 113th time.

I wouldn't have gotten to the good part, but I was stuck in an airport.

View all my reviews.

16. Parable of the Sower

2008-12-23T13:11:00.000-08:00

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow, this novel gave me nightmares for a week. Bleak future. Should be required reading for anyone who fantasizes about the post-industrial collapse.

View all my reviews.

15. Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook: A Worldwide Cycling Route & Planning Guide

2008-09-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

This was a fun and partially useful book, although it concentrates more on bicycle touring in remote places. The first half of the book concentrates on finding a good bike for riding around the world and also getting the gear for camping out anywhere from the Himalayas to the Sonora Desert. And of course everywhere in between. The second half of the book is filled with brief report backs from different bicycle adventurers. This section is both filled with practical advice and inspiring stories as well as a few scary stories as well such as the traveller who had just been dropped off by a truck that had given him a lift and was waving goodbye to them when to his horror they unknowing waved back and ran over his bike. Ouch. Watch for that. Fun good, but there may be more practical books for cyclists who plan to stay in the US.

14: The Essential Touring Cyclist: A Complete Guide for the Bicycle Traveler

2008-09-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

This is a good book to introduce you to Bicycle Touring. It has a really good chapter on training, with advice on building up enough weekly miles to comfortably bike a century (100 miles in a day) or start off on tour.

Also another chapter discussed the different types of touring. The simplest type is supported tours: where all you have to carry is a few bottles of water, your bike tools and a rain coat, and the rest of your luggage (usually a extra large duffel bag) is carted ahead on a van. The next step up is "credit card" touring where you bike from one motel or B&B to the next, carrying all of your clothes with you, but do not need to carry a tent or food or cooking equipment. Then the big one: fully supported touring where you carry everything on your bike: tent, sleeping bag, water, extra clothes, food, camp stove and pots. The author points out its not as rigorous as backpacking however, because you really only need to carry a days supply of food at a time and since your on the road its easy to resupply water and food a few times a day.

Another chapter covers the dangers and pitfalls of touring: weather, auto traffic, flat tires, broken spokes. And the final chapter covers travelling to your tour starting point via plane, train, or bus. And there is even a handy appendix with supported week long tours in different states. I found three intense week-long tours here in colorado.

A good resource for bicyclists who want to try out touring.

13. Ishmael

2008-08-16T15:07:00.001-07:00

a person answers a personal in a newspaper:
Teacher seeks pupil
must earnestly want to save the world
apply in person

When he arrives at the office, he finds an overstuffed chair, a bookshelf full of books and a lowland gorilla behind a wall of glass. That can communicate telepathically.

Ishmael is a philosophcal novel, in the form of a dialogue, between the teacher-gorilla Ishmael and the protagonist-student. Their topic is human culture. Specifically two opposing cultures. In our cultures parlance these are called primitive and civilized cultures, or hunter-gatherers versus farmers. Or in the more neutral terminology of the novel "takers" and "leavers". These two opposing forces are traced through out our culture, through stories in genesis. The story of Adam's fall and the story of the conflict between Cain and Abel.

Abel was a herder, and Cain was the new revolutionary culture, the new culture of Farming. This story is turned on its head to illustrate the conflict between traditional semitic nomadic cultures and the new farming cultures that were beginning to emerge out of the fertile crescent. The farmers grew their own food, were ablo to store it against the risk of drougtht and famine, were able to grow an excess of food with intensive agriculture, this led to an exploding population, as the population grew it pushed at the borders and the caucasian tribes swallowed the lands around them, all of the tribes around them, the Leavers either abandoned their hunter-gatherer/hearder ways and were assimilated by the farmers or they were exterminated, because to the Taker culture there was only one way to live: their way, farming. Any competitor, whether it be hunter-gatherers or predators such as wolves or foxes or competitors to their crops such as other plants, forests, etc must be exterminated. They clear cut the forest and the plains and plowed the soil and planted their crops: wheat, barley, corn, rice. and pulled up any "weeds" that grew on their land.

