Probable Futures
“Improbable Futures,” the last chapter in Better to Have Loved (2002), is derived from an interview given by Judith Merril for a documentary six months before h...
Category: Books
Yes, I like The Shire
In his New York Times column last Sunday, Ross Douthat remarked The teenage nerd enters conservatism through either Atlas Shrugged or Lord of the Rings, and bet...
Private Gain at the Public Expense
We should be on the Appalachian Trail today, but the threat of thunderstorms persuaded me that this week was not the time for a first backpacking trip with the ...
An End is a Beginning
Time passes, and I feel a need to catch up with an old familiar friend. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) passed on the 22nd. I can’t quite recall if I first ...
Science Fiction was never entirely about The Future
I’ve been reading stories from the November/December 2017 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine that I picked up at Barnes & Noble before C...
What I Bought Today
It makes perfect sense, buying this. Now, this time of year when, more than any other time of year, it’s the time to buy things. It was weird buying this, thoug...
First World Problems
Despite all evidence to the contrary, it is possible to use adverbs on road signs. This month’s additional practice is to not like anything on the Interne...
More Books Than Time
Looking at my shelves lined with books, I know where some of them are from, but not all. The newer purchases have no tangible memory with them. Oh, I know a bit...
Library Hazards
Began work on organizing my collection of fiction today, and am very irritated. One of the cats — I know which one — has taken it upon himself to ur...
My Sons Build Better Box Forts
My love and I put together the IKEA Billy bookcases for my library last Thursday. They had been occupying the hall, and my books boxes, due to certain logistica...
Dear Diary
I’m reading George Orwell’s diary and Samuel Pepys’s diary one day at a time in Google Reader, as the entries are published. The two diaries a...
Of the Character of one Mr. Brownlow
From There’s Pippins And Cheese To Come, by Charles S. Brooks (Yale University Press, 1917) By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who...
Logistical Speculation
I’ve just started John Keegan’s The First World War, on a topic of which I know little other than the abbreviated, over-simplified summary found in ...
Time to Read
Ernie says, I’m reading more these days now that I have my Kindle. How does having a Kindle give you more time to read? I’m constantly reading, but ...
Bowdlerization
sed -E 's/(dumb|stupid)//g'
Mice or Men?
Randall O’Toole‘s latest book, The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future argues that...
Mad Scientists’ Club
Who wouldn’t want to be a member? The Bigger Sister is reading well beyond what the schools expect of her, so at the library the other day, I went looking...
Read and Release
Read and Release Just released some books in the cafeteria. We’ll see how fast those Wheel of Time novels disappear. And then after the table’s clea...