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It is quite a book. Reminds me of Greg Egan.

And that makes me think of the Japanese word "tsundoku": http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/tsundoku-should-enter-the-english-language.html

For best effect, listen to the album "Haunted" by Poe while reading this book. The two of them are brother and sister, and the album has a bunch of references and tie-ins.

Just read this one myself a few weeks ago. I decided I'd read "The Four Horsemen". So first I did The God Delusion, then Breaking the Spell, then this one, and now I'm in the middle of The End of Faith. All of these have been worth reading, with the first and the last being the best so far.

Those are two of his best, in my opinion. I also highly recommend his Musicophilia if you haven't already read it. Hallucinations pairs really well with any of the "wonders of science and rationality" writers - Dawkins, Deutsch, Sagan, etc. It goes a long way toward showing exactly how we...

Always nice to see more Pittsburghers around here. Welcome.

This sort of thing is called "metafiction". Two of my favorite examples are Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. The second of those is also an example of "ergodic literature", which is literature that is deliberately physically difficult to read - text...

Actually, I can't stand Ocarina of Time (or any of the 3D Zeldas) - it's A Link to the Past which I really love. A Link to the Past is my second favorite video game of all time - it's only beaten out by Super Metroid. I'm definitely a 16-bit gamer.

Hah, a good friend of mine is blind and used to be a regular skydiver. (Not these days, though - I think he's "grown up" a bit much since then.) You can read this story about him: http://www.dropzone.com/forum/Skydiving_C1/General_Skydiving_Discussions_F18/Dan_Rossi_story_P678735/

Simon Singh is a great writer. He can make most any boring-looking subject worth reading about.

Right now, I'm reading the collected short fiction of C J Cherryh. I always loved her novels when I was a kid, but this isn't doing much for me now. Then again, I'm not getting much mileage out of fiction in general this year. Before that, it was Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. Sacks is great - I...

Just finished the last of the Hyperion books by Dan Simmons. Starting "I Am A Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter.

Dan Simmons' Hyperion, for the second time. This time I intend to continue on to Endymion and Rise of Endymion after Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, instead of waiting so long that I forget it all. It's been about 12 years since that first time through, and it remains a towering work of SF.

The Pittsburgh crowd here keeps growing. Welcome.

That middle pic looks like opera-singing :D

Two things at once right now: Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn. As usual for Sanderson, the book looks lame based on the back cover and basic concept, but is actually excellent. Sanderson seems lined up to be TOR's next big-name money-making writer. He's the sort who writes Fantasy as if it were...

Yeah, that really is a great book.

Just started Home Fires by Gene Wolfe. Everyone should get to know Mr Wolfe. I think he's the best writer in the English language alive today, in fiction, non-fiction, whatever.

Just finished The Other Lands by David Anthony Durham. Just started The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross.