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Decent novella, set in Borneo. It has many of the elements that hold a Shepard novella together: there's a jungle, drugs that alter or manipulate reality, a steady stream of political / colonialist theory combined with some reflexive loathing at the over-intellectualism involved in the theorizing, a hidden world only accessible through a leap of faith, and a question on whether faith and trust can ever be truly be genuine, or another move in the game of self-interest. It's a story of a low level British pawn shop owner who helps an idealistic American live in the jungle with a pharmacutical researcher, and finds that the American is looking for his approval before he remakes the world in his own image, and a witch who thinks that unchecked idealism and hope can be a greater evil than self-interest.

But the language is greater than the story. I have no real hope of reproducing Lucius Shepard's voice -- god knows it's not mine -- but part of me envies his sheer ability to make words read like music, to represent the interplay of skepticism and faith and the internal workings of men as finely as the landscape around them. It's a pleasure to read someone who has "read the text" -- every one of his characters is reading the environment around them and at least somewhat aware of their failings and blind spots.

So yeah. If you've read Viator, if you read Two Trains Running, you know what you're looking at here. If not, it'll be different to almost anything you've ever read.

A very slim book that tells you all the things you need to do to eat a healthy diet. He distills it down to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And everything following talks more about that. There's a some interesting bits -- one rule is "Break the rules" and another one talks about making a window garden or plot so you can eat out of your own personal garden.

But the biggest thing has to be "Don't eat sugary preprocessed crap." Which I don't do already, so I'm good there. I think he had some things to say about "unidentifiable food" -- basically if you're eating a bacon explosion don't be surprised that it's not healthy for you -- but what really stands out is that the US diet is so amazingly unhealthy that it manages to make people sick when just about nothing else does. There are Inuits living off seals and African tribes living almost entirely off of calves blood... even the French diet of cheese, bread and wine is healthier than Freetos and Hostess pies. (Sadly, he doesn't go into detail on pizza, but I bet Italian pizza is a very different beast than a Domino's Supreme Meat.)

Good read, hand it to kids and get them young.

It's somewhere between Einstein's Dreams and Lem's The Cyberiad - there are stories told using the early times of the Universe, of the world, of dinosaurs, molloscs and the "time" before the Big Bang. The storyteller is not a God, but clearly a more than human entity that remembers being different beings, but it's unclear how much he remembers from one story to the next, or if the stories all happen in the same world.

Despite being about the early days of the world, there are cheerfully anachronistic touches. One character, on seeing that his child does not recognize that he is a dinosaur, ends by walking far away and finally catching a train. Another story has him losing his sister when the Earth solidifies, only to find her later in 1912 married to a rail station manager.

There is no conclusion or deeper story involved, but it's almost more alien in the familiar concepts -- for example, what does it mean to be an "immigrant" before there is any such thing as time and space? Calvino doesn't shy away from the inherent absurdity in the stories he's telling, which ironically makes them stronger.

This is a collection of short stories with an incredibly lame bridging mechanism that strains credibility all by itself... and oh dear god it gets worse as you keep reading.

It's science used with all the exaggerated care and concern of a man using tipex on his computer screen for the very first time. His short story in which "evolution" is the punchline is astonishing not just in its sheer wrongheadedness, but also in the implication in the story that this is a very clever ending and very clever people are impressed by it. By the very end of the series of stories, you realize that this isn't an attempt at science, but magic dressed up as science. The Similarion, only with lasers and the Maiar as quantum lattice foam.

But the stories are trite and predictable when they aren't boneheaded. The writing is terrible. The characters are there to advance the plot and may as well have the relevant tropes stamped on to their foreheads. And by the time you get to the end of the book, you wonder how on Earth something so dated and parochial (seriously, humans? Made of flesh? At the end of the universe?) could stand up as a theory and you're waiting for the wizard to pull away the curtain and...

...nope. It really is that dumb.