Name: Chad Orzel
Weblog: www.steelypips.org/principles
Articles: 106
First Published: Monday, August 19, 2002
Last Published: Saturday, July 17, 2004
Currently listing articles 106-51:
-
Fountains of Wayne— Good show, weirdly mellow crowd.
-
Depends on What the Meaning of "Movie" Is— Scattered thoughts on ESPN's "Top 25 Sports Movies" list.
-
Incongruous Review— An OutKast review by one of the whitest people around.
-
Fiddle and Burn— It's exam week where I teach, so here's another guess-the-song list of lyrics. Show all work for partial credit.
-
Theology Answers— You might be saying "Isn't this just a cheap way to squeeze another blog post out of this same tape?" You might be right.
-
Heat of Fusion and Other Stories— There's an astonishing variety of stuff here, and nearly all of it is excellent. I highly recommend this book, and pretty much anything else by
-
The Knight— A unique take on the crossover fantasy story, but then you'd expect nothing less from Gene Wolfe.
-
The Last Light of the Sun— The latest from Guy Gavriel Kay, and there's some great stuff here-- revenge, epic journeys, a grand sweep of history, more explicit magic than Kay
-
Three Hour Theology
— A mix tape whose title refers to a mandatory discussion of Catholic doctrine that Kate and I had to go to in order to get
-
Richard Thompson Live— The man, the myth, the legend, solo in Albany.
-
Omega— A good, fun book in the fine tradition of large-scale SF. It's like Rendezvous With Rama, only with a plot, or Brin's Uplift Trilogy, only
-
New Magics— This is the fantasy companion volume to New Skies, a collection of noteworthy science fiction stories compiled with a younger audience in mind.
-
Lost on Me— Lost in Translation's Tokyo: What it gets right, and what it gets wrong.
-
Monster of God— This book falls into the general category of "Smart People Books," a subset of non-fiction in which a Smart Person sets out to explore all
-
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2— This is the second volume of a graphic novel following the exploits of a group of heroes in an alternate London at the turn of
-
New Skies— An anthology of "today's Science Fiction," and an excellent one at that.
-
Obscure Band Update (Brief Return)— Quick comments on recent CD purchases.
-
Murder Must Advertise— Muder, life in an ad agency, and twenty pages of incomprehensible cricket.
-
The Dark Is Rising— Susan Cooper's classic series, some of the best children's fantasy books ever written.
-
Nine for Mortal Men Doomed to Die— The year in music, or at least nine albums' worth of the year in music.
-
Desert Island Experiment— It wasn't a desert island, and it was only for a few months, but I have, in fact, packed books for a trip to an
-
Master and Commander— Before there was a movie with too many subtitles, there was a book by Patrick O'Brian.
-
Endless Nights— A somewhat disappointing new collection of stories in the Sandman universe.
-
The King, He's Back— The Return of the King has been out for five days now, so the hard-core fans have mostly seen it already. Those who haven't seen
-
Come On Baby, Cover Me— Scattered thoughts on cover tunes, good, bad, and ugly.
-
Tooth and Claw— A Victorian sentimental novel, with dragons.
-
The Matrix: Revolting— The third movie is terrible not because it doesn't make any sense (it doesn't, but the original didn't, either), but because it discards everything that
-
Quicksilver— The plot is too complicated to describe, and anyway serves mostly as an excuse for Stephenson to show off both his extensive research and his
-
Obscure Band Update— A few notes on recent CD purchases inspired by Web radio.
-
Kill the Matrix— The true idiocy of Gregg Easterbrook's unfortunate column about Kill Bill.
-
The Fortress of Solitude— A very good, but fundamentally flawed, coming-of-age novel about race in America.
-
The Things They Carried— I'm not a big reader of Vietnam books, so I can't say for sure that it's the best ever written, but I have a hard
-
Witpunk— A bad mix of stories that aim for "transgressive" and end up just gross, too-obvious Twilight Zone horror, and ham-handed satire.
-
Starlight 3— The third volume in the award-winning anthology series, from one of blogdom's own.
-
Blind Lake— The new novel from the author of The Chronoliths, and another example of SF the way I like to see it done.
-
The Hot Rock— The first Dortmunder novel, and one of the best.
-
Night Soldiers— A nicely atmospheric WWII spy novel, that's very well done, but not quite my thing.
-
Memories of Ice— Epic Fantasy, with everything including a few spare kitchen sinks.
-
Dead Air— You might call it Crow Road 2: Electric Boogaloo, or "Iain Banks writes High Fidelity" or even "Wonder Boys by Iain Banks." It's
-
Songs of Earth and Power— Bear's two fantasy novels in one volume, which have survived his slide into Crichton/ Clancy territory.
-
It Sounded Cool in Junior High— The Golden Age of pop culture is twelve, which explains why I love the 80's...
-
Crossfire— A new human colony on a distant planet stumbles into the middle of an interplanetary war.
-
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales— I'm a big fan of plot-driven stories. On the other hand, though, I tend to prefer my thrilling tales without manifestoes attached...
-
What's Opera Doc?— Why I just can't get into classical music.
-
Context is Everything— Fake rock at the Hard Rock Hotel.
-
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix— Because I'm a total sheep, and just can't bear to not have read the current book-of-the-moment.
-
Issola— The most recent Vlad Taltos book, which is surprisingly compelling reading for such a talky book.
-
The Wee Free Men— The latest from Terry Pratchett, starring a relentlessly sensible young witch-to-be and an army of foul-mouthed, six-inch-high blue men (Pictsies, of course...).
-
Welcome Interstate Managers— The sequel to Utopia Parkway, which inexplicably failed to sell a billion copies. The kids from the laser show are a little older, but the
-
Fluke— Christopher Moore returns with his unique take on marine biology. Featuring eccentric biologists, a surfer Rasta from Jersey, and a gigantic mass of sentient sludge...
-
Taltos— Emphatically not an Anne Rice book.
-
Money For Nothing— Donald Westlake, dabbling in spy stuff.
-
Set This House in Order— Matt Ruff's latest reads like he set out to go Motherless Brooklyn one better. Not only did he pick a more controversial and challenging mental
-
John Hiatt In Concert— Hiatt has a new album out (Beneath This Gruff Exterior) with The Goners (one of many bands he's used over the years), but he's playing
-
Bronfman Two Twenty— A little mix-tape nostalgia, courtesy of the alumni office...
-
A Short History of Nearly Everything— Pop-science writing is a hard thing to do well, and books frequently fail because they're pitched just over the heads of the intended audience. If
All BC Articles