Inventory of the tomes

My mother saved the table legs. They're somewhere in the kitchen now. And she complains about my dad being a packrat...

Paperback series
I have several books from some popular science fiction and/or fantasy series, all of them in paperback. So it makes sense to have this as a category. These books are individually rather small, but there are so many of them that they take up a lot of room. I have...

• 7 books from the Battletech series. I got into these after I started playing Mechwarrior II. I forget how many books from the series I read over the years. Some of them, particularly the Michael A. Stackpole ones, are actually quite good. These seven are pretty much random ones that I got as a Christmas gift in, I think, 1999. I had already read two or three of them, as it wasn't like my parents kept track of which ones I had and hadn't read.
• 4 Darksword books. The complete original trilogy and the odd companion book, Darksword Adventures. All I'm missing is the sequel, Legacy of the Darksword. Got into these because they were written by Weis & Hickman.
• All 7 books of the Death Gate Cycle. As before, got into it because it was the same authors that originally did Dragonlance. Easily their best work, though.
• 2 of the Star of the Guardians books. The Death Gate Cycle aside, these books seem to be convincing evidence that Margaret Weis wrote better without Tracy Hickman than with him. Their fans will be sending assassins after me right about now. But it's true.
• All three volumes of the Rose of the Prophet trilogy. Weis & Hickman's second best work, probably.
• 15 Dragonlance books. I have no idea how many Dragonlance books I've read. Dozens, easily. Maybe a hundred. Nothing particularly good about the ones I happen to own, except for what seem to be first editions of the Legends trilogy and the first volume only of the Chronicles. Also, I just remembered that I read one of these before I read the Chronicles. Presumably the same copy sitting on the desk now. I wonder where I originally got it. I didn't really get into this series until J.T. loaned me the Chronicles back in 1998 or so.
• 1 Redwall book. I am not positive, but I'm pretty sure that I read every single Redwall book that was published up to this one, although I'm sure there are a lot more now.
• 2 volumes of His Dark Materials. Missing the first one.
• 2 Magic: the Gathering novels. The concept of books based on a card game just seems too silly to me to bother with. But I have to say that back in the day, they actually got some good authors to write these things. You'd think that they'd just exploit the popularity of the game to make a quick buck, which of course they've done, but there are some real gems to be found here. Not anymore, of course. That's why I said "back in the day." Now the books are tied to the sets as part of their storyline. Some of the old books were good. These two, unfortunately, are not among them.
• 1 of the Chronicles of Prydain. I read the whole series in 1996 or 1997. The last one is pretty bad. This is the first one.
  

Science fiction and fantasy
Asimov: The End of Eternity, Prelude to Foundation, Nemesis, I, Robot
Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, Podkayne of Mars
Other: The Complete Chronicles of Conan, Cyberdreams, Thor's Hammer, Man Plus
"Classics" that are also at least kind of sort of science fiction: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Brave New World, 1984

Classic literature because I have class
John Steinbeck's two best books, two Poe books (one of which is complete works, so the other is redundant, but it does look nice), and then two others, one Russian and one French, both translated into English because I am too lame to know more than one language.

Ostensibly classics, but they suck
Three books. Should I say which ones, or would that mean more assassins?

Kind of miscellaneous
This old King Arthur book for children or some such creatures and also The Lovely Bones.

Picture books
Watchmen and Quick as a Cricket. We used to have more Audrey Wood books, but somehow this one ended up safe with me and the others have probably been ruined. Personally, my favorite is The Big, Hungry Bear.

Drama
Picnic (ugh), Hamlet, and three books of George Bernard Shaw plays. My great grandma got me those when I was really into Shaw. I don't think I've read anything by him in years now, but I still think they're some of the best plays ever.

Non-fiction
Eight or so books. No particular theme.

Useful reference texts that I should store somewhere easily accessible
Dictionary, calculus cliff notes, organic chemistry lab manual, old microbiology textbook, statistics textbook, biology textbook, plant identification books, general and organic chemistry textbooks, organic chemistry solutions manual, book of quotes, calculus textbook.

