March Book reports

Yikes, almost a month since I’ve posted anything here. Let’s see, other than working, I’ve read a lot of books since my last post. I finished “Physics and Philosophy” by Werner Heisenberg. Interestingly, he recommended that any young people reading the book should go into the field of biology where he thought all the really cool science would be happening next. This corresponds with advice given by Hans Bethe, mentioned by titus in his Advogato blog early this month. Their reasoning was that biology is beginning the transition into “real” science just as chemistry had once physics provided an understanding of atoms and molecules.

In honor of Jack L. Chalker’s recent passing, I finally got around to reading some of the Well World series. So far, I’ve read Midnight at the Well of Souls (pretty good for a first novel), the two part story Exiles at the Well of Souls and Quest for the Well of Souls (so-so), and the next two part story The Return of Nathan Brazil and Twilight at the Well of Souls (best so far). I had to stop there until we could get the next few books. Since they all seem to be out of print these days, it took a little eBay and Amazon shopping to track down some used book stores that had them. We now have all ten of the series so I’ll pick up on it again soon.

While I was waiting, I read a few other out of print books that were in the queue including Three to Conquer by the always enjoyable Eric Frank Russell (by coincidence Jack L. Chalker wrote the forward in the book). The plot is set in the futuristic year of 1980. And last, I read two John Wyndham books; The Chrysalids and Chocky.

It’s been interesting watching the search engine results for robots this month as the movie by the same name slowly gets closer to the top of page one. The mis-named I, Robot movie pretty much wiped out the search term “robot” for a while but, so far, it looks like they didn’t spend as much on SEO for this movie.