Three-Toed Sloth

Slothful Reading Update

I have been too lazy busy to update the book recommendations sidebar. The last three months should preceed this post, and April's recommendations follow it. Some TV shows on DVD are now included, since a lot of my time for reading fiction has gone into watching them; I suspect my taste in video is even less trustworthy than my taste in books, but why not?

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur

Archived book recommendations from the sidebar, with brief descriptions, and purchasing links to Powell's where applicable. Full-length reviews live elsewhere.

April 2007

March 2007

February 2007

January 2007

December 2006

November 2006

October 2006

September 2006

August 2006

July 2006

June 2006

May 2006

April 2006

March 2006

February 2006

January 2006

December 2005

November 2005

October 2005

September 2005

August 2005

July 2005

June 2005

May 2005

April 2005

March 2005

February 2005

January 2005

December 2004

November 2004

October 2004

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2007

Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery

Or: how a teenager got out of being shipped off to law school by forging ancient Etruscan writings, sparking a scholarly controversy that was to some extent a rehash of the Galileo affair. Briskly and amusingly told, with no great pretense that it was ever anything other than a brazen forgery — I won't spoil some of the jokes by pointing out some of the evidence of just how brazen. Thanks to John "reprieved" Burke for recommending this!

Jane Haddam, Glass Houses

Serial killers, pedophiles, bookkeepers...

C. J. Box, Trophy Hunt

Animal mutilation and energy booms in Saddlestring, Wyoming. Some bits made me wonder if Box had read Warren Ellis's Atmospherics (still, for my money, the best relation of the cattle mutilation myth).

Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution

When I think about it, I realize a truly substantial proportion of my basic knowledge of the world derives from reading Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guides and Cartoon History of the Universe; this is a worthy continuation of the latter.

Peter Hedström, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology

Will get its own review. In the meanwhile: right on, brother, right on.

Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant

Short devotional work presenting Wills's interpretation of the gospels. Wills has no interest in recovering the historical Jesus, and explicitly says that he finds such a project pointless; he is interested in the Jesus of his faith, as presented by the gospels vouchsafed to him by the Catholic tradition. (Presumably this is why, for instance, he uses only the canonical books of the New Testament, and assumes that they tell a consistent story.) Fair enough, if he wants to do that, though not at all convincing to someone without a prior committment to that tradition. But then I utterly fail to see how he can square this with rejection of, in no particular order, papal authority, bishops, priests, and even (I think) the mass? Well, he says, I don't see any justification for this in the text. But that same tradition which guarantees the text for him also comes down on their side. And a Jesus who founded a Church with bishops and priests performing miracles of transubstantiation would be very different from the Jesus he wants...

Battlestar Galactica [0; 1; 2; 2.5]

Yes, it really is based on that appalling old TV show. Yes, it really is as good as everyone says.

Michelle Sagara, Cast in Shadow and Cast in Courtlight

Fantasy novels with detective-story elements; the kind of thing which would appeal to those who like P. C. Hodgell, though it is not as good as her books. There is a weird emphasis here on names, writing (a --- you should excuse the expression --- literal body of inscription is a central part of the story, along with the magical struggle to control the reading of that text), and, near the climax, the autonomous power of language itself; this tempts me to postulate some kind of run-in with post-structuralism in Sagara's past (and I'd even say not a happy one, given her heroine's attitude towards teachers), but really anyone who comes to this looking for specifically Derridean high fantasy would be disappointed. (Not that I can think of anyone who would, now that Chun the Unavoidable is no longer among us.)

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur