Pages Tagged “Books”

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Reviews

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ★★★★☆ Jules Verne (F.P. Walter Translation)
  Even though marine science and geology have passed it by, it’s still a gripping episodic adventure through a strange, hidden world of marvels.
• Automatic Noodle ★★★★★ Annalee Newitz
  A short but joyful tale of creating the future you want out of the present you’ve been stuck with, told by robots who would rather make noodles than war.
• The Birding Dictionary ★★★★★ Rosemary Mosco
  A delightful collection of comedic ‘definitions’ of various terms one might encounter while watching birds (or interacting with people who do), filled with the style of humor and illustration the author brings to her comics.
• Bookshop.org ★★★★☆ A good place to shop online for books and still support indie bookstores. They sell eBooks too, in standard ePub format.
• BOOX Go 7 Color (Gen II) ★★★★★ After five years, I replaced the Poke3 with the Go 7 Color. It’s a lot faster and more responsive, brings back physical page turning buttons, and adds (pastel) color. Like its predecessor it has a sharp e-ink screen and runs any Android-based ebook reader app.
• Calculating God ★★★★☆ Robert J. Sawyer
  What if there is scientific evidence out there for a supreme being, but to find it you have to correlate knowledge from multiple inhabited worlds across the galaxy?
• Changing Planes ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  Lighter than most Le Guin I’ve read, Changing Planes is a Gulliver’s Travels for the present era, the social satire made possible through interdimensional travel.
• A Christmas Carol ★★★★★ Charles Dickens
  It’s been ages since I last read the original, and I wanted a break from a longer book two days before Christmas, so I figured I’d pick it up. And yeah, the story holds up.
• City of Illusions ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  How can you be yourself when you don’t know who you really are? A story of isolation, adaptation, kindness, cruelty, trust and hope, and above all, how to piece together the truth (or at least pick out the lies) on a future, depopulated Earth.
• A City on Mars ★★★★★ Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
  Accessible and intricately researched, with scattered humor to keep the reader’s interest. Getting to space is the easy part. Staying there is going to be a lot more complicated.
• Cordwainer Smith: Short Fiction ★★★★☆ Paul Linebarger
  Three mid-century science-fiction stories about the future of war, space travel, symbiosis, and the dangers of cutting off your own humanity.
• The Daughter of Odren ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A small, stand-alone tale set in Earthsea, reminiscent of the folk tales glimpsed throughout the series. Betrayal, revenge, kindness, and power - and just living.
• The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell ★★★★★ Mira Grant
  Seared into my memory. Cascading failures as zombies attack an elementary school. Well-written, but I never, ever want to read it again.
• The Defiant Agents Andre Norton
  An enjoyable space western with Apaches as the good guys, wrapped up in the cold war and tossing in the Golden Horde, a lost alien city and Russians with a mind-control ray.
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones ★★★★★ Seanan McGuire
  Creepy tale of twins transported to a world out of 1930s monster movies. Hangs together better than the first book.
• The Downloaded ★★★★☆ Robert J. Sawyer
  A short, fast tale of frozen people reawakening after the fall of civilization, built around the premise that you need to keep a frozen person’s consciousness active in VR, and there are very different reasons you might put people into cryo storage and a simulation. Not a lot of plot, mainly concepts and character studies.
• Dracula ★★★★★ Bram Stoker
  The original Dracula is a great read, not just for the way it codified modern vampire lore, but the way it’s built as a collection of letters, diary entries, and so on.
• A Dragon for William ★★★★★ Julie Czerneda
  A welcome return to the world of A Turn of Light (though shorter!)
• eBooks.com ★★★★☆ An eBook seller with some actual business ethics. No hardware (which simplifies things), but they have an app for Android and iOS, and any DRM-free titles can be downloaded and read on just about anything.
• Eifelheim ★★★★☆ Michael Flynn
  Detailed and thoughtful exploration of first contact with aliens in the midst of the Black Death.
• The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) ★★★★★ Katie Mack
  An engaging read for the general audience about what we currently know about the history and structure of the universe and what that knowledge – and the pieces we don’t know – might mean for its future and eventual end.
• Every Heart a Doorway ★★★★☆ Seanan McGuire
  A fast read with an intriguing concept that reverses multiple YA fantasy tropes.
