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Review: The Last Emperox
The Last Emperox by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well, that was quite the trilogy! Scalzi took all that he had been building up over the three books and used them to create a satisfying ending. If this isn’t your first Scalzi series you won’t be surprised by the ending. Don’t get…
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Review: Small Gods
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. I dropped the rating from 5/5 to 4/5. As usual, Terry Pratchett uses the fantasy of Discworld to shed light on reality. This book is less whimsical than other Discworld book although it does have its…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue
Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue by Christie Yant My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is one of my favorite collections of stories and one of the best anthologies/magazines I’ve read so far in 2021. A lot of the stories in here a phenomenal. There are also a lot of…
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Review: The Consuming Fire
The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars Scalzi continues to kick butt in the second book of The Interdependency. I’m used to the second book of a planned trilogy to be all setup for the third book which can mostly be climax. Yet, within this book Scalzi continues to have…
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Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins My rating: 4 of 5 stars I listened to the audiobook narrated by Greg from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as I drove the 900-something miles from Maryland to Florida and it was better than I thought it would be. Ms Collins has avoided most of the annoying tropes…
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Completing Advent of Code 2015 with 3 Programming languages
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of…
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Review: Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VI by Sebastian Deken My rating: 3 of 5 stars I was a kickstarter backer on the campaign for this book I’ve been waiting for this book for a while. This game, along with Chrono Trigger, was very formative in my early gaming years. The book decides to focus on one of the…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014
Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was a GREAT issue. I don’t think there was one story that wasn’t top-notch. My favorite SF stories were Codename: Delphi and Exhalation. My favorite fantasy was The Only Death in the City. The Afterparty excerpt was great and I…
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Review: Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood
Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell My rating: 4 of 5 stars Anyone who has followed my book reviews on Good Reads or my blog knows that I have read quite a bit of video game history. Whether it’s a history of video games starting with the miltiary and university campuses, a…
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Review: Programming Perl
Programming Perl by Tom Christiansen My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’ve effectively finished this book, although I’ll admit to skipping the section called “reference”; the book had already gotten deeper into the weeds than I needed at the moment. I’ve read a lot of programming books over the past 15 years (and a few…
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Review: Introducing Go: Build Reliable, Scalable Programs
Introducing Go: Build Reliable, Scalable Programs by Caleb Doxsey My rating: 3 of 5 stars Over my many years as a programmer (and now boss of programmers) I’ve read many of O’Reilly’s series – Learning {language}, Programming {language}, {language} in a Nutshell, {language} Pocket Reference. This is the first time (that I can remember) that…
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Review: Palpitations: The Highway To Never After
Palpitations: The Highway To Never After by S.K. Munt My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book gets a few extra points from me for taking place in Australia. All too often we get zombie/vamp tales taking place in the USA, England, or Europe (in that order). In fact, the only other apocalyptic Australian book…
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Review: Guards! Guards!
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book We finally are introduced to The Patrician as he will be portrayed for the rest of the Discworld books. He’s no longer the overweight Patrician we saw in the first two books. He’s infinitely more cunning…
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Review: Princess Academy
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale My rating: 4 of 5 stars My preschool kids have been enjoying Shannon and Dean Hale’s The Princess in Black series (I reviewed a few entries last year). So when I found out that Shannon Hale also does middle grade and young adult books, I recommended them to my oldest,…
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Review: Parable of the Talents
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler My rating: 4 of 5 stars Welcome back to the crapsack/grimdark world of America in the 2020s as created by Octavia Butler in the 1990s. It is sometimes eerily prophetic. More about that later. The addition of Lauren’s daughter’s (Larkin) annotations to her mother’s journals provides a…