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A book recommendation, and brief notes March 21, 2003 (5:34 AM) ( link ) On the advice of a friend, I'm reading Sheri Tepper's Grass. It's excellent, halfway through; hopefully the second half is as good. Grass is world-building at its best; its society reminds me of Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen (though the story is more interesting), and its ecology reminds me of Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, if you can imagine such a mix. Fair warning, though: plenty of books start out great like this (Vinge's is an example), and then fall flat through horrendous endings. Fortunately, the friend who recommended this book maintains that it's one of his favorite science-fiction novels, so I have high hopes. Two brief mentions of interesting book logs I've come across: the brand new Bookfilter (blogchild of Metafilter), and the interestingly named Blog of a Bookslut. Of note: the Bookslut blog contains this post, where T. C. Boyle has this to say about genre writers (including science-fiction and fantasy): I am just not interested in them because they are conventional. That's why people like them. They want the same thing, the same characters. Great writing to me is, you open the book and you are surprised each time out. This might be true of a tried-and-true genre like romance (although even there there's a significant amount of play around the joints). But this is almost definitely not true of speculative fiction, except, perhaps, for the "genre convention" that there is some element of unreality in almost all SF. Of course, the solution to this problem is that all good genre fiction just gets reclassified as "literature," a fate that has befallen such classics as George Orwell's 1984 and Richard Adams's delightful Watership Down. But if you classify willy-nilly like that, then you're begging the question: of course all genre writing is conventional, if everything conventional is genre writing. New Reviews: Four of them March 20, 2003 (4:59 AM) ( link ) ADDED reviews of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery, Daniel Keys Moran's The Last Dancer, and Connie Willis's Uncharted Territory. I still have three more books from the last month that I haven't reviewed yet, although I finished them a while ago. I'll probably write the reviews tomorrow and post them online; at the same time I'll bring my statistics up to date. It has been a pain doing fun reading while keeping up with my schoolwork and maintaining two other blogs, in addition to this site: Legal Ramblings and News Haiku. I just don't know how long I'll be able to keep this up. An incredibly good idea March 7, 2003 (6:44 PM) ( link ) Someone out there has started The Internet Book List, which will act like the Internet Movie Database, except with books. This is an incredibly good idea. I hope they add all sorts of features that aren't necessary for movies--like series information, latest book news, and so on. After the initial flurry dies down, I think I might email them to see if I can help. Not that I have a lot of books, but I think I can start submitting a few.

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