I talk about Wal­ter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­duc­tion too much. By too much, I mean every cou­ple of years. I really should read some other stuff that he’s writ­ten, so I don’t get too pseudo-​intellectually scholarship-​boyish. Like I’m about to. I col­lect stuff, not a lot, but stuff nonethe­less. It used to be baseball […]

I’ve either got what Bram had, or some­thing from a coworker. Christ­mas shop­ping is fin­ished, though I almost got into a fight at the liquor store buy­ing some­thing as a part of my secret santa gift exchange at work. All that I have left to do is fur­ther bak­ing. Appar­ently, chocolate-​dipped pret­zel sticks are a hit with a teething 18-​month old and […]

Here’s a great excerpt from the book I’m cur­rently read­ing. “This after­noon Sallie’s three youngest pups, Sue’s Sir­ius, and Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s cat, have to be shot. We could not under­take the main­te­nance of weak­lings under the new con­di­tions. Mack­lin, Crean, and the car­pen­ter seemed to feel the loss of their friends rather badly. We […]

I just fin­ished read­ing A Deep­ness in the Sky by Ver­nor Vinge. Since I’ve been cul­ti­vat­ing a gestalt knowl­edge of the sci­ence fic­tion canon for nearly two decades, I was able to notice nods and reflec­tions of past works. The book owes an obvi­ous and huge debt to James Blish’s Cities in Flight, but there are also Tolkien […]

I finally had the chance to try out the Euclid Cor­ri­dor today, rid­ing the #6 to a Flash Action­Script class at the Cole Cen­ter for Con­tin­u­ing Edu­ca­tion. When I started at the ISC just over a year ago the direc­tor empha­sized his encour­age­ment for us to take skill-​building classes. If there was an award for most classes taken, […]

The Eco­nomic Nat­u­ral­ist by Robert H. Frank was a fairly easy read and inter­est­ing to me from the stand­point of eco­nomic ethnog­ra­phy. I don’t know much about eco­nom­ics in an aca­d­e­mic sense, but after read­ing this book and reflect­ing it is obvi­ous that I use it on a daily basis. In ret­ro­spect this makes sense because eco­nom­ics is a method […]

I ordered The Road from the library a day before I found out it won the Pulitzer, because of a year-​old review from an old copy of Stop Smil­ing that I picked up at Pitch­fork. The Pulitzer noti­fi­ca­tion, com­ing as it did from a thread about lit­er­ary crit­ics and their deri­sion for genre fic­tion, stayed in my mind as I read the […]

Dur­ing unend­ing hours in the back of a con­ver­sion van and brief respites on land in Canada I read Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City. This book was rec­om­mended to me by Nate Scheible dur­ing a dis­cus­sion out­side of Parish Hall while wait­ing for a noise show to start and over a few Com­modore Perry IPAs. He found out that I was […]

This spring/​summer seems to be turn­ing into biog­ra­phy time so far. I’ve been pick­ing up books at Vis­i­ble Voice, and the Walker Evans biog­ra­phy was one of them. For the most part it is an inter­est­ing well-​written and infor­ma­tive look at the per­sonal life and moti­va­tions of my favorite phở­tog­ra­pher. Chrono­log­i­cally it gets a bit boring […]

As I wait for Ama­zon to ship me the lat­est Tolkien release, The Chil­dren of Húrin, I find myself dis­agree­ing with sev­eral reviews I’ve read, in terms of plac­ing this work in con­text with his other stuff. The lede in the Wash­ing­ton Post review: If any­one still labors under the delu­sion that J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer of […]

US Guys is a book by jour­nal­ist Char­lie LeDuff; a series of vignettes that are mar­keted as an exam­i­na­tion of man­hood and mas­culin­ity in Amer­i­can cul­ture. It starts off well enough, the writ­ing is crisp and the obser­va­tions are fresh and inter­est­ing, but by the end Char­lie seems to have run out of obser­va­tions about mas­culin­ity and […]

I’ve got a cou­ple of cheap pulp nov­els that have to do with my name. The first is Don­ald Barr Chidsey’s Cap­tain Adam: The his­tory of an auda­cious young sea­man from the Amer­i­can colonies who duelled and prayed and sinned his way to mag­nif­i­cent adven­ture on the law­less seas of the early 18^th cen­tury! The cover […]

