I’ve always been fascinated by thinking. I’ve read dozens of books on how the brain works, on consciousness, on the various theories about imagination and intelligence. The brain is an incredibly complex bit of business. So it should come as no surprise this hyper-complex system breaks down once in a while. Keeper tells the story of a woman who’s body betrays her and what the effects of this betrayal is on those that have to take care of her. No one knows what causes Alzheimer’s Disease. There are a few theories floating around, but there always seems to be one…
Category: book review
The Illearth War by Stephen R Donaldson
In Book Two of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever we find our hero back at home in the Real World. He’s a bit bummed out about his first adventure in The Land and remains an unhappy and lonely leper. Then he gets a phone call from his ex-wife Joan, before he can say a word, he feels himself being summoned back to the Land. He trips and bounces his head of a coffee table and leave reality once again. Thomas Covenant has been summoned to Revelstone, where he stands in front of the Council of Lords and is…
Willpower:Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
There was a willpower test involving small children and marshmallows. In the test, children are told that they can eat a marshmallow, but not right away. The marshmallow sits in front of them and then the tester leaves the room. Once alone, some of the kids eat the marshmallow right away, some closely examine the marshmallow, and some ignore it. Years later there is a follow up study that shows the kids who delayed gratification were much more successful in life and the kids who couldn’t wait, had a good deal less success. There’s nothing new here. After all, Aesop…
Lord Foul’s Bane Book One of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever
There are now almost ten books set in the universe of The Land. But it all started in 1977 with Lord Foul’s Bane. I just finished re-reading Lord Foul’s Bane for the first time in many years-it’s one of a handful of books that I’ve read more than once-and it seems both just as good as I remember it, and kind of silly. We open up with a grumpy man stiffly waking two miles into town to pay his phone bill. Along the walk he thinks about how much his life sucks since he came down with leprosy. His wife…
The Lower River
A 70 year old man has spent the past 50 years fondly recalling 4 years he spent in a tiny village in Africa. Or maybe the story is set a few years back and he is only 60. We open with our hero, such as he is, accidentally letting his wife find out that he has been flirting with a large number of women via email. The man and his wife weren’t happy anyway, so they get a divorce and go there separate ways. He sells his business and uses a bit of the money to go back to The…
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
I found a list of the Top 100 Sci Fi Stories not too long ago and there were a few titles I haven’t read. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age came in at 58. The Diamond Age was written in 1995, which makes it one of the younger books on the list and one that I missed when it came out. In our own world, where any random question can be answered with a quick Google and it hasn’t even created a world of better Jeopardy players, The Diamond Age seems a bit quaint. It’s the story of poor ignorant…
Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art by Christopher Moore
My Mother always wanted to be an Artist, and she specifically wanted to be an Impressionist. So I grew up with prints of the works of Van Gogh, Pissaro, Cézanne, Monet, and so on. Mom didn’t like Gauguin, maybe it had something to do with all the topless girls in grass skirts. My personal favorite was always Seurat. She would have loved Sacré Bleu. Christopher Moore is a fun writer. His topics are often a bit odd, such as vampires, death dealers, and friends of Jesus who somehow missed out being in the Bible. In Sacré Bleu we find an odd…
Elephant Girl
“We’ve got two lives — one we’re given and the other one we make.” ― Mary Chapin Carpenter Jane Devin doesn’t agree with Mary Chapin Carpenter, she has a more deterministic view of the universe. Jane sees her life as a river flowing beyond her control, going places she doesn’t want to go, and forcing her to be something she doesn’t want to be. All memoirs like to find one note and continue to strike it over and over again. Memoirs by chefs and restaurant critics tell how food rules their lives. Memoirs of artists talk about art, musicians talk about music,…
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Clearly Philip Jose Farmer wasn’t thinking about a series of books when he named this one To Your Scattered Bodies Go. It’s a title I’ve heard from time to time and it’s made a few best Sci Fi Books lists here and there. It’s one I recently got around to reading. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the first of the Riverworld novels. These are stories about a world that has been terraformed into an unending river and populated with everyone who ever lived on Earth. It’s a concept that has some appeal, as a writer can plop down any…
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar is the story of a young woman who has a mental breakdown and has the further misfortune to have it during the late 1950s when ‘doctors’ were fond of things like lobotomies and electroshock therapy. We follow Esther Greenwood around as she finds life a bit too much to deal with and tries to kill herself. She comes to think of her world as being muffled by a bell jar that has been lowered over her head, so that the world she sees is distorted and not quite as it should be. One thing leads to another…