Book discussion
These tend to be short-ish reviews of books I've read recently. I tend to focus on character development more than the plot of the story, so the interestingness of the story itself is not likely to be ranked too highly in my review.
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All about the Guide
The Thorn has a sex book. Guide to Getting It On (Fourth Ed.) was sent to the office (with Luke’s name all over it) by the publisher for us to review. It’s an eight hundred page tome, complete with illustrations, punny chapter names, and a ridiculous amount of humor, intentional and otherwise. Just this week, I have probably gone through a good third of it (at least). My stomach muscles are killing me from laughing so hard. The book is completely informal, using slang all over the place, yet is not the slightest bit crude or crass. It includes complete and scientific anatomical descriptions, and the ideas presented in the…
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Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men
In Y: The Descent of Men, Jones gives a wide-ranging account of maleness, inlcuding everything from baldness to hormones to erectile dysfunction to basic physiology. This book is rather well written. It may seem odd to apply a stylistic analysis to a book that is supposed to be scientific, but that is the first thing I noticed. The book is readible, and for non-fiction, that takes some doing. Jones’ style is relaxed, yet informative, and British humor shows throughout the book. I will admit that this book wasn’t what I was expecting. I read this book for a Gender Issues (Human Sexuality) course, and was expecting it to make an…
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Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
Oroonoko is the story of an African prince tricked into slavery by an English captain and taken to the colony of Suriname. In the process, he is separated from his lady love, only to be (un)surprisingly reunited with her in the New World. Oroonoko, a proud, noble, and heroic man, must choose between life and slavery, or death and freedom. This book is… interesting. I didn’t so much like the book as find it fascinating from a historical perspective. It is written by an English woman, Aphra Behn, for a popular English audience, about an African in America. The book interestingly combined European romance style of writing of the 17th…
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Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2
Featuring the author as the main character, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 is an exploration of the potentials of both artificial intelligence and humans to adapt. The lines defining intelligence and consciousness are challenged and blurred, as are the lines defining the main character’s life. Essentially, two storylines unfold in this novel. The first is the development of a series of artificially intelligent computers, using bottom-up, connectionist techniques, for the purpose of passing the Master’s Comprehensive Exam, an exam given to those going for Master’s degrees in literature. Each implementation is more capable of adapting and learning than the previous, and culminates in the creation of Implementation H, or Helen. Whether…
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Oh, the Agony
Last night, I joined some girls on my floor and a women’s fraternity on a outing to a place called Pumpkin Works. Pumpkin Works is a plaze with various mazes (and other things like hayrides, methinks). Their star attraction is a 6-acre maze, cut from a corn field, in differnet shapes each year. So you go at night, with some buddies and a flashnight, and try to make your way through the maze. Similarly, there’s a maze in which you weave your way through extremely claustrophobia-inducing walkways of hay with low ceilings, interspersed with short bits of crawling and the like. They have other stuff, too, but those are the…