Books of 2007

So, in 2007, I kept a list of all of the books I read during the year.

If you're wondering, I got the inspiration for this from Art Garfunkel. He's kept a list of every book he's read since 1968.

I thought y'all might be interested in my list. It's mostly SF this year.

BOOKS READ IN 2007

01. Year's Best SF 11, David Hartwell/Katherine Cramer (eds.)
02. Iron Sunrise, Charles Stross
03. Beyond Singularity, Jack Dann/Gardner Dozois (eds.)
04. Old Man's War, John Scalzi
05. Master of Time and Space, Rudy Rucker
06. Blindsight, Peter Watts
07. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
08. Bloom, Wil McCarthy
09. Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
10. Excession, Ian M. Banks
11. The Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi
12. When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger
13. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
14. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
15. The Last Witchfinder, James Morrow
16. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
17. Real World Print Production, Michael McCue
18. Real World Adobe InDesign CS2, Olav Kvern/David Blatner
19. Pebble In The Sky, Isaac Asimov
20. Year's Best SF 12, David Hartwell/Katherine Cramer (eds.)

I only averaged about 1.5 books per month, but on the other hand this list doesn't include short stories, or books I started but didn't finish (such as Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood or What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles). Three of the books on the list (Blindsight, I Am Legend, and Rainbows End) I read entirely on a computer in PDF format.

So many books, so little time!

Jeff Jordan

The Art of Jeff Jordan

"My favorite 'ism' is surrealism. I think that once artists learned to paint the world around them – call it 'realism' -- it was a short step to paint imaginary realities. Maybe the Greeks were the first surrealists, with all those stories about centaurs, mermaids, satyrs, and so on. Mythical creatures, visions of heaven and hell, dreams and nightmares –- artists have always painted realistic images of worlds which never were..."

CGSphere

CGSphere

"This website is dedicated to the evolution of technical and creative 3D sphere design and you're invited to participate! The purpose is simple; create the most captivating and visually appealing sphere from our provided scene using your 3D program and renderer of choice. We encourage everyone to submit his or her renders regardless of their skill level..."

Stones In My Pathway

Stones In My Pathway

" Bill Steber is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University with degrees in English and Photography. He has worked at the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville as a staff photographer since 1989, where he has won over thirty regional and national photojournalism awards. His documentary work has been exhibited widely throughout the South. In 1997, Steber was awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation grant to continue a project documenting Blues Culture in Mississippi that he started in 1993... The project combines portraits of blues musicians playing at home and in clubs with images that describe what remains of the rural African-American culture that gave rise to the blues."

Atmospheric Optics

Atmospheric Optics

"Light playing on water drops, dust or ice crystals in the atmosphere produces a host of visual spectacles - rainbows, halos, glories, coronas and many more. Some can be seen almost every day or so, some are once in a lifetime sights. Find out where to see them and how they form..."

Ghanaian Film Posters

Ghanaian Film Posters

"In the small west African country of Ghana, a homegrown film industry has sprung up steeped in stories of witchcraft and voodoo. Since the 1980s, video-juju has grown into a home movie phenomenon, wildly popular with Ghanian audiences.

Pascal Saumade discovered the bizarre and vibrant film posters that accompany each release painted on sack cloth and plastered to walls of Ghanian ghettos, and has since exhibited them all over Europe."

Mark Mothersbaugh's Postcard Diaries

Mark Mothersbaugh's Postcard Diaries

"During his downtime on early worldwide tours with DEVO, Mark Mothersbaugh began illustrating on postcards to send to his friends, which he still creates, and has been creating every day for over 30 years. It's an obsessive habit/hobby which still yields anywhere from one to a couple dozen new postcard-sized images per day...

Mark has archived nearly all the original postcard-sized works, filed neatly in spiral-bound folders at his home in Hollywood, CA. It is an astonishingly obsessive collection of private thoughts featuring Mark’s plethora of provoking & unusual imagery."

Astounding/Analog SF Magazine Covers

Astounding/Analog SF Magazine Covers

"Astounding/Analog has attracted most of the top SF cover artists over the years, as one would expect of the magazine that for long had the highest circulation of any SF title. Like Fantasy & Science Fiction, however, most of the covers were done by a relatively small band of favoured artists - certainly until the 1970s, though it has distributed its favours more widely in recent years. By far its most prolific artist was Frank Kelly Freas, whose output for ASF spanned nearly 50 years. His first cover appeared on the October 1953 issue, his last on February 2003 and he did 126 in all. This means that he did more than 20% of all the covers over those five decades, and nearly a third of them through his most productive period in the 50s, 60s and 70s."

An Eye For The World

An Eye For The World

"Shotaro Shimomura XXI (1883-1944) was Chairman of The Daimaru Inc., a department store chain that traces its roots to a single store opened in Kyoto in 1717. Mr. Shimomura was named President of the company in 1907 and toured Europe and the United States the following year to study the management of department stores. He took these photographs on a subsequent trip around the world in 1934 and 1935, prior to establishing a subsidiary trading company.

