For those who don’t know, this is Book Blogger Appreciation Week. The official site has blogging topics for each day this week. I’ve been busy and missed them all so far, but I’m going to do today’s and I’m hoping to do at least tomorrow’s too, which sounds like fun. (It’s writing about a book you loved that you discovered on a book blog – it would be very hard to choose just one, though!) So here is today’s topic […]

The Magiciansby Lev Grossman416pp (Hardcover)My Rating: 8/10Amazon Rating: 3.5/5LibraryThing Rating: 3.77/5Goodreads Rating: 3.58/5 The Magicians, written by Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman, debuted at #9 on the New York Times bestseller list and is currently #21. Although the ending isn’t quite what I would call a cliffhanger since the main loose ends from this book are tied up, it also seems to be leading up to another book. Grossman has confirmed that there will indeed be a sequel in […]

I noticed the post about the giveaway for the Spider and Jeanne Robinson books didn’t actually say who could enter. It has now been updated to say that it is open to anyone in the world. Since many of you probably already read the post a few days ago and won’t be going back to it, I just wanted to make a new one to let people know!

For anybody who didn’t catch my review of Variable Star almost a year and a half ago, I’m a big fan of Spider Robinson. Though I haven’t read as much of her work, Jeanne Robinson’s collaboration with Spider on the Stardance trilogy is also exceptional. Well, word is that Jeanne is fighting a rare form of cancer, and the couple is running low on cash. That link has several ways that you can help, but being the of-limited-resources types that […]

The Drowning Cityby Amanda Downum384pp (Paperback)My Rating: 5.5/10Amazon Rating: 5/5LibraryThing Rating: N/AGoodreads Rating: 3/5 The Drowning City is Amanda Downum’s debut novel and was just released on August 25. It is the first book in The Necromancer Chronicles series, and the next two books are scheduled to be published approximately a year apart (The Bone Palace in 2010 and Kingdoms of Dust in 2011). Ever since I saw the cover quote from one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Bear, I’ve […]

A brief technical supplement in support of our proposed new unit, the grrm. The grrm is a unit of change over time. Specifically, it measures the degree of warping of a shelf under a constant weight per distance over a given length of time. In terms of quality, more grrms represent a shelf that bends more under stress. In standardized units, 1 grrm can be described as: 1 degree of deflection under the weight of a full shelf of ASOIAF […]