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Monthly Archives: July 2011

Evan Dara: The Lost Scrapbook

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Another one of those long difficult books that I bought on principle and then let languish on my bookshelf for a decade (literally; I just went to Amazon to see what the reader reviews were like and it informed me that I had bought this from them in 1999). Like many Gaddis books, it consists […]

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Ted Gioia: The History of Jazz

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

So I have gotten really interested in jazz over the last year. (Apparently this is de rigueur for men as they enter middle age.) I’ve always had a vague understanding of the musical syntax, and can fake playing cocktail-piano renditions of standards okay, but I’ve never really had a good knowledge of the field as […]

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Daniel Abraham: The Price of Spring

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

This is the fourth and final volume of the Long Price Quartet fantasy series, of which I have previously reviewed the first three volumes. Basically everything I said about the other books continues to hold true; it’s totally character-driven (almost all plot developments occur because someone acted or reacted in a manner wholly consistent with […]

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Steven Erikson: The Malazan Book of the Fallen

Monday, July 4, 2011

I’ve already posted about the first three books of Steven Erikson’s mammoth epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen [1] [2] [3], but I’ve finished the series in the meantime and if I try to write one post each about the remaining seven, I’ll never get anything else done. So I’m going to […]

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What’s wrong with this sentence?

Saturday, July 2, 2011

“The federal [student] loans are a good deal, but they are often not enough [to] make up the difference between what a family has saved or can spend out of current income and what the student gets in grants and scholarship money.” [from the New York Times article A New Type of Student Loan, but […]

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