Not so useful reference texts that might still be of some use
Microbiology textbook from microbiology class, old chemistry textbooks, psychology textbook, American history textbook that was never for any class I ever took but it looks mediocre, newsletter production manual (huh?), books from philosophy of science class (all bad), books of photographs, my dad's old torn up book of frontpages from the Los Angeles Times, English textbooks, ancient zoology book.

Books that I have not yet read, but might some day
Logic puzzles, a strange book about mathematics, a 1940's mystery novel, a 1960's science fiction anthology, an Isaac Asimov book, a Colette book, King Lear, a book of Mark Twain quotes, Othello, a Neil Gaiman book, another anthology, Gravity's Rainbow, some book about science and politics, the complete works of Jack London, The Dilbert Principle, another Carl Sagan book, a Fyodor Dostoevsky book, a book of Dryden poems that is 110 years old, Henrik Ibsen plays, a Charles Dickens book I was supposed to read a while back but never did, Moby Dick (I've read part of it but never finished it).

Not really books
Or perhaps books intended for me to write in them or something. I found four lab notebooks and an old spiral notebook from junior high. Oh, there are also some instruction manuals, like the one for my globe and for my chemistry model set thing. Also, computer game manuals.

For the lulz
Books that I don't really intend to actually read, but that I do find amusing and happen to have for some reason include some funny self-help books, this really bad book that I don't know how to describe exactly, a book about IBS that someone must have given me because of my intestinal spasms, a book about how to become a millionaire by starting a mail-order business, and this awful fantasy trilogy that someone must have given me.

Do not want
Do you want any of these? Now is your chance...

• Patriot Games by Tom Clancy. Ugh, Tom Clancy. How could I ever have tolerated him?
• Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy. Seriously?
• Tom Clancy's Op-Center: Mission of Honor. Not even actually by Tom Clancy. Stupid, really. Glad I never read this one.
• The Charm School by Nelson Demille. Looks like a wannabe Tom Clancy book. Ugh.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells. Not sure why I used to like H.G. Wells either. I was young and stupid.
• 4 resume guide books or whatever. Not that I'd read a book written by a total stranger for help with my resume. My sister got them when she graduated from college and she didn't want them, so she gave them to me. I don't want them either.
• Some algebra workbooks.
• An old Christian apologetic book. Oh, I guess this is my dad's. I'll just sneak it onto one of his shelves or something. He probably wanted me to read it, but I'll bet he never read it himself anyway. Besides, I read the first bit of it and it was really boring and pointless.

And that's it, aside from five books that I threw away because of extensive mold damage. Now I just need to figure out how to make this stuff take up less space...

Cleaning part of of my room.

This has shifted from an attempt to gather, catalog, and do something about my books this evening. It has become something entirely more monstrous. I ostensibly cleaned this room out back in 2004. And yet, somehow I am finding object that not only shouldn't be in here, but that never belonged in this room and never belonged to me to begin with: relics of our move to this dump of a house back in 2001, during which I was incredibly sick and it fell to the rest of my family to pack my stuff and put what was thought to be mine in my room. But along with most of my stuff, a lot of other junk came for the ride. And some of it, nearly a decade later, is still here. I'm not even touching the closet for now. I'm already surrounded by junk. I'd take video of this with my laptop if I didn't think I would die of embarrassment.

The rest of this house is still worse, though. But forget that. No matter how awful the rest of this house is, I am going to do something about my room. Something. Not sure what. Can't possibly do it all tonight. And I do need to use the bed at some point, so I should probably figure out a way to remove the stuff that's there now. So, no video footage, but I will provide a written record of my sins. In this venture, I have discovered...

Table legs. Not just any table legs. These went to a table that has never existed in this house. Presumably the rest of the table was moved in a different box and didn't end up in my room. I think it was breccia or something covered in glass, so it was probably broken and thrown out shortly after we moved here. I think I actually knew that these damn things were still somewhere in my room, but I blocked it out because it was too stupid to consider. I am giving these to my parents because it seems good for a laugh and there's a decent chance that my dad won't actually throw them away and that they will survive to end up in some museum centuries from now along with the rest of the crap unearthed from our house, preserved only by virtue of the building's ridiculously bunker-like design while the rest of the neighborhood perished in some natural disaster or something.

A pocket calculator still in its box. Might be nice if it were something actually useful, instead of stupid and obsolete.

