Posts under ‘Reading Room’

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge by Bridge: Volume 2: Minnesota
by Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello
 
When an elementary school art teacher in Davenport, Iowa instructed her fifth grade students to study and sketch the local Mississippi River bridges one semester, probably neither the teacher nor her students nor anyone else had any inkling that a decades-long labor [...]

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84.
I know I’m just one of a multitude saying it, but I have to say that this news leaves me very sad.  
Actually I’m only familiar with a few of his books: 
Mother Night
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 
Slaughterhouse Five
and, my first encounter with him:
The Sirens of Titan
..which I read when I was 13, [...]

(via PZ) Here’s a list of The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years.
When I first looked it over I couldn’t believe how many of these books I have NOT read. Shocking. For example: I have not read Sword of Shannara. Tsk, and I call myself an SF&F fan!
Here’s the list [...]

Oh thanks, Wege. Just what I was dreaming of : being tagged with this book meme thing which is oddly omnipresent  throughout every nook and cranny (and crook and nanny) of Blogistan, despite it being one of the most boring and tedious tasks ever devised.
How to liven it up? Alas, it can’t be done. Even [...]

..Or is it the other way around?
UPDATED:  No, on second glance I take it all back.  There is really absolutely nothing funny about these soul-destroying little glimpses of hell.  Jesus wept. 

John of A Hole In The Head scanned and posted pages from some of the most depressing magazines I have ever seen:
Some time ago at a yard [...]

WIRED magazine asked a plethora of mainly SF authors but also some others to try writing a complete short story using only 6 words.
Something tells me this is one of those formats that, like haiku and limericks, is insidiously addictive, like the literary equivalent of Lay’s potato chips.
Bet you can’t write just one.
Now you know [...]

I’ve blogged before about Alice Sheldon, the SF author who famously wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. in the 1970s.  She has long been in my personal pantheon of favorite writers.  
There’s a new biography of Sheldon/Tiptree out now, and last week Salon reviewed it (well worth sitting through the advertisement  if you don’t subscribe to Salon Premium).
Aug. 10, 2006 [...]

Nostalgia:
Remember the Brunching Shuttlecocks? Among the things we have them to thank for is this classic:
The Geek Hierarchy
~~~~~
YouTubing:
Hey, when you’re as fascinated by sugar beets as I am, you’ll watch anything that has beets in it:
We got the beets!
On the other hand, this has no beets in it at all, but somehow [...]