I met a few friends for a drink and they recommended to me (or rather seemed amazed that I had not heard of it) Dragonlance. I looked it up and, to my chagrin, found that it is a huge series with over 20 books and a lot of short stories - actually, in 2008 there where over 190 novels in the same universe. Resigned myself to read them all, I googled for the right order in which to read the saga and came up with Chronicles, which is a trilogy of books, as the correct starting point.

As in the story, there is balance between the good and the bad in my assessment of the books. For one, I will not read the rest of the books and waste a lot of my time, but for the other, I already start regretting reading the first three. You see, the entire plot seems to have the only purpose of supporting a canon of the classic fantasy genre that the writers have thought up.

Probably emerging from games of Dungeons and Dragons, like many fantasy universes, the world of Krynn has nothing remotely original. There are elves, humans, dwarves, goblins, dragons, pegasi, unicorns, centaurs, and other races like that. From the very first pages, you meet the heroes that form the quest party and they seem to have gathered all the possible cliches in the genre in their travels: the dwarf is old and grumpy and complains a lot, the half-elf is tortured by his double ancestry, the knight is rigid and honorable, the mage is tiny and frail and frustrated about it, his big (twin) brother is huge and completely non-magical, etc. In fact, the mage character is the only one which seems remotely interesting, all the other being busy posturing most of the time, like real size commercials for their D&D class and specialization.

But what I thought was the most offensive of all was the premise of the trilogy. Beware, here be dragons... and spoilers. Do not read further if you think you might want to read the books.

You see, the world has been reeling after a huge Cataclysm, a fiery mountain hitting the planet and causing havoc. At the end of the book we learn that the gods, in their infinite wisdom, did that because the world was too unbalanced towards good! And we learn this from the good god, who for the entire duration of the story just nudged our heroes in one direction or the other while the evil god was amassing armies and killing everybody. How is that for balance?

Even so, you can hardly complain about a book being cliché if you don't read more of the genre and, to be honest, except for a few books, I didn't really read much fantasy. So I had an opportunity to enjoy this, even if the writing was simplistic, the characterization almost non existent and the story bland. But there was something in the books that kept me at arms length from enjoying it. It finally dawned on me in the middle of the second book, when, after reading about the emotional turmoil of everybody, having the men pair with the women - unless they were there for comic relief, like the dwarf and the kender (which one could consider a pair, if I think about it) - and making chaste promises to one another (like not having sex until they can focus on the relationship and stuff like that)... after all that, I realized that Dragonlance was written by two women. (Even later I realized that one of the women was actually a man. Shame on me! The rest of the review stands)

I don't want to sound misogynistic here, I really wanted to read something cool written by women, but for a series entitled after a weapon - albeit something long and thin, with a thick bulbous appendage at the tip - the story was surprisingly devoid of any detailed battles, tactics, strategy or even decent brawls. The heroes are always running around, talking about their feelings or thinking about them and, in case there is a huge battle between the forces of good and evil, quickly skips forward to the conflict between the two women that love the same man.

Also, as if it all wasn't formulaic enough, no one really dies from the group, unless it is something that fulfills their purpose in life, while the support cast keeps perishing without anyone actually giving a damn. Check out the bit where an entire ship crew - including the woman captain and the minotaur second that I had read a lot about in previous pages - just die without the characters even remembering it. Or the battle of the knights with the dragon armies, where one phrase describes how the knights held, but half of them died. Just like that. I may have written more about that bit than there was written in the book.

To end this terrible rant, if you thought Wheel of Time was childish, as I did, this is worse. T'is true, the fair maiden that hath captured my heart and recommended the books hath read said scrolls of wisdom when she was 16, so that might explain her fond memories and my tortured journey towards the end of the story. I also really really wanted to believe that by writing more, the authors would become more skilled at it. It didn't seem to be the case. I refuse to read another dozen books just to keep the faith.

In conclusion, I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone, including children or young adults - to which I think the story would be tantamount to poison, teaching all the wrong lessons in the worst possible way. These books sucked lance!

As always, this post will reflect my personal opinion. I know that The Listeners is a classic book, one that has been cited by SETI as a major factor in the project becoming known and supported by others. I know that at that time, doing a reasonable sci-fi book was a feat. I know that the writer was a believer in the contact with aliens and human nature and so on, and thus he must have been a nice guy, with similar desires to mine and other space-looking people. However the book annoyed me to no end.

