« September, 2006 »
The Onnovore’s Dilemma 
by Michael Pollan (2005)
read: 25 September 2006
rating: [+]
category: non-fiction
I’m reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I just started, I haven’t even followed corn all the way through yet. One thing that I read last night though really stuck in my head. One economist estimated that it takes 1 barrel of oil to get a steak onto your grill. Think about the number of cows in this county. Maybe the real culprit in our energy problems is not Detroit, but wherever it is that Cargill is headquartered. We don’t eat all lot of beef anyway, but I’m wondering how difficult it would be to avoid corn fed beef. I can remember commercials pitching corn fed beef as some sort of advantage. Cows, of course, don’t eat corn, unless it’s force fed to them by humans. It’s not even good for them. They have to be pumped full of antibiotics to counteract the negatives of the corn. It’s an ugly cycle that isn’t good for the cows, or the people.
Eon
by Greg Bear (1991)
read: 16 September 2006
rating: [0]
category: scifi & fantasy
A cold war inspired epic in which humans, exploring a vast asteroid sized ship from the future in orbit around earth, get trapped there when the Russia and the US launch all their nukes at each other and destroy the planet in the process. The book is long, very heavy on techno babble, and often a chore to read. I did finish it, but it felt forced at times.
Eternity
by Greg Bear (1999)
read: 16 September 2006
rating: [0]
category: scifi & fantasy
The sequel to Eon, in which man has a permanent settlement on the asteroid ship, but now has to deal with some ancient enemies of mankind. Like Eon, it is gripping and brilliant at times, but inter sped with just enough technobabble to make finishing feel more like a job than a treat.
Queen of Angels
by Greg Bear (1994)
read: 14 September 2006
rating: [-]
category: scifi & fantasy
I made it about 100 pages into this and just quit. The story didn’t grab me, and stylistically I found it difficult to read.
Slant
by Greg Bear (1998)
read: 14 September 2006
rating: [+]
category: scifi & fantasy
Set in the same universe as Queen of Angels, this is sort of a who-done-it in a future US where just about everybody is happy due to manipulation via nanotech, and everybody is connected to a super high bandwidth Internet full of, well, mostly porn it seems.(Certainly a plausible future!) However, under the surface, problems persist. Fairly fast paced and often tense, this was a pretty good read.
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