The remarkable photographs in this exhibition are from a set of 30 toned silver prints, some on textured paper. Each 6" x 8" photograph is protected by a tissue guard with its title in Japanese and English. The prints are housed in an elegant pawlonia wood box, carved with the photographer's initials. Mr. Shimomura presented these photographs to close friends and relatives upon his return. He also exhibited his work in the Ashiya Photo Salons of 1935, 1936 and 1937. Many years after the photographer's death, his images were featured in the art magazine Geijyutu Shinchou."

Via wood s lot.

Five Best SF Books of 2006

Best SF Books of 2006 - Bookgasm

"RIVER OF GODS defies labels. It’s at once cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk, awash in the verbiage of globalization and emerging-markets uncertainty. As the story’s huge cast of characters tumbles toward their individual destinies in tomorrow’s India, it’s hard to believe that McDonald doesn’t have a time machine stored somewhere in his backyard, perhaps in a rusty tool shed or underground bunker. There are some big books that you know are mostly filler; others, such as RIVER OF GODS, could easily be twice their size and still be amazing."

Starship Daedalus

Starship Daedalus

"The world's first engineering study of an unmanned spaceship to explore one of the nearer stars was made by a technical group of the British Interplanetary Society between 1973-77. The target selected for the exercise was Barnard's Star, nearly 6 light years distant from Earth. The contributors recognised that the work, based on the technology extrapolated to the beginning of the 21st Century, could represent only a first approximation to the solution of starflight...

Although the study was conducted during the 70's, it's still referred to today, even in NASA, as a baseline study. Any future mission to the stars probably won't look anything like Daedalus, but it gives a good idea of the complexity and scale of task, and the length of time it would take to get to even the closest stars.

No estimate of the cost of such an enterprise could be made, but it would be way beyond the capacity of an individual nation, and would probably need a period of world stability unlike any we have seen to date."

Peace on earth. So we can go to the stars. Merry Christmas!

Posting will be light or non-existent for the next few days.

Ape Artists of the 1950's

Ape Artists of the 1950's

"Congo’s favourite design was a radiating fan pattern and once he had become familiar with this, he started to vary it, splitting it in two, reversing it, curving it, stippling it, and even adding a subsidiary fan. He kept his lines within the area of the paper and tried to avoid going over the edges. And he knew when a picture was finished, refusing to continue until a new sheet was offered to him.

He was never given any reward for his paintings. Even at the level of he chimpanzee brain, it was clearly ‘art for art’s sake’, and attempts to stop him painting before a picture was complete led to temper tantrums and screaming fits. At the peak of his picture making, the intensity with which Congo concentrated on his work was astonishing...

The importance of these works by Great Apes is that they help us to understand the very ancient preoccupation with pattern making that has been demonstrated by the human species all over the globe. They may only display the germ of an aesthetic impulse, but the fact that they display one at all is frankly amazing."

Patchbox

Patchbox

A fun way to discover new art on the web. Anyone can upload an 80 x 80 pixel artwork sample, and a click on the image takes you to the artist's website.

NYC By Night

'NYC By Night' by Arnold Pouteau

"NYC has multiple personalities and one of my favorites is the one unleashed after the sunset..."

Gage/Clemenceau Architects

Gage/Clemenceau Architects

"GAGE/CLEMENCEAU ARCHITECTS is an architecture and design firm with projects covering a wide range of scales, from a 500 room hotel/resort to residential, furniture and product design. The work of the firm is motivated by the premise that architecture transcends the practice of mere building -- in favor of a new and vibrant alliance between progressive technologies, new materials, and a renewed interest in architecture as an exceedingly visual and aesthetically driven discipline."

Jim Phillips

Jim Phillips Rock Posters

"Jim Phillips is a graphic artist known for his rock posters, surf and skateboard art. Jim has created more than 100 rock posters since 1967 begining with Lothar and the Handpeople, at the Crosstown Bus in Boston. His second poster was for the first east coast appearance of The Doors.

Born in San Jose, Ca., Oct 24, 1944, Phillips has lived mostly in Santa Cruz,Ca. His first published work was in the spring issue of Surfer Quarterly, 1962, his 'Woody' a winner of a surf car cartoon contest. His surf art has appeared in many surfing publications since. In 1965 and 66 he attended California College of Arts and Crafts, in Oakland.

Between 1975 and '90 , Phillips was art director for Santa Cruz Skateboards where he created hundreds of skateboard deck, T-shirt, sticker, and ad art designs, with a record 8 million stickers sold within a two year period."

Images Of Ceylon

Images Of Ceylon

"The institution of photography in Ceylon was first established in the mid 1840's and was practiced quite extensively towards the end of the 19th Century. During that period there were dozens of local and foreign artist who took up the challenge to record the daily events which took place in the beautiful and mysterious island of Ceylon in the form of a photographic image."

Bike Furniture

Bike Furniture Design

"Bike Furniture Design is a design and manufacturing studio specializing in contemporary, modern furniture made primarily from recycled steel and aluminum bicycle rims, handlebars, and frames."

Strange Clouds

Strange Clouds

"Lenticular clouds are simply one more example of the beauty and complexity that can be the result from a simple process in nature.These lens-shaped clouds are often mistaken for UFO’s because of their weird shape that seems to mandate a prior design."