Rating: 4/5 Lee Child, Tripwire (New York: Berkeley Books, 2005). What an improvement! Of the first three books, this is the best. The characters are better rounded, the plot line was much more interesting, and the writing was greatly improved. Finally characters learned to do things other than shrugging! (Though there...
Rating: 4/5 Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996). There was a lull in the flow of books from the library, so I picked something off my shelf to re-read. I hadn’t read this story for many years. I had forgotten how great it was! Philip K. Dick was as much a philosopher...
Rating: 4/5 Alastair Reynolds, Zima Blue (London: Gollancz, 2009). I had forgotten how much I enjoy Alastair Reynolds’s writing. He is an expert in the “space opera” genre. Short stories give authors a great opportunity to distill a story down to its very essence. Reynolds does not waste words. I really enjoyed this...
Rating: 4/5 Lee Child, Killing Floor (New York: Jove Books, 1997). Apparently I’m a little late coming to the Jack Reacher party. Both my father and one of my sisters has been talking up these book for a long time, and I’ve just never made the time to read them. Well I finally did, and wow, I’ve been missing out! I do...
Rating: 4/5 Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (New York: Crown Publishers, 2011). Well the book was a fun read, but saccharine. Like the best Disney and Pixar films, Ready Player One is targetted to younger readers but cannot be fully appreciated except by older ones. Unfortunately, unlike movies like Wall-E (my...
Rating: 4/5 Robert Lomas, The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla, Forgotten Genius of Electricity (London: Headline, 1999). This is an excellent non-academic biography (no source notes) of Nikola Tesla. I knew of Tesla, but it was nice to read his story from beginning to end. Lomas is obviously...
Rating: 4/5 Eleanor Harman, Ian, Montagnes, Siobhan McMenemy, and Chris Bucci (eds.), The Thesis and the Book: A Guide for First-Time Academic Authors, 2nd edition (University of Toronto Press, 2003). Writing a PhD dissertation? Finished writing? Hope to publish it (or part of it) in book form? Then you must read this...
Rating: 4/5 Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). This book is a history of both vaccination itself and its opponents. The take-away message is that the media is not the place to go for truly balanced and accurate information about science and health. They are far more interested in ratings...
Rating: 4/5 Barbara Gibbs Ostmann and Jane L. Baker, The Recipe Writer’s Handbook: Revised and Expanded (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001). Well this is a book for editors. What it is is a style guide specifically for cookbooks. Should you use “green onions” or “scallions”? “Red pepper” or “red bell pepper”? What are...
Rating: 4/5 Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (New York: Doubleday, 2011 [1977]). I studied Philip K. Dick’s (PDK) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner) in a college English class and just loved it. I went out and read a bunch of PKD’s short stories. I had heard the title A...