Lots of good airplane books this time. When you are spending many hours, often sick, in planes and trains and stations, and carrying a large bag of books accumulated city by city, you tend to set aside the more challenging reads for later. Books that got set aside quickly included: Metternich's Europe (a collection of early 19th century political and social essays from many sources), A Free Nation Deep in Debt (a history of the world from the perspective of governments and finance, but so far a disastrous failure at actually explaining instead of just describing), Political Control of the Economy (Edward Tufte from before he figured out how to visually present data).

Banks, Iain. Raw Spirit. 2003.

A book in which Scottish author Iain Banks drives around Scotland to visit different Scotch distilleries sounds good on paper, but the result is perhaps quarter-hearted and arguably worth missing even for rabid Banks fans. Skim the introductory pages, in which he tells you how wonderful his cars are and describes in detail the mundane process by which he came to write the book, read the first episode, in which the roads are all delightful swooping "Great Wee Roads" with glorious scenery, the distellery and the people are very nice, and the scotch is complex, probably peaty, and either deservedly famous or undiscovered treasure, and you needn't read any further.

Vinge, Vernor. A Deepness in the Sky; A Fire in the Deep; Across Realtime (includes The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time)

Top-grade science fiction, with well-earned Hugos and Nebulas to prove it. The ideas are amazing (either brain-poppingly original or, even more amazing, brain-poppingly original in 1981 or 1986 and already mundane today); the characters are much better than typical SF. My only complaint is that the writing isn't good enough to merit the title "literature," because everything else is and these books deserve to be read outside the genre.

Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead. 2003.

All of the good things you may have read about this book are true. It's messy, informative, occasionally over-reaching, and something easy and rewarding to read cover-to-cover.

McKinley, Robin. Sunshine

One of my favorite authors, Robin McKinley writes "fantasy" and "children's stories" which are pure joy in every respect. Recently she's been watching a lot of Buffy, and the resulting book (not a Buffy book, but a modern, wise-cracking, serious, scary, profane vampire novel) makes me think that if she'd written one episode for Joss every season, the TV show would have had a seven-year lock on the Emmys.

Cherryh, C.J. Explorer

Cherryh is sort of the Steven King of SF; she keeps churning it out, it all blurs together, it's all very good. Skimming online book reviews, it looks like I skipped book five in this series, but that really didn't matter much. The stories and characters are all very dense; what's most exciting about her writing is how she makes peoples' (and aliens') motivations and hidden agendas not just plot elements but essential narrative elements as well.

I'm working through Peter Singer's collection of his own writing, in part because it's interesting and in part because I'm trying to slowly self-educate myself on the basics of philosophy. I formed the opinion several years ago that the discipline of philosophy was in some sense a failure because, after thousands of years of work, philosophers haven't reported back to the rest of us yet. My evidence for this assertion was the fact that I made it through sixteen years of education, including four years at a liberal arts college which included a diverse set of required classes, without a clue as to the principles and tenets of philosophy. I have been accumulating rebuttals since, including:

• I didn't take any philo classes
• If we define philosophy to be the study of everything in human thought, except the things that have their own disciplines, then philosophy's success is evident in the fact that its domain has shrunk so much as it's "solved" problems and spun them into specialized branches to work out the details (we call these biology, economics, etc), and the remaining issues are necessarily the hardest
• Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Confucianism, have reported back early and often, as evidenced by their deep influence on many Asian societies.

Singer's work in Ethics is particularly accessible, in part because ethics are less abstract and in part because his writing is very clear:

It would be possible to bring medical practice into line with the current definition of death in terms of the irreversible cessation of all brain function. [...] From the perspective of an adherent of the sanctity of life ethic, of course, the gain is that we are no longer killing people by cutting out their hearts while they are still alive. (Singer, Peter. Writings on an Ethical Life. p175)