Books, We Get Books
Apr. 13th, 2013 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowSo, I've had Skyrim for... close to a month now. (Really?) I finally decided that I needed a game guide, to help me plot out my players' progression. (My current Nord warrior will not be my last character!) A trip to Amazon was the result, and I ordered David Hodgson's Official Guide.
Of course, no one can eat just one. I wound up dropping nearly $200 on purchases. On the light end of things, I picked up the second Fables collection by Bill Willingham. (I read the volume that was nominated for the Hugo at the Reno Worldcon, and recently bought and read the first collection, which was fun enough to merit another purchase.) I also picked up Microcosmic God, the second volume of the collected stories of Theodore Sturgeon. (The first volume was a bit of a disappointment, but the title story of this volume was selected for the first SF Hall of Fame volume, and deservedly so.) Also, Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (the sequel to The Stress of Her Regard), Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Fortress (I have Sharpe's Triumph and Sharpe's Tiger already), and Eric Flint's 1636: The Kremlin Games. Also, I'm taking a flyer on Sarah Caudwell's mystery novel Thus Was Adonis Murdered, with an eye towards the rest of that series if this one's good.
More seriously, I ordered Isabell Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration, which I'd seen recommended on Ta-Nehisi Coates' site (and been reminded of byal_zorra); Xiaoming Wang's Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History; Dava Sobel's The Planets - when she's on her game, she's one of the best at the popular history of science; Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (and damn, that war was such an unmitigated disaster; the only good thing about it was the Peace of Westphalia); and one more prize: Reveil Netz' new translation of Archimedes, The Two Books on the Sphere and the Cylinder. I've read Netz' account of his team's reanalysis of Archimedes' long-lost The Method; now I'd like to see what light that sheds on Archimedes' other works.
The light and the serious: of such is balance made.
Of course, no one can eat just one. I wound up dropping nearly $200 on purchases. On the light end of things, I picked up the second Fables collection by Bill Willingham. (I read the volume that was nominated for the Hugo at the Reno Worldcon, and recently bought and read the first collection, which was fun enough to merit another purchase.) I also picked up Microcosmic God, the second volume of the collected stories of Theodore Sturgeon. (The first volume was a bit of a disappointment, but the title story of this volume was selected for the first SF Hall of Fame volume, and deservedly so.) Also, Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (the sequel to The Stress of Her Regard), Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Fortress (I have Sharpe's Triumph and Sharpe's Tiger already), and Eric Flint's 1636: The Kremlin Games. Also, I'm taking a flyer on Sarah Caudwell's mystery novel Thus Was Adonis Murdered, with an eye towards the rest of that series if this one's good.
More seriously, I ordered Isabell Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration, which I'd seen recommended on Ta-Nehisi Coates' site (and been reminded of by
al_zorra); Xiaoming Wang's Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History; Dava Sobel's The Planets - when she's on her game, she's one of the best at the popular history of science; Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (and damn, that war was such an unmitigated disaster; the only good thing about it was the Peace of Westphalia); and one more prize: Reveil Netz' new translation of Archimedes, The Two Books on the Sphere and the Cylinder. I've read Netz' account of his team's reanalysis of Archimedes' long-lost The Method; now I'd like to see what light that sheds on Archimedes' other works.The light and the serious: of such is balance made.
