Literature - It's a fancy word for "books"

I absolutely LOVED Cat's Cradle, except that it also crushed my soul.

Oh yeah, his books definitely tend to be heartbreaking when they aren't heartwarming. And Cat's Cradle is certainly a fine place to start. University of Chicago accepted it as his thesis for a Master's in anthropology, even! The Illium, NY in it and Player Piano really only share the name in common, as opposed to the recurring characters and settings in other books (it really is funny how Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout always seem to recur together).

After I read Cat's Cradle, I did a bit of research on the topics and strung together a funny little bit of backstory.
Ice-nine was an idea chemist Irving Langmuir came up with to entertain H.G. Wells in hopes he'd use it in a story. It didn't take. After both were dead, Kurt Vonnegut took it up and wrote Cat's Cradle around it. Sometime around then, the Soviets developed a thing called polywater, a configuration of water that hypothetically resembled ice-nine, and folks were afraid that it might result in the same disastrous effects ice-nine brought to the world in Vonnegut's book. It turned out to be a mistake, and polywater is now used as an example of pathological science, which is pretty much when cognitive dissonance and psuedoscience get together and have a baby. The term "pathological science" was first coined by Irving Langmuir.
Busy, busy, busy...

Would you guys believe I still haven't read any of Vonnegut's work (with the possible exception of "Harrison Bergeron" in high school--which I remember very little about). I used to avoid fiction for fun until sometime early this decade.



Yep, it's definitely a book. And he's got quite a few other political titles under his belt. He's also one of those high-brow satirical authors (Ivy Leaguer), so he'll make you feel inadequate if you're also a writer. Good stuff.



I think the letters are simultaneously my favorite and least favorite parts about the book. While I love his rants, I hate the font they're written in. And they seem to go on and on and never really add up to anything. So while I'm amused, I dread coming across them.



I finally got the pleasure of reading The Running Man last Christmas. It was one of my favorite 80s movies of all time, and the book was even better. I love how different the two stories are. I can definitely see a remake of the movie following the book more accurately and casting someone like Edward Norton to play the tortured hero. Quick read and excellent writing.

On a side note: At about the time I was reading the car wreck scene, a drunk driver almost crashed through my bedroom (one of the trees outside my sliding glass door stopped it from coming through). Would've made for a lousier Christmas, but great irony.



It's actually inside the Legendary Edition (on this website only), but it's an old version. The current version is much better.

And I do believe Mr. Paige should be right about finished with it based on where he was last time we discussed it. Assuming you've finished it, does it look like it'll be another wildfire series or a blip on the radar?

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

I got Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss as a Christmas present a few years back; srime if I haven't been abusing semicolons ever since(now that I finally know how to use them). In addition to that, I occasionally use terminal punctuation after the quote it contains as "that makes more sense".

Recently I've been reading random science fiction collections, most of them short stories from the fifties, which I find on the shelves in my mom's den.

I hated two fantasy books with an extreme loathing that I dare not put into words:
Wind in the Stone and Moonscatter. The women who wrote these abominations are vulgar in ways that even OHR-n00bs don't often dare to be. Using menstration as a plot device is just plain dumb; using euhemism to dance around it is dumber.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

Read Bone at work today. Very much should have read it sooner.

Why is using menstruation as a plot device dumb?

Probably because he thinks menstruation is icky. Which is dumbest.

Yep, I finished it, and loved it.
I am eagerly awaiting book 2.

I liked Terry Pratchett's Night Watch. But, then, I like just about everything that limey brit writes.

I just started reading a book called PROJECT: BLACK VIKING. It's a spy novel about a Puritan Cajun CIA agent that has to stop a weather machine from freezing the world or something.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

One of my vary favorite authors too! He occupies a discordantly large portion of my bookshelf space. I just picked up a copy of "The Science of Discworld"

Wow. This is a nice thread and it's right up my alley.

I love the Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan, although most people have heard of neither. It's a total fantasy about this guy who's reincarnated(maybe) and is able to 'channel' or use the One Power, though this makes guys go crazy cuz the bad guy 'tainted' the male half of the One Power, but the females can use it cuz their half is okay. I know, it's really confusing, but it's also really good.

Also love the Cal Leandros series by Rob Thurman. Don't read if you don't like language and innuendo. Or outright explicit-ness. It's cool though. Another fantasy, but this one's more nitty-gritty semi-realistic (ok, maybe not...) It's about this teenager who's part Auphe, who are elves, but the whole fantasy thing is WAY off, as you find out throughout the series as the author reinvents classic mythical creatures. Quite entertaining, especially as the main character's brother (sober ninja-guy) is in the center of a one-way love triangle between a vampire and a GUY puck. Yeah, the puck is the main innuendo. And everything else, too.

I just finished Snow Crash, which is an amazing stop-the-end-of-the-world sci-fi story. Quite a ride, and quite worth it. Contains the F-bomb quite a bit, though. Just a warning.

So that's what I like. I'll be checking out some of the other stuff here, too.

How come I always post on the old threads? The ones where nobody ever responds?


Don't bother answering, that was a rhetorical question.

well, i mean... it's pretty easy to avoid. just look at the date the last reply was posted on, and if it was a few months back then it's dead.

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1. I did say

2. Duh. I was trying to re-start it.