Book Blog
July 21, 2024
n interesting graphic novel by Dan Santat. It starts in a storm-tossed sea, where a ship is well into danger of sinking. It is a ship engaged in oceanographic research (specifically, animals) and its master goes down with it. In his dying moment, a hermit crab with a soda can for a shell comes to him and touches him in the fashion of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Somehow the creatures (the hermit plus his other little friends) gain sentience. Meanwhile, we cut to the master’s daughter Sophia, a young girl hanging around the expedition’s base, a failing park named Aqualand. […]
July 14, 2024
his is an interesting collection of the works of Kenji Miyazawa, the son of a Japanese pawnbroker who wrote in the early 1900s. His stories and interesting mixes of astronomy and whimsy, tales of troubled heroes under starry skies. My favorite, one of the oddest of the bunch, is the story of Signal and Signal-less, a tale of lovers separated by an insurmountable distance of a hundred yards. You see, “Signal” is a train signal on a modern main line, while “Signal-less” is a signal on a nearby branch line. They are both rooted in their spots but can only […]
July 7, 2024
o yes, this was the book I gave to the young girl with the hankering for female-orientated fantasy, as detailed HERE. In this Terry Pratchett Diskworld novel, the small, pious and stupid country of Borogravia has declared was on just about everyone. They block the roads and burn down the Clack towers. And this state of endless “police actions” have depopulated much of their country of fine young men and produced many widows. Young Polly works in her father’s tavern yet she wonders about her brother who marched off to war just last year. There were one or two heavily […]
June 30, 2024
o this is a story about a young girl in a world where nanotech ran amuck, where cities are now haves of nanotech, constantly building themselves anew, ever expanding, and infecting the humans around them with strange new personalities and improvements. And like Dorothy being drawn to the Emerald City (not “like” but rather “exactly”), a young farm girl brings her dead boyfriend and dead dog, preserved in status, to this place to see if she can possibly revive them (so that’s “Brain” and “Heart”, I guess). And I know that author Kathleen Ann Goonan went on to even greater […]
June 23, 2024
ell, like fine wine, I’ve been saving the Memory’s Legion collection by James S.A. Corey to enjoy, sip by sip. And I just finished the last glass with The Sin of our Fathers. This collection was a great set of stories that acted as prequels and sequels to the popular Expanse series. In each, a character from the massive set is exampled in an often-new light, showing where he or she came from and where they ended. And in this final story, we find out what happened to Filip Nagata, the tug-of-war son between Naomi and Marco (who was the maniac […]
June 16, 2024
nother Norfolk used bookstore find (someone tossed it, to my gain). The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a tale about a tunnel ship (that makes the warp paths other ships can use. In this universe, a divided human race (after our planet’s collapse there were those who stayed in system, and those who joined a refugee fleet) finds itself as members of the Galactic Commons, a sort of UN in space sort of thing. Rosemary Harper has signed up on Wayfarer to be their ship’s clerk. But she has a history, something she is hiding. But the […]
June 11, 2024
nteresting idea here – how would World War Two have changed if Neville Chamberlain had not just given Hitler Czechoslovakia, kicking off the war earlier, say, 1938? It’s interesting in that the Japanese are no-way interested in bombing Pearl Harbor yet. The Germans are slugging their way into France with a lot less then they had in 1940 – only Panzer Is and IIs. More importantly, General Sanjurjo does not die in a plane crash and runs the Spanish Civil War himself, instead of Franco. So there are no quick thrusts – just a slog in Spain, France, Poland and […]
June 9, 2024
eah, yeah, another Destroyermen book. I’m over the halfway point now. So our Alternate-World-War (starting when an aging destroyer fell into a primitive world where dinosaurs never went extinct) continues on the allies’ front lines. In the west at the former Grik capitol, the Grik ready a counterattack across the strait between Madagascar and Africa. And over in South America, the Doms prepare to strike the allied base. There is a bit of synergy in the storytelling. In both cases, a massive force looms over the good guys. And as very typical in Taylor Anderson’s story, it seems to always […]
June 2, 2024
o an interesting book, especially given our time. Imagine a company named “Information”, that unlike Truth Social or X, strives for a bias-free platform. You can ask anything and it should be reasonably correct (wasn’t this the original goal of the internet?). And further imagine that for the last twenty years, world-wide elections take place for local representations. You vote for your party and if you win, your immediate area is now under the control of that party. And there are dozens of parties – nationalistic, green, protectionist, etc. I really liked the party named Policity1st, which does not campaign […]
May 26, 2024
‘ve listened to David Sedaris many times on NPR. He’s the Jewish gag guy, a sad sack replacement for the crashed-n-burned Woody Allen. And he’s funny and observational. When you are Engulfed in Flames is his collection of short stories of his life. I really enjoyed his piece on The Smoking Section – here, Sedaris talks about smoking, how he started, and all the times he tried to quit. Interestingly, he and his partner moved to Tokyo for three months, as if the change of scenery would help. He even takes a class in Japanese and manages to finish dead […]