Book Blog
November 10, 2024
kay, so back in the seventies, I really loved Alan Dean Foster’s stories. They were funny and exciting and great reads. And now I picked up one that’s a half century old, Icerigger. Of course, the question is, how does it keep up with modern scifi? Not StarWars either, but adult series like The Expanse. So in Icerigger, a passenger liner is making a stop at a colony world, one totally covered in a sea of ice. During ship’s night (as they orbit in) the main character, a merchant named Ethan Fortune, comes across a kidnapping in progress. The inept […]
November 3, 2024
companion book to a wild breakout novel, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, this book picks up a couple of months after the completion of the first one. Of course, you might have thought that the siege was broken in the first book, but no, that’s never mentioned and the barbarian leader Ogus, outside the battered walls, still wants everyone in the city dead (gruesomely). So this time, our story comes from an actor of plays and a playwright (he publishes them like he’s grinding sausages) named Notker. His other skills include witty impersonations of political figures. So he’s […]
October 20, 2024
hat makes this a creepy read is that Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) wrote this in 2018, two years before the real-world insurrection, and it’s yet as chilling and disturbing as our own. The story takes place with a wide collection of characters (hint: write them down so as not to be confused) with most of them involved in the overthrow. Working off an online unpopularity list of political and public figures, Adjustment Day finds the various state houses filled with machine gun toting radicals, who quickly kill off pretty much everyone on that list. To get credit for doing it, […]
October 13, 2024
‘ve always thought of writing a semi-fictional book about World War One aviation. I realized there is far more to know than just the planes. Did pilots use zippers or buttons on their flies? Did they drink coffee (could the Germans even get coffee by 1918?). What was the slang, the thoughts, even the haircuts. Think about your own life and the number of little items in it – now imagine trying to write a compelling story at some level of detail. In the end, I still love flying so I wrote a book about crows, an excellent book that […]
October 6, 2024
ou might remember me mentioning this, how I got interested in this book, only to find out that I already had it on the stacks. Amusing story HERE! So Jon Winokur wrote this 1987, a book which look on the art of being a curmudgeon and what societal role we play (I use the “we” form here – is there any doubt that I’m not a get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon). Of course, the Okay Boomer crowd sees it this way. To them, they are superior to us, what with their ability to speed and tailgate (with their parent’s insurance close at hand), […]
September 29, 2024
‘m a little late to the party here. The Rockford Files played while I was in junior high and college, and that was D&D night so I never caught them. I do know that in my final year at Va Tech, my roomate watched these things and curious, I watched over his shoulder. I still carried an interest in this show for, what, forty years? Thus, in retirement, I took time to watch the series on Roku (which shows dedication, since it runs with lousy commercials that are no longer fun to dissect the tenth time around). Anyway, Garner plays […]
September 22, 2024
aving produced a novel with what I thought was a good cover (and wasn’t (even my dear old mother told me that)), this book is sold by its cover (even author Rebecca Thorne admits it). I was standing in the bookstore and it caught my eye, two women reading before the fire in dreamy watercolors. And so I was sold. Not convinced? I’m including it below. You be the judge. Cute, eh? So it’s an interesting little fantasy book, specifically because the main characters are “lesbians with powers”. I mean, how else can I put it? Reyna and Kianthe love […]
September 16, 2024
friend who has read and enjoyed a number of my recommendations suggested (tentatively) this book. His pitch reminded me of how I tried to ask for dates in high school. Hesitantly. And the book (about Fred, a nerdish young accountant who is transformed into an unholy creature of the night (well, religion doesn’t show up, not really, and Fred just works overnight on his accounting practice)) is interesting. Yes, Fred is as happy as a socially-awkward noodle-head can be, and he has a source of easy-to-get blood. But then trouble raises its head. And again. And again. The chapters are […]
September 8, 2024
f you’ve ever seen Justified on the web or streaming services, you know that cool main character, Federal Marshal Raylan Givens, a Gary-Cooper-like lawman who casually blows away Southern tire-biters who have it coming (meaning they are trying to draw against him). He’s a cool dude. And he’s the creation of Elmore Leonard, a crime writer of great renown. He’s written a string of books about this character and they are all as smooth as moonshine. It’s a very unconventional storytelling method. First off, you nearly have to read it out loud. From a grammar standpoint, it isn’t proper English. […]
September 1, 2024
idn’t we just talk about this author? Becky Chambers, writer of A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit. She’s that author who takes a wondrous set of characters and locations and trashes them, telling the story with edge-case characters and briefly-mentioned locations. You aren’t getting sausage grinding with this author. You get a new telling of a new perspective in a “loose universe”. I like this, if only because it is ballsy writing. So in Record of a Spaceborn Few, earlier books have hinted that when the Earth collapsed into ecological disaster, the […]