This is the item to talk about what kinds of books you read and why
you read them.

22 responses total.

I read lots of murder mysteries.  It is my hope that the knowledge
gained will enable me to solve a murder myself someday.

I read science fiction, to learn the extent of fiction in science.

That only works well when you read hard sci-fi; especially those novels 
that are just propaganda for theory.  Soft sci-fi starts crossing over 
into the fantasy category.

Which is one of the things that irritates me about the Ann Arbor District
Library: they put some of an author's works under "science fiction" and others
under "fantasy", and sometimes even different pieces of the same series.

well, splitting up a series into different categories is just wrong-- I 
doubt you're the only one bothered.

but like I said, there are shades of grey between some flavors of sci-
fi and fantasy.

I read... romance.  I used to read them in high school, then felt
like they were too stupid or whatever.  Now they're great cheap
fast (an hour or so per book) entertainment.  Much more satisfying
than a movie that costs $10 and lasts an hour.
I occasionally read scifi/fantasy (more toward fantasy). 

I used to read scifi a lot.  My hope was that I would learn how to
deal with space aliens and thwart them should any ever arrive and
attempt to conquer the earth.  However, I pretty much gave up
scifi when I realized that it was too late.

I have a married roomie that still reads romance.. what, is her love 
life lacking?  She still hasn't given me a satisfactory explanation.

Just like a man, to think "romance" means "sex."

Well, often they do.  But mostly it's escapist fantasy.  It's not
really any different from reading scifi.  Why do you read it?  Is
your imagination lacking? :).  It's just entertainment and some of
us like romantic comedy as opposed to action.

I like to read books with lots of characters in them.  Telephone
books are my favorite.

The plot stinks, though.

Get a life, dude.

resp:9 as a starry-eyed idealist, if not a romantic, you wish, Joseph.  
To me, "love life" does not mean sex alone, although I understand it is 
the popular definition.  Should I have said "marriage"?

resp:10 Romance you can get in real life-- scifi you cannot.  Perhaps 
I'm not a true "romantic" that gets all gooey over mushy stuff.  Or 
perhaps it is because most romance has struck me as terribly boring.  I 
mean, c'mon-- when has a writer ever chosen to write from the the man's 
perspective?  I remember reading a young adult category novel that was 
an exception.. a story that became eerily ironic as it mirrored some of 
my own experiences.

You can too get scifi in real life.  In my own personal real life
right now, I have the following scifi items:

    o A computer on my desk that can perform millions of arithmetic
      operations a second and is more powerful that the entire
      world's computing power during World War II.
    o A telephone that I carry in my pocket that I can use to talk
      to people around the world.
    o A television set that receives several hundred channels.
    o A personal digital assistant that I carry in my pocket that
      keeps track of appointments and can store hundreds of addresses
      and phone numbers.
    o A wristwatch that can store telephone numbers and can actually
      dial a telephone by emitting a sequence of tones.

Amazing!  Astounding!  What will those scifi writers dream up next?

The teleport silly. It's bout time they invent it already, I really hate my
daily commute to work ;-)

They can already teleport photons.. but teleporting people is 
infintessimally much more complex.  Anyone see that show where Gillian 
Anderson was hosting and mentioned this?

Time travel is theoretically possible, too, but it requires a lot more 
energy than we can possibly generate right now.

Yeah, especially at this hour of the morning.

"Time travel", assuming that means time travel by life forms, is not
"theoretically possible". It is still totally speculative, but all current
theory forbids it. Differential aging does occur in space travel, but
that isn't "time travel". 

If you disagree, please point to the established theory that shows it is
possible. 

Personally I prefer unestablished theories and encourage their
promulgation in this conference.

Signed,
Your Fairwitness

Oh...right...this is enigma.

Did we spoil your party, Spock?

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