Reading

Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.

FiveBooks on games

 Posted by (Visited 6673 times)  Game talk, Reading  Tagged with: ,
Mar 162010
 

FiveBooks is this neat site whose tagline is “The best five books on everything.” Basically, they pick a subject matter expert, and that person talks about five books that cover that subject. Tom Chatfield picked FiveBooks on games, and A Theory of Fun was one of them, alongside  classics like Homo Ludens and Flow. Quite nice company!

While you are there, check out Aleks Krotoski’s five books about the Web; and props to Julian Dibbell, who gets a book on each list!

Between the two lists, there’s only one book I haven’t read — and it’s the one on sports. Hmm.

Robert B. Parker Has Died at 77

 Posted by (Visited 13778 times)  Reading  Tagged with: ,
Jan 192010
 

As many of you know, I read plenty of detective novels. Today the news comes to me that Robert B. Parker has died.

He of course, wrote all the Spenser novels (which became the TV show with Robert Urich), the Jesse Stone novels (which became the TV movies starring Tom Selleck), the Sunny Randall novels, a bunch of excellent standalone books, and recently a few Westerns — Appaloosa was filmed with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen in a remarkably faithful adaptation now on DVD, and he sequeled it a bit ago with Resolution.

Parker was a spare writer. His later work is almost exclusively dialogue. When I would read a Spenser novel, I would usually end up forcing a passage on my wife as an example of “here’s how to do it.” His economy managed to get across enormous emotional content, and his last books were way beyond being pulp.

Luckily for me, I have a huge backlog of Parker books I have never read. I may go on a shopping spree, because I’m going to miss him.

Cory Doctorow live in Metaplace at 6am!

 Posted by (Visited 5624 times)  Game talk, Misc, Reading
Oct 272009
 

He’ll be taking audience questions, as well as answering some of ours. 🙂 Visit by following this link, or if you’re on my site reading this, just click on the embed below:

(event over, but here’s the log!)

Today we had Cory Doctorow in Metaplace, and he was a fascinating speaker!  We had way too many audience questions than we had time for, and could have probably went all day long.  Read on for the full chat log!

Cuppycake: As many of you are aware, Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and blogger at BoingBoing.net. He’s known for his activism on DRM and copyright, and for providing his books for free on the web through Creative Commons licensing.
Cuppycake: We’re excited to have him in Metaplace today!
Cuppycake: Hi Cory 🙂
doctorow: Hi there!
Cuppycake: First question
Cuppycake: You are a huge proponent of giving away electronic forms of your books. Can you talk about why?

Continue reading »

Matt Sturges live chat today at 2pm

 Posted by (Visited 5523 times)  Gamemaking, Reading  Tagged with: ,
Oct 132009
 

I don’t know if I have raved about Matt Sturges’ work in comics here before. House of Mystery (available in two collections to date: Room and Boredom and Love Stories For Dead People) has vaulted onto the list of my favorite ongoing series. He’s also involved with the Eisner-award-winning Fables universe, particularly through Jack of Fables.

But I am a bit biased — I knew Matt back in the days when I lived in Austin, when were both caught up in the variously overlapping writers’ circles around Turkey City (the writer’s workshop best known in SF/F circles for its widely-used lexicon). Matt was a member of the Clockwork Storybook collective, from which several writers of note have emerged.

I’m super happy to have Matt cornered on the Metaplace stage today at 2pm Pacific, to get grilled about comics, writing, and whatever else attendees want to hear about!

Edit: the event is over, but the chat log is available here.

How the world changes!

 Posted by (Visited 6679 times)  Reading  Tagged with:
Oct 032009
 

I think this is the first time I have ever seen someone claim that science fiction used to be mainstream and isn’t anymore!

John Mullan, Naughtie’s fellow judge for this year’s prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.

“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”

via Science fiction author hits out at Booker judges | Books | guardian.co.uk.

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