James Agee has long been one of my favorite writ­ers. Recently I received a book of his film crit­i­cism from the library. It is pub­lished by one of my favorite pub­lish­ers: The Library of Amer­ica. Typ­i­cally I’m not a fan of any par­tic­u­lar type of jour­nal­ism or jour­nal­ist, but Agee doesn’t really fit a type; his earnest­ness, pas­sion and […]

Yes­ter­day was a ter­ri­ble day to be head­ing west on I-​90. I hit Buf­falo right after the Bills game got out, had tor­ren­tial down­pours all the way to Cleve­land and arrived back in town right when the Browns game fin­ished. Peo­ple were dri­ving and not-​driving like jack­asses in the rain. The peo­ple pulled over on the side […]

What should I read this summer?

In which Adam talks about a new movie list he has started watch­ing and a pos­si­bly new book list to start reading.

In which Adam reviews Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe

In which Adam reviews another book by Gene Wolfe.

In which Adam reviews Gene Wolfe’s first novel, Peace.

In which Adam reviews A Case of Con­science, a sci­ence fic­tion novel by James Blish.

In which Adam reviews the eleventh install­ment in a fan­tasy series that he has been read­ing for sixty per­cent of his lifetime.

In which Adam reviews the dated but strangely appro­pri­ate sci­ence fic­tion novel The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner

In which an anthol­ogy, Dark Mat­ter: A Cen­tury of Spec­u­la­tive Fic­tion from the African Dias­pora, is reviewed and the critic shows some of his inher­ent racism.

As was rec­om­mended to me, I read J. M. Coet­zee’s Dis­grace. And indeed it was a good book. Folks seem to like call­ing Coetzee’s writ­ing “sparse;” and I guess you could say that. I tend to think that writ­ers who are wordy don’t really know what they are try­ing to say. What comes through with Coet­zee is that he […]

The Edna Web­ster Col­lec­tion of Undis­cov­ered Writ­ing by Richard Brauti­gan came in the mail yes­ter­day. This is a col­lec­tion of Brautigan’s writ­ing from when he was young [21 or so] and unpub­lished. It sat in a safe deposit box for years until Edna Web­ster, the mother of his first girl­friend, con­tacted a publisher.

The Unrea­son­ing Mask by Philip José Farmer is yet another first edi­tion hard­cover I picked up for 50 cents. I’d been impressed with his book To Your Scat­tered Bod­ies Go, so when I stum­bled across some­thing else by him, and for such a good price, I picked it up. It was alright. I think Mr. Farmer does a much bet­ter job […]

A few months back I picked up a first edi­tion hard­cover of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik for 50 cents. I finally read it, yes­ter­day. It is typ­i­cal, full of mind-​bending Dickisms, so worth a read. Spoil­ers past the hoo-​ha.

By rec­om­men­da­tion I read Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. It is a novel about the his­tory of phi­los­o­phy, writ­ten in such a way the the con­cepts from the pre-​Socratics through Kant and up to Sartre could be grasped by a juve­nile. Spoil­ers past the jump.

Pol­ish sci­ence fic­tion was new to me. Stanisław Lem is great. His Cybe­riad is appro­pri­ately sub­ti­tled Fables for a Cyber­netic Age and con­cerns itself with two wily con­struc­tors, Trurl and Kla­pau­cius, who are just stu­pid enough to get into all kinds of scrapes, and just smart enough to get the best of every­one in the end.

The Most Sig­nif­i­cant SF & Fan­tasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953 – 2002 I finally man­aged to track down every book on the above list, many are/​were unfor­tu­nately out of print. But I did it. I’ve read them all. Mini-​Reviews of all 50 are inside.

I just fin­ished The Chron­i­cles of Thomas Covenant the Unbe­liever by Stephen R. Don­ald­son [who is, inci­den­tally, from Cleve­land]. It is com­prised of three books: Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War and The Power that Pre­serves. With this series I have finally, after three years, fin­ished the Sci­ence Fic­tion Book Club list: The Most Sig­nif­i­cant SF […]

All My Sins Remem­bered is the sec­ond book I’ve read by Joe Halde­man. The first, The For­ever War, was a really good book about the social and psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of extended space travel when it screws with sub­jec­tive ver­sus objec­tive time. All My Sins Remem­bered is sim­i­lar but different.

