The Golden 80s

Buoyed by Keith Solty's posts on science fiction, I was reading a bit of SF today. I started by reading a few stories and then downloaded Karl Schroeder's Crisis in Zefra. While SF has not been my favourite genre, I still remember a lecture I listened to a few years back. It was delivered by a well-known scientist as part of a science journalism workshop. The one-hour lecture was well presented and as a listener I was busy scribbling names of the authors I have not read. The list I prepared is still with me and my job is still unfinished. Reading Solty's tag on SF led me to Ted Chiang 's wikipedia page. Ted is a technical writer who has written 'speculatiev fiction'. Well, that sounded interesting. This discovery on a dull, cloudy Saturday has forced me to look for Ted's free SF stuff on the net. Looks good! PS: Read a few poems by Robert Penn Warren. I tried using Google images to really understand the 'depth' of the imagery in poems. That experienc...

The world's smallest deer discovered in the Himalayas, says AP . "I do not like to track metrics like the number of comments as a quality measure. Anything you track is likely to cause some change in behavior," says Richard L. Hamilton, author of Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, in an interview . He also says that DocBook is used more than DITA. Interesting. What kinds of documents do Agile software development require? Read this blog post by Eelco Gravendeel. Making a strong case to let sci-fi movie classics to remain as classics is the article, Top 10 Sci-fi movies that should never be remade 2.6 million viewers tuned in to the final episode of the most recent series of Ladette to Lady , a TV serial that is related to reviving the debate, Why can't a woman be more like a lady? Interview with Ian Rankin , one of my favourite crime fiction writers. Oxford University faces flak over land use. Oxford University dragged into ...

Slate picks up the best of 2008. New York Time's 10 Best Books of 2008. Salon's best books of 2008. Time magazine selects Roberto Bolano's novel as the best in 2008. Lastly, the best from the bible of literary criticism, TLS .

"By writing books, the individual becomes a universe. And since the principal quality of the universe is its uniquness, the existence of another universe constitutes a threat to its very existence."

I read the The Art of Fiction by David Lodge in the early 90s. I was very much impressed by the book, which gave an insight into the world of literature. I did keep notes while reading the book and today I decided to put a list of books recommended by the author in various chapters. The books include the following: Defamiliarisation -Villete-Charlotte Bronte. For more on defamiliarisation, click here . Interior Monologue -Ulysses-James Joyce Intrusive Author -Adame Bede (George Orwell), Howard's End (E M Forster), As Good as Gold (Joseph Heller) Suspense -A Pair of Blue Eyes (Thomas Hardy) Skaz -The Catcher in the Rye-J D Salinger. Skaz Epistolary Novels -Pamela and Clarissa (Samuel Richardson), Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen), The Trick of It (Michael Frayn) Mystery Novels -Wilkie Collin's novels, Heart of Darkness(Joseph Conrad), The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles) and Mrs. Bathurst (Rudyard Kipling). Names -The author says that names are never neutral in fic...

Like the greatest practitioner of the art, Thomas Mann, Daniel Kehlmann is a master of irony, deftly subverting the expectations of the reader, writes Daniel Johnson about Kehlman's novel Measuring the World. Read the article in The Telegraph .