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Uncertain Principles

Physics, Politics, Pop Culture

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Seventeen Books

One of the latest "memes" going through those parts of blogdom that are prone to such things is the "Fifteen things about books" list. I think I saw this most recently from Scalzi. I was tempted to post something in response to his comments on Science Fiction vs. Fantasy, but in the course of trying to avoid writing a grant proposal review, I seem to have said most of what I wanted to say in his comments. Other than this: Damn but Gregory Benford sounds like a pompous ass in the essay that started this off.

Anyway, things about books. I started to do a list of facts about me and books, but that really wasn't going anywhere interesting, so instead, here are fifteen lines from fifteen books, chosen by the ultra-scientific method of looking over the bookshelves and grabbing thing that I thought highly enough of to want to quote from them. This seems like a reasonable post for a sloppy, icy Friday.

All the source books are fiction, some are better known than others, and they're ordered alphabetically by author to make it a little easier to identify them.

(Why seventeen? Because seventeen is the mystical number. And if I could remember which book that one came from, I would've replaced one of the above...)

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