Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

If you like really long books… Middlegame took a few chapters for me to get into. I listened to the audio-book and Amber Benson went a little over the top a few times for me. She tried a little too hard to give the bad guys really bad voices and she laid the Boston accent of one of the heroes on a little thick. Still, she did a pretty good job and I really enjoyed this fantasy book set in the real -such as it is- world. We start off with an Alchemist creating some kind of super golem to…

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Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much. Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own,  but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today. Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like…

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The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)

Katie Mack is a theoretical cosmologist and Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. She’s also a fan of Science Fiction and popular culture. She does a great job of covering the various ways that our Universe, as we understand it at the moment, could come to an end in a few billion or trillion years. Or in the next few minutes. She has a friendly way of talking about the most esoteric and abstract concepts. I was reminded of Sheldon teaching Penny about physics by starting with ancient Greece on a warm Summer evening. We all know a bit…

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Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter)

Number 27 in the long history of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. Anita Blake lives in a vast and complex universe and you can never be sure what you’ll find between the covers. Some are thinly disguised porn, some are slasher films, some are masterclasses on polygyny, and some are rather dry textbooks on the legal system of this alternate reality. In the beginning we had a handful of important characters, but the cast has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Half a dozen or so people make cameos in Sucker Punch and I have no idea who the hell…

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The Outcasts of Time By Ian Mortimer

The Outcasts of Time starts off in the The Reign of King Edward III. Our heroes speak of events by the year of the King’s rule, since the way we count years had not yet been invented. We follow two brothers as they wander around a Plague infected world. Death is all around them. Bodies lay where they have fallen in the street, people hang themselves in despair, great pits are filled with dead bodies. In short order, the brothers have the Plague themselves and death is nigh. Then our hero hears a voice. It tells him to go to…

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The Outsider by Stephen King

The Outsider tells the story of a small town Sheriff trying to solve an impossible murder. The problem is that he knows who the killer is, only the killer has an airtight alibi. The first part of the book spends a lot of time with the man arrested and the man who arrested him. Things are not as clear cut as they at first appear. The monster the Sheriff has to deal with is not the normal human variety, but something different. There is death and violence and things that go bump in the night. Like all Stephen King books,…

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Calypso by David Sedaris

Listening to David Sedaris’s Calypso a few days after Anthony Bourdain’s suicide is a bit jarring.  David talks about his sister’s suicide with the same cold disinterest that he talks about everything else in this small collection of personal essays. His sister’s problems are on a par with bickering with his husband, wasting money on odd clothes in Japan, and picking up trash as he walks around the English countryside. This is nothing new, David has always been a narcissistic sociopath. His lack of empathy just seemed to stand out a little clearer for me this time around. I had…

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Noir by Christoper Moore

I’m a fan of audiobooks, since I tend to do a lot of driving for work of one kind or another. So I got the audiobook version of Christopher Moore’s Noir. The reader, Johnny Heller, takes to the idea of a Noir novel with some gusto. He swings wildly from Edward G Robinson to JFK to FDR and once or twice meanders into Droopy the Dog and other cartoonish voices. For me, at least, a little of this goes a long way. I found myself lost more than once amid the voices that sounded a little too much alike a…

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“We’re all one head injury away from being someone else.” -quote from a book about the brain I have forget all of but this line. I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about thirty years ago. At about the same time I read If You Meet The Buddha On the Road Kill Him. Another very interesting book. I remember enjoying Zen and it’s tale of a madman traveling around the Northwest with his son riding along behind him on his trusty motorcycle. I mainly remembered a scene near the start of the book about a clumsy mechanic…

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The Collapsing Empire

The Collapsing Empire tells the story of a handful of people living in the far flung future. Humans are scattered around the galaxy or the universe or something. Lots of random settlements, two of which we see, are connected by a McGuffin bit of sci-fi called The Flow.  This is much like a Stargate system or a series of Portkeys or Jump Gates or a Warp Field or any other made up means of transport over vast distances you have ever seen. Like these other constructs, the tech doesn’t really matter. So it’s kind of odd when John puts a…

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