Ghost in the Shell; Shirow Masamune (Dark Horse Manga; 2004; ISBN 978-1-59307-228-5; cover by Shirow Masamune).

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: The Lost Memory; Junichi Fujisaku (DH Press; 2006; ISBN 978-1-59582-072-3; cover by Kazuto Nakazawa).

So after coming across the anime movie version of Ghost in the Shell and acquiring (and partly watching) the anime television series of the same name, I picked up three novels based on the television series as well as the original manga that inspired the movies, the television series and now the novels.

Masamune's GITS (to be fanboi-ish about it) parallels the stories that were developed into the movie as well as episodes of the show, but goes in directions that neither followed. It is also, quite frankly, a lot more adult in nature than any of the other versions. I'll have to look up other works by the artist/author.

Fujisaku wrote (according to material in the book) some of the episodes for the GITS: SAC show. Whether it is a problem with translation or the sparse nature of a story originally intended for the screen, this was a sketchy, scattered read. It might have worked better on the small screen, as a book it was a disappointment.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:17 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 213 words, total size 2 kb.

Travels With Herodotus; Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage; 2007; ISBN 978-1-4000-7878-3; cover by Raghu Rai).

Ryszard Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist who fell in love with one of the world's first history books, The Histories by Herodotus (good overview of the book here; electronic versions here, here and here). This collection (sometimes this feels like a group of essays strung together, sometimes it feels like an integrated work...I'm treating it as a collection, hey, it's my reading project...)

The book alternates between Kapuscinski's sometime bizarre travels to China, India, Iran, Egypt and other points around the globe and his examinations of the one book that traveled most with him: The Histories. Sometimes the book illuminates his travels or vice versa; often he finds more drama and interest in the book than the places he visits. Some amusing stuff, some moving stuff, and a lot of very good stuff.

Made up of: Crossing the Border; Condemned to India; The Train Station and the Palace; Rabi Sings the Upanishads; Chairman Mao's One Hundred Flowers; Chinese Thought; Memory Along the Roadways of the World; The Happiness and Unhappiness of Croesus; The Battle's End; On the Origin of the Gods; The View from the Minaret; Armstrong's Concert; The Face of Zopyrus; The Hare; Among Dead Kings and Forgotten Gods; Honors for the Head of Histieus; At Doctor Ranke's; The Greek's Technique; Before He Is Torn Apart by Dogs and Birds; Xerxes; The Oath of Athens; Time Vanishes; The Desert and the Sea; The Anchor; Black Is Beautiful; Scenes of Passion and Prudence; Herodotus's Discovery; We Stand in Darkness Surrounded by Light.

Part of the 2008 Year in Shorts.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:16 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 284 words, total size 2 kb.

Do Your Ears Pop in Space?; R. Mike Mullane (Wiley Books; 1997; ISBN 0-471-15404-0; cover by James Carr).

Mile Mullane was a shuttle astronaut who produced the uproariously funny autobiography, Riding Rockets. In this volume (very similar to a book produced by Skylab astronaut William Pogue), he answers a series of questions about how to train to be an astronaut, what it is like to fly the shuttle, how to eat in space, and more.

The book is somewhat dated, having been written before the Shuttle-Mir missions and the increasingly long stays on the International Space Station. And, it is somewhat more "G rated" than his autobiography (more detail can be found, for example, in that book on the testing that the space shuttle's toilets system underwent...). I bought the book as part of a vague plan to write a story or series of short stories about the relatively near future in space (still working on them!), and it gave me a lot of general information (still looking for a bunch of specific answers!).

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:15 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 190 words, total size 1 kb.

In addition to re-reading Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization tales, I've also started reading and re-reading the Known Space stories by Larry Niven and others. First appearing in the 1960's in a series of short stories, plus such novels as A Gift from Earth and Ringworld, Niven eventually opened up the era known as the Man-Kzin Wars to other authors. more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:14 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 263 words, total size 2 kb.

Star Trails: 50 Favorite Columns from Sky & Telescope; David Levy (Sky Publishing; 2007; ISBN 978-1-931559-46-1; cover by Shaun Lowe).

A collection of columns by comet-hunter (and popular science writer) David Levy. A Starlight Light put me on the trail for the work by variable star observer Leslie C. Peltier, which has become my favorite work on astronomy (and the life of the observer). The Last Hour and A Sunrise Total Eclipse are two nice columns on the joy of observing. Tsutomu Seki and the Great Comet of 1965 recalled memories of seeing that comet myself.

Since these are columns as they appeared in the magazine, there is a certain amount of repetition that could have been taken out if they had been changed for the book. However, Levy is a good writer (I especially recommend some of his observing guides and his biographies, especially the one for Clyde Tombaugh).

