Mr. Burke's Reading List

2100: What Does the Future of Healthcare Look Like? , (no editor information available) (2019?) Update to entry pending Normally, I start off these entries saying like "not a review, just some notes to help me remember what I read". In this case, I'm not sure I wish to remember. I'm deliberately leaving out names, so anything negative I have to say won't get associated with them in any web searches. Also, the book contains no copyright information other than the authors retain the rights to their own stories which have not been published elsewhere. I'm assuming this book is from 2019, but there is no way to know. Update: I just discovered that all of these stories are available to be read online from the foundation that hosted the contest. I guess a link would be helpful. I was recently at a book reading/book launch party for an anthology that I wanted to participate in. (Maybe I'll write about this some day.) There was a raffle, and I won tw...

A Dozen Dozen Game Books , Philip J. Reed (2019) Entry pending I spent a lot of time reading gaming material in the latter part of the year. Altogether, those pages could comprise a book the size of many others I'd read this past year. And they were better written than some of the things I subjected myself to (particularly things I didn't bother to list on the blog). The title of this post doesn't mean that I read 144 books. It means that I read many of the books in the A Dozen Adjective Nouns series by Philip J. Reed (@philipjreed on Twitter). There will eventually be more than a dozen of these, and many are already available for preview by the backers of two separate Kickstarter campaigns. (And I'm one of them.) Here are some of the coming PDF files: On top of this, there was an additional Kickstarter for Delayed Blast Gamemaster #2, which had issues #1 as an add-on. These were each 48 pages of well-thought-out source material. I thought all of t...

Classics Illustrated: Romeo & Juliet , William Shakespeare (Author), (Illustrator) [image pending] I don't know where I got this graphic novel from -- probably from the library. It's been in the basement for a while. I didn't read illustrated classics as a kid because they seemed to dense. I picked up a few when I started teaching (they were in the class library), but those seemed very thin. If you didn't already know the story, you might not know what was going on. Then again, if you did know the story, you'd see how much was left out. So... Romeo & Juliet . I've watched the Franco Zeffirelli film from 1968 with Olivia Hussey and ... other people that I could google. And I've seen the modernized version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, which kept the dialogue but modernized everything else. I prefer the former. There are also a billion adaptations -- skip those. What I didn't know about this comic -- even though it's on ...

Mathematical Recreations , Richard H. Minear (Author), Maurice Kraitchik (1944) [Image pending == its just a green cover with a geometric pattern] I have too many old math books in my basement. Years ago, I made a practice of attempting to read one math book each summer, and to see how far I got before I gave up. Reasons for giving up: the math moved beyond me, or the notation became tiresome to figure out. There are times when I might prefer a sentence to a nifty equation. Consider the difference between four or five lines of programming, and a single line of "clever code" that can accomplish the entire thing. Or even a paragraph explaining just what is going on. Sometimes I feel I'm not the audience for these books, which is usually a 1940s grad student or above, or a 21st-century math professor (and above). This book has been in my possession for at least a decade, and was taken from a pile of discards in the William E. Grady Technical-Vocational High Scho...