• Five Ways to Forgiveness ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  Five loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath.
• Flashforward (Novel) ★★★★★ Robert J. Sawyer
  A fascinating exploration of time, destiny and free will after everyone on Earth gets a glimpse of the same moment 20 years in the future.
• Four Lost Cities ★★★★★ Annalee Newitz
  Fascinating look at how cities form, live and die, seen through archaeological discoveries at Pompeii, Angkor, Cahokia and Çatalhöyük.
• Four-Day Planet ★★★☆☆ H. Beam Piper
  A fun frontier/sailing adventure, but nothing special. Sort of Moby Dick in space with everyone based out of a corrupt frontier town.
• Fuzzy Nation ★★★★★ John Scalzi
  Not sure it’s better, but it is more enjoyable than the original, with better characterization and less deus-ex-machina. Same overall story of colonization, corporate greed, enviromnental exploitation and who counts as people, but different enough to enjoy both.
• Fuzzy Sapiens ★★★★☆ H. Beam Piper
  Continuing the Mad Men approach to ecological space colonization, this sequel explores the growing pains of a company town becoming a democracy, a corporation losing its monopoly, and two species of people figuring out how to live together.
• Galactic Derelict ★★★☆☆ Andre Norton
  A decent outer space adventure from the anything-goes era of science fiction. The story drags a bit after it switches from time travel to space travel.
• A Game of Thrones (Book) George R.R. Martin
  I should have liked this book. I tend to enjoy big epic fantasy, but I just couldn’t get into this one.
• The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time Book 12) Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
  Events move rapidly toward the apocalypse foretold in book one, and Sanderson shows he was a good choice to finish Jordan’s series.
• The Great Typo Hunt ★★★☆☆ Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson
  A cross-country road trip with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs. I’ve mellowed on the subject since it came out, but it’s still interesting.
• Head On ★★★★★ John Scalzi
  The sequel to Lock In is a fast read with intriguing concepts, fun characters and an interesting mystery. This time locked-in FBI agent Chris Shane investigates the death of a locked-in athlete in a sport too extreme for human bodies, played with remotely-controlled robots.
• The High and Faraway (Trilogy) ★★★☆☆ Greg Keyes
  Not Keyes’ best work. Interesting concept and characters, but poorly edited and creepy (in a bad way).
• Illuminations ★★★★★ T. Kingfisher
  Madcap magical damage control in a family of eccentric artist-magicians. Fun like A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive baking, but with a tighter story and better-defined characters.
• In the Shadow of Spindrift House ★★★★☆ Mira Grant
  Imagine the Scooby-Doo gang encountering a Lovecraftian horror in Hill House. They manage about as well as you might expect.
• Interference ★★★★☆ Sue Burke
  An intriguing followup to Semiosis that weaves several drastically different sentient species (both plant and animal) into a story about factions, community, freedom, communication and war.
• Invasive ★★★★☆ Chuck Wendig
  Swarms of killer ants genetically altered to target humans are as much nightmare fuel as you would expect.
• The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport ★★★★★ Samit Basu
  Starts as a cyberpunk take on Aladdin and gleefully launches into a glorious mishmash of robots, legacies, secrets and political upheaval in a crumbling spaceport slowly sinking into the mud on a backwater planet.
• The Kaiju Preservation Society ★★★★★ John Scalzi
  Escaping the pandemic by learning to survive on a world with gigantic monsters.
• Key Out Of Time ★★★★☆ Andre Norton
  Lost in time, lost in space, out of their depth, a handful of humans are caught in the middle of a four-way power struggle on the high seas of an alien world.
• Kobo (eBook store and readers) ★★★★☆ A solid alternative to Kindle, from the eBook selection through apps and hardware. The app works well on my eink tablet without too much tweaking, though it still wants to sell me more books before I can open the one I want to read.
• The Last Unicorn ★★★★★ Peter S. Beagle
  Whimsical and melancholy tale of the last unicorn’s quest to find others of her kind. Well drawn characters and story, very much a classic.
• The Lathe of Heaven ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A surreal tale of dreams changing reality, global stakes anchored by the three people involved. Be careful what you wish for.
• The Law of Superheroes ★★★★★ James Daily, J.D. and Ryan Davidson, J.D.
  A fun read that applies real-world law to comic book tropes. Shape-shifters, alternate realities, resurrections and massive property damage are all explored.
• Little Fuzzy ★★★★☆ H. Beam Piper
  An enjoyable tale of first contact, colonialism, environmental stewardship, corporate greed vs. ethics, and most importantly, who counts as “people” on an alien world that turns out not to be uninhabited after all.
