Books

Science Fiction Fantasy General Fiction Nonfiction Religion and Atheism
Books are pretty important to me, so here's a bit of a list of what I've enjoyed reading over the years. For a list of what I've been reading lately, see my reading list. My books links page has links to sites that have whole books online.

Science Fiction

I read mostly fiction, and of that, a lot of it used to be science fiction.

Neal Stephenson

My favourite author. In chronological order, he wrote The Big U, Zodiac (Nothing Beats an All-Black Breakfast), Snow Crash, Diamond Age (Judge Fang, The Sandwich), Cryptonomicon (web site), and the Baroque Cycle, consisting of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. He also wrote The Cobweb and Interface with his uncle under the name Stephen Bury.

Full text of The Big U. When I first found and posted this, The Big U was still out of print and Stephenson was saying that he wasn't particularly interested in getting it back in print. Now it's been reprinted, so go buy a paper copy.

Snow Crash is online here and other places.

Two Tires Fly... full text of Cryptonomicon

Some other stories and articles around:
Mother Earth Mother Board, an article he wrote for Wired about undersea cable laying.

Here's an older article (1994) about China: In the Kingdom of Mao Bell. Now I know when he did his research for Diamond Age.

In the Beginning was the Command Line. An excellent article about operating systems and more. Available in hard copy or distributed for free as a text file at Cryptonomicon.com. Here's a link to a nice html version.

Jipi and the Paranoid Chip (Or Jipi's Day at the Office)
The Great Simoleon Caper
The Spew
Smiley's people
Dreams & Nightmares of the Digital Age
Mark Hughes's Hiro worship page

Robert Heinlein

I used to be really into his books. This has diminished over time, so that now I can only seriously recommend Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers.

 

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

- Time Enough For Love
A couple of fan pages:
Nitrosyncretic press
wegrokit.com has number of articles.
Notebooks of Lazarus Long: I don't know if anyone has these complete and in order online, but this one looks pretty close. This section from the mythical notebooks appears in Time Enough for Love.

Spider Robinson

I like the Callahan's books and the Mindkiller series (Mindkiller, Time Pressure, Life House). He doesn't always see two sides of every question, and when he thinks something is cool or it's really important to him, it'll show up in more than one book. For example, this business about whether or not "adrenaline" has an e on the end, or the paradox of why we like things like sugar that aren't good for us, or how cool Nikola Tesla is (was). But he writes a good story.

Check out webscriptions for sample chapters.

Lois McMaster Bujold

She writes both science fiction and fantasy. Her science fiction is a series of books about a character called Miles Vorkosigan (and also about his parents before he's born), as well as two other books that fit in but aren't about the same main characters called Ethan of Athos and Falling Free. Of her fantasy, I only know The Spirit Ring and The Curse of Chalion.

All of her books are ok, but the ones I love are the Vorkosigan books. They're a really good story because they do a compelling job of showing Mile's struggles against his handicaps, the expectations of society because of the power that he's born into and the tradition of service in his family, trying to follow in the footsteps of his highly successful father, trying to be good enough for his grandfather.

Cetaganda First 8 chapters
Mirror Dance First 4 chapters First 10 chapters
Memory Chapter 1 of first 3
Komarr First 3 chapters
A Civil Campaign First 5 chapters
Diplomatic Immunity First 4 chapters

Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game is on my must-read list. I also enjoyed the sequels as well as Wyrms and Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus. He also writes some more fantasy-type books that I've never read.

Bruce Sterling

I'm not really a fan. I read The Difference Engine by him and someone else and thought it was so-so. I don't really like the way he writes. But, there's this really cool website (thanks Seann) with lots of articles and stuff, some of which are pretty good: The Bruce Sterling Online Index.

Anne McCaffrey

The dragonriders of Pern books are something of a guilty pleasure of mine. I can still re-read Dragonsong and Dragonsinger and enjoy them because they're just very well written and it's a sweet story. I also enjoyed Crystal Singer.

Roger Zelazny

I just read A Night in the Lonesome October and really liked it. I also really like Roadmarks and Lord of Light. I'll also read his short stories.