The Taker world-view is: The world was made for man to govern. Before he evolved the world was in chaos, it needed Man to come and order things. The other view, the Leaver view is: Man was made for the world. Just like the birds and the trees and the foxes and the whales. All of life will continue evolving, Man isn't the final end of the world: the reason the world was created.

Wow, this novel's affected me alot, I nearly cried at the end, and it wasn't overly sad. The story does an amazing job, turning our cultural stories on their head as a warning about our Taker culture, by the previous Leavers cultures. Higly Recommended!

12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

2008-08-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

Book 3 in my 60s Philip K Dick binge.

11. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

2008-08-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

Book 2 of my Philip K Dick 60s novels binge. I'll have to write the full review of this book later, another mind-bending story involving hallucinogens, shifting realities, religious epiphanies.

In the future the United Nations is colonizing distant planets and the moon. Only life in this colonies is lonely and dull, so the colonists spend their time and money taking the hallucinogenic drug Can-D and staring at "Perky Pat" doll-houses until they transform into Perky Pat or her boyfriend, who live back on Earth, go to the beach and have sex. This past time becomes a full-blown religion to the colonists with arguments over transubstantiation of the body into the Perky Pat layout, it also becomes big business and the Perky Pat Layout company hires pre-cogs to predict which fashion accessories will sell well on Mars. This all works well until the mysterious billionaire entrepreneur Palmer Eldritch suddenly returns to Earth from the distant star Proxima Centauri. Does he have a new religion/drug? How will it compete with Can-D?

10. Ubik by Philip K. Dick

2008-07-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

Glen Runciter runs Terra's most successful prudence organization, a category of business designed to prevent pre-cogs and telepaths from reading your thoughts and future and gaining a business edge with your secrets. But business is bad: all of Runciter's main adversaries' talents are disappearing somewhere off-world and he has no idea where. So at the beginning of the story Runciter visits his wife Ella, who lives suspended in half-life or cold-pak storage a sort of limited-time limbo between life and death.

Philip K Dick has a way of starting his novels off with both wild ideas of the future and bland characters and then after he shifts the reality a couple times the characters suddenly go from poster board cut-outs to characters you care about. At the beginning this novel, with its rich boss and bumbling ever-broke employee, Joe Chip, reminded me of George Jetson and Mr Spacely of The Jetsons. But as the ideas of the novel took hold and the concepts, the crazy possibilities sank in I became entranced and my views about this world and life and death were called into question. The future world (of 1992) that Dick creates is one part Jetsons, with its rocket travel to Zurich and the Moon, chutes that drop you from the roof of your building to your office chair and Mortuaries that keep loved ones in "half-life" or suspended cryonic animation for monthly one hour visits; and on the other hand the future is one part distopia with pre-cogs that can see the future and telepaths that can read your thoughts and the worse of all, everything in the future is coin-operated! Your coffee maker, your refrigerator, and even your front door.

This book, first published in 1969, perfectly straddles the early PKDs obsession with the hard core sf ideas and concepts like telepathy, precognition, rocket travel, paranoia, shifting alternative realities with his later themes: life, death, the afterlife, gnosticism, things falling apart. Its a great book to introduce oneself to the amazing, mind-altering substance called Philip K. Dick. Highly Recommended.

9. Software by Rudy Rucker

2008-07-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

A classic of the cyberpunk movement. A story about immortality, consciousness, the human soul, what makes us human, what makes us unique, our thoughts? or our physical existence? This whole book was a metaphysical trip, a trippy conversation over pot cookies.

I like any story where the robots are as sympathetic as the human characters, like Blade Runner, like the new Battlestar Galactica, like Star Trek's Data, like Aliens' Bishop. The robots, the boppers from this series while less polished, are just as compelling, and far more believable.