The first and biggest of all problems is the insistence of the writer to add to the book all kinds of quotes from various works, many of them in a foreign language - that is, other than English. It was the reason why originally publishers refused his manuscript. Now, even if I understand the language, I don't know the quote. There is an annex at the end of the book that translates everything, but really, when a character randomly interrupts a perfectly good conversation to spout something unintelligible in another language, that guy is an asshole!

Then there was the construction of the book, the Project being presented like something that held sway over the human heart. All you had to do to convince anyone of anything was turn on the speakers so that they hear static, while the main character would do PR work, knowing exactly what to say to manipulate the other person. I would not have a problem with that, if the manipulation would not be completely obvious and most of the time completely ridiculous. It felt like a Naruto episode where the other ninja, filled with power, suddenly decides to switch sides because Naruto is such a nice guy. I know I don't inspire confidence when I compare a classic sci-fi book with a Japanese manga, but for me it was the same quality of work, which may be entertaining, but not great.

All the people and events changed in order to conveniently support the plot. It felt fake and it is a lousy writing technique, more suited to pulp. I did not enjoy that.

As for the plot itself, it is about this Project, which is pretty much SETI, that suddenly receives an alien signal piggybacked on 90 years old radio transmissions. What people do and say is so underwhelming that it felt like I was wasting my time while reading the book. That is why it took so long to finish it. My conclusion: while a classic for the science fiction genre, I did not enjoy the book or empathise with its characters. The plot is difficult to swallow and the story is very dated. I would not recommend it.

Written in 1951 by George R. Stewart, Earth Abides describes the end of civilisation by way of a deadly pandemic. The main character is an intellectual, used to observe rather than do, therefore he gains comfort in the idea of observing the end of the world. He is immune to the disease, as are few others, and so he becomes not only the observer, but the patriarch of a whole new tribe of people.

The pace of the storytelling is rather slow and the story itself spans several decades, until Ish dies of old age. The book is clearly well written, and I would say well thought, as well, but I take issue with Ish's character. He is proud of being an intellectual, of reading books, he worries all the time about the fate of civilisation, but he really does nothing to share his knowledge or do something of what he is thinking of. I know that's a trait I share, unfortunately, but his level of passivity is insane.

If at the beginning of the book I was relishing the description of the single guy finding ways to survive, both physically and mentally, then liking the way the little group of people was growing into a tribe, then I kept waiting for something else to happen. Instead, they all become complacent, living in houses they didn't know how to maintain, using products from abandoned shops they did not care to learn how to make, forgetting how to read, and so on. The biggest calling of an intellectual is to continually learn and teach. Instead, in what I see as great hypocrisy, Ish is merely content to be slightly more learned than the people around him, thinking to himself like he was reading from the Bible, even if he considered himself as an atheist rationalist, then having hopes that his child will grow to be an intellectual and spread it around, as he was doing none of that. He just complained endlessly about how stuff should be! That was infuriating.

Perhaps that is why it took so long to finish the book, as the ending felt horrifying and even insulting to me: people living like the old American indigens and caring not one bit of the immense body of knowledge that came before them. Perhaps what was worse is that this scenario seems very plausible, too.

What was refreshing (if you can use this word for a book that is 60 years old) is that there were no depictions of warrior groups roaming the land, looking for slaves or whatever, or any other type of antagonistic situations that required heroic violent response. It seems to me that this is almost a requirement in modern apocalyptic sci-fi, if not in most of it.

The style of the writing and the thoughts of its main character are a bit dated, but not terribly so. Electricity is not really useful for much other than lightning and maybe listening to radio, so they don't feel they need to maintain it one bit. Women are not as learned or smart as are the men, but that's OK, because they are women. It is normal for some people to not know how to read. A man can decide for another what is best, just because he thinks he is smarter, and it is only civilised to let them choose for themselves and completely optional. Buildings are mostly wood, so a big fire would burn a town to nothing. And so on and so on.

I can't put my finger on it, but there is something 50ish about the mindset of the lead character that definitely feels alien to me now. Perhaps the idea that, even if he were to make the effort to teach the children to read, the only books that would be of use would be technical or science. That's an incredibly weird point of view to find in a fantasy literature book.

