News You Can Bruise for 2009 January 3 (entry 0)

(5) Sat Jan 03 2009 08:55: Wow, this is a busy vacation. Not only do/did I have the anthology, story revision, new story, and Beautiful Soup work, but I've embarked on a new project comparible in scope to The Future: A Retrospective, except cooler and higher-profile. I hope to have more details about that soon.

Alas, the day job returns on Monday, and the frenzy of writing will slow, but 2009 is looking a lot better for my fiction career than it seemed just a few days ago.

Unrelatedly, this entry prompted me and Sumana to Bookmooch about 15 books we're not gonna read/don't really need to keep, and I've put ten more in the equivalent of the proposed box.

Another way to stop the cycle of reading the books you suspect you won't enjoy enough to keep, is to choose your next book at random. But I've tried this in the past and it wasn't very satisfying. I did enjoy the brief experiment where you told me what books to read, and I'd actually like to re-open that experiment, so let me know which of these books I should read next. With the caveat that I need to finish The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and then I'm going to take advantage of my new bookshelf space and finally read Rules of Play, so it'll be a while before I get to your demands.

Comments:

Posted by Jarno Virtanen at Sat Jan 03 2009 14:04

I vote for On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. It represents one of those ideas, which might revolutionize the quest to understand intelligence in a way that's so simple that it seems trivial in hindsight.

I also vote that you don't read Joyce's Ulysses, at least if you tend to want to finish books that you start. ;-)

Posted by Brendan at Sat Jan 03 2009 14:13

I demand that you read the Tiptree biography! I am curious to know what you will think of Altered Carbon, which I enjoyed but in which I found glaring blind spots (some of which were addressed in Sean Williams's The Resurrected Man).

"I also vote that you don't read Joyce's Ulysses^W^W Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky..." I did actually finish that one and I cried at the end, but it took almost exactly a year.

Posted by Zack at Mon Jan 05 2009 18:39

Paul Fusell's Class ranges from hideously outdated to not-even-wrong. Very much not-recommended.

Posted by Holly at Tue Jan 06 2009 09:19

I vote The World of Null-A; I was going to read it when my thesis was about constructed languages in fiction, but then I changed topics and never actually did, so, you know, someone I know ought to.