• Minor Mage ★★★★☆ T. Kingfisher
  By turns melancholy and creepy, with a dash of sarcastic armadillo.
• Mysterious Galaxy ★★★★★ Bookstore specializing in sci-fi and mysteries, involved in local community and conventions.
• Night Watch (Discworld) ★★★★★ Terry Pratchett
  Time travel, barricades and a mix of humor and darkness in a rebellion with good cops, bad cops and time monks.
• Nomad of the Time Streams ★★★☆☆ Michael Moorcock
  A 19th-century British soldier in India is flung into three wildly different future wars, forcing him to reexamine the world he thought he was building.
• Norse Mythology ★★★★☆ Neil Gaiman
  Entertaining, sometimes gruesome, sometimes funny and sometimes sad collection of stories about Odin, Thor, Loki and the other gods of Asgard.
• Not Cross-Posting to Better World Books I recently picked up some used books, which worked out great. But I’m not cross-posting my reviews there because they claim copyright over user submissions, not just a perpetual license.
• The Old Iron Dream ★★★★★ David Forbes
  An extended essay tracing the strand of military authoritarianism and white male supremacy in science-fiction, from John Campbell through Heinlein, Pournelle and other major names up through the then-present of 2013.
• Onyx BOOX Poke3 ★★★★☆ I used the Poke3 as my main ebook reader for almost five years. It’s a convenient size, has a clear e-ink display, and can run the Android app for (almost) any eBook store.
• Overgrowth ★★★☆☆ Mira Grant
  Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the POV of an alien plant person who grew up human. Now the invasion has started, and she’s sorting out friends, family, and who she can trust from either planet.
• Parable of the Sower ★★★★★ Octavia Butler
  Hard to put down. And hard to pick up again. It’s certainly not a fun book, but it’s extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.
• Paradises Lost ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  An intricate novella about the middle generations of a multi-generational spaceship, and the religion they’ve developed that believes nothing outside the ship is real, and both Earth and their destination are myths.
• People of the Crater ★★★☆☆ Andre Norton
  Standard fantasy rescue-the-princess adventure with sci-fi trappings, nodding vaguely toward Hollow Earth tropes.
• Planet of Exile ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A tighter story than Rocannon’s World, with better-drawn characters, and more ambitious in its worldbuilding and themes.
• A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching ★★★★★ Rosemary Mosco
  A fast, funny, informative read about pigeons, their long history with humans, appearance and behavior, and even modern extreme pigeon breeds.
• Project Gutenberg ★★★★★ Predating the web itself, they’ve put together tens of thousands of ebooks from classics and other public domain sources in multiple formats from plaintext to ePub.
• Quantum Night ★★★★☆ Robert J. Sawyer
  Intriguing premise, well explored: Quantum entanglement, psychopaths, and mob behavior. Can we reboot humanity amid a rising tide of xenophobia?
• Ready Player One (Book) ★★★☆☆ Ernest Cline
  Back when I read it, the nostalgia and scavenger hunt were enough for me. Now, not so much.
• Rocannon’s World ★★★☆☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A serviceable quest story that melds fantasy and sci-fi. Engaging enough, but I’d only recommend it to someone who’s read her later work.
• Semiosis ★★★★★ Sue Burke
  A fascinating take on space colonization, intelligence, and language, following multiple generations of humans on a world dominated by sapient plants.
• Shy Little Kitten’s Secret Place ★☆☆☆☆ A 1980s sequel to the classic The Shy Little Kitten that completely misses the point of the original book and tells shy kids they need to change themselves.
• Soon I Will Be Invincible ★★★★☆ Austin Grossman
  Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible is a fun read for fans of the super-hero genre, an affectionate parody featuring every cliche in the book.
• Soonish ★★★★★ Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
  Fascinating, accessible, funny, and still relevant overview of cutting-edge tech, even though it took me 7 years to get around to reading it.
• Space Oddity ★★★★☆ Catherynne Valente
  Not quite as fun as the first book, but it’s just as absurd and chaotic, and exactly what I needed in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election.
• Space Opera ★★★★★ Catherynne Valente
  Fun sci-fi social satire from Catherynne Valente. The world is a mess, but we can find the sublime in chaos.
• Standard Ebooks ★★★★★ Great source of classics and other public domain material, formatted and edited for maximum readability and compatibility.
• Star Born ★★★★★ Andre Norton
  An adventure woven through the post-war struggles of an alien world, with humans caught on both sides, exploring identity, colonialism and prejudice. Definitely worth the read.
