Book Notes
Reading my very first Tom Clancy book now. First impressions are that he is overly fond of military and political jargon. It's not at all incomprehensible, it just seems that he gets a kick out of saying ". . . POTUS said . . ."

Reading the Arabian Nights was kinda fun. The intoductory story was quite a bit racier than what followed, so that was a bit of a let down; not a bad way to get just a peek into arabic culture though.

Reading Mesopotamia and the Bible reminded me that I'd rather be vivisected by aliens than read about archeology.

The Golden Age was really one of the most amazing and inventive sci-fi novels I think I've ever read. I think there was more plot in the first 15 pages than in the whole 1st Matrix movie.

For a guy who never finished a college class, PKD always astounds me with both his knowledge and his thoughtfulness, not to mention the humor and fun plot lines. A Scanner Darkly is about drugs and dual personalities (caused by taking the drugs), and about the ability of people into institutions to sabotage themselves. The main character is both a drug dealer and a drug enforcement officer, never realizing that he's in fact tailing himself.

Reading Aquinas is a bit odd, since it consists of watching someone who lived over 700 years ago have a conversation with someone who lived over 1200 years before he did. He has lots of good things to think about, but a great deal of it seems, at least to me, to be superfluous. I'm in the section now about virtues, which is good since it talks about how to live well, but I can't say I'm all that interested in exactly how each virtue is related to ach other virtue and which are the cardinal ones and the principle ones and which can exist without the others, etc.