I'm just starting to read again, children permitting
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Fenris isn't a hell planet, but it's nobody's bargain. With 2,000-hour days and an 8,000-hour …
Trouble's brewing at the whaler's co-op-- in space! Simple solid old school sci-fi, from before sci-fi got trippy and cool. People fight with fists and guns, light or put out fires, and argue about price fixing in a frontier town. In spaaaaaace. It's fun, I guess.
The topics are clearly explained at a leisurely pace, and I enjoyed the frequent, well thought out exercises. This is the rare mathematics textbook that includes answers to all the exercises, instead of, say, leaving you scratching your head for a month before you figure out you're chasing a careless typo.
One quibble: so many combinatorics problems are posed along the lines of "match up every girl with every boy" etc. and it's like, it's the 21st century, can we just, y'know, not?
Lilith is a fantasy novel by Scottish writer George MacDonald, first published in 1895. It …
It's a weird one. It's nominally a Christian fantasy novel, but it's more Gnostic than anything else. It's the kind of novel in which the narrator is invited to literally lay down and die about twenty pages in. It can't quite make up its mind whether its worldbuilding is allegorical or literal. Much of the writing is labored and confused. There is purple, adoring, faintly sexual prose about horses and leopards. Strange beasts erupt from the sand-- are they direct representations of sin, or just weird-ass alien monsters? In the end, it puts forth a very specific theology, one which on one hand offers salvation to everyone, but predicates everything on submission. Not sure how I feel about this one, but it was an interesting read and worth a mull or two.