• Star Hunter ★★★☆☆ Andre Norton
  A standard survival adventure with mismatched partners and ruthless rivals, only with weird stuff going on and in space.
• Starter Villain ★★★★☆ John Scalzi
  A fun, fast read, parodying the James Bond Villain archetype. With talking dolphins and typing cats.
• Summer in Orcus ★★★★★ T. Kingfisher
  A portal fantasy that answers the questions: What kind of quest would Baba Yaga send an 11-year-old girl on, and how can she save a world anyway?
• The Telling ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A thoughtful tale of discovery, as an observer from Earth struggles to find and understand fragments of the lost cultures hidden beneath a society that’s thrown away its past in favor of a single vision.
• This Is True vol.8: Invisible Man Disappears From View ★★★★★ Randy Cassingham
  A fun collection of strange-but-true news stories from 2001-2002.
• The Three-Body Problem (Book) ★★★★☆ Liu Cixin, Ken Liu (Translator)
  Not a proper review of the book, but a collection of comments I made while reading it back in 2018.
• The Time Machine ★★★★☆ H.G. Wells
  A bit dry, but it draws you in, and if the plot is simple, it’s enough to wrap around some thought-provoking speculation about the future of humanity - and a critique of industrial society.
• The Time Traders ★★★★☆ Andre Norton
  A fun time-travel spy thriller through the bronze age that’s very rooted in the cold war.
• The Tombs of Atuan ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  Still my favorite of the Earthsea books. There’s something fascinating about a labyrinth that you must traverse in total darkness, keeping a map and counting turns in your head.
• Triggers ★★★☆☆ Robert J. Sawyer
  It’s an interesting take on memory and identity, but not one of Sawyer’s best.
• Tune in Tomorrow ★★★★☆ Randee Dawn
  A fun romp through backstage theater, mystery, soap opera, mythology, fandom and screwball comedy romance tropes. (whew!)
• Under Alien Skies ★★★★★ Philip Plait
  A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.
• Under the Influence ★★★★☆ Trey Ratcliff
  Trey Ratcliff details a fascinating look at a side of Instagram that I’ve mostly ignored.
• Usurpation ★★★★☆ Sue Burke
  A different sort of book than Semiosis and Interference, taking place entirely on Earth long after the second Pax expedition returns. Can the bamboo keep humans’ chaotic conflicts in check? Where do the robots fit in? With so many forms of intelligence, who counts as a person, anyway?
• Vaster Than Empires And More Slow ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  An intriguing story of a dysfunctional crew dealing with each other and a planet that, at first glance, appears to have no sentient life, only plants.
• When The Moon Hits Your Eye ★★★★☆ John Scalzi
  A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. Not so much about the moon turning into cheese as how lots of different people react to the moon turning into cheese.
• Where to Get eBooks A round-up of places I’ve used to find, buy, borrow and download eBooks.
• The Wind’s Twelve Quarters ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A collection of short stories from early in Le Guin’s career, spanning her first sale through the time when she’d begun to be recognized as a major force in the genre.
• A Wizard of Earthsea ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  The Earthsea series is one of my regular re-reads. It starts here, with the tale of how a goatherd grew into a wizard in a world where magic is woven through everything from the poorest village to the greatest palace. How he released a terrifying evil in his youth, and how he sailed the world seeking how to make up for his mistake.
• A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking ★★★★★ T. Kingfisher
  A fun and original take on the teenage wizard genre. With an immortal carnivorous sourdough starter named Bob.
• The Word for World is Forest ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  Infuriating to read…and that’s the point. A story of colonial exploitation, asymmetric warfare, dehumanization and environmental destruction.
• The Word of Unbinding and The Rule of Names ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  The original two stories set in Earthsea, before Le Guin wrote the novels. Each stand-alone, each interesting both in itself and in seeing what the series and its themes grew from.
• Worlds of Exile and Illusion ★★★★☆ Ursula K. Le Guin
  Interesting to see Le Guin as she’s developing her craft. Not the best place to start with her work, but absolutely worth reading.
• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You ★★★★★ Janelle Shane
  A fun, accessible introduction to how artificial intelligence works…and how it sometimes doesn’t!
• Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village ★★★★★ Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper
  A delightful parody of every English countryside murder mystery trope, as a guidebook to a village that has them all.