Mix CD's that Eric made and later gave to me. They were sitting on a book. They should still play. Not that I ever bother to put a CD into the drive on either of my computers. But it's a nice idea. I'm saving these, of course.

A pad of sticky-notes from GRCC. Probably from when I first started there back in 2005. Why would I keep these? I never use sticky notes. These go in the trash.

A blue slip of paper with text in blue Sharpie reading, "I got you the BEST bookmark ever! Love you. V" Are you kidding? I'm totally keeping this. If it was in a book at the library and I pulled it out and brought it home, then it is clearly worthy of my collection.

Audio cassette tapes featuring Ravi Zacharias and Zig Ziglar: two people whose opinions I couldn't care less about. Just about all of my dad's other tapes were destroyed by being in our garage. Most of my family's possessions were in carboard boxes there for storage. When my mother tried to move some, she found that even though the boxes looked normal, when she tried to lift them, the tops and sides of the boxes would pull away, revealing that whatever was in them was completely ruined. Our garage didn't flood or anything. It's just so humid and mold-infested that nothing left in there is safe.

One of those flashing light clip-on things that doesn't even work, possibly because it has the word "Boeing" on it, meaning that it's from when my dad worked for Boeing.

A nerf dart gun. Awesome.

I think these are 3-D glasses. Whatever. I don't need them.

Underwear. Um, I have no idea how these got here?

A dozen plastic grocery bags. I laugh at the oceans. Or is it cry?

My checks. These should last me for the next 50 years or so at this rate.

Drugs. And the "discard by" date hasn't even been reached yet.

The adapter for my mouse that I bought. I forget what this adapter is called, but I don't need it. Might as well keep it somewhere in case I do? I don't know. I don't want to be a packrat, but this is potentially useful. I might be able to use it to connect the mouse to my old computer or something. I think my old computer is too old even for that...

The test of a sea urchin, specifically a "sand dollar." I've probably had this for like, a really long time. Might as well keep it.

My flash cards for reactions in organic chemistry. Excellent.

A handheld game called "Radar Sea Combat" that still works. Amusing. How old is this thing?

Magic CD's of the old Microprose variety. I never bought these, but I think I salvaged them from our garage and my brother must have gotten them somehow. I should try to install this stuff on my old computer, although I already got some of that software from the Home of the Underdogs back when they had it.

This amazing thing that I stole from my dad. No way am I giving this back to him. It's a miniature poster thing of the electromagnetic spectrum and presents it better than just about anywhere else I've seen. Really cool. I say I stole it from him but in reality he let me borrow it and I've just never given it back. That being said, one of the reasons for me not giving it back was that it was hidden behind a wall of books on my "bookshelf." And no, I didn't forget that it was there. I just didn't want to give it back to my dad. I will treasure it forever. Uh, I mean I will give it back to my dad at some point.

A beaten up page of sleeves for cards. Useless.

A laminated map of the good old U.S.A. One of those ones where Alaska is in a box with a different scale from the rest of the map so that it looks smaller. The state of Texas undoubtedly cut this company a check.

A 2005 calender that I am guessing my mother gave me because it's a Pink Floyd calender. No need for old calenders.

A GRCC schedule for last quarter. I'm sure I have much older ones around here somewhere, though. Throwing this one out.

Award certificate things from high school, mostly from wrestling. Amazing how hard my name is to spell. No, it's not "Steven." And it's not "Stephan" either. I am Stephen Bahl. Is that so confusing? I also see my promotion certificate to green belt in judo that I thought I looked everywhere for back when I was supposed to make a copy of it for my next promotion. Whatever.

A tumbler from Jet City Pizza. I think the phone number changed, so the one on it is no good. I hope that place is still around, actually. They might not be. Does anyone know? Wait, this is the internet. I can just look it up. Looks like it isn't. That's a shame.

Another map, but this one is my "First State Quarters of the United States Collector's Map." And I did complete it. This thing is worth big money. Like we're talking $12.50 at least.

Some sort of Leatherman knockoff thing that I've had for like 15 years. Maybe more. Be prepared.

Okay. I think that's everything but the books, which is sort of like saying that's a small fraction of the mess I'm dealing with, since the vast majority actually is books. But this is already running on and I haven't even started on the books. I'll report back on that issue later.

