Charles > Recent Status Updates

Finished The Golden Compass after losing some momentum reading it; the Oxford part of the book was more interesting to me than all of the adventure-to-the-north stuff. I'll revisit later to read The Subtle Knife.

The stories so far: "The Luck in the Head" by M. John Harrison is more a vehicle for describing a fantasy setting than a story, but I enjoyed it; "In the Hills, the Cities" by Clive Barker was suitably horrific and the best of the 3 I've read so far; "Crossing into Cambodia" by Moorcock was an apocalyptic war story that I didn't enjoy.

A book about writing that deals with concrete essentials like plot and character, rather than presenting a series of exercises and dispensing condescending advice like, "Write every day" and "Show, don't tell." A welcome change for me.

better and better... now it's noir.

Unique... good.

Impressive.

Very good so far.

the style is verbose & musical. a book best read aloud.

"...as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he *must* do...."

"Does everything on this planet have disgusting habits?" ... "Life has disgusting habits."

Ready to be done with this one. Keep falling asleep reading it and that's only partly due to sleep deprivation.

Can't tell what the focus of this book is supposed to be. We've gone from universes to evolution to brains to insects to plants and are now on immune systems; while the author offers some framework from looking at these different topics from a computational standpoint, it's not very unified. Maybe that will be resolved in the section called "Answers".

130

"...MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has created progressively more complex robots.... Herbert... ...was able to trundle into people's offices and steal their soda cans."