Category: Books

  • The Company

    I just read the conclusion of Kage Baker’s Company series, The Sons of Heaven, which just came out in paperback. I was lucky enough to pick up her first book, In the Garden of Iden, on a whim back when it came out. That was good enough for me to buy her second book, Sky…

  • Canadian Book Prices

    When I was young, U.S. books sold in Canada for the U.S. price, paid in Canadian dollars, and stores in tourist spots in Maine would take Canadian dollars as equivalent to U.S. dollars. Then the Canadian dollar started to sink against the U.S. dollar. Stores started putting up signs saying that they took the Canadian…

  • Insane Architecture

    It is generally believed that anybody who sees the lost city of R’lyeh goes insane. My personal observation is that the towns of Silicon Valley make me feel insane. It seems therefore plausible that Silicon Valley is in some way associated with Cthulhu. Of course there are many people who live in Silicon Valley, but…

  • Banks

    I’m happy to see that there is a nice new edition of one of my favorite books, The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. For some reason the book drags me in every time I read it. Much of it amounts to a critique of an exaggerated version of our own society, but the…

  • Lukyanenko Watch

    I recently read the trilogy of books by Sergei Lukyanenko: Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch. I’m surprised they aren’t better known–my local science fiction bookstore doesn’t carry them at all. On the surface they seem rather derivative: they involve a struggle between the forces of light (the Night Watch) and the force of darkness…