dan finishes "Overclocked"

Cory Doctorow has done some fine work, and his writing is easy to read, interesting, and hard to put down once you've started reading it.

While he often uses titles that are plays on other famous sci-fi titles (I, Row-Boat & Anda's Game come to mind), his content is unique and stands well on its own.

Anyway, his stories were really interesting and had some cool twists in them that I don't want to give away here - I totally recommend checking it out.

You could, literally, check it out from your library, purchase a copy at a bookstore or on Amazon.com, or download it for free from Cory's website.

Totally worth the time.

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Dan's reading situation

Further to my last post about my rekindled love for libraries, I've actually finished reading one of the books I checked out and even went ahead to check out some more.

I've been inspired a bit by the feature that's running on AVclub.com by a critic who bought a box of bargin-bin sci-fi books and is reviewing one or two a week.

While I'm not buying any books (yet) to do this on my own, I've found a lot of good stuff at the library (and had been introduced to some new authors by a very helpful clerk at Barnes & Noble the other day...)

Latest report:

Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card

I'm a big fan of his; and I've read everything he's published in Ender/Bean series of books he's done. I was in China when this book came out in 2005, and it was pretty difficult to find a copy in Hong Kong (or on the internet...and I wasn't willing to pay for Amazon shipping)

So I finally get to read it now. I burned through it, as I usually tend to do with his books.

Basically, I think that he did a pretty good job of tying all the loose ends of the series together.

And although the book is set ~100+ years in the future (?), due to the far-flung political nature of the conflict going on, he's had to adjust a bit for events that have happened in the past 7 years as he's worked on this series - the result is still pretty cohesive.

Card's personal religious and political views do seem to make an impact on the writing, and it makes for a pretty unique perspective - he never mentions the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at all in this novel, but the gentle respect for religion while still pointing at the many political realities intertwined with it are interesting.

I'm a bit sad that the series is over, but this does mean that I'm "free" to go on with some other books...

On deck:


"Overclocked" by Cory Doctorow

I really liked "Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom", I read Cory's blog, and I'm a big supporter of his anti-DRM philosophy. Overclocked is a collection of short stories by Cory. I'm on page 45 right now, in the middle of a story called "When Sysadmins ruled the earth"...it's an after the bomb type story set in the age of google. Interesting.

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