What I’ve been reading

Discovering Périgord Prehistory, by Brigitte & Gilles Delluc, A. Roussot, & Julia Roussot-Larroque

Europe’s Lost World; the rediscover of Doggerland, by V. Gaffney, SW. Fitch, & D. Smith

The Thriving Library; successful strategies for challenging times, by Marylaine Block

Mammoths, by Adrian Lister & Paul Bahn

Bad Dream, by John Christopher (sf)

Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian (fic)

The Invisible Sex; uncovering the true roles of women in prehistory, by J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, & Jake Page

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (fic)

Far Seer, by Robert J. Sawyer (sf)

I picked this 1992 sf novel up, at a Library used-bookstore, because the cover said “Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards”. It took me two tries to get into it, and finally I finished it, wondering all the while how this novel could possibly have won science fiction’s two biggest awards. My error: the line about the awards appears under the author’s name and he has won those two awards, but neither was for this book.

Far Seer is set on a world where T. rex-like reptiles are the sentient life-form. The young protagonist is a student of the heavens who is given one of the newly invented “far seers” (telescopes). What he sees enables him, in about a year local time, to recapitulate intellectual advances brought to Western thought by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, early geologists, and others. His ideas are even more threatening to the dominant religion than were those of Copernicus and Galileo. The over-simplification of the thought and observations needed for these discoveries, and the lack of intellectual excitement for this reader, made Far Seer seem under-developed to me. It would be a good read perhaps for a science fiction fan in junior high or high school; there’s one brief sex scene which might even be a plus––dinosaur sex!

The Philip K. Dick Reader, by Philip K. Dick (sf)

 

 

 

The Fantastic Pulps: 21 tales of fantasy, horror, mystery and science fiction, from the famous pulp magazines of yesteryear, ed. by Peter Haining

The Nature of Paleolithic Art, by R. Dale Guthrie

The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom

Not Even Wrong: adventures in autism, by Paul Collins
Agincourt, by Bernard Cornwell
The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge

Matilda, by Roald Dahl
Benno’s Bear, by Naomi Flink Zucker (young adult book)
The Explosionist, by Jenny Davidson (young adult book)
Heredity, by Jenny Davidson 
New Legends, by Greg Bear (ed.)
Unstrange Minds: remapping the world of autism, by Roy Richard Grinker
The Loch Moose Monster: more stories from Asimov’s sf magazine, by Sheila Williams (ed.)
Ex Libris, confessions of a common reader, by Anne Fadiman
Don’t Make Me Think, a common sense approach to web usability, by Steve Krug
The Art of Time, by Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber
Linnea in Monet’s Garden, by Christina Björk and Lena Anderson
Iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how people think differently, by Gregory Berns
Murder in Amsterdam: the death of Theo van Gogh and the limits of tolerance, by Ian Buruma

Complications: a surgeon’s notes on an imperfect science, by Atul Gawande
Voodoo Science: the road from foolishness to fraud, by Robert Park
City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles, by Mike Davis (the quintessential artificial city, its past and present, and what may creep out at all of us in future)
The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, ed. by Karen Joy Fowler, P. Murphy, D. Notkin, J.D. Smith
Horizons, by Mary Rosenblum
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, J. Marshall, and E. Weiner
Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd 
Vanishing Acts, edited by Ellen Datlow (sf stories concerned with the disappearance of species)
Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell 
Jar City, by Arnaldur Indriđason
Beowulf, dual language edition, ed. and tr. Howell D. Chickering Jr.
The Sparrow (1996), by Mary Doria Russell
Hawksbill Station (1967), by Robert Silverberg
Owls and other Fantasies, poems and essays, by Mary Oliver
Year’s Best SF 5 (2000), ed. by David G. Hartwell.
Fooled by Randomness: the hidden role of chance in the markets and in life, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Other End of the Leash; why we do what we do around dogs, by Patricia B. Macconnell, Ph.D.
The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards
Bastard out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison
Pegasus Descending, by James Lee Burke 
Old Man’s War , by John Scalzi 
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
Night Kill, by Ann Littlewood
The Hugo Winners 1976-1979, edited by Isaac Asimov