This novel was one of the fore-runners of the cyberpunk movement and its easy to see why. While rough around the edges (the writing can be a tad misogynistic and there is one nasty homophobic phrase that stopped me cold and reminded me this was written during Reagan's reign of terror and hatred) if taken with a grain of salt its a great story that stands with the best robot/human tales. In fact its inspired me to dust off my old nanpwrimo novel and rewrite it with robots. Viva la Boppers!

8. Eragon

2008-07-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

I'm generally not one for dragon books, oh who am I kidding my last review was of a Star Trek novel, but I loved this book! One night I sat up and read entranced until I suddenly noticed the time when a roommate came home: it was 3 am. The story lines and short chapters kept me turning the pages and at the end of each chapter saying "just one more."

This is a beautiful fantasy novel, with an addictive plot and fun if a bit stockish characters. Yes, the dwarves and the elves feel lifted out of Lord of the Rings, but that can be said from most fantasy novels. The true junkie test is that I want to immediately jump into Eldest the next book of the series as opposed to the Golden Compass series, which I enjoyed but wanted to take a break from.

7. Star Trek, The Dominion War: Book One

2008-06-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

I started reading this book as a lark. After looking for some other books in the boxes and boxes of books we have stowed away, I found Books 1-3 of this series. Since we've just started watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine from the beginning of the series, I pulled these books out. (The Dominion War was the climactic story line of the DS9 series.) Then one night, a couple days ago as a lark I started reading book one ... and I was hooked. It was very well paced and well-plotted. The story revolves around what the Enterprise crew was doing during the Dominion War. There are four plot strands that the story switches back and forth between and they are all interesting. Ensign Ro, Data and Riker are the highlights for me.

I recommend the book for any Star Trek nerds. At night I found myself annoyed when my roommates wanted me to put down the book and watch an episode of Star Trek--even when the book was written after the TV episode, the book, in this case, is still more satisfying.

6. Little Brother

2008-05-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

I just finished this great new novel written by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame. Its a story about what might happen to a high school hacker living in SF if a terrorist attack blew up the Golden Gate Bridge and the Department of Homeland Security declared martial law in the city.

I enjoyed the story immensely, it kept me up late last night turning pages. The technology that Marcus, the main character and hacker of the story, used was almost as interesting as the plot itself, which says alot. Some of the technologies used were: TOR, a tool that allows users to surf the web and email each other anonymously, RFID chip neutralizers, gait analyzers, (ie motion detection analysis that could supposedly identify people by their gait--this was neutralized by putting some pebbles in ones shoe.) and ParanoidLinux, a free linux distro with an intense emphasis on personal privacy and security.

There are instructables of how to use all of these technologies here and the book is available for free download here

5. Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook

2008-05-26T23:59:00.000-07:00

This book is a survival guide with fun, simple recipes in the margins. It has chapters on saving water, growing your food, storing food, managing your waste, creating your own energy, alternative transportation, being prepared for emergencies, imagining sustainability. All with a breezy, conversational style.

The parts I liked about the book, were its emphasis on communitarianism, after all in an emergency situation or in a world of less food and work, you are going to need good neighbors. That's your most important asset, not your gun stash or your EMRs.

I did have a slight problem with the change your ride chapter, in which he spends the entire chapter writing about potentially better gas mileage and bio-fuels. Biofuels are not sustainable, even if you look past the idea of burning food in a car in a starving world, there's the fact that you are taking nutrients out of the soil to grow the corn and then never returning the nutrient via compost as you can when the corn is used as food. Oh, yeah and one more annoyance was all of the powdered milk in the recipes.

But the chapter on Utopia which deals with eco-villages, developing consensus and talking to the gun-nut-wannabe-warlords with a reference to the Seven Samurai more than make up for the ethanol name dropping.

But overall, I heartily enjoyed the book and will try some of the recipes (without the powdered milk).

currently reading

2008-05-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

In Defense of Food
the Color of Magic
Little Brother
A Country Year
Twelve Wild Swans
Post-petrol Survival Guide and Cookbook

you see how this goes!?