davidgoldfarb

January:

Watership Down, Richard Adams. This was a favorite book of mine when I was small. I'd had a hold on the library's e-book copy, which finally came in. I was curious to see how it would hold up. Well, it was still an enjoyable read; I will say that when I was small I didn't see the anti-intellectualism expressed as a disdain for modern art. (The only acceptable form of art is storytelling: twice in the book we get poetry instead and both times it's a symptom of societal illness.) The hippie rabbits in one story who don't appreciate what their parents went through in the war, that also went by me.

Red Moon, Kim Stanley Robinson. This is another Stan Robinson near-future novel. If you liked New York 2140 or the Mars trilogy, you'll probably like it; and if you hated those, then you won't.

Come Tumbling Down, Seanan McGuire. The latest "Wayward Children" novella, and again that probably tells you if you'll like it or not. I enjoyed it greatly, although partway through I found myself wondering whether the plot was really going to be as straightforward as it looked, or whether there was going to be some twist. Also the Doctor Who shoutout becomes all but completely explicit.

Becoming Superman, J. Michael Straczynski. I find JMS's prose to have a lot of I-want-to-read-it-osity, to the point where I bought his book about scriptwriting even though I have no interest in writing scripts. This book has that. It's also got a whole lot of pain and suffering, on the part of both JMS himself and his family. If, like me, you enjoyed Babylon 5 and want to read more about how it got made, that's in there (along with JMS's perspective on just why Crusade crashed and burned) but there's a whole lot more.

Standard Modern Precision, Daniel Neill. A specialized book about bridge bidding, of little interest to anyone who's not a tournament bridge player.

February:

A Mist of Grit and Splinters, Graydon Saunders. The latest Commonweal novel; and the first where I wondered whether Graydon was starting to resist his editor's influence. In all the others, I felt like I could keep track of what was going on and who was doing what. Here, not so much. There were conversations — several of them — that I had real difficulty following. Maybe if I'd borne down and read through the scenes several times I could have deciphered things, but I wasn't involved enough to feel it worth the effort. A bit of a disappointment.

The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman. Further adventures of Lyra as a grown-up. Lyra has a bit more internal conflict than she did in the original trilogy. Ends on a cliffhanger. (Naming your Ayn Rand expy "Brande" is a bit on the nose.)

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine. Space opera in which the galactic empire is based on (or at least inspired by) pre-Columbian Meso-American cultures, which is certainly something different. I'd heard a lot of good things about it and wanted to see whether it would make my Hugo nominating ballot. It didn't, but I won't be surprised or displeased if it is indeed shortlisted.

Paladin's Grace, "T. Kingfisher". Another delightful fantasy romance in her "Anuket City" setting. According to the author, this was supposed to have been the sequel to Swordheart (it isn't) and the highest-level plot outline of both that book and this one are pretty similar. If you liked that you'll definitely like this.

So there's this vocabulary quiz that seems to be going around the people I read online. Everyone I know seems to be in the top .01%, myself included.

I did a couple of other clickbaity quizzes on the same site. Here's the result of the one which said it would tell me what career I should have:



....well! I test business software rather than games, but that's still pretty on the nose.

Credit to https://www.arealme.com/career/en/ for that.

From himself.

Italic = read it. Underlined = not this, but something by the same author. Strikethrough = did not finish. * (asterisk) it's on my to-read stack and I hope to get to it sometime soon.

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Got these from yhlee.

1. What was your first experience with computers?

Had to think back! In the hills above the UC Berkeley campus, there is a science museum with interactive exhibits called the Lawrence Hall of Science. When I was young my parents would take me and my sister there for youth classes. There was one that was called, if memory serves, "Creative Play on the Computer". Well, I don't recall there being much creative about it, really, but it was one or two hours of getting to use the games on their mainframe system. This had to have been something like 1976 or 1977, and the user interface was teletypes stocked with rolls of newsprint paper. Each time something changed in whatever game you were playing, the computer had to print out a whole new page. By the time your session was done, you had a big pile of paper to tear off and then roll up.

