I finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union today. I liked it, although I think it overdid it perhaps a little with its sheer Jewishness—it takes place in an entirely Jewish state, one whose inhabitants are all highly aware of their Jewishness in ways I’ve never encountered in real life. It’s not quite caricature, and it’s definitely a loving portrait in many ways, but it felt like Chabon figured out how to convey “a Jewish atmosphere”, and conveys it, and then hires a trucking company to keep on conveying it from his mind to yours, while you’re trying to follow the plot. I suddenly wonder if At Swim-Two-Birds strikes the non-Irish in a similar way, given that it’s steeped (very steeped) in Irishness. In any case, Chabon’s novel is a good one, and a good read, but my question is: is it science fiction?
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High Geekery, this. Webcomics, one about a band of D&D characters rendered as stick figures, the other about a wargaming geek sucked into another dimension… I discovered both of them quite recently, despite friends who are into The Order of the Stick and the fact that Erfworld appears to have garnered critical acclaim.
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I’ve been playing around with literary awards in Freebase recently, mainly the novel/fiction Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.
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I’ve been re-reading Hellboy, one of my favorite comics. I got into it a few years ago and it took me a little while to figure out why I liked it.
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Okay, finally, I’m into this millennium. I have no idea why it took me more than a year to go from 2000′s favorite books to 2001′s.

Especially since I only read 39 books in 2001, my second-lowest yearly total of the years I’ve kept records.
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Continuing directly on the theme from the previous entry, author Charles Cumming has written a hypertext work that’s a fiction/Google Maps mashup: The 21 Steps.
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I finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance today. It’s an excellent book, covering a broad swathe of life in India during The Emergency, a period of what was essentially dictatorship form 1975 to 1977. It’s also extremely depressing.
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I finished Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal yesterday. In summary, the book is a statement of Krugman’s views on a modern society’s optimal economic setup, the fact that he believes that the United States of the 1950s–1970s was much closer to that setup than it was before or has been since, and his theories on how that state was reached, lost, and can be reached again.
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This is a list of the blogs and sites I read on a regular basis, not including those of friends.
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Radegund recently posted a “book meme”, listing the 106 (no idea why that number, but hey) books most listed as “unread” by users on LibraryThing (a kind of book version of Last.fm). I hadn’t known about LibraryThing before, and it looks interesting. In any case the idea is to list how many of the 106 you’ve read, so I did that.
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The Pale Blue Eye is a historical thriller set in 1830s America, at West Point Military Academy. A murder there brings a retired police constable, Augustus Landor, back to work, and in the course of his duties he becomes friendly with one of the cadets—Edgar Allan Poe.
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I haven’t been reading very much recently. I did finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Four Pillars of Investing recently, but overall it’s been a rather slow year, almost half gone already and only nine books finished.
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I tend to buy too many books when I go to bookstores. Today Jamie wanted to check out what the Modern Times bookstore had, so I tagged along, clearly a foolish move.
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I’m still waiting for Powers 10 to come out—it may be out, but the local comic store I go to (Comix Experience on Divisadero) hasn’t gotten it in yet. So I got some other things instead.
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Last month I wrote about wanting to change my reading habits, so that I would think more while reading, and read more critically. Since resolving to do this, the main difference is that I’ve been reading far less.
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It’s been a little over a year since Seth and I started reading Sartre’s Essays in Existentialism. We haven’t met quite every week, but probably haven’t missed more than six or so sessions.
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The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a series of fantasy novels by Steven Erikson (and possibly also by Ian Cameron Esslemont). I started reading it way back in late 2000/early 2001.
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I tend to read a lot, and I tend to read very quickly. I’m wondering if I should alter my approach.
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So this is only about six years late…
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I was thinking about this at a party I was at this evening, and commented that sharing books is one of the pleasures in life. Upon reflection, I think this is really true, that I do absolutely love sharing books with friends.
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Closer, closer to this millennium…
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Century Rain doesn’t take place in the same universe as the other Alastair Reynolds books I’ve read (Redemption Ark, Revelation Space, Chasm City). This universe posits an Earth abandoned by humans after a nanotechnological disaster.
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Slightly late, but getting closer… soon I might reach books I read this millennium.
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