| Shadows over Innsmouth (Shadows Over Innsmouth #1) |
Various |
2013/12/19 |
4 |
Del Rey, 2001 |
|
| History of Shit |
Dominique Laporte, Nadia Benabid, Rodolphe El-Khoury |
2013/12/01 |
4 |
MIT Press, 2002 |
Read My Notes |
| Space Captain Smith (Chronicles of Isambard Smith, #1) |
Toby Frost |
2013/11/01 |
3 |
Myrmidon Books, 2009 |
Funny, thought not hilarious satire of both British Imperialist fiction (think Alan Quartermain) and science fiction. This was the first novel of several, so maybe they get better. There are some clever nods to classic science fiction scattered throughout. |
| The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine |
Michael Lewis |
2013/10/01 |
5 |
W. W. Norton & Company, 2011 |
One of the clearest and most readable expositions of the 2008 economic crisis, told from the perspective of the people who were so convinced that the market was a fraud that they bet against it. Lewis’s prose is clear, even in the sections dealing with the (deliberately) arcane and complex world of derivatives and swaps, and the cast of outsiders and characters that he describes are colorful and interesting. |
| Yellow Blue Tibia |
Adam Roberts |
2013/10/01 |
4 |
Gollancz, 2009 |
Read My Notes |
| The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 |
Eric J. Hobsbawm |
2013/09/19 |
5 |
Vintage Books, 1996 |
Read My Notes |
| Inventing Western Civilization (Cornerstone Books) |
Thomas C. Patterson |
2013/09/15 |
4 |
Monthly Review Press, 1997 |
Read My Notes |
| The Grin of the Dark |
Ramsey Campbell |
2013/08/28 |
3 |
Tor Books, 2008 |
|
| NOS4A2 |
Joe Hill |
2013/08/08 |
5 |
William Morrow, 2013 |
|
| Lilith’s Brood (Xenogenesis, #1-3) |
Octavia E. Butler |
2013/06/01 |
4 |
Grand Central Publishing, 2000 |
|
| The Birth Partner: A Complete Guide to Childbirth for Dads, Doulas, and All Other Labor Companions |
Penny Simkin |
2013/04/28 |
5 |
Harvard Common Press, 2013 |
Even handed discussion of labor and birth, with lots of good comparisons and trade-offs for various procedures, labor situations, and techniques. The book is pro-natural birth, but one would be hard-pressed to read it as a polemic. It’s very balanced in its discussions. |
| Rasputin’s Bastards |
David Nickle |
2013/04/28 |
2 |
ChiZine Publications, 2012 |
A very interesting concept (what happens to Soviet-created psychics after the Cold War ends?), but I found myself getting bored with all the characters. Some of them were interesting, fleshed out, with clear motivations, and others just seemed to be plot devices. And I have to confess that I didn’t even really understand what was at stake in the grand scheme, and why the villains acted the way they did. |
| A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain |
Owen Hatherley |
2013/02/24 |
5 |
Verso, 2012 |
|
| Letters from Abu Ghraib |
Joshua Casteel |
2013/02/13 |
4 |
Essay Press, 2008 |
|
| Zone One |
Colson Whitehead |
2013/02/05 |
4 |
Doubleday, 2011 |
|
| The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy |
Kenneth Pomeranz |
2013/01/28 |
5 |
Princeton University Press, 2001 |
Read My Notes |
| The Book of Cthulhu II |
Ross E. Lockhart, editor/ Various |
2013/01/28 |
4 |
Night Shade, 2012 |
“Like all anthologies, it has stuff I liked and stuff I didn’t, but the overall quality was quite good. All of the stories drew on Lovecraft’s mythologies, or borrowed from his stylistic tropes. Some were quite direct, continuing the plots or characters of Lovecraft stories, while others simply used the mythology as a backdrop. Highlights (for me) were:““Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”” by Neil Gaiman““This is how the world ends”” by John R. Fultz““Rapture of the Deep”” by Cody Goodfellow““A Gentleman from Mexico”” by Mark Samuels““Boojum”” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette““The God of Dark Laughter”” by Michael Chabon” |
| The Nightmare Factory |
Thomas Ligotti, Poppy Z. Brite |
2013/01/20 |
4 |
Carroll & Graf, 1996 |
|
| Landscapes of Clearance: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives |
Angele Smith, Amy Gazin-Schwartz |
2013/01/01 |
0 |
Left Coast Press, 2010 |
|
| The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night |
Elizabeth Pantley, William Sears |
2013/01/01 |
4 |
McGraw Hill, 2002 |
|
| Psychogeography |
Merlin Coverley |
2013/01/01 |
3 |
Oldcastle Books, 2006 |
A good introduction to Psychogeography as a scholarly field and approach. The author links modern psychogeographers (Ian Sinclair, etc…) to the Situationists of mid 20th century France (Debord), and further back, the the literary traditions of 19th century England, particularly writers of Gothic fiction (Stevenson, Machen, etc…). It’s a good book, but I think the field is too idiosyncratic–its individual practitioners aren’t really classifiable together, or are too divergent to be classified easily. Thus, the book is engaged in a difficult project of findings connections to people who don’t easily connect. Still, it’s got a great bibliography, which I will no doubt mine in the future. |
| Militant Modernism |
Owen Hatherley |
2013/01/01 |
4 |
Zero Books, 2009 |
|
