Readability

Most people hate reading on a computer screen, but many of those people also spend hours reading online, so what’s the solution?  Try Readability.  I was reading an interview with John Joseph Adams, an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a guy who has to do A LOT of reading, and he [...]

Ringworld in Oz

When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them.  At nineteen I felt like a grownup [...]

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Dracula by Bram Stoker amazed me by how thoroughly Christian it portrays it’s 19th century worldview.  Published in 1897, this late Victorian novel doesn’t proselytize, but accepts Christianity like the rising of the Son.  Dracula is about a creature of the darkness invading the world of the light.  More than that, Dracula is about a [...]

Lessons from Blogging

Exercise for my flabby memory is the top reason why I put so much time writing on these blogs.  If I go too long without writing, I’ll notice that I’m forgetting more words in day to day conversations – I have to keep writing to fight the decline of my mind.  But am I writing [...]

Books Read 2008

2008 was a year of reading about the world and looking back at classic science fiction.  18 of the 45 books I read this year were SF.  11 were non-fiction.  12 books were ones I had read before – for some reason I listened to many SF classics that I first read back in the [...]

Further Adventures with eReader on the iPod touch

For some reason I’m getting more hits on the iPod touch eReader eBook post than anything else I’ve written lately, so I must assume that the iPod touch and eReader are a hit combination.  Since I wrote that post, eReader has come out with version 1.2 that offers many nifty new features and they’re promising [...]

Has Reading With My Ears Ruined My Desire To Read With My Eyes?

I have hundreds of unread books sitting on my shelves wagging their tales anxious to be read, but of the 28 books I “read” so far this year, only one was read with my eyes.  And that one, Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, was read as a magazine serial.  Had it been available on audio at [...]

iPod touch eReader eBook

I just bought an iPod touch 8gb for $199 refurbished at the Apple Store.  I’ve been wanting a carry around Internet device and the iPod touch is very elegant.  It took nothing to set up – just typed in my Wi-Fi code and I was connected.  I immediately upgraded it to the new 2.0 software [...]

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 56, Again

It is so easy to get distracted while writing.  My goal the other night was to focus on what it means to search for sense of wonder books in late middle age, but I got sidetrack from this intent by reminiscing about Clifford Simak’s City.  We science fiction fans often agree that around age 12 [...]

Roping A Wayward Mind

In the excellent essay, “The Myth of Multitasking,” Christine Rosen opens up with this 1740s quote from a Lord Chesterfield to his son that I can’t stop thinking about:
There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in [...]