I remember playing Hunt the Wumpus, and a Star Trek bridge command game that was way too complicated for me, and a Star Trek themed space war game (imaginatively entitled "Spacewar") that wasn't.

2. What is your favorite bird?

The ruby-throated hummingbird, because I love jewel-toned iridescent colors. Close runner-ups include the red-tailed hawk and the northern mockingbird.

3. What's your favorite comfort food in the winter?

Hm. I'm not sure if I have one, really. I could say chocolate chip cookies, but there's nothing seasonal about that. I've lived my entire life in the east SF Bay Area or in Houston, neither of which gets really severe winter weather, so there's not so much need for winter comfort food.

4. What was the first sf/f book you read?

Assuming you don't count comic books, it was a book in the "Whitman Classics" line called Tales of Time and Space. I still have it, which is fairly remarkable considering I've had half a dozen moves and a fire. It's an anthology with a peculiar mix of stories: Fredric Brown and Arthur C. Clarke, with a couple of stories that would be well above most childrens' heads (the punchline of the Brown involved the phrase "master race" which I'm certain meant nothing to me at the age of five), also Poul Anderson...but also a deservedly forgotten story about a worldwide sleeping plague pulled out of a 1940s issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The link above has the full table of contents, if you're curious.

5. Who is your favorite underrated historical figure?

Another one I'm not sure I have an answer for. Antoine Lavoisier isn't really underrated. Maybe Bertrand Russell, for his contributions to mathematics and his outspoken atheism, but if I have to think hard to come up with someone, do I really have a favorite?

It seems to be traditional at the end of these to offer five questions to anyone who leaves a comment asking for them, so I'll go along with that.

This is down a bit from last year. I blame Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin for turning me on to a game called FTL that sucked up a fair amount of my reading time. There is also the fact that I went full-time at my job in mid-year, and starting commuting by car instead of bus, which meant that I no longer had an enforced two hours a day of reading.

I note that I am counting a number of novellas / short novels published as single volumes; otherwise my total would be even lower. On the other hand, some people count graphic novel collections, and I don't.

In addition to all of these, there were subscriptions to Asimov's, Uncanny, The Bridge World, and the ACBL Bridge Bulletin.

( Here, have a cut )

And here's what I read in 2016.

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I have fallen behind in posting my book logs. Let's see if I can catch up. Here's what I read in 2014.

(Doesn't include comics, comic book collections, or graphic novels generally, even though something like McCloud's The Sculptor takes enough time to really deserve inclusion. Doesn't include subscriptions to the ACBL Bulletin, The Bridge World, Asimov's Science Fiction or Uncanny. Still less blogs like Making Light or File 770.)

( edited to add a cut )

From wild_irises and james_nicoll.  I'm following wild_irises' lead and bolding one's I've read, and italicizing ones where I've read other things by that author.

Grimspace by Ann Aguirre
Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear
Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg
Chime by Franny Billingsley
Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop
Tithe by Holly Black
The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Synners by Pat Cadigan
Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Survival by Julie E. Czerneda
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
King's Dragon by Kate Elliott
Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman
Slow River by Nicola Griffith
Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly
Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge
Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
The God Stalker Chronicles by P.C. Hodgell
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
Valor's Choice by Tanya Huff
God's War by Kameron Hurley
The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Daggerspell by Katharine Kerr
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Ash by Malinda Lo
Warchild by Karin Lowachee
Legend by Marie Lu
Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey
Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
The Thief's Gamble by Juliet E. McKenna
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Old Man's War by John Scalzi
A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
The Grass King's Concubine by Kari Sperring
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
City of Pearl by Karen Traviss
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge
Farthing by Jo Walton
The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Time for my annual post about the books I've read last year. Under a cut:
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