The Living Structure Meme
If you want to prepare for a new and illustrious career for future, I would recommend bioengineering, since future ships and buildings will be living things. Paolo Bacigalupi’s “A Pocketful for…
Tag: books
Bovary and the Beatles
Near the end of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, in the translation by Geoffrey Wall, there is a line, describing Charles’s inability to cope with the loss of his wife:…
A Worthy Quote from Borges
From “The Immortal,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley: “I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews,…
It All Starts with Sturgeon, sort of…
Science fiction took a big step toward modernity (actually postmodernity) with Theodore Sturgeon’s “Unite and Conquer,” which I read recently in the collection A Way Home. Within that story, the…
2010 – what I should have learned…
After finishing Our Man in Havana with relative alacrity, and the resultant satisfaction that comes from a really good book, I am forced to contemplate the time wasted with other…
The end of “The End of the Affair”
The End of the Affair was simply a great book. I had avoided Graham Greene books up to this point. I do not know why since he is often associated…
The Reivers – Read It!
I recently finished reading William Faulkner’s The Reivers. It was an excellent book, highly recommended. Some great passages stood out in my mind: “…if all the human race ever stops…
Wastelands…
I, like so many others in the reading public, went through a Stephen King phase. It was in junior high for me, when I bought his books by the yard…
It’s all in a name…
I do not remember a time when the words “Skywalker” or “Alderaan” sounded nonsensical and silly. In fact, I don’t know if that time ever existed. They seem like perfectly…
Burgess’s Honey for the Bears
I recently finished reading Honey for the Bears, by Anthony Burgess. Of course his most famous work by far is A Clockwork Orange, although his other writing is highly regarded…