The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke: A collection of short stories set in the same universe as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. (Well, one is supposed to be set in Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, but it still reads very much like the other stories in the book.) I’m perpetually delighted by the attention Clarke [...]
I haven’t updated this blog since last October, due to considerable laziness on my part. But that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned it, and I shall try my best over the next few days to catch up on the backlog. In this post, some notes on the books I read from October to November [...]
Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett: Another Ankh-Morpork novel along the lines of The Truth, i.e. a look into the chaos that explodes when the Discworld equivalent of a modern-day convenience develops. Vetinari at his absolute best here. There’s definitely a gentle parody of that 50s film stereotype of the con man who ends [...]
Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner: I bought this book on the recommendation of my best friend, despite my initial qualms about her plot summary—she described it as a medieval story about a swordsman and a scholar (I thought hopefully of Narcissus und Goldmund and less optimistically of Mercedes Lackey’s numerous swords-and-sworcery novels). Still, I wanted to [...]
It’s lonely being in Cambridge during the summer, when your friends are all back home in New York (or other places). Lab work is exciting, even when all I’m doing is pipetting isopropanol back and forth, but once I step outside the CGR building, a crushing sense of being entirely self-contained in my own consciousness, [...]