Gabrielle, who’s 8 years old, is re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia, a compilation of something like 7 books totalling close to a thousand pages.
She’s a major bookworm, and I shot this image to capture the moment. But the truly incredible thing is that she first read the series at 6 years of age. Unbelievable.
Of course, at that time she was being home-schooled. Now she’s in a regular school environment and is not progressing nearly as fast as before …
I’ve just finished re-reading The Lord of the Rings for probably the tenth time, and was so incredibly struck by one passage.
I have been seriously remiss in writing up some mini reviews of what I’ve been reading lately, and this article will not address the issue satisfactorily.
However, in the limited time I have …. here’s the list.
Go get it, go read it.
I don’t agree with everything Spider says or writes, and he has a disconcerting preoccupation with clothing, or the lack thereof, but he is a seriously fine author (who happens to live right my backyard – Vancouver), and this compilation of short stories is VERY good.
Perhaps I’ll add more to this later ….
I picked up Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman the other day, really anticipating an excellent novel along the lines of his enormously influential A Canticle for Leibowitz some 40 years ago.
Major disappointment.
A hundred pages in, after assorted buggeries in a monastery, other nastiness with priests breaking vows, etc. and just a generally bad, uninteresting story and characters, I dropped it.
What a waste, after such a good book!
[ update ]Too wierd. As of tonight (March 18, 2005) this blog entry is the number one Google result for the word “unimpressive.”.
This is an amazing historical book about the most forgotten massacre in history: the killing, raping, and torturing of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by the Japanese Imperial Army in the period before and including the Second World War.
I like to maintains some kind of record of the books I’ve read … I’ve sort of been in that habit for the past few months.
I like to actually do a mini-review of them all, but this week I lack the time … In any case, here’s the list, with a brief comment on each (maybe!).
I just finished reading Hitler’s Secret Partners, by James Pool. While being interesting for all the usual reasons – interesting topic, well written, fascinating details – the book is particularly interesting for insight into why WWII happened the way it did.
In Pool’s analysis, WWII happened mainly because Hitler was running a pyramid scheme. If that sounds completely crazy to you, read on before you judge.
I just finished reading A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar, which formed the basis of the recent movie of the same title starring Russell Crow.
Yikes!
The Dune series by Frank Herbert is one of the best SF series ever, ranking up there with fantasy’s Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien) and the Thomas Covenant novels (Stephen R. Donaldson).
And now they’re being bastardized by bullshit from Frank’s son Brian and some other hack by the name of Kevin J. Anderson.
I just finished reading Infantry Aces, a compilation of stories about the second world war – from the perspective of the enemy: German soldiers.
It’s an engrossing and revolting book, for a number of different reasons, not least of which is that the author is a WWII veteran … and a German soldier.
OK, I went to see I, Robot. OK, I liked the film. OK, it far surpassed my abysmal preconceptions.
But, I mean, really! Is this I Robot?
I just finished reading “Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America” by Robert Friedman.
Very, very scary.
I’m reading (or trying to read) a book called Hour of Judgement, by Susan R. Matthews.
Erch, it sucks.
I read a book a couple of weeks ago that I really enjoyed on a variety of levels: Drifting Home by Pierre Berton.
Berton is kind of a Canadian icon; he’s written weighty tomes on a variety of Canadian and international issues; he’s written good histories (like Vimy Ridge) on key episodes in Canadian history.
Drifting Home is a totally different book … it’s a book about a trip he took with his family down the Yukon river … hence the ‘drifting’ part of the title. He grew up on the river, and his father was actually a part of the Gold Rush around the turn of the century.
I am so hugely impressed with Stephen Baxter that I almost cannot express it in words.
Hyperbole is boring, and bullshit is worse, but he is seriously one of the major, if not THE major forces driving science fiction forward these days. Just when we thought all the good plots were taken by Heinlein and Asimov …
