Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
I’ve compiled my summer reading list for 2016. As is normal for me, it’s dominated by space opera and military science fiction, but peppered with some steampunk and superhero fiction. It weighs in at 14 books and 6 graphic novels. That’s one fewer than last year, but that gives me gives me some wiggle room to … Read more
Olaf, the German Shepherd puppy that my family and I spent the last year raising for the Seeing Eye, has gone off to college. He’s being assigned a trainer, and with any luck we’ll be getting status updates about him soon. During his time with us, we taught Olaf basic obedience and socialization. Now that … Read more
My slow voyage throughPatrick O’Brian’sAubrey/Maturin epic series nears its end with The Hundred Days, his 19th novel . The books are set in the late 1700s and early 1800s against the backdrop of a series of European wars. The protagonists are Jack Aubrey, an captain in the British navy, and Stephen Maturin, Jack’s long-time friend, sailing companion … Read more
I got this book in Kindle format for Christmas 2015 and then promptly forgot about it. Since then I’ve read a number of books, so many that I was getting dangerously close to having to buy another one (or at least, check it out of the library). And then I remembered … my old friend … Read more
Moodle Hack/Doc Fest — that biannual summer camp for instructional technologists, web developers, and other folks who work with Moodle — hits Indianapolis this summer. It’s being held Tuesday, June 21 through Thursday, June 23, 2016 at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint will be held Monday, June 20, 2016. … Read more
Sun of Suns takes place in an immense habitable Dyson sphere (or something like a Dyson sphere) inclosing the star Virga. A freefall civilization — complete with barrel-like towns spun to produce gravity — has spread throughout the enclosed habitat. The book tells the story of Hayden Griffin, a young man seeking revenge against the … Read more
The Laundry series is an amusing mash up of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The X-Files, Call of Cthulhu, and The Office. The second book in the series features its hero, Bob Howard, in a very James Bond-ish style adventure in which he has to re-enact all of the tropes of the spy genre in order to … Read more
My original summer reading list was done as a cover gallery. Let’s see what it looks like reimagined as thumbnails accompanied by the book’s title, author, and brief description. Aurora Kim Stanley Robinson Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel about the crew of a generational starship finally arriving at their destination … and dealing with … Read more
Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel about the crew of a generational starship finally arriving at their destination … and dealing with what they find there. It’s the first Robinson book I read since I finished his Mars trilogy about a decade ago.