jeremy snyder's meta|remix

this was another in my series of reading in finnish to keep the language up. i got this off librivox as well (props to the excellent finnish reader tuija aalto). the book seems like it will be a journey book, and it is, but not in the way you might expect. it’s more about a boy’s journey into adulthood, from country life to sophisticated city life, than it is about getting there. overall, i enjoyed it, but not as much as rautatie.

i just finished reading a book in finnish, called rautatie (the railroad).  Read the rest of this entry »

this is another one of my childhood favorites, white fang.  Read the rest of this entry »

another one i got off librivox…

call of the wild is a book that i loved as a kid. i’m sort of on a kick to check out books that had an impact on me as a kid or teenager. it’s a nice experience to go back and read this again and experience it with a different frame of reference. as a kid, this book just brought about the wanderlust in me. as an adult, i appreciate more of the emotional depth in the book.

another one of the classics i hadn’t read, so i picked this one up:

treasure island by robert louis stevenson

overall, good fun and an enjoyable read/listen.

note: i actually got this off librivox, second recording version. i have to say props to the reader – this is one of the better librivox recordings i’ve heard! get it on itunes as well.

i discovered librivox a few weeks ago, and i’ve downloaded a few books from there. the latest that i just finished is return of the native. they’re great in the sense that they’re free, and there’s tons of them.  Read the rest of this entry »

i just finished reading lucifer’s hammer. i had heard about this as a classic in the sci-fi / apocalypse genre, with a particular interest for me, in the sense that i love books that are hypotheticals set in a point in known human history (or the present). for me, this book started really slow, but ended strong. the technique of weaving diverse characters and storylines together late in the plot is something that a lot of people would praise in film, like tarantino does, but somehow i found it cumbersome in this book. maybe there were too many characters, or maybe it just took too long for them to start overlapping in the storyline for my taste. overall it was a decent read, although not one of my favorites.

a while ago, i heard a piece on npr about harper lee, the author of to kill a mockingbird. it piqued my curiosity, so i went out and read it.

Read the rest of this entry »

i just finished about 30 hours of audio of “the complete robot” by isaac asmiov.

i’ll have a nicer analogy over in the jeromecast, but here are some thoughts:

• wow. this was long.
• this was also a trailblazing work, opening up tons of thoughts about robots. i bet literally every sci-fi writer who’s written about robots was influenced at least in some way by a story in this collection.
• i found the experience of bunches of short stories, featuring consistent themes and some common characters, to be really enjoyable. i also like writing short stories, so maybe that’s why.
• i didn’t enjoy every story, but i did enjoy that the exploration of the themes was pretty exhaustive. for almost every area you might have wanted to consider, from robot psychology to human/robot relations, there was at least some discussion.
• i’ve never been a huge asimov fan, but i think this may have changed my mind. i’ll consider trying a few more of his works and see if that changes.

this was also an “>audiobook of war of the worlds, kind of a dramatization. and i’m really glad i did it that way, because that allowed me to get a sense of what the panic was like back in 1938. Read the rest of this entry »