The Speed of Dark: Book review

The Speed of Dark (RC 58560).

In a speech I gave at the American Library Association Convention in Atlanta in 2002, I pointed out that "recorded books take me places and show me things I would otherwise never get to encounter. They see for me by their descriptions, their vivid word pictures, and lyrical prose. They befriend me when I'm lonely, educate me when I'm curious, and amuse me when I'm in a blue mood."

Such a book is The Speed of Dark. It raised questions: Should we all be a monoculture like bananas or soybeans waiting to die of a virus, genetic, memetic, or cyber-based; or should we celebrate diversity, and if so, how much diversity, and if so, when should we try to change diversity and why? How normal is normal?

Can we keep our uniqueness and graft it to an understanding of the world of normal to become rather a kind of hypernormal or supernormal as Lou seems to do in the epilog?

Pay attention to the extended metaphoric representation of the duality of dark and light. To Lou, dark may not be a bad thing but rather the leading phenomenon, the bold explorer, to which light must catch up. I admit that that made me stretch a little, and I may not have it right at all!

Several books my be of interest--The Mind's Eye (RC 35003) and My Soul to Take (RC40485) or perhaps, Like Sound through Water by Karen Foli.

I wish I had Lou's mathematical, logistical, and computational abilities. I'd have done my own version of bringing down the house at Vegas a la those MIT students.

Visit the site of the author of Speed, Elizabeth Moon.

Click the audio link to learn more about the book and even hear a micro-snippet. I regret that the telephonic connection slightly jumbles the background music from a CD, "Inner Journey," put out by The Monroe Institute.

Additional link: The Georgiana Institute.

Free public domain audio books

Librivox is a site where volunteers read public-domain books aloud and the resulting audio books are made available for free download as podcasts. Also see Branko Collin's article on it. (Posted for David Faucheux.)

Turducken, anyone?

For the Zip USA feature in the November issue of the National Geographic, a Louisiana town near Lafayette was spotlighted. To learn more, click the audio link.

'Library Thing'

"Library Thing pulls the information from Amazon, so you're bound to find your book in the search results. When you add a book to your library, tag it withkeywords. This helps you organize books by subject or location. I like to tag my books as read or unread. But my favorite feature is the reviews. The site has a lot of members, and many of them post comments on books." - Kim Komando (item spotted by David Faucheux).

Addendum from David Rothman: Also see Branko Collin's post to the main TeleRead blog.

Gift Giving

I have been busy reading/hearing many books in the past several weeks. Several come to mind: Ghost Image, China Run, I Love You Phillip Morris, The Natural History of the Rich, Baby Momma Drama, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, and Stone Garden. But it was the only Braille book on the list of recent reads that I want to mention here. I like to read nonfiction books in Braille. You can skim around, look at recipes, essays, and such quickly. This book would be good to read along with say a suspenseful novel. You could take a break from the edginess and read a short essay or two for a nice change of pace. I don't often do this but enjoy it when I do. Obviously, books of photos and coffee table art books are out of my purvue, but this type of short nonfiction works well.

Of Poppies, Flanders Fields, and ...

Something to think about for Veterans' Day. Seems a shame we still need war in the third mellinnium.

Hickam, Dos Passos and Dostoyevsky featured in Tom Peters' forthcoming chatcasts

Homer Hickam's Sky of Stone, John Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov will be featured in Tom Peters' next chatcasts for Online Programming for All Libraries and the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center.

Sky will be discussed Nov. 21, with The 42nd Parallel set for Dec. 20 and the Brothers K for Jan. 31. As noted those are audiochats, though you can ask questions by typing, not just with voice. Go here to log in and get the software, which is spyware-free. Pictured is Homer Hickam, author of Sky and also the topic of a recent TeleRead post. Coming in December--date not yet set--may be a discussion of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 led by Bradbury expert Loren Logsdon, an English professor from Eureka College in Illinois. Bradbury was born in Waukegan.

Meanwhile see the main TeleRead blog for more details onthe Hickam, Dos Passos and Dostoyevsky chatcasts.