“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
―
Sir Francis Bacon
This is Bibliophile.
Ever hit undo one time too many and erase an entire blog post? Well, I sure did. I had all my books selected, and then, with a few errant key strokes, lost it all. Ah, hubris. It's funny--I've officially turned 30 today, and I keep interpreting everything as this omen for how the next decade will be. Oh, the restaurant I wanted to go to is closed for renovations? Omen. The weather's nice today? Omen. Lost a Bibliophile post? Omen. It's going to be a long next thirty years if things keep appearing to be symbolic constructions referring to other entities the entire time. Anyway, this week, Bibliophile takes a trip to Carleton University. We'll be looking at some of the new books it's accumulated in the next month, after the break.
Showing posts with label 19th cent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 19th cent. Show all posts
Monday, August 5, 2013
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Bibliophile: The Ol' Bait and Switch At Dalhousie
“A book without words is like love without a kiss; it's empty.”
― Andrew Wolfe
I'm not sure why anyone would write a book without words, and if love requires a kiss in all places, a lot of pet owners are performing acts that probably aren't legal, but whatever, it's a metaphor.
This is Bibliophile.
If you're new here, the idea is that I browse through the weekly new book list at my local University library, and note the new entries. Sometimes, though, the phrase "weekly" is a bit of a misomer, and the list fails to be updated, in which case I usually skip the week, or take another Canadian university to browse. This is one of those latter weeks. So this week, we're looking at the new books at Dalhousie University. Books available at my own local university, good ol' University of Waterloo, will be marked by a bolded H.
― Andrew Wolfe
I'm not sure why anyone would write a book without words, and if love requires a kiss in all places, a lot of pet owners are performing acts that probably aren't legal, but whatever, it's a metaphor.
This is Bibliophile.
If you're new here, the idea is that I browse through the weekly new book list at my local University library, and note the new entries. Sometimes, though, the phrase "weekly" is a bit of a misomer, and the list fails to be updated, in which case I usually skip the week, or take another Canadian university to browse. This is one of those latter weeks. So this week, we're looking at the new books at Dalhousie University. Books available at my own local university, good ol' University of Waterloo, will be marked by a bolded H.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Bibliophile: Cavorting Like the Greeks of Tomorrow
“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson
The good ol' library has added some 6001 items this week. So we probably WON'T be doing the completionist list this time around. Here's the books I did get to, after the break.
― Thomas Jefferson
The good ol' library has added some 6001 items this week. So we probably WON'T be doing the completionist list this time around. Here's the books I did get to, after the break.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Book Triad V: Ian Bogost, Magic Carpets, Serial Killers, and other Latour Litanies
Actually, that's the only Latour Litany here, really. But it's a nice segue into our first book, and our list of books. This time in Book Triad, we'll be looking at:
Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost
The Secret of Ka by Christopher Pike
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Reviews and other ramblings after the break.
Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost
The Secret of Ka by Christopher Pike
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Reviews and other ramblings after the break.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Book Review: Flatland
While this intent wasn't really made clear the last time around, I fully meant for Book Review to become a regular feature, every time I finished a, you know, book. But that hasn't happened, and my opinion of all literature read between November till now must go sadly unrecorded in the annals of history.
Luckily, that's not the case for Flatland.
Flatland. By Edwin A. Abbott. The edition I read was the second edition, published in1884--actually, an electronic facsimile of the second edition, published in 1884, but let's not split hairs--and it's generally considered one of the earlier predecessors of science fiction. The plot--well, it's not really a plot, for starters. More like a concept. The concept is that a 2-dimensional being--a square, as it turns out--becomes aware of his nature of a 2-D being and attempts to explain himself and his world to the 3-D people.
The first half of the book is a description of the 2-D society, and the second half tells of the square's encounters in Lineland, No Dimensions, and Space. The first half is focused on the culture that results from a flat world, and that's really my favorite type of sci-fi: one high concept, then a careful consideration of how that change influences people, on macro and micro levels.
But while Flatland fulfills the basic criteria of a modern sci-fi story, it's very much a work of its own era. It reads a lot like an H. G. Wells novel, if that's a style you're familiar with. But there's no real plot, per se, and no overarching story; it's just the square character reciting what happened to him, in increasing fervour. I'm not really familiar enough with 19th century literature to know how typical a protagonist the square is. All right, obviously, he's not very typical, since he's, you know, a square, but he's got a male-dominated, upper-class entitled sort of attitude to him, and I'm not sure how much of that attitude Abbott is including to reflect ourselves in Flatland, and how much he just thinks that's what people are like.
There's some interesting stuff with the intersect between mathematics and theology, and I'm wondering how deliberate the inclusion of the millenial stuff is. (The square receives his vision on year 2000, in their Flatland timeline.) I also liked that Abbott switches from narrative to dialogue when the square is confronted with a sphere; it emphasizes the way the square has lost all sense of agency. It's super short, and can easily be squeezed into a single afternoon. And while there's nothing revolutionary to it, as an earlier pioneering work of science fiction, Flatland is actually more interesting in terms of high concept than a lot of the stuff people like Wells and Stoker were putting out in the general time. So, if you've got an afternoon to kill and a mild taste for geometry, give it a try.
Later Days.
Luckily, that's not the case for Flatland.
Flatland. By Edwin A. Abbott. The edition I read was the second edition, published in1884--actually, an electronic facsimile of the second edition, published in 1884, but let's not split hairs--and it's generally considered one of the earlier predecessors of science fiction. The plot--well, it's not really a plot, for starters. More like a concept. The concept is that a 2-dimensional being--a square, as it turns out--becomes aware of his nature of a 2-D being and attempts to explain himself and his world to the 3-D people.
The first half of the book is a description of the 2-D society, and the second half tells of the square's encounters in Lineland, No Dimensions, and Space. The first half is focused on the culture that results from a flat world, and that's really my favorite type of sci-fi: one high concept, then a careful consideration of how that change influences people, on macro and micro levels.
But while Flatland fulfills the basic criteria of a modern sci-fi story, it's very much a work of its own era. It reads a lot like an H. G. Wells novel, if that's a style you're familiar with. But there's no real plot, per se, and no overarching story; it's just the square character reciting what happened to him, in increasing fervour. I'm not really familiar enough with 19th century literature to know how typical a protagonist the square is. All right, obviously, he's not very typical, since he's, you know, a square, but he's got a male-dominated, upper-class entitled sort of attitude to him, and I'm not sure how much of that attitude Abbott is including to reflect ourselves in Flatland, and how much he just thinks that's what people are like.
There's some interesting stuff with the intersect between mathematics and theology, and I'm wondering how deliberate the inclusion of the millenial stuff is. (The square receives his vision on year 2000, in their Flatland timeline.) I also liked that Abbott switches from narrative to dialogue when the square is confronted with a sphere; it emphasizes the way the square has lost all sense of agency. It's super short, and can easily be squeezed into a single afternoon. And while there's nothing revolutionary to it, as an earlier pioneering work of science fiction, Flatland is actually more interesting in terms of high concept than a lot of the stuff people like Wells and Stoker were putting out in the general time. So, if you've got an afternoon to kill and a mild taste for geometry, give it a try.
Later Days.
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