Anyway, as one D.D.Shade lamented in a 1998 review of this book: When you're talking to someone you just met and you discover they 'love' science fiction, and you ask with great anticipation if they have read Earth Abides, the answer is "No, should I?". I agree with the man. The book should be read and should be known, as a classic of the genre and a reminder of how "the first Americans" thought about these things. Don't expect to go all "Wow!" while reading it, but as it stands, there are few books that are as thorough about the end of civilisation as this one.

I read about Dark Universe online, in a "best" sci-fi book list from somewhere. Richard Dawkins recommended it as a very good book and one of his favourites. I can see why the book would appeal to Dawkins, perhaps he even read it when he was a child. The idea is that the book is classical pulp fiction; the characters are simple and undeveloped, the logic strained and the science only consistent with the times in which it was written. At first, when I started reading, I was captivated by the world of people living underground after a nuclear apocalypse, but then I started getting more and more annoyed with the leaps of logic and superficial characterisation. I thought it was a book written by a teenager, like Eragon maybe, but instead it was written by a grown man in the 50s. When I learned about this I understood more of why the book existed at all and why people seemed so... stupid and onetracked. The ending, something that almost offended me, not by its quality - which wasn't good to begin with, but by its implications, is classic 1950 "scientific" thinking. The hope of humanity as small minded arrogant assholes.

Bottom line, it is a simple and easy to read book, in a bad way. The science for it is lacking, the characters are simplistic and the plot classic pulp (prince and princess kind of crap). Too bad that a good initial concept was wasted by a mediocre writer in a mediocre time.

I have not read any of China Miéville's works, but I have received a positive recommendation from a friend and decided to read The City and The City, thinking that I would read a science-fiction story. Instead, it is a fiction filled police procedural - a detective story - placed in a city that is, at the same time, part of two different countries. There is a detective, set on finding the murderers of a young girl, who during his investigations takes the reader through the internal workings of this weird place and leaves us with the concept that we all, as city dwellers, are silently and cooperatively complicit in the evil perpetrated around us. Interesting, indeed, but quite a shallow concept to be transformed into a book, even one written by such an obvious talent as Miéville. There is also a sad reason why he wrote the book such, as a present to his terminally ill mother who enjoyed detective stories.

But back to the book. It is fascinating to observe a place where an establishment, a person or even an object are part of one city or another based on physical characteristics such as certain colours, a certain gait or a certain way to make a common gesture. This idea is the soul of the book and the rest just a pretext to explore it. Anyone breaking the boundaries between the two cities is immediately and absolutely punished by a shadow entity called Breach, which appears next to anyone even focusing too long on a place from the other city and maintains the "skin" between the two different nations. Miéville does not explain, really, what caused such a split, why Breach was formed and even how it does what it does (and indeed, how it did the same thing for thousands of years). The point of the book is not to root into reality the concept of this shattered place, only to explore its possibility. And it does this skilfully. The issue I had with the book is that, except for this brilliant and original idea, you are reading a police procedural, plain and simple. I was in the mood for something else, perhaps.

My conclusion is that it is a very well written book, one that is worth reading, but not something that could be considered brilliant except for the seed idea. Outside that idea, which has been pretty much detailed in this post, the plot is a standard detective story.

I was first directed to Esther Friesner by the excellent audio reading of The Shunned Trailer, a short story which humorously and skilfully combines Ivy League competitiveness with Lovecraftian mythos. You can (and should) listen to it on the also excellent podcast site EscapePod, which together with its sister sites Pseudopod and Podcastle provide free weekly audio stories from the genres of sci-fi, horror and fantasy, respectively. The story itself was so amusing to me that I actually laughed out loud, which - for those so blissfully unaware of it - is not the same thing as LOLing. I made a short foiree into some Lovecraft stories, then proceeded on reading something of Friesner's.

Druid's Blood is an alternate universe Sherlock Holmes story. The "alternate" in the universe is an England where the druids repelled the Romans by using magic and then went on protecting the British isles with a magical shield that prohibits the entry of - for lack of a better word - contraband. This includes, for example, steel. It is an interesting modern bronze age world in which the druids are the highest religious order, everything is run by magic, technology is pretty much forbidden, but the Brits still have their high ideals, the monarchy and Sherlock Holmes. The irony is thick when the work comes from an American author.

