What Video Games Have to Teach Us

I came across What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee and decided to give it a read.
Straight off the bat, Gee informs us that while he has academic credentials (primarily as a reformed linguist) he has only discovered video games in the past few years. This sets the tone for the book: this is not to be a dry tome full of footnotes and theories, but rather a journal of one man’s experiences with video games.
Only it isn’t just a journal. The more interesting bits are where Gee presents us with his experiences playing games like Pikmin and Half-Life, and though he doesn’t make many sophisticated observations about gameplay he does have an interesting perspective to share.

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Reading for April, 2006

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. Notes to follow.
The Wild Palms by William Faulkner.
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl.
Company by Max Barry. Funny for about ten pages, then it just becomes tedious and sloppy.
Oh, and I also listened to a books-on-tape version of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. This would have been nine hours of agony, but I was able to adjust the pitch control on my tape player and speed things up a bit. A dreary book.

Reading for March, 2006

Dragon Weather by Lawrence Watt-Evans. I’ve been a fan of Watt-Evans for a while, though for some reason his books are sometimes hard to find. His writing has always been of a consistent quality, unlike a lot of the other stuff on the fantasy and science fiction shelves. As he has gotten older, he seems to have become increasingly cynical. In Dragon Weather, he creates a protagonist who loses his family and is then sold into slavery, and after escaping vows to seek vengeance.
His books have also gotten longer, and this is the first volume of a trilogy, following the trend of every other fantasy writer in the market today. But I’m not sure I like the story enough to continue.
Stanisław Lem died on March 27, 2006. In tribute, I read Eden which I bought at a library book sale many years ago. Lem’s descriptions always make me feel a little queasy, and I’ve never been able to reread any of his stories.

Reading for February, 2006

Rogue Star by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, the third part of the Starchild Trilogy.
The Giver by Lois Lowry, winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal. And then I read Gathering Blue by Lowry as well.
That’s it for February. The rest of my time was spent feeding and taking care of the new daughter. And playing Civilization IV.

Reading for January, 2006

The Wanderer by Fritz Lieber. Won the Hugo Award in 1965. The story is pretty much a template plot for a disaster movie, complete with handfuls of oddball/nonintellectual characters who get killed as the disaster worsens.
Gateway by Frederik Pohl. 1978 Hugo Award. The first copy I had (checked out from library) was missing a signature, and had actually been stamped “Withdrawn”, but they sent it to me anyway.

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Reading for December, 2005

It was a busy month, but a good amount of time for reading, at the hospital, visiting relatives, and so on.
Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb. Book three of the Tawny Man Trilogy. This was my least favorite of the FitzChivalry/Elderling novels, so much of the story is spent tying up loose ends, and the book lacks any real conflict on a scale equal to the previous books. The Tawny Man certainly didn’t need to be 2000+ pages to tell the story it told.

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Reading for November, 2005

I read most of James Agee’s A Death in the Family, but skipped the last forty pages or so. There is some criticism that the book was assembled by editors and did not appear in a form Agee would have approved of.

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Reading for October, 2005

William Faulkner, Light in August. Number 54 on the Modern Library list.
James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan. I think the Studs Lonigan Trilogy is only sold as a single volume these days, but I found a library copy of the first book. It is full of outdated references and deals with fairly dark subject matter, like “gangshags” and a plethora of prejudice.

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Reading for September, 2005

A more fruitful month for reading, though I didn’t finish those books which were previously unfinished.
Carol Shields, A Fairly Conventional Woman. There were two copies of Happenstance at the library, and one was twice as long as the other. I took the longer copy, which was a dos-a-dos bound copy of two Shields novels. A marketing gimmick, I guess. So I read The Wife’s Tale, which was actually the more recently (1982) written of the two novels.

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Reading guide for Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is on the 2005 Booker Prize shortlist. As Ishiguro won the Booker in 1989, his nomination here isn’t a compelling endorsement; the judges like to reward their favorite authors based on their past accomplishments rather than their most recent work.
Never Let Me Go is written in an unrelenting confessional voice using a limited vocabulary. It was only after at the halfway mark, when I put the book down to find something else to read, did I realize that the “students” of the story, including the narrator, were intellectual simpletons. Oh, of course there is the whole being-cloned-for-their-vital-organs thing, but that is just so much window dressing.

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