The Book of the New Sun is a tetral­ogy com­posed of The Shadow of the Tor­turer, The Claw of The Con­cil­ia­tor, The Sword of the Lic­tor and The Citadel of the Autarch. It is sort of a blend of both fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion in terms of genre, but with chap­ter titles like “Escha­tol­ogy and Gen­e­sis” it […]

I’ve read every­thing Cord­wainer Smith ever pub­lished now. That is some­what dis­ap­point­ing because I like him and his tena­cious sto­ries quite a bit. Norstrilia is one of the clas­sic sci­ence fic­tion books I bought for 10 cents apiece while antique shop­ping last week.

I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick and while this novel is sup­pos­edly his break­through work, The Man in the High Cas­tle is my least favorite of his works. The basic premise is that the United States of Amer­ica and Britain lost World War II and now the USA is split between Impe­r­ial Japan and […]

I hon­estly don’t know why this book was in the Top 50 Sci­ence Fic­tion books list. Death­bird Sto­ries by Har­lan Elli­son is a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries that wres­tle with gods and wor­ship­pers, both new and old, and from dif­fer­ent angles.

Wilmar Shiras’s Chil­dren of the Atom is a hard book to come by. It had been out of print for quite some time until rel­a­tively recently. I now only have four books left to read on this list. Thank­fully, I can find them all in the Cleve­land library system.

I’m cur­rently read­ing John Brun­ner’s Stand on Zanz­ibar. I man­aged to get my hands on a first edi­tion in fair con­di­tion. Paper wasn’t acid-​free in those days, so the paper is get­ting a lit­tle soft, but it is still very read­able. First off it reminded me a bit of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren.

A few weeks ago I fin­ished read­ing The Redis­cov­ery of Man, a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by Cord­wainer Smith. His real name is Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger and he was the god­son of Sun Yat Sen, a pro­fes­sor of Asi­atic Stud­ies at Johns Hop­kins, spoke sev­eral lan­guages, wrote the sem­i­nal work Psy­cho­log­i­cal War­fare and was a spy [more here].

I fin­ished Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Red by Anne Car­son this morn­ing because I woke up at 5am, for no rea­son, for the third con­sec­u­tive day. It is a “novel in verse” and a blend­ing of Greek myth and contemporary life.

What a curi­ous book. This guy is lay­ered a bit like an onion and there really isn’t any rea­son to trust any­one who claims any­thing in the entire book. The humor is droll, very Scotch, and the type that makes you want to smack the peo­ple upside the head for being goof­balls. It was an enjoy­able, somewhat […]

I’m almost fin­ished with all of the books I received for Christ­mas. I cur­rently have around 75 pages left to read in Alis­dair Gray’s Poor Things and then I have to read Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Red by Anne Car­son and I will be with­out read­ing mate­r­ial once again. Here is what I read while my site was wigged out:

I fin­ished read­ing my first Christ­mas book today. The Changeling Sea by Patri­cia McKil­lip. Despite the fact that she writes fan­tasy aimed at a mainly female audi­ence she remains one of my favorite fan­tasy authors.

I am still 6 feet, one and one half inches tall, I am 167 pounds, my heart­beat is 71 bpm and my blood pres­sure is 133⁄81. I also voted today and am dis­ap­pointed that I did not receive a sticker.

I’ve been run­ning low on things to read lately. Most of the sci­ence fic­tion and espe­cially the fan­tasy stuff looks like com­pletely shal­low and uno­rig­i­nal tripe. And while there are plenty of other things to read besides sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy, I don’t really know where to start.

Over the week­end I had a con­ver­sa­tion with B rd over at edlun­dart about time and since then I’ve coin­ci­den­tally read sev­eral short sto­ries deal­ing with time travel by Michael Swanwick.

I fin­ished read­ing Ivan­hoe the other day. It was good, sur­pris­ingly so. I ended up lik­ing the main vil­lain more than any other character.

