Re: The Element

I was interested in The Element, by Ken Robinson because I agree that everyone does have something they enjoy that they’re talented at, and that too many people forget or bury that passion. But I found this book more inspirational than instructional. It’s 95% stories of talented people who figured out what their talent was […]

Re: Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper

Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, by Fuschia Dunlop. is full of great stories about food, cooking, and China. About half the book is about Sichuan: how she came as a student to Chengdu, fell in love with the food, and enrolled in the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. […]

A Simple Begining of Darwin

I finally gave in to the pressure of hearing so many stories about Darwin that I got up the gumption to wedge my Darwin collection out of its slipcase. It’s four books collected in one volume, very intimidating. I mean, this thing is fatter than a dictionary! Then I read the first chapter of Voyage […]

Time to read Darwin

2009 is Darwin Year, among other things, because it’s 150 years since On The Origin of Species was published. I’m a little late mentioning this, because the commemoration really started last July, on the anniversary of the day Darwin felt pressed to lay claim to natural selection. So one of my resolutions for this year […]

Re: Beginnings, Middles, & Ends

Beginnings, Middles, & Ends, by Nancy Kress is one of those books I keep coming back to. It’s so well organized: beginnings, middles, and ends crossed with plot, character, and revision. And it explicates one central idea, which gives the writer the reassuring feeling she is handing you an infinitely flexible tool that will help […]

Re: Do It Tomorrow

One of the things I like about Mark Forster is that he’s clearly one of us, just trying to figure out how actually do the things you want to do. For instance, near the beginning of Do It Tomorrow, he confesses that no one was able to do the mental strength exercise from Get Everything […]

Re: Just Do It

There’s been a bit of buzz in this past year about couples who commit to having sex every day for n days. A whole year. 100 days. A week. So I finally managed to read one of these books, and really all the advice in it can be gleaned from the title, Just Do It.

Re: Save the Cat!

It’s funny that a recent comment mentions movies and TV as a source for your scifi and fantasy fix, as I am interested in screenplays. In fact, some of the more emphatic statements about storytelling are found in screenwriting books. For example, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, which I first heard about on The […]

Re: The Self-Aware Universe

Like Programming the Universe, I got one key idea from The Self-Aware Universe, by Amit Goswami: that the probabilistic realm of quantum potentia is the same thing as the unitive consciousness of mystic experience. Unlike the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, this book conveys a good introduction to both quantum mechanics and the unitive consciousness. I just […]

Re: The G.O.D. Experiments

I checked out The G.O.D Experiments, by Gary E. Schwartz partly because it was right next to God: The Failed Hypothesis in the library, and partly because it seemed like a logical followup. Followup, yes. Logical, not so much.