Rating: 3/5 Ian Hamilton, The Disciple of Las Vegas (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2011). This is the second book in Hamilton’s Ava Lee series of novels. As you may recall, I wasn’t a big fan of the first book . I liked this book a little better. Ava Lee is a forensic accountant who works with “Uncle” in retrieving...
Rating: 3/5 Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora’s Star, Commonwealth Saga #1 (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). This thousand-page tome is the first of two novels in the Commonwealth Saga. It’s apparently popular in Calgary because I had to keep returning it to the library because of holds. It took me three attempts, but I...
Rating: 3/5 I finished these books months ago, but I’m just now getting around to posting about them. This is a series of coffee-table-style books (meaning mostly full-colour photos) that take a discipline and present one author’s take on the 100 ideas that changed that field. There are six books in the series:art,...
Rating: 3/5 W. Tecumseh Fitch, The Evolution of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2010). This is a textbook that surveys the state of research into the evolution of language. It does a high-level survey of our current understanding of human evolution, and Fitch then goes through seemingly each and every hypothesis...
Rating: 3/5 Robert Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One, 1929–1964 (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1970). I typically really enjoy historic science fiction, and I was really looking forward to reading this collection. I wasn’t totally disappointed. About half the stories were really enjoyable,...
Rating: 3/5 Lee Child, Echo Burning (New York: Jove Books, 2008). This is certainly the most boring of the Reacher books so far. There are really only two action set pieces and the rest is just driving around not sure if Carmen is lying or not. It’s a fine book, don’t get me wrong, but compared the the previous four,...
Rating: 3/5 Lee Child, Running Blind (New York: Berkley Books, 2005). I’m rating this book highly because I enjoyed it so much, but it is not without its flaws. This is the sort of book you read when you don’t want to think too hard. For me it’s like sitting down and watching CSI: I don’t try to figure it out; I just...
Rating: 3/5 John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988). Numeracy (critical thinking in general, really) is a topic I read about fairly often (e.g., here , here , here , here , here , and here , plus others that never made it to the blog). Certainly not...
Rating: 3/5 Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010). When Pluto got demoted, I remember hearing about it, but I apparently didn’t care enough to do any reading about it. I had no idea how it happened or why. So when I saw this book sitting on the shelf, I felt a...
Rating: 3/5 Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background (London: Orbit, 1995). Well I’m afraid this is it for me and Iain M. Banks. It’s so frustrating! The first two thirds were the best I’ve read of him yet. I loved the characters, the humour was effective, and the action was awesome. He uses flashbacks very effectively...