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Book reviews pending; Stephen King April 22, 2003 (2:13 AM) ( link ) I have to apologize for the complete lack of updates here: work has been keeping me busy, and it's hard to justify writing a book review (which, however low their quality may end up being, actually take some time to whip together). That being said, I'm still reading, and I have the following reviews pending from the past two months (!): Dan Rhodes's Anthropology, Robertson Davies's The Fifth Business (from over two months ago!), Sheri Tepper's Grass, Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese, Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker, Mary Russell's The Sparrow, and now Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn, which I just finished. These reviews will be done...soon. On a completely unrelated note, today I saw Stephen King in person: he was giving a reading of his fifth Dark Tower book in the Yale Law School auditorium. King is quite a personable speaker, with an easy, humorous style, and an impressive physical presence. Unfortunately, I had to leave partway through his reading, but I heard enough to feel confident that he will, indeed, finish the Dark Tower series--the next three volumes all in a row!--to appease rabid fans like me. Ender's Game and military training April 5, 2003 (2:49 AM) ( link ) According to this article in the New York Times, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is having a major influence on how the military is using computer simulations to train soldiers. " 'Ender's Game' has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Fla., which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions." Unfortunately, the article also gives away the ending of Ender's Game just one paragraph earlier; while I still think the novel is successful without the surprise, the surprise ending certainly added a great deal of emotional impact to the story. Two books skipped, and The Sparrow April 1, 2003 (12:59 AM) ( link ) In a fairly unprecedented move, I'm just going to stop reading two books that I'd been pursuing intermittently for the past few weeks: Stephen King and Peter Straub's The Talisman, and Kan Macleod's Star Fraction. I decided to stop reading The Talisman after I was more than a quarter of the way through and suddenly realized that I had read a book-sized chunk of the novel already--and I still wasn't interested in the plot nor the characters. Macleod's book elicited the same reaction, though it happened after only two chapters: I really couldn't tolerate his writing style, nor did I find the promise (read, "threat") of a "libertarian" conclusion to be particularly compelling. What's funny is that I am a big fan of almost all of the authors who lavish praise on Macleod on the back cover; indeed, that praise--in addition to Macleod's Hugo nomination for Cosmonaut Keep--is what got me started on Star Fraction. Alas, it sucked. I am happy to report, though, that on a friend's recommendation I've started another book that has begun consuming ever more of my time: Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. The book jacket effuses that it is "as literate as The Name of the Rose, as farsighted as The Handmaid's Tale and as readable as The Thorn Birds." I don't know if it's quite as good as The Name of the Rose (the only novel of the three listed that I've read), but it is really, really good so far--and if the much foreshadowed tragedy is as awful as it seems to be, I will no doubt be shattered. Classwork and other concerns have been truly debilitating these last few weeks. But although the rest of my life may be stressed, at least reading will always be a refuge.

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