Category: Books / Novels / Writing


  • The only books I have ever pre-ordered are the ones for A Song of Ice and Fire. The question came up about whether George R. R. Martin has the time to finish the books before the HBO television series catches up to him. In summary he estimates the television series will take multiple seasons for…

  • My resolutions for 2010 involved a lot of reading, improving my cooking repertoire, improving my photography repertoire, and having fun in the present. In goal accounting for 2010, 2 were successful and 2 not. Except for the reading goal, the other three were well outside my comfort zone.  I forgot my statement for the resolutions in 2009.…

  • I recently completed my first resolution for the year 2009: Read 12,000 pages. pp Check the Reading page for the master list. Titles in bold are the ones I recommend. (They also are probably the ones I quote the most.) Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – Carl Sagan – 368…

  • I tend to buy books. As Heather pointed out on Flickr, I could save lots of money by checking books out from the library. I don’t for one big reason. I am lazy. Most of my purchases fall within a sweet spot of wanting to read more about something because I heard about it on…

  • Joined a book club. Oddly enough for being an avid reader, I’ve never really done well discussing them in groups. In high school, there was a group of authors who would discuss manuscripts each other had written. The difference between this and a book club being openly critical of something hurts can hurt the author’s…

  • Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers. Not trusting a single sample, I tested fifteen writing samples including stories and blog posts (excluding those with block quotes). The Cory Doctorow result was the…

  • Yeah, I am definitely the latter consumer….

  • I agree all too often we think of our interactions with others as competition (a zero sum game where other’s loss is our gain). Instead, our fortunes are correlated with others, aka in non-zero sum game, so cooperation is the effective strategy (like Tit For Tat). Because non-zero is becoming more an more the norm, working effectively…

  • These are the books I read this year after completing the resolution list. The Art of Racing in the Rain – Garth Stein – DONE – 322 pp (10,461 total) The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain’s Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Mutiny, Shipwreck, and Discovery – Martin Dugard…