What I've been reading

"Death By Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries" by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I enjoyed the essays on science and culture best. I also find that his injection of humor into his writing makes the hard science more accessible. (Bonus: Neil talking to Jon Stewart. Apparently he got hate mail from elementary school kids for "killing" Pluto.)

and

"Titan" by John Varley. J. and I are Varley fans, and when he recently decided to re-read the Titan trilogy as books on CD, I decided to join in. It's as trippy as I remember it being when I first read it 15-odd years ago.

My full comments on both books here.

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Incidentally, if I were doing the "50 books by People of Color" challenge as some are, "Death" would be my first one for the year. I'm not planning to do the challenge, but it did make me curious about my numbers from previous years. It's a little complicated by not always knowing, just by an author's name, if s/he is a POC. Also, determining who is a POC is a little difficult due to the slipperiness of racial categories. For instance, many are counting Indian authors as people of color, but racially, people from India are "Caucasian."

But, anyway, to my best estimation, my counts from previous years were:
2006: 4 books out of 51 by POC; 3 different authors (2 novels by Octavia Butler)
2007: 12 books out of 52 by POC; 7 different authors (6 books by Octavia Butler)
2008: 1 out of 53 by a POC

Activity update

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Linda Bacon's HAES book

( oops! )

Oops- I meant to post a review to the HAES community and posted it to my journal instead. I'll let it stand behind the cut for anyone who is interested in my take on the book who isn't already reading the HAES community, though.