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My Books of 2013
It’s definitely hard to read books when you have other obligations. This year I had two semesters of graduate school and the majority of the second year of Scarlett’s life. Now I know why my mother, who loved reading, would only make it through a couple books a year. Frankly I only got through this…
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Kickstarter Update 3
I’m writing this in late August – by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the…
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Review: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris My rating: 5 of 5 stars With this book David Sedaris is a modern day Aesop. In the same way that we use Science Fiction and Humor to allow us to discuss our condition without chafing (they’re not talking about good ole ‘merica, they’re talking about…
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Review: The God Engines
The God Engines by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a very short book. Well, technically it’s a novella – it even says so on the jacket flap. The MSRP is $25 and I think it’s not worth all that for how short it is. However, it’s $9 for hardcover or…
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Revew: Redshirts by John Scalzi
Redshirts by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars (warning: This whole review is full of spoilers!) When I first heard about this book I thought about it in the same way that I thought of the Battleship movie. The Red Shirt joke is a fun joke that’s been parodied endlessly. But is it…
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Survivorship Bias and the Brain
Earlier in the year I came across an io9 article around 15 science fiction and fantasy novels that were rejected by publishers. The implication, of course, is what fools those publishers were – look at how many sales these books got and how how popular they remain today. Some of the books included The War…
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My favorite Hitchhiker’s Guide Quote
“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all…
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Review: At Home: A Short History of Private Life
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Although I enjoyed Bill Bryson’s other book A Short History of Nearly Everything, I actually didn’t know that when I picked this book up. I had heard the other book as an audio book so I didn’t remember…
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Review: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 1
Entirely separately from my recent reintroduction into the traditional comic world, I’ve been into graphic novels, as you’ve probably read on this blog. An article I read on Cracked brought The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LoEG) back into my consciousness and then I read the [non-comic] books The Map of Time and Dracula. So I…
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Going Back to Comics
note: this was written on 1 June then put into my blog queue I don’t remember exactly what made me decide to check out some new comics, but I think it was a mix of inventorying my comics and clicking over to the Whiskey Media site, Comic Vine. In the reviews for May’s comics, two…
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Nanowrimo 2010
So, I started working on my Nanowrimo partway through November. I quit partway through because I fell too far behind. So I reworked the story to have a better ending than the rambling mess it had become and tried to get some people to edit it for me. They’ve been busy and I’m sick of…
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Review: Dracula
Dracula by Bram Stoker My rating: 4 of 5 stars this review originally appeared on Good Reads Dracula is, like Frankenstein, a book that has influenced so much of our pop culture that we don’t even question that we know the facts of the book without having even read it. Before having read Dracula, I’d…
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Review: The Map of Time
The Map of Time: A Novel by Félix J. Palma My rating: 3 of 5 stars disclaimer: I won this book from Good Reads First Reads contest This review originally appeared on the Good Reads website Unsurprising for a novel about time travel, the contents of the book are not strictly chronological. Do not despair,…
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Review: Scott Pilgrim vs The World
It took a bit of convincing from Dan, but eventually I read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. I knew right away that this was a book written for people like me. Just like Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, people older or younger than me would never get the full appreciation of all the references. I thoroughly hated the…
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Participating in the 2010 NanoWrimo
Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start. I’d heard about it on NPR and on…