Steve Aylett

I have Toxicology, a collection of short stories by him. It doesn't entirely work for me, but I do really like a few of the stories in it. Here's my favourite, from which this quote comes:
"Yanda,"..."Listen. I'm not really in any hurry to be illuminated. Heaven doesn't tolerate cunning or wit. This grub in the head's an inconvenience, I realise that, and I should probably say I'm sorry, though that's just a guess on my part. But I want you to know. Despite your sentences being a barricade to the truth. Despite your approval existing only for trifles. Despite your gargantuan efforts to bury yourself, deny your mind and cremate your courage. Despite your attempt to remove all distinguishing marks. I see you. You're an angel, babe. Mad, soft around the edges, scared, and trying your damnedest with what you have. I love you down to the deepest atom. What do you say to that?"

John Varley

I just recently read my first book by him: Steel Beach, and it was excellent. I then went on to read Titan, Wizard and Demon which are also highly recommended, and also Mammoth and The Golden Globe, which were okay, but not in the same league as the others.

Ray Bradbury

I liked The Martian Chronicles, but I think my favourite books of his are Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine.

William Gibson

I liked Neuromancer a lot and the books that came after, and I like his short story collection Burning Chrome very much.

Arthur C. Clarke

I read a lot of his books a long time ago, probably when I was about 12. Of the bunch, Childhood's End and Rendezvous with Rama stand out the most.

Larry Niven

Ringworld is really good. The sequel less so. I've read some short story collections (The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton). I also read The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Jerry Pournelle and thought it was very good. I haven't read Lucifer's Hammer or Inferno, but I've been meaning to.

My must-read science fiction list:

I think the best way to define this list is to say that if I'm lending someone books, these are the ones I'll try for sure to get them to read. Or that if I'm talking to someone who likes science fiction, I'll be surprised if there's a book on this list that they haven't read.

Other science fiction I've enjoyed

Dan Simmons's Hyperion books
Contact - Carl Sagan
A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge

Fantasy

I'm not a big fan of fantasy in general. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and they're good but they don't do much for me, and then I've also read: the whole Belgariad series by David Eddings, the first five or so of the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, Tad Williams' Tailchaser's Song and The Dragonbone Chair, Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, endless Piers Anthony, both Xanth books and the Incarnations of immortality series, Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold by Terry Brooks, the two books by Lois McMaster Bujold I mention above, and who knows what I'm forgetting. Basically none of these books are anything I'd go back and re-read. However, there is some stuff that I'd call fantasy that I do really like, so here it is.

Sandman - Death: The High Cost of Living

Neil Gaiman

He's most famous for his Sandman comics, which I love, but I also really like Neverwhere and American Gods, and his short story collections.

Piece of script from The Kindly Ones, one of the Sandman series.
Piece of annotation from Season of Mists.

I now have American Gods and I like it a lot. I went to a reading by Gaiman here in Victoria, which was very cool. He read from American Gods (and autographed my copy of "The Wake"). I realized when I was browsing the web after the signing that Angels and Visitations is out of print and much sought after. I hadn't realized how lucky I was to have found it used for $12. Here is someone who's filled in some background information about the gods mentioned in the book (possible spoiler content), with some pictures of the House on the Rock.

Terry Pratchett

If you liked Douglas Adams, you might like him as well. I have to say he's one of the funniest authors I've read. He's also got a very wide following: every once in a while I'll be talking to someone and something will come up about oograh, or dwarf bread, or sapient pearwood, or the inner life of camels. His best-known books are the Discworld series, of which my favourites are the ones about the witches.

Pratchett fans are many and they're on the web:
Check out some quotes

Beginning of Equal Rites
Beginning of Carpe Jugulum

Anne Rice

I wouldn't really call myself a fan, but I've sure read a lot of her books: must be at least seven of the vampire books, the Sleeping Beauty series, The Mummy, Belinda and Exit to Eden.

William Goldman - The Princess Bride

Very enjoyable. Make sure you read the introduction. Good movie too.

Quotes
Part of the script

General Fiction

Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey books

I love these books. The more I read them the better I like them. My favourites are Murder Must Advertise, Strong Poison and Gaudy Night.

