Number two in my package of books from amazon.co.uk. As I mentioned before, I love some but not all of Miéville’s books, and this one looked enough like it was right up my alley that I was sufficiently excited to order it from England before the US release date. And… it was pretty good. My […]
I first encountered David Mitchell through his debut “novel” Ghostwritten, an intricately linked collection of short stories that really tickled my structural fancy. Of course, he is now mostly known for Cloud Atlas, another linked set of stories that span from centuries in the past to millennia in the future with impressive facility. In between […]
I love math and logic puzzles that seem like they could require a lot of thinking but turn out to be answerable in 30 seconds if you think about them the right way. Here’s one Jake Wildstrom recently posed that I liked: Take a random permutation of the n integers from 1 to n. On […]
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This year’s US Chess Championship is currently being played in Saint Louis; it started yesterday and runs through May 24. The reason I bring it up here is that I think that the organizers are doing a good job of making it accessible and interesting for casual chess players, one of which may be you. […]
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This novel takes the all-too-familiar career of Thomas Cromwell and turns it inside out, revealing an unexpectedly thoughtful and empathetic character. What’s that, you’re not familiar at all with the career of Thomas Cromwell? Well, neither was I, and I suspect that that made my reading of it much different from the intended one, as […]
It’s been a while since I first posted about Cardiacs but I’ve been fitfully taking some notes and doing some transcribing, and I should post some of it before I forget about it entirely. If I list a song here without a video link you can probably find it in the previous post. Although a […]
A couple of months ago I got a random email saying (paraphrased) “Love your Infinite Jest notes, love your blog, can I send you a free copy of this novel that appeals to a lot of the people who like Infinite Jest?” I looked it up and saw that it was self-published, which is not […]
One of my 2010 projects is to read this 4000 page, 5 volume history of Western classical music. It got outstanding reviews when it was published in 2005, and last year it was released as a reasonably-priced set of paperbacks, and when I finally got to browse them in the bookstore I was impressed enough […]
This is a short Czech novel from 1993 that just got translated into English last year and showed up on lots of SF/weird readers’ 2009 best-of lists. The genre is magic realism, which is to say highly-literate fantasy that takes place in the real world. The narrator (I don’t think he ever gets a name) […]
Saturday, February 27, 2010
I haven’t had much to write about books lately, for a couple of main reasons: I’m trying to get all the way through Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music in 2010, which is close to 4000 pages long, and I got sucked back into the game of Go (I’m using the Korean word, baduk, for […]