David Chart's Blog

Category: Books

  • A Place for Consciousness

    This is the book about consciousness that I noted a little while ago, and I’ve just got around to reading it. It’s very good. In the first section, Rosenberg raises most of the problems about consciousness that had occurred to me. In short, no matter how good a physical description you have, there is nothing…

  • A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic

    The title of this book is slightly less self-explanatory than you might think; its range is the North American Arctic, and thus primarily the Canadian Arctic. There’s nothing about Greenland or Scandinavia, nor about Arctic Russia. The primary target audience is people who are going to the Arctic and want to know what they are…

  • The Pure

    This is a book for White Wolf’s Werewolf: the Forsaken line, detailing the “bad werewolves” of the setting. Naturally, with it being a horror game, the “good werewolves” are not exactly models of virtue and restraint, but they are supposed to be much more sympathetic than the Pure. The Pure are driven by an unwavering…

  • The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy

    Another fairly self-explanatory title… The series of Cambridge Companions aim to provide a range of scholarly essays on a topic or philosopher, to help advanced students to get to grips with them. Thus, they are introductory from one perspective, but very far from superficial, which makes them an interesting read. One interesting thing about this…

  • Shadows of the UK

    This is the World of Darkness sourcebook for the UK. That may, indeed, be fairly obvious from the title, not to mention the cover image, but it still seems like a sensible place to start talking about it. Most of the authors are British, as far as I know, and quite possibly all of them.…

  • Waiting for Wolves in Japan

    This is a very interesting book, concerned with attitudes to wildlife in the mountain villages of a small region in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. It’s more interesting than that makes it sound, because that draws in attitudes to nature more generally from all across Japan, although the focus is on the one small region where the…

  • Shadowrun, Fourth Edition

    Shadowrun is a cyberpunk roleplaying game with elves and magic. It’s set in, in this edition, 2070, after magic returned to the world in 2012, awakening dragons, elves, dwarfs, orks, trolls, and magic. The player characters are freelance criminals who do dubious work for corporations. Although, since large corporations are effectively countries, they might better…

  • A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism

    I’ve been reading a lot of books about bilingual education, and this is the latest. Actually, I’ve read three, and the other two are both recommended in the back of this one, which is quite encouraging. They all have distinctly different approaches, but they also all agree on two points. First, raising your child bilingual…

  • Ghouls

    Ghouls is a book for the World of Darkness, specifically for Vampire: the Requiem. It concerns humans who are given vampire blood to drink. They become addicted to the blood and, fairly quickly, come to regard the vampire supplying it as the most important being in their world. The blood also gives them access to…

  • Caring for Your Baby and Young Child

    Or, as I like to think of it, “Paranoid Parents’ Problem Primer”. Seven hundred pages of things that could go horribly wrong with your child. OK, it’s not quite as bad as that. The first chapters are all about normal development, and thus much less paranoia-inducing. They do talk about the things that can go…