Dick Francis

I read a lot of these at one time and I remember some of the best ones being The Danger, Banker, Slay Ride and Reflex. I reread The Danger recently though and I didn't enjoy it that much, but maybe I was expecting too much. I just read Reflex again and thought it was pretty solid.

Robertson Davies

I've read the Deptford trilogy: Fifth Business, World of Wonders and The Manticore, and also the Cornish trilogy: The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus. All good, although I enjoyed the first series more.

Jean M. Auel

The Clan of the Cave Bear series. There's a lot of good anthropological and biological lore in these books, and a good story in the first book. The plots in the later books go downhill a bit, getting stuck with weaker and weaker interpersonal conflicts until the last book is very soap-opera.

Trevanian

I've got Shibumi ("Go is to chess as philosophy is to double-entry bookkeeping.") and The Eiger Sanction, but I'm not sure that I'm going to be reading them anymore. Way too bleak.

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

"Don't be silly. Manuscripts don't burn." Pretty much all I got out of a Russian literature class (I took a variety of courses in first year). Check out this great web site for pictures (Behemoth) as well as history and background information.

Tim Tomlinson

All I know is that he wrote a killer story for Libido magazine. Read a chunk of it here. I just really like the rhythm of his writing in this story but I guess what also appeals to me is the theme I see in it of the conflict between a person's animal nature and rational nature. "It's myself I'm in disagreement with, but I'm still myself."

Nonfiction

David Foster Wallace

Writes both fiction (I've just read Infinite Jest) and nonfiction. I've got A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, both collections of articles. My favourite story is a very funny article about going on a cruise in the first collection.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

This book explores the general question of why some cultures have dominated over others, and concludes that it has a lot to do with the plants and animals that each culture had to work with, as that determined whether they could develop agriculture, which would then result in higher population densities and the development of government, technology, and epidemic disease. In the epilogue the central question of the book is carried into more modern times to ask why some countries dominate over others:
Obviously, part of the answer depends on differences in human institutions. The clearest evidence for this view comes from pairs of countries that divide essentially the same environment but have very different institutions and, associated with those institutions, different per-capita GNPs. Four flagrant examples are the comparison of South Korea with North Korea, the former West Germany with the former East Germany, the Dominican Republic with Haiti, and Israel with its Arab neighbors. Among the many "good institutions" often invoked to explain the greater wealth of the first-named country of each of these pairs are effective rule of law, enforcement of contracts, protection of private property rights, lack of corruption, low frequency of assassinations, openness to trade and to flow of capital, incentives for investment, and so on.
He goes on to say though, that good institutions are not something that just happens to arise in one place and not the other, and he brings up what he calls "the effect of history", by which he means that these institutions arise out of a long chain of events that originate in the past geographical causes (back to the domesticable animals, climate, etc.). To illustrate, he quotes some economy papers that explore the correlation between modern GNP and a country's history:
It turns out that countries in regions with long histories of state societies or agriculture have higher per-capita GNP than countries with short histories, even after other variables have been controlled. The effect explains a large fraction of the variance in GNP. Even just among countries with still-low or recently low GNPs, countries in regions with long histories of state societies or agriculture, like South Korea, Japan, and China, have higher growth rates than countries with short histories, such as New Guinea and the Philippines, even though some of the countries with short histories are much richer in natural resources.

John Preston - My Life as a Pornographer

Essays about being a writer of porn (and what it's like to be confused with your fictional heroes), but also about gay culture in general: S/M as a manhood ritual and how this used to be enacted at the Mineshaft club, what gay men need out of safe sex education and what they're not getting, what pride events are about for him, porn photo models, and the erotic potential of men's underwear. He often talks about trends he's observing and describes the roots behind them. These essays were mostly written in the late eighties and early nineties. He was HIV positive during the time that he wrote at least some of these articles, and has since died. I've posted one of the essays from the book that I thought was both moving and important: Gay Pride, Telling the Truth, and Pornography.