Still more about books

Something needs to be done about this mess. I had most of the books I bought at that library booksale sitting in a spot on my floor between my bed and my desk (actually between my bed and a big plastic container of Magic cards that is itself between my bed and my desk). It was supposed to be temporary storage until I could figure out where to put them. Well, when I pulled them out, there was slight water damage on some of the ones that had been directly on the floor. I relocated the whole mess to my bed and later to the top of my dresser and now to my bed again. Books. It's out of control. I just cleared off my whole bookshelf, which is really not a shelf at all, but a large area that takes up most of my entire desk (and it's not a small desk).

I am going to organize this shit somehow. I should separate what I have read from what I haven't and what I want to keep from what is junk. Also, I'm finding some interesting things that are not books at all. Also, my hand started aching after my exam today and it's still painful, so I don't want to type a lot. I'm going to cut this short.

Before I do that, I'm going to say a quick bit about the last book I read. To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis. Not a full review, because I can't manage that right now. But I'll likely finish the book I started after it (one of my old books that I've had for years and never read) soon, so let's just get it out of the way.

This book is awesome. Glowing recommendation. Will definitely be reading more from this author in the near future. Best time travel mystery story I've ever read. Actually, it's the only time travel mystery I can think of right now. Whatever. #14 or so on my still-in-need-of-reworking top 50 list. Glad to be reading good science fiction again.

First update in a while, mostly about books

I actually have been doing things other than playing Oblivion. No really. I've been reading books. Not just for school and not even just at work during my break, even (but mostly). Traditionally, I've talked about the books I've read in my old journal even when I wasn't updating with anything else (usually). I'm going to finish another book soon and it's the best one I've read in quite a while, but more on that some other day. I'm still not done with it yet.

Tonight was the first time I had training partners for judo since right about the time the high school judo season started. Pretty cool. I competed in a tournament earlier, by the way. Like two weeks ago or something. I sucked and I didn't feel like writing about it here. But now you know.

Geology class is kind of cool, but also annoying because it seems so dumbed down. It's definitely got me wanting to learn more about geology, especially the chemical aspects of it. Not saying that I want to necessarily pursue a career in geochemistry or anything, but it is very interesting stuff.

In a month or so I should be reapplying to the University of Washington, I guess. We'll see how that goes. Eventually. Probably.

So the first of the two books I read was The Future at War Volume I: Thor's Hammer. I bought it at that library book sale a while back. Like Cyberdreams, it is an anthology. It's the first in a three-part series of anthologies compiled by Reginald Bretnor. I would read the other two, but there's no way I'm going to hunt for obscure 1970's science fiction paperbacks. Out of the question. I can glean, from the introduction, how the trilogy was supposed to flow. This volume deals with war on Earth and in near-Earth space. The second volume moves outward to war in the solar system and the third volume moves all the way to intergalactic war.

Not to bash the previous anthology I read, but this one definitely takes editing to another level. As far as that goes, I could say that Reginald Bretnor gets an "A" for effort. Instead of just, "Hey here are some stories from our magazine that all have something to do with one of three or four completely different things" he actually has a real theme. The book includes both science fiction short stories and articles written by science fiction authors. Between pieces, Bretnor chimes in briefly and thoughtfully to give background. He doesn't try to bash the reader with some sort of message or digress into his own opinions on the material. He lets the stories and articles do the work themselves.

Unfortunately, Thor's Hammer leads with its trump card. And it's rather blatant about doing so. I picked this up because it had Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson's names on it. I mean, not solely for that. It was also because it looked like an interesting concept for an anthology and I was getting books for very little money. Anyway, right after the introduction, the very first thing this book gives us is Robert Heinlein's The Long Watch. It is excellent. It would be impossible to keep up that level of quality the whole time, but this definitely made the rest of the book look worse than it probably was.

Charles Sheffield's Fixed-Price War was pretty good. Tom Purdon's Moon Rocks was also good. Poul Anderson's Marius was decent. Rick Rubin's Final Muster was interesting. Most of the rest was disappointing, although it might have seemed better had they saved the best for last rather than throwing it out right away.

