I’ve noticed a lot more of that in recently published books. Either the editors are as barely literate as the rest of the population, they’re not given enough time to properly do the job, or they just didn’t care. Roll 1d6/2.
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And maybe it’s petty of me, but I just cannot get through books with basic errors like that. I’ll forgive one or two throughout an entire book, but four by chapter three? Two on one page? I can’t keep reading. It was already getting my ire up.
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I’m reading Grave Expectations: a Mystery by Alice Bell, who I’ve always enjoyed reading on video game news site RockPaperShotgun. I’m a bit worried about the site’s future since one of the first things the new owners did was get rid of one of the 100 most influential women in the UK games industry, but hey-ho. Anyway, I’m only about a third of the way in and it’s just as funny and British as I’d expect.
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this is kind of an infuriating little read, in English, about a few academics trading letters in the 1970s.
Eh, it would be only amusing, but you do have to remember that it was and still is absolutely outrageous for someone below the age of forty or forty-five to become a doctor of philosophy, with both publications in print.
So, one expects this kind of in-fighting while comparative children were still uncertain of their futures.
Still, I am surprised this publication was released apparently with the approval of G. Granel’s estate.
I know Granel as a particularly adept translator and editor, and always as a source of sudden inspiration when needed.
A brief but meaty little overview. Hard to say if it’s truly a pop-science book or just a relatively accessible overview of some highlights of research up through 2019, the date of its publication.
It amuses me.
/* Not a knock against pop-science books. I’ve read my share, and there are some true gems out there…enough to convince me it’s a valid and worthwhile genre (I guess you’d call it).
I suppose I’d have made my point more clearly by saying it’s nothing like those execrable little compilations of dubious, ill researched “factoids” that people like Malcolm Gladwell and his ilk barf out every so often when they want to spend advances on royalties boozing it up at the horsetrack, or whatever people like that do.
So, not quite a textbook, and not quite a “handbook,” which has a very particular meaning among technical books, usually written about various specific topics among the sciences, which are also always many many thousands of pages long, feature lengthy articles on very specific topics by experts specialists, and are prohibitively expensive for many an average scholar to buy, as is the way with many publications destined for research libraries and published by academic presses in general…ahem…Kluwer…that one in Frankfurt-am-Main…
…or even at the more affordable end, some texts one is likely to see in a bookstore, like from Éditions du Seuil or even the very large volumes of PUF (ironically, one of the chief places for French academics to publish one or both of their doctoral dissertations, which is part of the reason that you don’t usually see “hot shot” “prodigy” professors in places in Europe which adopt this requirement to publish one’s dissertation, in book form, as well as one’s Habilitationschrift, before being considered eligible to be a real professor, as opposed to just a teacher).
Anyway, that last category of publishing houses can be very reasonable to buy extremely important contributions to scientific literature, but prices tend to go up IME the more pages the book has…seems reasonable, I guess!
/* late edit to review: Yeah, I guess one could say it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.
I’d say its only real purpose consists of its extensive bibliographic references. The actual content is slim and cursory, especially to those familiar with what I’d consider to be common knowledge among those who have done any reading of lighter books.
Some cool images from MRI and fMRI studies, but very few details given about the experimental parameters in the case of conclusions drawn from fMRI.
Not really recommended, but it is a nice light read. */
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I must say, the author of that book must have some sand to publish a book with such a bold title.
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First time read - her first completed novel, but not released until after her death. A metafictional satire of Gothic novels, in line with her Juvenilia. It’s her most outright hilarious.
I hope to read or re-read all 6 of her novels, and the epistolatory piece (Lady Susan) by years end.
Finished up with Persuasion on Friday, and have the Harvard Press annotated editions for Emma and Pride at the ready…
But I’m anxious to dig into Sense and Sensibility next, as that’s another I’ve never read. Seen the movie and miniseries, but never read it.
I’m very disappointed how there are no longer any Austen’s on shelves at the library, it’s all E-books - It’s difficult to cuddle up with a laptop the same way you can a paperback, so I might just order a used, annotated S&S.
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It hasn’t come in yet, but I had a book as a kid that I was obsessed with and, looking back, totally didn’t understand was satire. I knew it was fictional, but I didn’t get the humor.