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Les Misérables

• Cozy Classics: Les Misérables (Review) This board book takes "abridged" to a whole new level, adapting the 1200-page epic to a twelve-word tale for babies and toddlers. Oddly enough, it works.
• Welcome I first read Les Misérables in my teens. I've come back to it twice as an adult, reading different translations and bringing new thoughts to - and from - the experience each time.
• Commentary on the Novel I first read Les Misérables back in the early 1990s. I read it again 20 years later, writing a running commentary along the way, and again 5 years after that.

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Blog Posts

• Avatar and Manta’s Gift

  This is kind of funny. When I watched the movie Avatar way back in 2009, I was struck by the similarity of the premise to Timothy Zahn’s 2002 novel Manta’s Gift: The main character, a human who’s suffered a severely disabling injury, is offered the chance to place his consciousness into an alien body and […]

  (Nov 2025)
• Ursula K. Le Guin eBook Bundle (Ended)

  Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting the Literary Arts charity, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing… I’ve read the Earthsea series (good-to-great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I’ve got […]

  (Nov 2024)
• Lost Cities and Alien Skies

  You wouldn’t think that books about astronomy and archaeology would have a lot in common, but Four Lost Cities and Under Alien Skies pack some odd similarities.

  (May 2023)
• Shelfie

  Spotted at the library over the weekend.

  (May 2023)
• Blue Sunsets on Mars

  One of many cool facts brought up in Phil Plait’s new book, Under Alien Skies is that Martian sunsets are blue! On Earth, nitrogen scatters light randomly, with bluer colors scattering more than redder colors, so the ambient sky is blue, but when you’re looking toward the sun at a shallow angle (like sunrise or […]

  (Apr 2023)
• What’s in a Name? (1984 Edition)

  I always find it weird when someone insists that 1984 is warning about socialism because of the party name.

  (Jul 2019)
• Bedtime Stories

  Wow, bedtime stories have really changed in the last couple of years.

  (Jun 2017)
• Predictive Frameshift

  I’ve been thinking a lot about Robert J. Sawyer’s Quantum Night the last few months. It links human cruelty, psychopathy, and mob behavior to the nature of consciousness, mostly focusing on the main characters but playing out against a global crisis brought on by a rising tide of xenophobia. More recently, I’ve been thinking about […]

  (May 2017)
• Newsflesh: Worst Case Zombies, Best Case Survival

  Mira Grant’s Newsflesh features the worst-case scenario of zombie design, yet humanity survives with civilization mostly intact.That’s really optimistic.