Anyway, I don't want to spoil the story; you have to read it for yourself, but I recommend it highly. The first chapter is not so good, so I suggest you go through it even if you are not terribly enthusiastic about it. The rest, though, made me not let the book out of my hands - to my wife's chagrin. Not as funny as The Shunned Trailer (after all, it was not intended as a parody) it combines several famous ideas and characters with this twisted history of a magical Britain. The book is not meant as an exploration of history, though, as the characters and references are not really meant to have been contemporary or explainable by small tweaks in the time stream. I liked the book, although I don't know if I want to read more of the author right now. She is certainly smart and funny, but even if I enjoyed the book tremendously, it couldn't reach the level of good fun and concentrated smarts that The Shunned Trailer seemed to be. As such, I recommend reading the book first, then listen to the podcast of The Shunned Trailer. Perhaps in this order, the pleasure level will be higher.

There has been a lot of discussion on the changing of the names of Sherlock Holmes and doctor Watson. Whether it was a form of respect to the original characters to change their names if you change their entire world or whether it was a copyrighting issue or some other motive, I see no reason to dwell on the matter. After all, the epilogue is a tip of the hat to doctor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented a character of such incredible skill and intelligence, only to relegate his own role to the faithful sidekick. Enjoy the book.

It is difficult for me to not admire Lovecraft and at the same time just as difficult to fully enjoy his stories. He was admirable because he was a true horror writer, haunted by his dark visions so completely that a lot of his stories are set in the same world, undoubtedly filling his mind at all times. And it is difficult to enjoy his stories because the horror feeling in his books comes from a very subjective and I dare say outdated place in the human mind. Most of his characters attribute adjectives like "abhorrent" or "grotesque" to mere shapes or smells and they actively attempt to filter out anything that might challenge their peace of mind and established world order. That's a silly and disgusting thing to do, I think, and perhaps this is what repels me most from writings of "the master".

But let me tell you of At the Mountains of Madness. The first thing that came into mind when I started reading it was "The Thing". It is placed in Antarctica where an expedition finds some frozen aliens who then defrost. There is even mention of shapeless things that can assume any form or function. Of course, this is as much as the similarities go. First and foremost the story is told by a scientist, in the pompous and highly descriptive manner in which most Lovecraftian work is written. This geologist, one of the few survivors, decides to write a more detailed account of what happened in view of a new expedition organized to go in the same region. His motive, and here is where I scoff the most, is to dissuade people to ever go there again, as some things are too horrible and evil to be explored by man. Say what? How is that guy a scientist? Anyway, he writes this as to fill in the gaps that he consciously and deliberately left out when he returned from the expedition, all of its members sworn to secrecy on some aspects of the trip. He sounds more like the leader of a cult than a member of a scientific group, doesn't he?

The end is more satisfying, though, where even Lovecraft's roundabout and subjective exposition has to give when describing the things they actually discover, explore then run away from. Even if I cannot abide the motivations of his characters or enjoy the way things are made more or less horrible or grotesque by their close minded whims, I have to declare some affection to the universe Lovecraft describes and perhaps some lingering interest on what one could make of it.

And indeed, people have been trying to resurrect Lovecraft's work in various ways: board games, graphic novels, sequels and prequels, movies. I seem to remember a 2005 movie that I liked, made after The Call of Cthulhu, but even that was made as a silent black and white film using the exact text from the story. And even if it achieved its goals of bringing Lovecraft's work to the screen, it did nothing to make it less dated or more accessible to a modern audience. Guillermo del Toro wanted to make a movie after At the Mountains of Madness, but he was deflected by film studios and his other work, mainly Prometheus. Del Toro even said that he would not make the ATMOM adaptation because it would have the same premise and twist as Prometheus. I am not so sure they should have been similar, but hey, that's how he saw it. What I am trying to say here is that modernizing Lovecraft for the present audience takes most of the love out of the craft :) Even this novella, which was a little bit longer than a short story, had so much roundabout storytelling and filler descriptions that if you took them away you would remain with a skeleton idea that could mould over anything.

