Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.
Snagged from here, another one of those useless Internet memes.
I’ve bolded the ones that I haven’t read, because it was easier. At one point, I actually made a project of marching through these.
It has been a while since I did one of these posts, and as a result, I have a largish backlog of books to mention. This doesn’t even begin to cover everything I read, but hey, it’s a start.
The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 13) wraps up the saga of the unfortunate Baudelaire siblings. Alas, I fear that children worldwide shall be perplexed by the conclusion to this saga, for it is rather existentialist in tone (a word which here means “not going to answer any questions”). But adults may find it challenging and intriguing. You see, it’s been a bit of a lie all along that these books are really solely aimed at kids. In the last book, we discovered that the most fearful thing in the whole series was a giant question mark that rose from the bottom of the ocean, conveniently termed “the Great Unknown.” We saw that the clean lines of division between good guys and bad guys are seldom real, and exist mostly in our minds. There are some revelations: it becomes clearer who Beatrice was, for example. But mostly, what we learn is that all real stories begin and end in in medias res, that there are no tidy endings, and that significant and even unfortunate events are often familiar retreads that have been lived by others: the deaths of parents, most notably. All in all, I still think that this is a far deeper and richer series of books than one might expect to find on the children’s bookshelf, and will long stand as a classic. It’s also probably the single best-written book I will review this time around.
A while back, I promised to write about the differences and similiarities I saw between the folks who attended Worldcon and the folks I tend to see at the various gaming conferences. Walking around Worldcon was an interesting experience, because everyone there was clearly “of my tribe” in some indefinable fashion, and yet they were also different. Just the sheer sense of anonymity was interesting, for one: seeing so many sorts of people that I recognized made me expect to run into people I knew — but in practice, that didn’t really happen very much (although to my pleasant surprise I bumped into some: Jamil Moledina, who runs GDC now; Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games; and a few SF writers whom I know and expected to see there, like David Brin, Cory Doctorow, and so on).
So, herewith, my thoughts on similarities and differences:
Continue reading »
A Theory of Fun made Next Generation’s list of “50 Books For Everyone In the Game Industry” written by Ernest Adams. It’s quite a good list — I think I have read 2/3rds of it.
John M. Ford, who wrote the magnificent fantasy novel The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History and the funniest Star Trek novel ever written, has passed away.
