just a place to keep track of my current and recently read books

And give you a chance to Amazon them up if you like

Science Fiction Books / SciFi Books

Most Recent: Kelly McCullough: WebMage

Many of my "scifi" friends are actually "scifi/fantasy". With rare occasion, I just don't enjoy fantasy, but I have to admit this was one for me. The hero of the book is a modern day college-aged sorcerer, who travels mythological realms by having his goblin (who he created and who doubles as his laptop) enter the "MTTP://" address of the place they want to travel to. Not an amazing book, but a great airplane read.

Ben Bova: The Silent War

Book three of "The Asteroid Wars". OK, I admit it, I want to know what happens!

Stephen Baxter: Manifold Space

Baxter is an amazing visionary. In Manifold Space we rewind Manifold Time as if it didn't happen, and amazingly, Reid Malevant has an even more amazing adventure than in the last book! The Blue portals from Manifold: Time reappear, and this time Malevant and others use them to fast forward thousands of years into the future to solve the Paradox: If there were intelligent life in the universe, why don't we see it? ***** of *****

Ben Bova: The Rock Rats

The asteroids have been opened up in Book One, and the surviving members continue The Asteroid Wars, seeking to make a life for themselves in the asteroids while all hell breaks lose back at home. Bova's "paid by the word" short story background sometimes annoys me. Gar to Ben: I don't need a complete description of every piece of clothing of every person in every scene in your book! Or was that the extra touch that drew me in to the characters and made me rush out and get Book Three so I could see what happens next?

Neil Gaiman : American Gods

Gaiman asks the question, what happened to the gods that various people have brought with them "from the Old World" to the United States. His protaganist, Shadow, is one of the best characters I've read in recent years. This was another "airport book" for me. I had read and enjoyed Gaiman's Anansi Boys a couple years ago on another trip. Both of these remind me of Douglas Adams' Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.

Ben Bova: The Precipice

By a strange coincidence, I ended up reading two "Global Warming has destroyed our planet, the Asteroid Belt has the resource to save us all" books in the same library visit. The Precipice, to which the title refers is a Global Warming cliff which the world has fallen over, and now is suffering a landslide of increasingly devastating effects as polar icemelt flooding is just the beginning of a global economic collapse.

Stephen Baxter: Manifold Time

Reid Malevant is a worth-while protaganist. An ex-astronaut who dares, like so many of Baxter's readers, to ask the question "Why did we give up on space?" Throw your imagination open and let Baxter take you for an amazing ride!

William Gibson: Spook Country

I have to admit that I love Gibson's view of the future, but feel that his best story-telling lies far in the past. In Spook Country Gibson revisits in a very loose way some of the characters from Pattern Recognition. Main storylines involve a Cuban family practicing their KGB-inherited Trade Craft and a former musician who has been asked by Blue Ant's founder to write a story on Geolocation-sensitive Virtual Reality art for a non-existent tech magazine. Sound strange? Well, you did see the author's name, right? He brings it all together nicely at the end, and like with Pattern Recognition and even Idoru, at the end I was left wondering if I had wasted my time on the story, but kept going back to play with Gibson's concepts of the future over and over in my mind. Gibson is still a BRILLIANT futurist who struggles to find a story worth reading to relay his vision.

Thrillers / Action Books / Spy Books

CURRENT: Dan Fesperman: The Warlord's Son

Today's newest library book . . .

RECENT: Robert Ludlum: The Bancroft Strategy

I picked this one up at the airport because I accidentally checked my book with my bag! Hadn't read a lot of Ludlum other than the required Bourne series. This one has my interest!

Political Books / World Politics

CURRENT: Peter Lance : 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI

OK, not a recommended book, but this list is about what I'm reading, not what I'm liking. Clearly Mr. Lance has an agenda which differs from my own, but any writing about terrorism that is well researched is of interest to me.