So, my conclusion is that At the Mountains of Madness is one of the most accessible Lovecraft writings. It seems less dated than others and actually brings some clear descriptions of what is going on, not just randomly used adjectives testifying to the bizarre mental state of the characters. I can see no way to modernize or take the story and bring it to a modern audience without breaking the plot and turning it into something else, so if you want to experience it, you need to read the novella. It's relatively short so it shouldn't take much, unless you find it hard to go past the most descriptive parts without falling asleep, as I have.

  Oh, what a wonderful book this was. A cross between a William Gibson and a Peter F. Hamilton book, Accelerando was like a cyberpunk's wet dream. Not only it describes the deep transformations of our culture caused by the increasing power and speed of computation, but it goes further, years, decades, centuries and millennia more. You know the feeling you get when you get close to the end of a book and you sigh "Oh, I wish it would continue to tell the story"? It happens at the end of every chapter. It's like Stross could have ended the book at any point, but he chose to continue the story until its satisfyingly circular end. What is it with writers and the return to origins, anyway? There is an explanation for the structure of the book, as the author originally published each chapter as a separate story.

  What is even nicer is that the story doesn't skim the details, showing only superficial bits that further the story, but it goes into everything: cybernetics, economy, ethics, law, the nature of consciousness. It gets frightening at some points when you realize that in the situations depicted in the book reality would be even more carnivorous and that your own individuality (held coherent in the book for the benefit of the reader) is just an illusion we cling to, ready to dispel when we muster the courage (or the insanity) to let it go.

  I also liked how, while it was human-centric, the book did not limit itself to one species, nor did it go the way of accelerating (pardon the pun) until the whole story becomes meaningless in some encounter with a God like alien or by complete transcendence. I have to say I appreciate Stross immensely for not doing so, which is the normal and easiest way for a geek to end such a story: by generalizing the hell out of the situation until no particulars make sense. In that, the writer showed real restraint and mature wisdom. It makes me want to read all of his books.

  If you want to know what the plot is, you will have to read the book, as I can't really do it justice here. I can tell you that it made me believe in an explosive evolution of the human race in my lifetime more than any Kurzweil discourse and it did it easily, by simple measuring MIPS/gram on the scale of the entire Solar System. If we will run Moore's Law for a few more decades, it will make enormous sense that "dumb matter" is done for. It is a fantastic vision of computation as a devourer of mass, a frightening equation akin to Einstein's matter to energy conversion. Did I mention that it also - convincingly - explains Fermi's paradox, much more so than "we get to build androids for sex", which was the most believable for me so far?

  Needless to say it, but I will anyway: go read it, read it now! It is an amazing book. It is a little too pretentious in some parts, when it bombards your brain with technobabble just so it gets you "future-shocked" enough to understand the characters, but what cyberpunk fan doesn't eat that up, anyway? Also the familial connections in the book are a bit too overdone, but then again, they provide the generational point of view necessary to describe centuries of human evolution. There is a page - surprisingly Web 0.9 for such a plot :) - for the book, with an extract from the first chapter, but I don't think it is representative for the entire work.

You can actually read the book online for free, from the author's site: Accelerando

We is a classic book, written by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin, who envisioned how the future in the hands of the Bolsheviks will work against the individual. He imagined a world in which all people shave their head, wear the same uniform and have numbers instead of names and live in completely transparent buildings, with no privacy. As the preface of the book there are three commentaries on Zamiatin's genius, history as a writer in Russia, then his voluntary exile and the interdiction of his works in Russia.

So did I like the book? No. To say that is dated is an understatement, but it's not only that. The style is that of a diary, but one in which dialogues between people are described verbatim. The way they speak is emotional, hysterical, they interrupt each other and words are incoherent, so contradictory to the premise of the book. Even the inner thoughts of the main character are chaotic, childish, delirious, with wild mood swings. It was so horrible that, after deciding that 200 PDF pages were not going to be a lot of reading, I stopped at 50 and started skipping ahead. The entire book is like that.

Maybe Zamiatin was a great writer, but I don't see it. Just because he was Russian is no excuse for his incoherence. It felt like he wrote the book while intoxicated; with too much coffee. Even if he starts his book with Dear readers, you must think, at least a little. It helps, I believe that it was his duty as a writer to communicate his ideas in a digestible form. Maybe thinking is different from person to person, Zamiatin. If I think about it, the story within is similar to the movie Equilibrium, only that was more action based, as any American movie is prone to be, and watchable. The same champion of the system being seduced (through a woman, how else?) by the emotions that he was sworn to fight against.

About the subject of the book, I can say that stories about rebels fighting Utopian regimes are making me feel conflicted. I care about the personal desires of the individual, but I also care about the overall system. One must understand that a centralized and overall controlled system is as disturbing to a person that experienced individual freedom as is a decentralized system based on individuals is for someone that lived in a different environment. To assume that one or the other knows better is just arrogant and stupid. The worse thing that can happen, in my view, is to only have one acceptable system that, even if we could leave one country for another, would be the same all over the world.

On the other hand, once you, as an individual, decide that something is right and something is wrong, you have a responsibility to act. I just remember that quote Slaves dream not of freedom, but of becoming masters. It would be a lot easier for me to accept people rebelling against systems if they would stop attempting to change the world for everybody, not just themselves.

Well, I will leave you with a quote from the book, one that seemed eerily contemporary: If human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime.

I will go forth immediately and say that this book is hard to read. It's not just that it uses English names of fruits and plants not often met in normal conversation or movies, it's not only that it uses the English measurements units that most Europeans have no understanding of and it's not even the author's apparent obsession with Angostura bitters :). It's because the book is filled with information and it is better suited to be used as a reference than a one-off read. It is obvious that in The Drunken Botanist the author, Amy Stewart, put a great deal of research; such an amount, in fact, that it would be impossible to be able to absorb all of it in one read. You realize that a book is great when you see affecting you in your every day life. No, I did not get drunk every day on strange cocktails, even if the temptation certainly existed, but I found myself looking at plants everywhere and wondering how they would taste in a drink. "Is that fruit edible? Probably not, it's red and the fruit of a decorative tree, so probably it is poisonous. But surely there is a way to destroy the poison and enjoy the taste in an alcoholic drink." That sort of thing.

And what I find even nicer is that the author is ready to continue the conversation started in the book on a special website called DrunkenBotanist.com

The book is split into very little chapters, each on a certain plant, a little bit of history - the degree of details varying wildly, but described with great humor and passion, the way they are used in drinks, cocktail recipes, some botanical or chemical info - although not too much. There are organized by themes, like leaves or fruits, grasses or trees, and so on, but essentially it's an enumeration of plants and their uses. This is something I didn't like that much. My issue is that I expected to see more botanical information, like how plants are related and how the drinks made from them are related. As such, you only get a few words at the beginning of a chapter about the plant's family, but no connection is made. Of course, no one stops you for researching and doing it yourself.
Another thing that bothered me a little was the images. I agree that full color and size images of the plants described would have printed as a huge book, but the e-book version I read had no such limitations. Instead of seeing a simplistic representation of some plants, I would have liked to see the plant itself. That would have helped me understand what each plant was in my language, as well.

I have to conclude that the book is a very interesting one, albeit difficult to finish reading. I understand the need to earn money and thus sell it as a book, but for me it seems that the book's format would have been a lot more appropriate for a web site and that some features should have been different in the electronic version than the printed one. Instead, the Drunken Botanist site is actually a blog, in a blog format, which is unusable as a reference, really. I recommend browsing the book and certainly have it available. Some information in it is great at parties and the botanical insight into the common drinks and their ingredients is fascinating. But think of it as something to have ready for when you need to know what you are mixing. I would say it's a mandatory read for any bartender, though.

Your Inner Fish is a very nice book, popularizing the science behind paleontology and anatomy and making a surprising and thorough connection between the two. In short, Neil Shubin describes the way bodies are built and how our ancestry, from single cell organisms, fish, amphibians to primates, influences our design. It is a rather short book, and also easy to read. From field stories of discovering fossils in the wild to the anatomy classes that he teaches in university, the pages take one through a journey of true discovery and makes us understand so easily some things that very few people consider simple.

I could review Your Inner Fish for you, but someone did a lot more effort of it here. Also, the University of California Television YouTube channel released a one hour video presentation of the book which I am attaching to this blog post, as well as what seems to be the book's Facebook page. What I can say is that I liked the book a lot and I recommend it to everybody, science minded people or not.