Gerald Durrell

He wrote to make money for his real passion which was to preserve endangered species, by raising awareness and trying to presenve habitat and so forth, but also by captive breeding programs which is what he did at his zoo. My favourite book is his first book: My Family and other Animals, a very funny book about his childhood in Greece.

Hunter S. Thompson

Very funny, crazy, honest and surprisingly compassionate. I like his collections of articles best, starting with The Great Shark Hunt, but I will read anything he wrote.

Some of my favourites are Song of the Sausage Creature ("There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.") and Midnight on the Coast Highway (The Edge).

 

Have you ever put a brick through a big plate-glass window, Ralph? It makes a wonderful goddamn noise, and the people inside run around like rats in a firestorm. It's fun, Ralph, and a bargain at any price.

- The Pro-Flogging View
From a letter to Ralph Steadman: read it here.

On the web: Fear and Loathing in Elko

Religion and Atheism

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

The End of Faith - Sam Harris

Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris

A nice, short little read. From a footnote:
While many people of faith seem convinced that prayer can heal a wide variety of illnesses (despite what the best scientific research indicates), it is curious that prayer is only ever believed to work for illnesses and injuries that can be self-limiting. No one, for instance, ever seriously expects that prayer will cause an amputee to regrow a missing limb. Why not? Salamanders manage this routinely, presumably without prayer. If God answer prayers - ever - why wouldn't he occasionally heal a deserving amputee?

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - Christopher Hitchens

Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This book is the memoir of a Somalian woman who grew up in Somalia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and Ethiopia before fleeing to Holland. It's very interesting to read about her experiences living in those countries and her changing perspective on Islam. As an adult she became a member of parliament in Holland and making a ten-minute movie criticizing Islam and its treatment of women in particular. The Dutch filmmaker who directed the movie was murdered over it and she has been forced to live under very tight security ever since.

Breaking the Spell - Daniel Dennett

Probably my favourite. He takes quite a patient and non-adversarial tone, and simply suggests that we examine the phenomenon of religion in a scientific light. He's preaching to the converted in me, but still, somewhere during the book I felt something in my mind go ping! when I really thought about the absurdity of taking one religion more seriously than another.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God - Carl Sagan

This is a transcript of a series of lectures that Carl Sagan gave as the 1985 Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow. Here's an interesting passage:
"And there's an extremely interesting statistical study by the American social scientist James Prescott, in which he has looked at the compilation by Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor of hundreds of different societies, not all of them still extant. ... It is Prescott's view that there are causal relations. That, in fact, in his view the key distinction has to do with whether cultures hug their children and whether they permit premarital sexual activity among adolescents. In his view those are the keys. And he concludes that all cultures in which the children are hugged and the teenagers can have sex wind up without powerful social hierarchies and everybody's happy. And those cultures in which the children are not permitted to be hugged because of some social ban and a premarital adolescent sexual taboo is strictly enforced wind up killing, hating, and having powerful dominance hierarchies."

The World's Religions - Huston Smith

Previously released as The Religions of Man, this is a really well-written and interesting book describing the main points of the major world religions. Covered are Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and a final chapter on what he calls the "primal religions." For each religion, he explains the history and the main points of thought.

Christian Bible

Just for my education. So far I've read the first five books of the Old Testament, and the four gospels of the New Testament. I don't think I'll be reading the whole thing, but since the New is only(?) 250 pages long, I can probably make it though that.

I'm reading the New International Version, just because that's what was being handed out for free at the University clubs day. I'm pretty happy with it, but it uses a few colloquialisms, such as "sleep with" and "stiff-necked" that I have trouble accepting as the best possible translation. The ideal Bible translation for me would be as literal as possible - no modern colloquialisms and no changes to "gender-neutral" language, in modern language, and using readings from the Dead Sea scrolls where appropriate.

The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity - James VanderKam and Peter Flint

I didn't read the whole thing as this book gets a little dry in places, but I skimmmed through the discovery etc, and then paid more attention to the "Dead Sea Scrolls and Scripture" section. There's a very informative discussion there about the various sources used to compile the modern versions of the Bible. Let's see if I can provide a summary (all quotations are from VanderKam and Flint):

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