Nightcat2008 Nigcat Nigcat itibaren Novopavlivka, Mykolaivs'ka oblast, Ukraine
A man's attempt to learn the guitar and play a gig in 6 months. It's a lively account of what could be a very dull subject. He throws in some history of the guitar and brief biographical snippets of people like Django Reinhardt. It also helps that he seems to be able to call on the services of Davendra Barnhart, Bert Jansch, PJ Harvey, Johnny Marr and more to help him out. Well, I read it in about a day. Very entertaining and easy to read. It's a bit of a blokey genre piece in parts, but it's a very warm and engaging one. His journey to the States has some very amusing parts, particularly where he waits at what is thought to be the Crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. Unfortunately it's now a filling station and lots of white guitar players keep turning up there. Recommended.
As Asimov kept writing Foundation shorts, they kept getting longer. There are actually only two stories in this volume, and the second is significantly longer than the other. For this reason it really dominates the read, and so I'll focus on it. The whole premise of psychohistory and the Foundation is to use mathematics to predict a macroscopic view future, and then use those predictions to make a macroscopic plan of how to (with some known and less than 100% probability of success) steer the future in a desired direction. The problem with this is that it can't account for microscopic events (and in particular *random* ones) that might alter the course of history. So Asimov throws Hari Seldon one heck of a screwball in the form of a megalomanical telepath known as the Mule--a genetic aberration (not predictable by psychohistory!) with designs on taking over the galaxy. Since Seldon is long dead, it's up to the heroes of the day to figure out how to deal with it and keep the Foundation on course. The Mule is a reasonably well-drawn character, and that coupled with the usual guts of any Foundation story make this a solid read.