  (Oct 2016)
• Low-Tech/High Tech B&N

  I stopped frequenting Barnes & Noble a while back because they were so determined to sell you a Nook and get you out of the store, never to return. (That, and for a while we had a great indie bookstore nearby.) Now they’re selling vinyl records. And holding events. They’re doing Throwback Thursdays and a […]

  (Jul 2015)
• Do Not Taunt the Octopus

  Some thoughts on Mira Grant’s latest Newsflesh novella exploring the post-zombie world, and some parallels to Scalzi’s Lock-In.

  (Jul 2015)
• Reading More Books: A Different Problem

  I’ve seen several articles lately that offer tips for those whose New Year’s resolutions include reading more books. A common thread: suggestions for what to read, or who to follow to get ideas what to read. That’s not the problem I have. I have stacks of books I want to read. The problem is time, […]

  (Jan 2015)
• “Who puts a fountain in the middle of a library?”

  I was immediately reminded of the Huntington Beach Central Library when stumbling on this line in The Magician’s Land.

  (Aug 2014)
• The Shelves are Paved with (The Path of) Daggers

  The only books left from the Wheel of Time back catalog at the end of the sale were the three you might expect people to leave on the shelf.

  (Jun 2014)
• Les Mis Break: From Paris to Mars for Red Planet Blues

  This week I’m taking a break from my epic Les Miserables re-read for Robert J Sawyer’s latest, Red Planet Blues: a sci-fi hard-boiled detective yarn. Talk about contrast.

  (Apr 2013)
• Dealing With Multiple E-Book Stores

  I’ve bought books on Kindle, Google Play and Kobo, and read on all three apps. Here’s why I’ve sampled different stores, despite the problems it introduces.

  (Apr 2013)
• Les Mis: Looking Back at the Book

  A snarky but affectionate review of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables has made me think about re-reading the novel for the first time in 20 years.

  (Jan 2013)
• (Mad) Scientific Fact: The Girl Genius Novel is Out!

  Phil & Kaja Foglio’s Agatha H. and the Airship City adapts the first storyline from their award-winning Girl Genius comic series to prose novel form.

  (Jan 2011)
• Home Libraries

  Two comic strips about book collections: Wondermark #442: In Which Beth Keeps Her Books I stumbled on the Wondermark strip at Long Beach Comic-Con and it really hit home, between the fact that I grew up loving books for exactly this reason, and the impending arrival of the next generation. As for Girl Genius, I […]

  (Nov 2010)
• Goin’ On a Typo Hunt

  NPR has an article on The Great Typo Hunt: Two friends cross the country with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs. And there’s a book. I may need this. When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. […]

  (Aug 2010)
• Lesser Plays

  As a spinoff of the “lesser books” meme on Twitter (taking a classic book title and making it mundane, trivial, or otherwise lesser), someone started in on “lesser plays.” I came up with a few: Less Miserable (admittedly this one’s a gimme) Spring Just-a-few-more-minutes-before-I-wake-up. The Importance of being Ernie. Eleven Mildly-Annoyed Guys The Prince and […]

  (May 2010)
• Books of Laredo

  As I walked out on the streets of Laredo, As I walked out in Laredo one day, I stopped in the mall just to visit the bookstore. The bookstore was closed, it’s been taken away. The only bookstore in Laredo, Texas, a city of 250,000 people, has closed. The nearest one is 150 miles away […]

  (Jan 2010)
• Unexpected Shower

  Bad idea of the day: I’ll be back before the rain starts again. No need to bring my umbrella.

  (Jan 2010)
• Finished The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time) – It’s Good

  The first book of the 3-part conclusion to The Wheel of Time lives up to its promise. It may not be 100% Robert Jordan, but it’s the next best thing.

