I’ve always loved science fiction and fantasy. It was perhaps my first great love as a reader. When I was nine or ten I discovered Anne McCaffrey on my father’s shelves, and devoured entire series of her work. As I got older I was launched into Kurt Vonnegut, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Orson Scott Card, Philip K. Dick, John Varley and more. My love of it has never waned, though as an adult it’s taken a distinctly young-adult turn (thanks in […]

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Apropos to my recent wonderings about what to do with the books I have been aquiring, Scott Esposito over at Two Words posted this gem: Yes. That’s a house made out of books. An exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. And clearly, my dream home/solution to the storage of books problem. Though it might be hard to find the ones I’m looking for…

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I’ve been pondering a seemingly unanswerable question having to do with books. I’m addicted to them – have spent most of my life, both as a child and as an adult, acquiring them and stubbornly refusing to get rid of them. Between the age of sixteen and now I’ve moved at least 14 times, and each time I’ve had to rely on the generosity of family and friends to help lug dozens of boxes of books to my new, inevitably-too-small […]

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I recently started work as a freelance copyeditor for a textbook company. I’ve so far had two fairly large projects, one a guide for passing a legal examination, and another a freshman rhetoric textbook. In both projects, something has come up that I’ve been struggling with. American. As a Latin Americanist, it’s always troubled me that we don’t have an equivalent English word for estadounidense, literally, a person from the United States of America. We don’t have our own specific […]

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In March, Google launched the first inter-species translation app. I’m just learning about it now, but the vast stores of literature as yet undiscovered in the animal world will soon be coming to light, and I for one couldn’t be happier. My suspicion is those cats have been recording the finer points of human history for centuries. Here’s a video showing how it works.

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