I've reviewed two books of William Golding already and both of them were complex analyses of the human nature. This little novel, The Double Tongue, is similar in complexity. A note at the beginning of the text is explaining perhaps best why Golding's books are so great in details. You see, the novel was published posthumously, after a draft of it was found in Golding's belongings. He has already finished the book once, wrote another version and had started on another draft. No wonder his books were so reflective and self referential and connected to so many other works of literature or philosophy.

About the content, it is rather interesting, as it details the story of a girl in ancient Greece, just before Romans started dominating the country, who becomes the Delphi Pythia. The story quickly goes to the decorative role a "well bred" female would have had in those days, carefully instructed how not to draw attention, kept in total ignorance, all for the moment when she would be offered to a husband. After attempting escape from this fate, the only option her father has to "do with her" is to give her to a priest of Delphi called Ionides. Thinking she was going to become a servant of the temple, sweeping floors, she becomes the oracle. This is used to analyse concepts as religious sentiment, political use of faith and to describe the parallel system used in this world of superstition and showbiz.

I thought that it was a really short story. Told from the point of view of an octogenarian woman, it dwells on the adolescence, the initial shock of coming to Delphi, but very quickly skips entire decades to bring the conclusion. The title is relating to both the Python that the god Apollo killed in the Delphi cave, which gave him the forked tongue that said two things at once, but also to the double system of religious ecstasy backed by very real intelligence networks and the duplicity of people who either declare themselves religious while lacking the sentiment or the other way around . The story is inspired by Ion of Euripides and the ending is revealing only to a select few who understand the reference to a passage of the Bible (see here and here).

I can say that I liked the novel. It wasn't a "wow" thing like in the case of Lord of the Flies, nor did it cause me to feel more enlightened with the final reveal. Being that short and the last novel of Golding, there is really no reason not to read it.

When I first opened the ASP.NET MVC 4 Recipes, by John Ciliberti I was amazed. It seemed to transcend the reference book and go into a sort of interactive path thing. You know interactive books, where you read the book and at certain points you get to choose what the characters do by going to read one page or another? This is what Recipes seemed to be. You get to a point where the author tells you which chapters to read and in which order based on your role in the organization. That is and will remain a wonderful concept and I would see more books steal it for themselves. However, the actual content of the book did not feel as great as its presentation, I am afraid to say. This is not to mean it is a bad book, only that I expected a lot more from it from reading its "mission statement". The book is Microsoft centric, obviously, but it says very clear that it will solve problems with Microsoft products as a rule. For example it favours KnockoutJS as a JavaScript framework. But that's not really annoying, though.

I think what bothered me most was that the content was all over the place. There are some chapters in which there are specific problems. The problem is described, then the solution is provided. Very nice. But then there are some problems that are vague and general with a very specific solution, lending a lot of lines to some issues and moving past others in a hurry. Of course, I would have liked all of the problems to have their own book and that was impossible, but the compromise here did not feel as great; I thought some of the problems were not really something someone would have more than once, and sometimes never, so using the book as a reference helps only so much. Some examples of problems to be solved: You would like to begin working with ASP.NET MVC Framework, but you do not understand the MVC pattern and why it is beneficial. - why would you start reading an ASP.Net MVC book if you don't even understand the MVC pattern? You would google something first. Or: You have started using the new .NET asynchronous programming pattern and love its relative simplicity compared to other programming models. However, you would like to have a better understanding of the code generated by the compiler so that you can improve the designs of your asynchronous methods. So you jump from not knowing what MVC is to wanting to read IL. Maybe I am just mean, but it soon turned into a very hard to read book from jumping from one issue to another like that, from level to level. Not to mention some "loaded" problems that have a description several lines long in the form of "you have found that your company strategy sucks, because of 1,2 and 3, and you want 4,5 and 6 because 7,8 and 9". It doesn't sound like my problem at all :)

Bottom line: I have not started working with ASP.Net MVC, yet, nor do I believe that my first job with it would be as an architect, so I will have an opinion on how it works in real life in a few months, probably. The book seems useful now, but not the ASP.Net MVC start to end tutorial that I wanted when I started reading it, and maybe that is why I had such a critical eye for it.

This is the second book about LSD that I read, after The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space, by John C. Lilly and it is also the autobiography of a scientist, but unlike Lilly, who seemed to have gone bonkers while writing his book, Hoffman maintains a scientific attitude about the whole thing, objective when needed, subjective in more personal chapters that he clearly delimits from the others. LSD: My Problem Child is the story of the invention of the drug, straight from its inventor, Albert Hoffman, a then chemist for pharma company Sandoz. In a nutshell I loved the book, the style, the author's integrity and the fine ironies that he slips from time to time. As you can see in the link above, the book is already free online so there is no real reason not to read it.

Hoffman explains in the book how, while researching the chemical properties of the ergot and attempting to potentate substances already discovered to have positive medical effects, he created Lysergic acid diethylamide. The substance had no visible effects on the test animals so he went on testing other substances. Five years it took for Hoffman to return to LSD in order to further understand its function. Usually a very thorough chemist, he touched some of the substance and only then the effect was understood. This simple anecdote hints on how many interesting chemicals we might have gone unnoticed, even after someone created them.

The method by which chemists work to find useful chemicals in nature is also very interesting. They take a plant, let's say, that has a specific effect that is testable via animal experiments. They isolate the active substance that produces that effect. Then they attempt to recreate the substance synthetically. After doing that, they test all kinds of related substances that they create via simple chemical operations from the original substance. This often leads to more powerful drugs or even completely new effects. Quoting from the book: "Of the approximately 20,000 new substances that are produced annually in the pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratories of the world, the overwhelming majority are modification products of proportionally few types of active compounds. The discovery of a really new type of active substance - new with regard to chemical structure and pharmacological effect - is a rare stroke of luck."

It took another five to ten years for LSD to reach mainstream. Until then psychologists and psychiatrists were using it to more effectively reach the patients and LSD was considered a wonder-drug. Sandoz was extremely happy with Hoffman's discovery. But then it became a subject of abuse. A counterculture of recreational use for LSD led to an institutional backlash that made the drug illegal, even if it was not addictive, not toxic and one could not overdose accidentally. However, it was essential to take it in a controlled environment, with someone to act as a guide and safety net. Many people did not do this and hurt themselves or others or had psychotic breaks. To get someone out of an LSD trip was simple: either guide them via calm words or (the technical solution) give them a calmer agent like cloropromazine which immediately cuts off the "high".

How come the black market is filled with toxic, addictive, nasty drugs, but someone considers LSD to be a problem? Anyway, I am quoting again from the book, a little bit that talked about experiments on primates, but one that I took to be a fine ironic jab at society's reaction to the drug: "A caged community of chimpanzees reacts very sensitively if a member of the tribe has received LSD. Even though no changes appear in this single animal, the whole cage gets in an uproar because the LSD chimpanzee no longer observes the laws of its finely coordinated hierarchic tribal order."

What I liked about the book very much was how thoroughly and objectively Hoffman researched LSD and other psychedelics (he also identified and separated psilocybin, another psychoactive substance present in "magic mushrooms" used by native Americans in religious rituals). He not once preached the recreational use of the drugs, deplored the misuse of these kinds of substances, but he also kept a strong position that they do no harm and can have amazing effects when used for medical purposes and the correct way. Far from being a "druggie" book, this is one of those autobiographies that you can't let down from your hands until finishing reading it. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The sixth book in the Dexter series is not really better than the others. I would have thought that five rehearsals would have resulted in a slightly better book, but instead it seems as if Jeff Lindsay is slowly losing the inspiration he started with book after book. In Double Dexter, the police is impossibly incompetent and this time even Dexter falls into the same category. It takes him chapters to do and act like he was supposed to and a lot later than even an average reader would see it coming. The opponent is inconsistent and not really a challenge, if it weren't for Dexter's apparent drastic drop in IQ.

If you have not read any of the books so far and maybe just watched the CBS series, be warned that they are completely different beasts. The show writing is clearly better and the plots are divergent to the point of being different stories altogether, but with the same character. Not that this eighth and final season is great writing anymore, but that's a different subject altogether.

Bottom line: Having read Double Dexter, I cannot say that I hated it, I really like the character, but I think Lindsay is bored with Dexter. Maybe he should just invent someone else and start writing better books.