  (Nov 2009)
• Stella!

  I’ve started reading The True Stella Awards.

  (Oct 2009)
• Breaking the Castle’s Fourth Wall

  Hah! It turns out those ads for Heat Wave during Castle aren’t fake: ABC actually had someone write the Nikki Heat book as a tie-in. The first time I remember seeing something like this was with (appropriately enough) Murder She Wrote, with a paperback mystery novel credited to Jessica Fletcher. In that case, though, the […]

  (Oct 2009)
• Zap, Tom said shockingly

  Weird: Apparently Tasers were named for a Tom Swift invention, as in “Thomas A. Swift’s electric rifle.”

  (May 2009)
• Questions

  Is the glut of vampire novels a result of more people WRITING them, or more publishers ACCEPTING them? Google employees ask the all-important question: Will It Lens?

  (Apr 2009)
• Wheel of Time Finale: 3-Book Split

  The last Wheel of Time book is so massive it’s being split into 3 volumes. I’m half annoyed, but it doesn’t surprise me that it needs that many pages.

  (Apr 2009)
• Shopping Observations

  Can we get a moratorium on covers of “Last Christmas?” Actually, can we get one on the original too? Funny how easy it is to spot a cover by Darryl K. Sweet. It makes me want to mash up Xanth, WOT, and every other fantasy series he’s covered I can’t see giving someone Countdown to […]

  (Dec 2008)
• Frostbite Looks Familiar

  Looking at the “all ages” shelf in Borders, which seems to be almost entirely made up of novels about vampires and dragons, I noticed that the cover to the Vampire Academy novel Frostbite looked awfully familiar. I walked over to the DVD section of the store and picked up a copy of Buffy the Vampire […]

  (Sep 2008)
• Surprises

  This morning I was surprised to hear that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had died. In part, it was because I hadn’t realized he was still alive. As the brief story went on, I remembered reading about his return to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Of his work, I’ve only read A Day in the […]

  (Aug 2008)
• Judging a Book’s Cover

  Reusable Cover Art in Historical Novels: A Gallery. A lot of them are clearly using classical paintings, but some of them are photographs or even modern-style art. What’s especially interesting are the covers which used the same source material, but altered it subtly: adding a headband or a pendant, replacing a bedframe, etc. The Rap […]

  (May 2008)
• The Born Queen

  We’ve both finished reading The Born Queen, the conclusion to Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. Yesterday we spent the day reading in tandem on the couch: I read book 3, Katie read book 4, and finished within an hour of each other. Determined to catch up, I read 100 pages last night […]

  (Apr 2008)
• The Race for Eslen

  After working my way through The Briar King in bits here and there, I made time for The Charnel Prince.  I finished the second book Tuesday evening, and I’m currently 100 pages into The Blood Knight. Meanwhile, I’ve been talking about the books (Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone) a lot, trying not to drop spoilers in case […]

  (Apr 2008)
• No Time for the End of the World

  Well, my copy of The Born Queen has arrived via UPS, and I’m nowhere near finished re-reading the first three books of Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. I’d hoped to start at the beginning of March, but I was in the middle of the Trade Pact books and wanted to finish that […]

  (Mar 2008)
• Completing the Series

  Yesterday I finally had time to finish reading To Trade the Stars, the final book in Julie E. Czerneda’s “Trade Pact Universe” trilogy. Now I’m ready to pick up The Briar King again, since the final book of Greg Keyes’ fantasy quartet, Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, comes out at the end of the month. […]

  (Mar 2008)
• Essential Graphic Novels

  DC Comics has posted a list of 30 Essential Graphic Novels (that are published by DC or one of their imprints). I’ve read: Watchmen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol. 1 & 2 V for Vendetta Sandman vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes Sandman: Endless Nights Fables vol.1: Legends in Exile Batman: Arkham Asylum Batman: The […]

  (Jan 2008)
• The Flash Companion

  I just turned in final drafts for the last of three articles I’m contributing to TwoMorrows’ upcoming book, The Flash Companion by Keith Dallas. The book covers the entire history of the Flash, from Jay Garrick through Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen. It’s full of articles, artwork, and interviews with writers, artists, with […]