One thing that I learned from most of these stories and almost all of the articles is that the 1970's was a completely different world from the one I live in now. I mean, it wasn't, of course. That's silly. But I learned it. So I guess I learned a lie? A pretty convincing one, though. I went into this with Man Plus, but only a little. Mainly, I guess the way the Cold War dominated science fiction fascinates me. Technically, I do remember the Cold War. But I was so young that even if I had been able to understand what was going on, no one bothered to keep me informed. The only times I can recall adults referring to it, they simply called it "the war" and didn't bother to go into detail. I learned more in history classes in school, but not much. Most of what I know about the Cold War I learned from reading on my own.

When I say that the Cold War dominated science fiction, I don't mean that futuristic science fiction invariably dealt with a world in which it was still going on. That did happen a lot. But even in futuristic scenarios that have nothing to do with the Cold War as we know it, the idea of the Cold War still applied. I almost feel as though from reading enough of this that I have a sense for a particular brand of nothing much actually happening but almost everyone being convinced that major shit is about to go down that I don't think I've ever directly observed in real people in my whole life. But in science fiction, either some flavor of that expectation or some component of it or it in combination with a few other things is virtually nonexistent before and after the Cold War.

Also, I could write a whole post on Jerry Pournelle's article, Lasers, Grasers, and Marxists. Not because it's particularly bad or particularly good. It's because there's something about his article that is entirely terrifying and which he is aware of and is part of his point, all while there's something about his article that is entirely terrifying in a way that he could never have intended. I'd say more, but this is already probably so long that I lost everyone. Maybe later.

Anyway, the other book I just finished is Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden. And it's also from the 1970's and yes, it also got me thinking about the difference between then and now, although for entirely different reasons. Carl Sagan was a knowledgeable and proficient science writer. While this has probably never been held up as one of his great works, it's not a bad book and I have no reason to believe that he slacked off on this one. However, the most prominent thing about The Dragons of Eden is quite possibly how useless it is.

The subtitle is, "Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence." Sagan gets into the nature of intelligence, how to define it, artificial intelligence, intelligence in other animals, intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, how the human brain works, and some weird symbology that I found a bit annoying, but not nearly enough to ruin the whole show. However, three topics that get relatively huge sections in this 250-page book are computers, neuroscience, and phylogenetics. They aren't the only three fields of science touched on, but the intersection of these three is the focus of The Dragons of Eden. And if you were to randomly draw names from a hat of scientific and technological fields, you would spend quite some time before you hit on a combination that has seen more progress since 1977 than those three. I guess that's a very longwinded way of saying that almost the entire book is outdated. But I think it explains why so much of the book is outdated. Science changes. Science is expected to change. It's a good thing. Science writing becomes outdated. It happens. But when it comes to science writing becoming outdated, you aren't usually going to write a book tying three disparate research fields together with a single theme and have those turn out to be three of the most rapidly changing fields after your book comes out. Yeah, it's been over thirty years. Long enough that much of the science writing at the time would be outdated anyway, but not, I think to such an incredible extent.

This post is over.

Blogger is giving me title suggestions that don't make any sense and have nothing to do with the content of this post...

See what I did there?

The future is now. I am at school. Not new. The power is out. Not new either really. I am updating this while the power is out. Now that's new. Yeah, apparently the wireless internet still works even though the electricity is down all across campus. I'm not surprised. Because it's the future. If this were the past, I would totally be surprised. But I am not, as this is the future, after all. Such things happen in the future.

So I've still been playing Oblivion far too much to get anything done. When I got the game, my brother decided to get it for his PS3. He'd played it before on the XBox 360, but no longer had one because he'd gone through two of them. Everyone else though, who knows about the game and has heard that I have been playing it, have only commented that it is old. This is perfectly true, but it just seems odd to me, mainly because the games I'm used to playing are from mid-90's. 2006 just doesn't seem that long ago. Compared to the games I was playing before, like Diablo 2 and Lords of Magic, Oblivion looks amazing. The sky, the landscape, everything. But of course, now it really is old. This leads me to think in terms of accelerating changes in technology, but I don't want to argue that the singularity is totally here, man, or anything like that. I'm just saying, it kind of weirds me out.

Mainly, I just figured that I had to post once I realized that I do indeed have internet despite the power being out. If the power is out at home, I won't have internet and will probably flip out, but this is probably pretty local. Das ist alles für heute.