Made up of: Preface; Starting Over; Accidents at the Telescope; The Third Star; Cole of Spyglass Mountain; A Starlight Night; Telescopes for Telethon; A Marriage of Science and Art; The Last Hour; The New Age of CCD Observing; In the Footsteps of Giants; Don't Let It Get to You; Earth Strikes Back; Uncaged Spirit; A Toast to Friends, Present and Absent; Something Old, Something New; Four Decades of Stellafane; The Man on the Moon; An Observer for All Seasons; Letter to My Granddaughter; Skyward Bound; Arthur C. Clarke's Vision of the Cosmos; The Street-Corner Astronomer; The Comet Master; Tsutomu Seki and the Great Comet of 1965; The Real Unified Theory; A Central American Heaven; Crescent City Astronomers; A Peak Experience; Miracle at Birr Castle; Observing Earth; A Voyage to Remember; Two on a Tower; Tombaugh's Star; Tombaugh's Telescopes; My First Telescope; A Sonnet for Columbia's Seven; Adventures with Mr. Schmidt's Telescopes; Further Adventures with Mr. Schmidt's Telescopes; A Sunrise Total Eclipse; Meteor Nights; A Perfect Storm; Red Lights in the Sky; A Tale of Two Eclipses; A Not-So-Transitory Success; Seeing Einstein's Gravity Lens; In Praise of Penumbral Eclipses; A Ringside Seat; My First Meteor; What is a Planet?

Counts as fifty-one entries in the 2008 Year in Shorts.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:10 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 364 words, total size 5 kb.

The publishing industry is dying. Blame second-hand stores! Blame the internet! Blame the chains!

Blame everybody but yourselves.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:59 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

He gave in. 'What books, Chiara?'

'The ones Mamma gave me, in English, about the English sea captain and his friend and the war against Napoleon.'

Ah, those books. He took another sip of his wine. 'And do you like them as much as Mamma does?'

'Oh,' Chiara said, looking up at him with a serious expression, 'I don't think anyone could like them as much as she does.'

Four years ago, Brunetti had been abandoned by his wife of almost twenty years for a period of more than a month while she systematically read her way through, at his count, eighteen sea novels dealing with the unending years of war between the British and the French. The time had seemed no less long to him, for it was a time when he, too, ate hasty meals, half-cooked meat, dry bread, and was often driven to seek relief in excessive quantities of grog. Because she seemed to have no other interest, he had taken a look at one of the books, if only to have something to talk about at their thrown-together meals. But he had found it discursive, filled with strange facts and stranger animals, and had abandoned the attempt after only a few pages and before making the acquaintance of Captain Aubrey. Fortunately, Paola was a fast reader, and she had returned to the twentieth century after finishing the last one, apparently none the worse for the shipwreck, battle, and scurvy that had menaced her during those weeks.

(Donna Leon, Friends in High Places)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 258 words, total size 2 kb.

One of the projects that I'm tackling during my time off is...the basement. It's been a mess for a while. Between the Great Flood of 2003, storing my in-laws stuff there, storing my parent's stuff there, moving things back and forth...it has gotten out of hand.

So it is time to sweep, sort and toss. Among the potential tossing will be a lot of books and games and such.

Let's face it: my book collection is somewhere around 8,000 (I kid you not) volumes. Am I ever going to re-read them? As my daughter says lately, "No way, Jose!" It's time to weed out books that do not make the cut in terms of quality, books that I'm no longer interested in, books that are duplicated (either as other paperbacks or as hardcovers), etc. Most will be given away to friends and family...only the real stinkers will go to the recycling pile.

Games? I've got the very earliest incarnations of RuneQuest, early editions of Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Empire of the Petal Throne and piles upon piles of wargames. If I retired tomorrow, I might keep them all, but, again if I look at it realistically...something has to give. Maybe I can sell them on eBay (advice sought!).

Time to bring order out of chaos. If I clean up and sort and toss, I'll be more likely to enjoy the remainders. And maybe (if my hands can take it), I can start to get involved in some figure painting or model building and painting again. Heck, figure painting might be something my daughter and I can do. Hmmmm...father and daughter Warhammer 40,000?

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 278 words, total size 2 kb.

So where does the reading stand? I'm at 89 books and 681 short works, here at the "halfway point".

Not halfway through the year. Halfway through the month.

As it turns out, I'm off for the rest of the month. I have a lot of projects lined up, but I expect to be able to do some solid reading as well. Will I beat my previous personal best in these two categories? That would be 122 books in 2004 and 543 short works in the same year.

Short works...check. Long works...going to be tougher! Stay tuned!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 100 words, total size 1 kb.

Fred's Reading Report (December 200

What? December already? Things got a little hectic there, between working on Odyssey of the Mind, my mother-in-law being in the hospital, my daughter having her birthday...so making the monthly report slipped my mind!

So where do I stand? With short works, 607. Can I make it to 730, the equivalent of two short works a day for the year? Doubtful, but what the heck!

In the longer form, 82 books completed. Probably another 82 being read. Do I suffer from short-attention span theatre or what (I prefer to think of myself as being able to massively multi-task!)?

I continue to expand ways and means of reading. I've continued, as I talked about last month, to read books on a electronic reader. And, I continue to listen to audiobooks during my commute. This past month I used this to finish up The Surgeon's Mate by Patrick O'Brian. I then started listening to The Ionian Mission by Patrick O'Brian and have added the audbiobook versions of the Lt. Leary series by David Drake to my iPod. Currently, I'm more than halfway through With the Lightnings.

Four more weeks, more or less. Almost two will be vacation (in theory). Where will I end up?

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:09 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 212 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Maniac.

Posted by: John D. at December 03, 2008 09:26 AM (twiRb)

2 You know, I think you've used that comment a couple of times. I don't think of myself as a maniac, just spending a heck of a lot less time watching television and the like!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at December 03, 2008 09:27 AM (jc70B)

3 Does "automaton" fit better? It all stems from envy, of course. I wish I read as much as you do.

Posted by: John D. at December 03, 2008 01:33 PM (twiRb)

Hide Comments | Add Comment