RECENT: Marc Sageman: Leaderless Jihad

I actually decided 1000 Years for Revenge was not an airport, and took Leaderless Jihad instead. Sageman's book is probably going to be the primary book I recommend to people for understanding where we are in the current Jihad, which he rightly calls "the third wave". Strong central jihad is over. How does the process of radicalization occur among those who may never come face to face with "Al Qaeda Central"? Why does our presence in Iraq serve as such a great recruiting poster for this third wave? And why is the arrest rate of potential terrorists nearly 40 times higher in Europe than in the US? Sageman avoids speculation and builds his case on solidly accepted principles of the Social Sciences.

Carlo Bonini / Giuseppe D'Avanzo : Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror

Bonini and D'Avanzo are Italian journalists who have gone to all the right people and asked point-blank about the Nigerian-Iraqi Uranium "intel" and other topics. This is what investigative journalism is all about. I really enjoyed their presentation of what they learned in those interviews.

Haiku Books / Poetry Books

CURRENT : Edward Hirsch : Poet's Choice

Hirsch's previous book, "How to Read a Poem", was a great help to me in understanding some of the poems that I previously read and said "I don't get it." This new book takes a favorite poem from 130 different authors and puts the poem in context historically, literally, and in Hirsch's personal experience.

RECENT: Amiko Miyashita and Lee Gurga : Einstein's Century: Akito Arima's Haiku

Miyashita and Gurga combine as the translation team to bring the English speaking haiku world access to the poems of one of the most popular haiku group leaders in Japan.

RECENT: Jim Kacian and the Red Moon Editorial Staff : dust of summers: The 2007 Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku

Jim and his crew continue to find some of the very best English-language haiku. If you've missed a single year of this anthology series, please do yourself the favor of going back and catching up. I've discovered some great new poets this year that I would have missed altogether if not for the work of Red Moon Press! Buying through the Red Moon Press website was not hard to use at all and the book arrived very quickly.

Peggy Lyles : To Hear the Rain

I have no idea why I didn't already have this book in my collection. Surely I've meant to buy it before! Regardless, it was a pleasure to reflect on the poems of such a great haiku poet, excellently arranged and produced in a nice hard cover edition by Brooks Books. (Thank you, Randy!)

George Swede : Almost Unseen

I find it necessary now to go buy several more collections of "Brooks Books". There are certain poets that you see reading the main haiku magazines and every time you see them, you feel a connection, if only because of the frequency of their name. How refreshing to finally get the time to "know" George Swede better by reading an entire volume of work dedicated to his poetry. Often when I'm reading a book or magazine of haiku, I'll use a strip of notebook paper as a bookmark, and copy my favorite poems onto the strip. After filling a first and second strip, I gave up with Swede's poems and realized that to read my favorite haiku I would just need to re-read the book again. So many wonderful haiku! (Thank you, Randy!)

Abigail Friedman : The Haiku Apprentice: Memoris of Writing Poetry in Japan I wish that I could meet Abigail Friedman and personally thank her for this book. As a diplomat in Japan, Mrs. Friedman met haiku as a stranger, and embraced the haiku club concept, at first as a way of exploring the culture and meeting people, but eventually because of a love of haiku poetry. Her careful recollections of each phase in her personal haiku journal unmask this Japanese poetry form in its native environment better than any book I have read to date. If you only buy one haiku book this year, this one should be it. It will change the way you think about haiku.

Translated by Takafumi Saito and William R. Nelson : 1020 Haiku in Translation: The Heart of Basho, Buson and Issa Technically, this was a 2007 book. But I still keep going back to it over and over, so I'm going to list it at the bottom of my 2008 Booklist as well. Anyone who is interested in classical haiku needs to have this book. Each poem is placed by its season, and given in English, kanji, and romanji, allowing the reader to experience the sound and rhythm of the original poem, even to some extent if he or she lacks Japanese altogether. Topics have been given for the poems in a catalogue fashion, and the dates, where known, are also included.

Assorted Non-Fiction Books

David Freedman: At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion