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Nonsense. I look at it. Admittedly, I sometimes turn away horrified, but the look bit is there.

How come very few people reply, then? And why do you turn away horrified?

Well, I've always thought - seriously, 'cause I've seen you say "no-one reads this" before - it's because people treat it as a statement, a finalised review, rather than an invitation to discussion. *shrugs* I don't think that's bad. But the horror - or, y'know, that metaphorical horror which is more akin to "meh, not for me" - comes when you like things that I think are atrocious.

*grins* I mean, I've got Battlefield Earth on my bookshelf. And, like, lots of stuff by PKD. And a whole host of other utter trash. God knows what someone'd think if they judged me by what I read instead of what I read that I thought was good (or liked - a different matter entirely.) But I get the impression from your blog that you like a lot of things I don't.

I got so many books for Christmas and more on the way that I don't even know where to start.

Like what?

Anyway, different tastes, and all that.



Well, while I can take or leave anything by L Ron Hubbard, I have read and reviewed two Philip K Dick books for previous book-reading blogs. I found A Scanner Darkly far more entertaining than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Both were still good books, though. I'd certainly try another PKD book in the future (The Man in the High Castle, perhaps?), though there are other books that I would prefer to try first. I intend to read another Charles Stross book first, The Jennifer Morgue.

Commenting on my blog isn't going to end with your head bitten off. I welcome other opinions, as long as they are reasoned ones. If they're either vicious diatribes or 'dur-hur, you are wrong because you're stupid' (plus a few spelling and grammatical errors), then I don't welcome them. Suggestions for books to read will not be taken unless I particularly feel like it.

Reading The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series... on my brand new Sony digital e-reader that I got for Christmas, I might add.

The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin

Reading Duma Key by Stephen King. Really interesting so far, about 400 pages in.

I've finished reading this about half an hour ago on the kindle, it only took a few hours to read:

It is a very very very very good book. It's written as if from Ham's perspective, and it features the other space chimps as well, Enos, Ginger, Luscious and Violet. What I like is how they speak to each other but the humans can't understand them, so they have their own little dramas and things. It has a good balance of humour and seriousness, some parts are actually very sad and depressing. The most depressing thing is near the beginning they all think that if they finish their training they'll get to go back home but eventually they realise they'll be following humans' commands forever. The funny part though is when Enos steals the keys to their cages and they escape and drink bottles of coke on the roof of the building, and because the scientists let them smoke cigarettes a few times they were now fully fledged smokers so they took some packets with them as well. And the next day they had a bad cough and the NASA scientists thought they had an illness and were really scared and kept them in quarantine.

Finished Suelette Dreyfus' Underground about the Australian hacker underground that included Julian Assange, aka Mendax. Assange was Dreyfus' primary source for the book. Brought back memories of both my time hanging around hackers in high schol and college as ell as an old friend of my who was a computer programmer for NASA when the w*k hack happened. Mendax'd story also triggered by PTSD so I'll offer a PTSD warning in case you're sensitive like me to stories of trauma.

You can get the free PDF here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~suelette/undergro ... ground.pdf

I'm starting Edwin Abbott's Flatworld today.

Read The Magician's Nephew. Unfortunately I have all the Narnia books except TLTWATW, so will have to skip over it to The Horse and His Boy.

Oh, and finished the Hornblower and have ordered most of the rest of them in two convenient omnibuses. Omnibii. Books. Given that I don't particularly like either the setting or the characters, the writing must be compelling.

I've read Underground quite a few times, and enjoyed it, and I was surprised when I looked up Julian Assange's Wikipedia article recently to find that he was Mendax.

Just finished "The Greatest Show On Earth" by Richard Dawkins.

Have read the first few chapters of "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan.

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
A Brief History of Time: Stephen Hawkings
On The Origin Of Species: Charles Darwin
Dragon Avenger: E. E. Knight
Temeraire(still!): Naomi Novik
Cosmos(still): Carl Sagan

A bunch of partially read books on my book shelf that I need to finally finish.

I actually read it twice, two nights in a row despite the stuff about Mendax's life that parallels mine and thus triggered my PTSD. I don't have any specific recollection of the name Mendax prior to the Wikileaks thing, but when Wikileaks was starting to get noticed, the name Julian Assange was very familiar to me but I just couldn't place where I had heard/seen his name before. I've been around quite a few hackers--from 1988 to 1998 roughly--including a couple Aussies, so it's entirely possible someone dropped his name somewhere in there. Dunno--unfortunately my memories of that time has gotten fuzzier and fuzzier with each passing year. But I was quite surprised to find he is suspected of being involved with w*k hack, which I had known about from my NASA friend.