I am on Goodreads (as "Tomj"), I have decided to start blogging about what I've been reading, here is what I read in October. I'll have another batch for November.
Playground, Richard Powers. As others have remarked, this novel kind of does for the sea what The Overstory did for trees. Powers is one of my favorite novelists, and this one is one of his best, up there with The Gold Bug Variations and The Echo Maker.
A Few Days in Athens; being the Translation of a Greek Manuscript Discovered in Herculaneum, Frances Wright. A 19th century novel that discusses Epicureanism, a pretty good. Available from Project Gutenberg. I've really gotten into Epicureanism.
The Demon Breed, James Schmitz. A science fiction adventure novel, featuring a strong female protagonist, set in a planet with an interesting ecology. I am reading books nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (I am a judge). Pretty good book.
Polostan, Neal Stephenson. Historical fiction, featuring a Russian-American woman brought up as a Communist. First book of a trilogy. Stephenson and Powers are two of my favorite living writers, so October was a good month for me.
Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, Gabriel Kennedy. This is the book that most of you will be interested in, so it deserves a few more words.
Exhaustively researched (there's even a list in the back of many of the places RAW lived), accurate in the most important particulars, the section about Robert Shea is well-researched, too. I agreed with most of the opinions in the book. The research generates quite a few things that surprised me. I didn't know that Paideia University, where RAW got his advanced degree, actually was a creation of RAW and his wife. You'll learn other things about RAW you didn't know before, even if you are well read in his work.
The book is formatted accurately for Kindle (not a given for self-published books) and has a good cover, by Laura Kang. The book's main flaw is that it is poorly copyedited, or rather, it reads as if there was little copyediting. Lots of spelling and grammar mistakes.
Chapel Perilous is available as a Kindle, hardcover and paperback via Amazon and on Lulu.
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