[... snipped ...] - Ursula K. Le Guin "No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters"
This is collection of essays on various subjects. I have also read her fiction stories from Earthsea and Hain cycles. So far, all of her books were worth it. - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky "Prisoners of Power" Science-fiction set in Noon universe. The title as translation from original is rather sucky. In my opinion it should be more like "The reversed world". I have read Polish translation, let's hope the translation to English went better than with the title. There were two sequels to the book (as well as many other stories from Noon) - "Beetle in the Anthill" and "The Time Wanderers", both good, too. Another book of theirs is "Roadside Picnic", which I have read years ago and I think there is good time for refreshing. Not the average movie-like s-f, not much about triumphing over the Universe here. - William Shakespeare "Titus Andronicus" Lots of gore. - Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares "Chronicles of Bustos Domecq" "Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi" Both books have been printed together in my language, as they treat with stuff happening in the same surreal world. Albeit they narrate things in different way - the first is more about surreal/paradox, the latter is more like detective stories, still a bit surreal. If you read them, try solving the murder cases by yourself. This requires that one reads very carefully, so as to not expose oneself to the solution. At some point one has to stop reading. And maybe re-read the story from the start, in order to get all the pieces together. I had entertained myself for months with this, despite not much success :-). Of course, one can also read it all in one go, like any other book. There is still some fun to be had, like connecting various people mentioned in the stories, their relations, what happened to them after their story finished and this kind of things... Also, from previous years: - Umberto Eco "Foucault's Pendulum" Detective/history/conspiracy story all in one, very interesting. - Leonard J. Rosen "All Cry Chaos" Yet another detective story, this one involving chaos theory. Looks like there is a follow up, which I have not read yet. - Neil Gaiman "American Gods" "Anansi Boys" This is already known to everybody, I guess. - Arthur Schopenhauer "Eristic Dialectic: The Art of Winning an Argument" Interesting small book. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
