The Nerdy, Wordy, Reading Life
We’ve started a new book group on Friday nights. Our initial plan is to read the 22 “books” of St Augustine’s City of God over the course of 22 weeks. Last night Brent, Aimee, Mindi, Jared, and I all had spaghetti followed by discussion of book one. Aimee emphasized the significance of Augustine’s view of women [...]
I really enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (this was only the third Bradbury for me). It took me a while to get into it. The “weird” level was pretty high and it moved slowly. Eventually ( by about the last third of the book) it began to pay off. Bradbury’s vision is uncomfortable but [...]
I’ve been a bit scattered the last few days. The puppy might have something to do with my state of mind. He’s been pretty good, calm and eager to please, but keeps waking us up early. I hope I’m not an entirely lazy person and that I really do need the sleep I feel like I [...]
OK. The laptop and I have an uneasy truce going on. It still crashes frequently and is unpredictable but will occasionally stay operational for whole hours at a time. Back to our regularly scheduled book reviews… I recently finished William Gibson’s Neuromancer. And I really don’t know what to think of it. I did enjoy [...]
I took a trip from Boise to Idaho Falls to visit my sister Quinn last weekend. It is about a four hour drive (a bit less if you keep your cruise set at 80, ahem!). I had been planning this trip ever since Thanksgiving, which was the last time I’d seen my sister. I very [...]
So far 2012 is going very well. We rang in the new year with 8 of our very best friends. We spent the evening eating, discussing Constantine’s eldest son Crispus, women in ministry positions, and the relative merits of such diverse things as The City of God, Harry Potter, “Tangled,” and The Lord of the [...]
The last few years have been slower reading years for me. I have dropped well below my usual pattern of 100-ish books in 12 months and even farther below my 2008 high of 200. Part of this has been due to my graduate work, which absorbed much of my time; part due to the depressive [...]
I finished Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy last night. I quite enjoyed all three volumes. They were not the most absorbing books I’ve ever read (I give them a collective grade of 3 stars out of 5), but I found them very interesting. Asimov’s vision of the Galactic Empire, fundamentally secular and very concerned with the fate of [...]
My most bookish (and Wolfe-ish) friend loaned me Gene Wolfe’s first novel: Operation Ares. It was quite disappointing for a Wolfe. Of course, Wolfe himself has made efforts to keep the volume out of print, as it endured a brutal editing process (103,000 words to 60,000!) without Wolfe’s input, and he is not proud of it. [...]
This Gene Wolfe novel was a quicker read than most of his books are for me. Like the Wizard Knight duology, Pirate Freedom features a contemporary young man transported out of this world. This exploration of the golden age of piracy offers a meditation on morality, wisdom, and free will. The perspective of the narrator [...]