Why do you ask: do you have an absentee father who enjoys bAseball more than company?

At Number 4.

…like for a Gallagher performance…

…lots of plastic sheeting and disinfectants…

but she slips in an insignificant detail once in a while.

She balks if specific “insignificant” details are not included in analyses, but it is difficult to figure out how exactly she wants you to prove her point.

Nervous as hell, as th

**Nervous as hell, as the next paper’s due today (I have it done, but still nervous and tweaking it like hell).

I thought originally that I was having horrible nightmares, but then I realized I never fell asleep. The “nightmares” were just the insane and confusing thoughts that were induced by reading your comments.

(But don’t take that wrong. I like living this way)

P.S. I borrowed that first part from my niece Stephanie. Now before you take me for a thief, just know that I have not had an original thought since reading “Take Heed, 67MARQUEZ”.

P.S.S. I am up to 1989; just fourteen seasons left.

I’ll be flat out honest. I started off the semester doing a. After the first test (we have like 4 tests + final), realized that it was a bad idea.

I’ll say I’ve read and attempted to comprehend the majority of the texts. My comprehension IQ is probably somewhere near nonexistent though.

If I get confused in the middle (which I way too often sometimes do), I turn to the Cliffnotes, while trying to manuever through the text.

And I hope this paper I’m about to turn in in about an hour fares well.

I’m a rhetorical citizen of the world.

It’ll be a very short paper.

… I’m presuming that all of us locals know what the “K” in Ursula K. LeGuin stands for, and why that’s significant?

1. Would you categorize Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon as science fiction?
2. Is it any good?

Someone gave it to me a couple of years ago, but I never got around to cracking it open. I wedged it into a partially obscured slot in my bookshelf, and that was that. Many layers of dust later, there it remains.

I am, alas, embarrassingly unfamiliar with science fiction writing. I read Parable of the Sower years ago, Childhood’s End, maybe the stray Margaret Atwood novel along the way, but that’s about the extent of it.

Anyway, I’m about to be between books, and your post has inspired me to expand my horizons. Cryptonomicon is almost certainly the closest thing to science fiction I own, but if it sucks and/or is a different beast altogether, I’ll schlep down to Powell’s for the real deal (I think I’d prefer something pompous and overbred, with tons of adverbs).

My reading tastes veer toward the lighter side of sci-fi/fantasy, so that’s the grain of salt to think about with all my suggestions:

In no particular order:

1) Ringworld by Larry Niven: a classic old-school “hard sci-fi” with a cast of odd aliens exploring a theoretically plausible man-made ring world. Short and breezy.

2) Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card: this is one of those books almost no-one has ever read and then hated. Widely regarded as Card’s best work. A coming-of-age tale about a young child sent off to battle school, he’s an unappreciated underdog (sort of like a certain Bay Area baseball team). When my friend was learning French she picked up the French version because she wanted to reread it for the forth time.

3) Good Omens by Neil Gaimen and Terry Pratchett: Pratchett is master of comic fantasy and Gaimen always goes for the dark stuff. They came together to tell a tale of the apocalypse and the talents blended perfectly. Best part are two main characters: a demon who’s kinda nice and an angel with a dark streak, who are pals.

4) Discworld series by Terry Pratchett: None to serious here. Pratchett’s quite prolific, with maybe 30 books in the series by now. Lots of allusions to our own world as seen through a funky, off-beat lens. I keep coming back to his books because he is a master at wordplay, a good line of the top of my head: “There are overhead costs underfoot”. Tons of memorable characters as well. Books are short and I’ve occasionally finished ’em in one long Sunday. Best not to read a bunch in a row as you eventually tire from the style.

5) Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff: Ruff is a little known who is a personal favorite of mine. He dabbles in supernatural fiction rather than straight up fantasy. Fool on the Hill is a good v. Evil battle set on the Cornell campus. Fun characters like faeries (all with Shakespearian names) and a group called the Bohemians who ride around campus on horses (except ZZ Top, who rides a donkey, and Ragnorak, who rides a black motercycle) Not all the characters have names that weird. Ruff adds many allusions to the process of writing which are an extra bit of fun.

6) The Pern series by Anne McCaffrey: a young adult fantasy series about dragon riders who regularly must battle against mindless silver threads that fall from the sky and devour crops. McCaffrey isn’t the greatest writer, but I find her world fascinating. There are three main groups: dragonriders, holds (medival type feudal holdings), and craft halls. This isn’t a quest for the treasure type fantasy, it’s about world altering events and how the characters face the challenge. Another group of quick reads.

7) The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson: a series of books about the colonization of Mars, going from the first 100 scientists sent out and expanding into corporations vying for control and underground resistance in an ever complicated venture to terraform the planet . I especially like the beginning, as many of the ideas seems quite plausible and get you thinking about what might happen if we really do go to Mars (who knows, may happen before capture another Series, though I’m not really that cynical). After the first book things delve into the realm of sci-fi as it grows farther away from our current level of technology. Especially good are the various character studies as they come spending a lifetime away from Earth.

Well, that’s enough to keep a person busy until Spring Training starts up. I hope people can find something that peaks their interest.

So many choices! Hmm. I’ll do some investigating next time I’m in a bookstore. Bookstores are dangerous places, though: I kept buying books faster than I could read them. And then I realized that was too expensive, so now I’m getting books from the library faster than I can read them. So many books, so little time…

Good stuff.

Adverbs are so far beneath my contempt that I usually don’t even bother addressing them. And they are, as thejd44 points out, an obvious flag of lazy and poor writing.

Adjectives, though, are a more overused and insidious crutch for middling-to-fair writers. Used judiciously they’re fine; but (like semicolons and parenthetics and similes and run-on sentences), their overuse makes for flaccid prose.