I went to Half Price Books on Fri­day and man­aged to not buy the whole store. Instead I bought three illus­trated books of fables and folk­tales. All brand new and all rather cheap.

“There are… two con­cepts of the artist. The one gives all to his work, in a very real way; if he does not pro­duce vol­umes, at least he goes through many, many drafts. He neglects his life, and his life tot­ters and sways and often plum­mets into chaos. It is pre­sump­tu­ous of us to judge him […]

…if I repent of any­thing, it is very likely to be my good behav­ior. –Economy

I read two books in two days. Yes, I’ve already fin­ished the books I picked up Sun­day at the library. Besides both hav­ing the word ‘heaven’ in the title and both using the word ‘mil­que­toast’ in the expo­si­tion, they are very different.

I’m on riley­dog today! I’m almost done read­ing Louis Aragon’s The Adven­tures of Telemachus. Appar­ently, this is also a par­ody of a story writ­ten by Fenelon in 1699. I’ve had pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence with Dadaist films and visual art, but not lit­er­a­ture. This expe­ri­ence has been appro­pri­ately strange. Aragon warps every­thing for his own plea­sure. Greco-​Roman is wrestled […]

Min­utes ago I fin­ished read­ing Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is, undoubt­edly, one of the best sci­ence fic­tion nov­els I have ever perused. It makes no bones about its sta­tus as alle­gory [which I, like Tolkien, have cor­dially dis­liked for some time]. But it does not strike me as an alle­gory about human­ity as […]

I’ve been wend­ing my way through Fritz Leiber’s refresh­ing short story fan­tasy lately. I con­sider myself some­what of a con­nosieur of oth­er­worldly lit­er­a­ture, and Fritz, I must say, is not a stale author. Much fan­tasy is either bad Tolkien imi­ta­tion or based on an RPG of some sort. Need­less to say, I’d rather read Tolkien and the other Inklings […]

This is the sum­mer of sci-​fi for me. Last year was the beat gen­er­a­tion, and distopias. Philip K. Dick could some­how qual­ify in each of those cat­e­gories. What I find most inter­est­ing how­ever, is the ease with which his sto­ries are con­verted into films. Blade Run­ner is based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric […]

I’ve been burn­ing my way through the Top 50 Sci­ence Fic­tion books of the last 50 years. I’ve recently read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Williams Gibson’s Neu­ro­mancer, and Anne Rice’s Inter­view with a Vam­pire. Cur­rently I am read­ing Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. I am 28% fin­ished with the list. Last evening I fin­ished Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s […]

Every morn­ing, one of the first things I do is read the fun­nies. I do this online using my.yahoo. I read Boon­docks, Fox­trot, and Non Sequitur. Since yahoo pro­vides me with plenty of other options to access, I have cho­sen to take advan­tage of a few. One of these is the Barnes and Noble Show­case. It is mostly crap. Rarely […]

Went to the library again. Got Gravity’s Rain­bow by Thomas Pyn­chon; The Com­plete poems of Carl Sand­burg; and a selec­tion of short sto­ries by Philip K. Dick. As I was check­ing out, I was checked out by the librar­ian. She hit on me last time I was there as well. I was wear­ing me Hea­then T-​shirt, and she said some­thing about […]

The Sum­mer Read­ing List cur­rently con­tains: High Fidelity — Nick Hornby Ulysses — James Joyce The Hawk­line Mon­ster — Richard Brauti­gan The Wasp Fac­tory — Iain Banks His Dark Mate­ri­als Tril­ogy — Philip Pull­man Gravity’s Rain­bow — Thomas Pyn­chon The Cor­rec­tions — Jonathan Franzen Some­thing by Kafka I’m always tak­ing sug­ges­tions as well, espe­cially poetry. Tomor­row I get my St. Joe County Library Card.

