Read A Book A Week
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Carto’s Recent Posts
- Earthsea — Dragons and Wizards
- Flowers on Note Cards
- An Exhibition of Paintings by Monet
- Twisted — An Arizona garden in California
- The Thinker Waits
- Weathered — Church Bells in the Tower
- Favorites 2017 — Transition to Winter
- Transformation — Land’s End turns chilly
- Peek — Halloween in Palo Alto
- Stanford at Night
Carto’s Most Viewed Posts
- Téa Obreht—Tigers, Myths and Death Rites In The Balkans
- Curve — American Buckaroo in Action
- Awash in The Waves of Virginia Woolf
- Perry Mason—The Case of the 24th Sestina
- Illustrated Tales of Nations—German Cigarette Cards
- Max Headroom, Cyberpunk TV
- Carlos Fuentes—Author of The Doll Queen is dead at 83
- Zero To Hero — Donna Tartt spins a murder tale in Vermont
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Posts Organized by Category
Category Archives: Speculative Fiction
Earthsea — Dragons and Wizards
Sheltering at home gives me extra time for reading— I read in English some books I first read while studying Spanish: 100 Years of Solitude, Love in the time of Cholera, Death in the Andes, etc. Now, I’m turning to … Continue reading
Posted in Fantasy/Adventure, Fiction, Other, Photography, Speculative Fiction
Tagged Charles Vess, Coloring, Illustration, Photoshop CC, Ursula K. Le Guin
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The 25th Century — A Doom Scenario
Note: California City was laid out in 1958 by real estate developer and sociology professor Nat Mendelsohn on 80,000 acres of Mojave Desert land. It was never completed, but has one landowners’ resort, one PGA golf course, one prison (the California … Continue reading
Posted in eBook, Fantasy/Adventure, Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Tagged California, POD, postaweek, San Francisco, Self-Publishing, Tijuana, Yucca Mountain
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Pulitzer Prize: Indecision, Waffling Second to None
Joseph Pulitzer is shown here in a pensive mood. In the background is the Medallic Art Co. medal that is awarded to winners of the Pulitzer Prize. What would Joseph Pulitzer think of the indecision on the part of the … Continue reading
Posted in Speculative Fiction
Tagged Ann Patchett, Congress, literature, postaweek, pulitzer prize committee
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Haruki Murakami—1Q84, Two Moons Over Tokyo
1Q84 is a love story set in Tokyo in 1984. The “Q” in the title is a pun on the Japanese letter for “9”, which sounds like the English “Q”. “1984”, of course, is a reference to the George Orwell … Continue reading
Posted in Fantasy/Adventure, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Translation
Tagged 1Q84, george orwell classic, Haruki Murakami, Japanese Fiction, postaday
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Allende’s Tale of El Dorado, A Lost City In The Venezuelan Rain Forest
Deep in the Venezuelan rain forest: imagine yourself standing at the base of Angel Falls. You are wrapped in fog and can only imagine the top where the water cascades over the lip of the high mesa thousands of feet … Continue reading
Posted in Fantasy/Adventure, Fiction, Nature, Spanish, Speculative Fiction, Translation
Tagged Isabel Allende, postaweek2011, Rain Forest
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A Chamber of Secrets
Turing’s Delirium is a fictional take on the inner workings of a South American government as a former dictator, now president, prepares the country for elections. The president must suppress the revelation of illegal activities of members of his cabinet … Continue reading
Historian, Inquisitor Cyber Chat
The historian Teresa fidgets at her computer terminal hoping that Inquisitor will connect to the chat room, but her cyber chat friend remains offline and unavailable. It has been several weeks and the historian is distraught by the waiting, but she … Continue reading
The Edges of Cyberspace
Novels about writer’s block always interest me and Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 is no exception. The cover is interesting to look at and challenging to understand, and the book is a good read after a few tedious early pages. I … Continue reading
Galatea, Raphael and Cyberspace
The dust jacket of my copy of Richard Powers’ fictional journey into cyberspace, Galatea 2.2, has the painting of a young woman by renaissance master Rafael; called La fornarina, the painting is a likeness of Raphael’s mistress. Judging a book by … Continue reading
Artificially Yours, Watson
When William Gibson wrote Neuromancer he introduced the word cyberspace into the American lexicon, and his images of giant Artificial Intelligences battling for cyberspace dominance captured the public imagination. I’m not sure that I understood then or now what AI … Continue reading