  (Dec 2007)
• Firefox, Kindle(ing) and more

  Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out. Nice so far. Oddly enough, it runs better than the current Opera 9.5 previews on my old Linux box at work, though that mostly seems to be the fault of the find-in-history option. I usually avoid any sort of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, online included, but I’ve […]

  (Nov 2007)
• Temeraire Flies Again

  I just found out that Empire of Ivory, the fourth book in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, came out today! The series takes place in an alternate version of the Napoleonic Wars in which dragons exist, and are used in warfare. This results in an odd mix of naval battles and aerial dogfighting, with […]

  (Sep 2007)
• Spam from the Third Age

  I’ve held off on posting funny spam subject lines lately, but I just had to comment on this pair. First up: Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken. It’s a quote from Lord of Chaos, the 6th book in Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, The Wheel of […]

  (Aug 2007)
• Flash Greatest Stories Redux

  Today DC Comics released The Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, a collection of classic Flash stories ranging from 1947–1994. Back in February, when they announced the contents, I did a point-by-point comparison of the stories to be included and the stories that appeared in the 1991 book, The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told. When […]

  (Aug 2007)
• …and the Wizard

  After the “Weird Al” concert we explored the fair a bit, then left to go to Borders to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Katie had reserved the book at the new one that just opened at The District. And by “just opened,” I mean Wednesday. Her confirmation number was 7. I kid […]

  (Jul 2007)
• Waiting for the Wizard

  I walked over to the nearby Barnes and Noble at lunch just to see whether anyone was lined up for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

  (Jul 2007)
• Offline in Crotheny

  Sorry I haven’t posted much here lately. The main reason is that I’ve been re-reading Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series before picking up The Blood Knight. (I’ve also been spending time at the Comic Bloc Forums discussing the Flash relaunch.) Re-reading The Briar King and The Charnel Prince both followed the same […]

  (Aug 2006)
• The Wheel Turns

  I finally talked myself into reading New Spring, the prequel novel to Robert Jordan’s interminable long-running Wheel of Time series. It’s actually a very interesting character study of young Moiraine, and much more engrossing than the last two books in the series have been—perhaps because I don’t expect it to advance the plot. Anyway, I’ve […]

  (Jun 2005)
• Class Dis-Mythed

  Phil Foglio once again illustrates the Myth Adventures universe in the next book in the series: Class Dis-Mythed. I don’t know how much of it is Jody Lynn Nye’s influence and how much of it is just Robert Asprin being re-energized about the series, but since they started collaborating the books have improved drastically. The […]

  (May 2005)
• The bunnies have died in vain

  Looking at the list of “most popular” links on Del.icio.us, it seems someone has scanned the entire Book of Bunny Suicides and its sequel, both by Andy Riley. Good grief, people—you can pick up the book for $7.00 at any bookstore. I can understand posting a couple of excerpts, but from what I can tell, […]

  (May 2005)
• Counting Goldfish

  Neil Gaiman writes about the re-release of The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish: There were copies of the new edition of THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH, with the Enhanced CD in it. It’s bigger than the original edition, has a new Dave McKean cover (mostly because people seemed […]

  (Aug 2004)
• On the Borders of Reality

  The two of us and our friend Daniel were wandering through Borders last night, looking at the Harry Potter display. Oddly, it was right next to the sections on Astrology, Speculative (I guess New Age is too passé), two whole shelves on Magical Studies, Christianity, Metaphysics, and finally Self-Help. (How’s that for an interesting combination?) […]

  (Nov 2002)
• Book Review: The Waterborn and The Blackgod

  J. Gregory Keyes has fast become one of those authors whose work I will pick up knowing nothing more than who wrote it. I enjoyed his work in the Babylon 5 and Star Wars universes, but after reading the four novels of The Age of Unreason and these two, I can say I’ll definitely be […]

  (Sep 2002)

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