I fin­ished The Bell Jar last night. I can’t really say that it blew me away. The obvi­ous auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ref­er­ences to Plath’s own life were rather…obvious, and the depic­tion of men­tal decay and rebirth didn’t do much for me either. Granted, since the nar­ra­tor is the crazy one, the nar­ra­tive is going to be col­ored by […]

Bul­let­ma­nia! I’ve played The Two Tow­ers video game. B+ (the lev­els are too short). This post by Mr. Oblivio is great. My Uncle Corbin is here for the ND v. Seton Hall game and will be feed­ing me shortly. She called my house last night but I was already up here. I suck. This semes­ter I will be read­ing these books: […]

I don’t lis­ten to them any­more: they annoy me. They’re going to sleep together. They know it. Each one knows that the other knows it. But since they are young, chaste and decent, since each one wants to keep his self– respect and that of the other, since love is a great poetic thing which you […]

upon reread­ing Nau­sea i am inter­ested in the exis­ten­tial­ist take on regret. Roquentin seems less alien­ated to me than he did the last time i vis­ited him, instead he seems more con­cerned with what used to be and what has changed. he does not accept this change to Nau­sea and mourns for his past. is this Sartre’s […]

Robert Jordan’s newest Cross­roads of Twi­light will be released on the sev­enth. and i must say that i am ready. since i started his Wheel of Time series in 1994 and it offers very few signs of impend­ing clo­sure, i have become slightly impa­tient and per­turbed and even at times apa­thetic regard­ing the series. it has taken so long […]

i’m not one who has much knowl­edge of lit­er­ary trends in novel-​writing but House of Leaves strikes me as a book that could very well be the great work of post­mod­ern lit­er­a­ture. which means every­thing and noth­ing. as an exper­i­men­tal novel it is a remark­ably well con­structed thing. i had a bit of trou­ble get­ting in to it, but […]

i’m about 75% through Screams of Rea­son by David Skal. Its mostly about Hollywood’s fas­ci­na­tion with mad sci­ence. Its ok. but a good shot in the dark by my mother who bought it for me. i can see many dif­fer­ent tracks where expan­sion and deeper aca­d­e­mic dis­course would add some insights but it is pretty hard to […]

after a sum­mer filled with read­ing works con­sid­ered to be fine pieces of lit­er­a­ture, my return to the books i have enjoyed the most, fan­tasy nov­els, is bit­ter­sweet. i rel­ish the sto­ries for their enter­tain­ment value, but now they are start­ing to seem a little…juvenile. per­haps this is just due to the books i am read­ing cur­rently, The Ren­shai Chronicles, […]

Day 2: On page 182 of Atlas Shrugged, I fig­ured out who John Galt was. Major Objec­tion: 18% of the way through the book. The story only holds my inter­est because of the char­ac­ters’ inter­nal dia­logues. Char­ac­ter devel­op­ment does not seem to be Ayn Rand’s strong point and her use of nar­ra­tive device only seems clich?. I AM, […]

It was sim­ply and well writ­ten and I was impressed with Huxley’s knowl­edge and insights into social con­di­tion­ing, yet as the author him­self said in his fore­ward, it has many flaws. I am now con­vinced that every utopia is at the same time an antiu­topia. Granted, Hux­ley presents a world free of virtue or vice, that cre­ates an […]

Yes­ter­day, I read Naked Lunch by William S. Bur­roughs. It has been on my list of books to read since Dr. Ledman’s US His­tory class junior year of high school when Phil cor­rectly answered one of his father’s ridicu­lous extra credit ques­tions. They never had any­thing to do with US his­tory per se and were always […]

5.30.02 INT. NIEUWLAND SCIENCE BUILDING 2:14pm DAY it took awhile to get used to the malenky slovos in A Clock­work Orange but once i got it through my gul­liver to under­stand what it meant to go out with your droo­gies and use your rooker in order to tol­chock some grahzny veck and smeck about while the red […]

5.26.02 EXT. MOD QUAD. 6:03pm DAY i think the extreme con­ser­vatism here at Notre Dame has made more of a lib­eral out of me. the hypocrisy, bureau­cracy, and oppres­sive nature of ‘tra­di­tion’ that i am con­stantly faced with has slowly forced me from my rather apo­lit­i­cal fence­sit­ting into a slightly more rad­i­cal stance where i wel­come effec­tive change and […]

5.9.02 INT. KEOUGH HALL RM 435 1:00pm DAY all of the mar­mosets are gone, and so am i. this won’t be updated until i am back on the 20^th. for those of you who want to know, here is my sum­mer read­ing list as it stands now (feel free to add to it). fritz leiber; art of […]