Dresden Files #1 Storm Front — First of an apparently well-loved series that also had a short and unsuccessful stint as a SciFi channel TV show. Storm Front is about as pulpy as pulp fantasy gets, being a cliche-ridden formulaic mash-up between urban fantasy and shlocky detective novel. Entertaining enough for what it is, but the writing was bad enough in places to be distracting. Started #2 but lost interest pretty quickly. Not recommended.

Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; A Horse and His Boy (first 3 books of the Narnia series) — If I have read these before, I don’t recall doing so. The first book was brilliant, the second book was great, the third book started well but slowed and got bogged down and a bit dull. Will finish the rest of the series some other time (I’ve been told it’s pretty much downhill from LW&W, anyhow). Recommended, but I’m not entirely sure I understand the breathless praise the series often gets — nostalgia is a potent force, it seems.

Gerv posted about his Wikipedia addiction, so I figured I’d follow suit, only slightly differently. I don’t read nearly as many Wikipedia pages per day as he does, and rather than pick a dozen random pages I figured I’d just give a list of 50 or so interesting ones I’ve looked at recently. For really no particular reason other than I’m sort of bored and looking at Wikipedia is fun.

• Time (magazine)
• CF-105 Arrow
• Pong
• Yellowstone Caldera
• Tricorder
• The Ant and the Grasshopper
• Five elements (Japanese philosophy)
• Fibonacci number
• Caraway
• Fiddlehead fern
• Teleprinter
• George Eliot
• Swamp Thing
• Black Stone
• Blipvert
• Chartreuse (color)
• Pomelo
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh
• Maltose
• Aircraft flight control systems
• Hadrian’s Wall
• Katherin Hepburn
• Abraham Lincoln
• Letterpress printing
• Shuswap language
• Nehi
• Sagrada Familia
• House Hippo
• Civitas
• The Education of Little Tree
• Clifton Cathedral
• Isobutane
• Vashti
• Oregon Death with Dignity Act
• Ashanti mythology
• Ozymandias
• Gecko (layout engine)
• Japanese map symbols
• Persian Empire
• Eurotas River
• Schrodinger’s cat
• ARM architecture
• Chaordic
• The Wire
• Kubler-Ross model
• Chac Mool
• Standing Stones of Stenness
• Chimay Brewery
• Brownie (camera)
• Gallia Narbonensis
• River Phoenix
• Molcajete
• Pelagic zone
• Containerization
• Horse archer
• Roger Tory Peterson

There’s a great article at the Atlantic that’s worth reading: Is Google making us stupid?. I don’t think it is, but I do think it’s changing things, and probably in ways we haven’t begun to realize yet. It’s an interesting observation, and definitely something to think about.