Satire of Sci-fi cliches, government conspiracies, UFO encounters and the first fully documented account of the “awful danger from beyond” told in a mockumentary format - fully illustrated with “articles” from American Scientific, NY Times,The White House and the Federal Agency for Interstellar Contact (F.A.I.C.). The documentary reveals man’s first meeting with extraterrestrials, the Treaty of Los Alamos with the Telpathic Princes of Anomaly (in exile), the forming of FAIC and Watch the Skies. The tension mounts with the translation of an encrypted message from deep space which reveals a galactic scourge - The Blight - who have conquered more than 13,000 star systems intend to add one more to their rule – ours!
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About 1/3 through “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” by Claire North.
Very strong examination of immortality/“loop” time travel. North is clearly having a ton of fun with the book, and the quick, non-linear chapter order lends to the central conceit.
(I’m really enjoying it, and thinking about sketching out a TTRPG campaign using the same mechanics. The campaign could have a rouge-like structure, with the characters being reborn on day 1 at each session. They could be attempting to siege a fortress, or some other completely impossible task for level 1 characters. Only through dying repeatedly – leveling up and multi-classing as they go – can they develop the skills needed to infiltrate the fortress and beat the big bad. Anyway, that’s a nerdy digression!)
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I discovered Rodney Brooks’s outstanding blog. (Rodney Brooks is an extremely important roboticist who has written at least one outstanding book aimed for the general public…not merely a theorist, his acceptable ideas have been practiced for decades).
If it matters, he is the only scholar on the topic of AI about whom ontologist Barry Smith has ever spoken about positively, to my knowledge.
Rodney Brooks and the predictions section of his blog
(For the record, the only other two blogs I’ve found good to read are that of Peter Smith, a logician retired out of Cambridge and also a classical music fan, and Bartosz Milewski, a computer scientist whose interests include category theory, template metaprogramming, and a bunch of weird tricks).
So, I get to add another blog to the list. His predictions on topics like driverless cars are pure gold.
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I have started The Book of Fantasy (originally published in Argentina in 1940 as Antologia de la Literatura Fantastica ; revised in 1965 and 1976; 1988 edition with new introduction by Ursula K. LeGuin) edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and A. Bioy Casares. It looks to be an eclectic, possibly eccentric collections of pieces, many very short. Consider the following work, which I quote in full.
A Woman Alone with Her Soul by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1912)
A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.
Was Fredric Brown aware of this before he wrote “Knock”?
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If you like this and haven’t checked out Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, you might enjoy it!
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Another loop time travel story I’d recommend is Replay by Ken Grimwood.
From the Amazon page -
“Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn’t know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again – in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle – each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: “What if you could live your life over again?”
From the wiki page -
Replay won the 1988 World Fantasy Award and was on the shortlist for the 1988 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
The novel has been included in several lists of recommended reading: Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels (1988), Locus Reader’s Poll: Best Science Fiction Novel (1988), Aurel Guillemette’s The Best in Science Fiction (1993) and David Pringle’s Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction (1995).
Edit to add - I read it when it came out back in the day, and still remember it
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A friend gave me that book in college. Might be the book I’ve reread the most times. Years later I moved to Atlanta and Emory, Moes & Joes and Polaris on top of the Hyatt all still exist!
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Just snagged it from the library – thanks for rec!
(And added @JohnnyRocket69 's suggestion to my hold list as well!)
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I’m still carrying around Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, it has been a couple of months since I first started it and I’m barely touching it. I really want to like it but it’s just not gripping me. The narration is very close third person so there’s a lot of description of main character’s thoughts, mostly about proper manners, I rarely feel like picking it up.
Thinking about putting it aside to read Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist, might be good to come back fresh from that.
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I give a book the first 50 pages. If I’m struggling to care or it takes days to get fifty pages read, it won’t be worth it, and I won’t enjoy it.
I love the Miss Fisher television series. Tried reading the first book, and just couldn’t get into it. Pages and PAGES of descriptions of clothes and shopping. Who cares! Get to the mystery already.
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Yep. I used to make a point of finishing every book I started, but these days my time’s just too valuable.
/me goes back to watching a MST3K episode I’ve seen a dozen times.
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