m. c. de marco

I try to read a few books by a lot of authors rather than all the books by a few authors, but in certain cases I’m a fangirl and I try to read them all. Usually this is easy to do, because the books are laid out in a particular order (Lois McMaster Bujold, Gene Wolfe), there aren’t so many of them (Mary Doria Russell, Greg Egan), or I’ve been following them long enough to pick everything up (Walter Jon Williams, Doris Lessing).

But in some cases the task is overwhelming. I find myself fifteen or twenty years behind on the output of some prodigies of literary prodigality.

At io9, a book review of Memory Sticks by Wood Ingham:

A few months ago, Wood Ingham joined with authors Will Hindmarch and Chuck Wendig, to form an on-line writer’s collective known as Jet-Pack. Although initially connected by their work for RPG publisher White Wolf, the three authors’ flash fiction and short stories revealed a series of off-kilter realities and glossy dystopian futures.

According to io9, you can Get Away From It All By Traveling The Multiverse. Although I have an abnormally tall stack of library books out, I’m hoping to get more writing than reading done this summer. I must, however, resist the temptation to do it in the form of an epic poem…

Futurismic contemplates the post-scarcity entertainment landscape:

In a world so full of entertainment choices that you could probably spend your entire life reading or listening or watching without ever having to repeat yourself, how do you choose what to enjoy next?

I take advantage of some methods of generating artificial scarcity: buying used books instead of new (reducing the selection, at least for me) or reading library books by the three-week deadline instead of my own books.

Via Daring Fireball: the arc90 lab announces a customizable bookmarklet called Readability that will turn almost any cluttered website into a cleaner, sparser, more readable page.

I found this old link while catching up on the aggregator: New Scientist reports on the psychological benefits of reading fiction. You need a subscription to read the whole thing, but here’s a quote I found by googling:

We found that fiction readers had substantially greater empathy as measured by the mind-in-the-eyes test, and also performed somewhat better on the interpersonal perception test than people who read predominantly non-fiction.

I became a de facto member of the 1654 Society a while back when it merged with another group to which I apparently belonged. (I don’t quite recall the details now.) As a consequence, I got a complimentary copy of Conversations in the mail this week, with a link to the IJII’s website. I had the feeling when I first looked at it that it was a fellow drupal site, but I wasn’t certain until I signed up and saw the telltale tabs on the registration page.