The Rookie

Great Robot Overlords, but I love teh interwebnets.
At the moment, I’m listening to a couple of podiobooks (free audio books in podcast form),  Brave Men Run, by Matthew Wayne Selznick and The Rookie, by Scott Sigler.   They’re both excellent so far and I highly recommend them.
But that’s not what I’m writing about tonight.
What I wanted [...]

Currently Reading

The Ships of Air: Book 2 of The Fall of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells
The Tyranny of the Night: Book 1 of the Instrumentalities of the Night by Glen Cook
Furies of Calderon: Book 1 of the Codex Alera by Jim Butcher
The Essential Hemmingway by Ernest Hemmingway
The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem
The Pleasure of My Company by Steve [...]

Astonishing X-Men

Just a quick post today as I have to go plan my wife’s birthday.
I picked up the first trade collection of Astonishing X-Men, with art by John Cassaday, and story by Joss Whedon, and I’ll tell you, it’s been the most fun I’ve had reading a super-hero comic in years.
Not that I have ever had [...]

Travels with Charley

I have been meaning to write more about Travels With Charley ever since I finished reading it.
It has been a very long time since I have found a book so quotable, or so beautiful. Steinbeck’s descriptions are poignant and real without being over-the-top or cliche. More than that, however, are his observations on [...]

Another Quick Book Post

Last night I finally got my copy of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City: Local Heroes and it was definitely worth the wait. 
This series of graphic novels is a brilliant post-modern look at superheroes and how interactions with ordinary citizens might happen were they real.  This book is a collection of un-related stories all set in [...]

Current Reads

I haven’t done a reading post in a while and I still have to go put in today’s studying, so here is a quick list of what is presently on my radar:

Getting Stoned with Savages by J. Maraten Troost – Troost’s first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals was enormously funny and easy and entertaining [...]

Starship Troopers

I spent the afternoon reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a book I had never gotten around to reading even though I have been a Heinlein fan for many years. Now, I am also a fan of the 1997 movie, Starship Troopers. I even like the animated Starship Troopers.
I just had not, [...]

Continuing Edjamakation

Four of my friends are currently back in school, through various ways and means, and studying various things.  One is studying the very practical field of accounting, another is working on a masters in applied economics, one is studying something with computers and information architecture, and one is studying applied linguistics.  Another friend recently graduated [...]

Things Have Changed

Yesterday, I read through a copy of Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More” as it had been loaned to me by a good friend and it seemed like it would be a good, light read after having slogged through “Hawaii” previously.
The stories are light and fun and written in the [...]

Michener’s Hawaii Redux

Around 2:30 last night, I was finally able to close the back cover of the book, having completed all 1130 pages in 5 days, and my head was spinning around two thoughts:
First, what an amazing novel.  There are a few places where I felt the author was preaching a bit, and some of the repetition [...]

Stoked

A few years ago, when buying a copy of Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” for myself, I decided, on a whim to order the Japanese translation at the same time.  When that magical little Amazon box came, I opened it up and gave the Japanese copy to my wife.  We read the book at the same time, [...]

Michener’s Hawaii

My father and I have always gotten along reasonably well, given that we are a father and son product of the eightes and nineties, meaning that he was a working Dad and I put up with it and I was a rebellious teen and he humored me, but our tastes have never quite lined up.
We [...]

Won't Get Phuled Again

Recently, I have mentioned some new series that I have been enjoying; it has been really gratifying to get the e-mails from a few of you telling me that you plan to try the ones I have been recommending.
But this post is not about those series.
Unfortunately, this post is about the opposite.  This post is [...]

Belle de Jour

This post deals with sex and erotica. If you are offended and / or weirded out by reading about such things, you may want to click away and come back tomorrow, when I plan to have a nice, safe, minor-level rant about movies. But, for now, for today, I’m writing about sex. [...]

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Cory Doctorow is one of those people you can’t help but hear about if you spend as much time on the web as I do.  He’s a copyright activist and lecturer as well as being one of the co-editors of boing boing.  And he’s a science fiction writer.
Mr. Docotorow has a very interesting premise behind [...]

Blame Harry Dresden

Seriously. I wanted to put up a lot of unique, thought-provoking, discussion causing posts, really, I did. But then I got the next book in the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher and everything else got put on hold.
I’ve briefly mentioned these books before, here, and here, but I thought I’d take a [...]

Temeraire

Well, it's finally happened. For the first time since I was fourteen, I bought a book with a dragon on the cover.
Based on a recommendation from the Dragon Page: Cover to Cover, I ordered a copy of Naomi Novik's "His Majesty's Dragon". I sat down with it last night and finished it [...]

Serialized

I keep a shelf in my bedroom with all the books I own that I haven't actually gotten around to reading just yet.  At the moment, there are seven books with bookmarks in them and another dozen or so that I haven't started reading yet.
Usually, when I get new books, they just go to the [...]

Mucho Mojo

Joe R. Lansdale's Mucho Mojo came recommended from a good friend, saying that the central protaganists' relationship mirrored ours to some extent.
He's got a point. The two protaganists are friends who have obviously been through a lot together and even because of each other, yet constantly take snipes at each other. They even [...]

Scar Tissue

 
I stayed up all night reading Anthony Kiedis' Scar Tissue, an autobiography much more about one man’s coming to terms with his addictions than it is a book of being a rock and roll frontman.
The story is written in an engaging, conversational style, leaving the reader feel that a friend is telling them the story [...]

The Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, was an incredibly fascinating read. Gladwell proposes that fads and trends are epidemic in nature and can be identified, launched, and even prevented.
The book is organized in classic style – section one deals with defining the Tipping Point and it’s [...]

Blogging the Bible

Occasionally, an internet meme will come around and catch me completely off-guard.
I have been reading Will Shetterly's re-write of the Bible at fatbible.blogspot.com since he began writing it in October of last year.  I have found it to be a very interesting way to look at the Good Book; a book I haven't sat down [...]

Shopgirl

A couple of months ago, I watched the movie Shopgirl, starring Steve Martin and Claire Danes. It was a good movie, slow and subtle and interesting, so I picked up the book to read on the plane during my last trip back to the States.
The book, written by Steve Martin, was a delight.  It is [...]

Pandora’s Star

Pandora's Star has kept me up reading far too late for the past several nights.  It's a fantastic book; it's got action, intrigue, politics, personal stories, and space battles all wrapped up in a neat, little sci-fi package.  Well, not little.  The paperback clocks in a just under 1,000 pages….
Peter J. Hamilton writes really good [...]

eBook

Currently, sitting in several boxes, in several locations, are the approximately 300 books that I just do not want to give up. This is a problem. We have a good sized apartment, but, nothing compared to a house or, well, really the U.S. style apartments I was used to before coming to Japan. [...]

The Book of Three

Everybody has their first fantasy series.  The one that stuck in their head.  The one that became more real than the walls of their bedroom.  The one whose characters became life-long friends, often quoted and  remembered.  And of course, two of the classic series, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, have [...]

Quick Book Review

I stayed up way past my bedtime last night reading Old Man’s War by John Scalzi.  What an incredible book.  Highly recommended.  It’s available on his website or through Amazon.  Be warned though, it contains a fair amount of coarse language and a lot of violence.  And a bit of sex, but nothing too graphic.
That [...]

Brainfried

My brain has gone quiet on me. I’ve been pushing myself further and faster in the pool, as well as studying harder and harder, and then planning lessons well in advance to boot. As a result, I sat down with my sketchpad this morning and got nothing. Not a single idea. [...]