Book Blog
March 8, 2015
he what, you ask? Well, there’s my astronomy interest, bleeding over. Picked this up from the lending library at the Central Florida Astronomical Society (just how many clubs am I a member of?). While mostly the book is made up of plates showing beautifully clear drawings of a section of the Moon (including a side description of all the craters located there), what I really found most interesting were the descriptions of the Moon. Where it might have come from (at least back in 2004 – everything changes so fast). How it orbits. While this section isn’t all that long, […]
March 1, 2015
kay, so I picked this one up at the Forbidden Planet shop (right next to the Strand Bookstore) on my New York trip. I’m not a big graphic novel fan – loved the original 300 and was reading The Spirit way back in the day. I’ll admit that there is a certain depth (dimensionally different from superb writing, but still there) that pictures can add to a story. So, here in Northwest Passage, we open with an Indian getting run down by a mob of Europeans on a ridge overlooking an English wilderness fort, where within, the one-time wilderness explorer […]
February 22, 2015
really like Neal Stephenson. I loved Snow Crash and appreciated Quicksilver (haven’t gotten the guts to follow up with the next two massive books). So when I saw a copy of Some Remarks in a used book store, I had to get it. This is a collection of a number of his articles and interviews, not all of them (some of them he looked back and and decided to leave them buried). But I did like most of it. I’ll admit that his raving about the time period he covered in Quicksilver eventually befuddled me so badly I had to […]
February 15, 2015
et’s just get this out front – I like Rafael Sabatini. I’ve reviewed Scaramouche, The Shame of Motley, and The Marquis of Carabas. I haven’t done Captain Blood but I’ve read it twice and could review it cold. I’ve liked them all. But The Trampling of the Lilies? I’m going to have to luke-warm this one. I figured it was shaping up to the usual Sabatini fare – low-born clerk loves nobleman’s daughter. He professes his love. Then he gets a horse whip across the face. He then takes a shot at the nobleman who’d slashed him and ends up […]
February 8, 2015
his week, I scratched through Project Gutenberg and came up with two short scifi stories, both out of pulp magazines. I didn’t want to spend that much time on them but they deserved some sort of mention (and me? I deserve some sort of weekly blog entry out of them). A Spaceship Named McGuire – this was a shortie written in 1960, just about when Harry Harrison was coming up with the Stainless Steel Rat. It was when humanism was making a push back into the industry, when bold wisecracking heroes were popular. In this story, a clever space detective […]
February 5, 2015
The first admission is that I’ve bought just about every Pratchett book out there – loved the Diskworld series. And Gaiman, I’ve also read one or two of his and generally liked them. So when a work acquaintance mentioned Good Omens, I had to have a look. I’ve got to say that I really enjoyed it; the opener is perfect with the Angel of God (Aziraphale) and of the Devil (Crowley) distantly looking down at the ejection of Adam and Eve from Eden, both with strong misgivings (Crowley is miffed that the apple thing was very unfair, even though he, […]
February 1, 2015
short one this time, a little tale I found on Project Gutenberg’s western section (though it was originally published in a sci-fi mag back in the early sixties). It’s a funny little piece of a district in Texas which is trying to drive it’s census numbers up, and calls upon a lazy local named Manuel to wander the simmering lavaflows (Sodom, don’t you know) and count as many people as he can. “Even the little ones?” he asks with shaky English. The supervisor tells him that, yes, children are to be included. But we, the reader, get an impression that […]
January 25, 2015
eing a railroad guy, you’d have think I’d have heard of this one. But no, I was casting about on Project Gutenberg and fell over it (HERE). And so now I know a little more about the world. That is, a little more of its bad and terrible history. It was December 29, 1876 and a pair of locomotives were lugging eleven passenger cars of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway towards Ashtabula, Ohio. One hundred and fifty nine passengers were aboard. As they crossed the bridge just short of the station, it gave way, throwing everything (save that […]
January 18, 2015
pulled this from Project Gutenberg, read it, didn’t like it. And now I’m finding that H.P. Lovecraft deemed it his greatest influence. I don’t get it. See, I have a problem with fantastic (meaning amazing, unique, and stupendous) things. Having one is fantastic. More than one? You gotta have a good reason for it. I don’t like the idea that Peter Parker (a.k.a. Spiderman) not only gets bit by a radioactive spider and has his body uniquely change, he also (as a high schooler) figures out how to manufacture web slingers so he can swing all about town. See? That’s […]
January 15, 2015
‘ve mentioned Brooke, the cute little redhead who cuts my thinning hair and talks books, books, books with me. Noticed she had an old copy of The Stand amid her combs and sheers and started talking books and now we’re thick as thieves. If only my hair grew quicker. Anyway, I always honor suggestions – if someone tells me I should read something, I generally will. So Brooke mentioned Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. I’d never heard about it. Apparently everyone else in the world has (including a parking lot attendant and a rounds doctor when I had a […]