reading notes

On the Nature of Seeing
by James Elkins
ISBN: 0156004976
There is no such thing as “just looking”; Elkins argues persuasively that seeing is more complicated than that. As an art historian with a willingness to explore not only the metaphorical but biological underpinnings of vision, he’s in a position to know.
He considers extreme images (death, illness, nakedness), [...]

by Nick Mamatas
ISBN: 9781933368436
In near-future, slightly dystopic Long Island there are hundreds, thousands of discarded smoke detectors at the dump, ripe for the scavenging. Why would anyone want to scavenge elements from smoke detectors from a dump? To manufacture a nuclear weapon in their basement, of course. That is what Daniel Weinberg does, and he [...]

by Charles Yu
ISBN: 0156030810
“Third Class Superhero” might be the most straightforward story in this collection. Which is odd only because it’s mostly about Moisture Man (yeah, about as impressive as he sounds) and how probably good people wind up doing not so good things in the quest to… do good.
Yu writes stories about mothers; about [...]

The How-to Craze that Swept the Nation
by William L. Bird, Jr.
ISBN: 1568982828

…hobby kits, like paint by number, functioned as a compromise between genuine creativity and the responsibilities of homemaking and earning a living. The real art began the moment the the hobbyist ignored outlines to blend adjacent colors, added or dropped a detail, or elaborated [...]