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 Wounded Land

When the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant came out, I had already read the first Chronicles at least twice.   I read The Wounded Land greedily and found it to be just as compelling as the first books.  It was kind of tough having to wait years between books. The Wounded Land starts off with our real hero, Linden Avery.  A doctor who has a lot of secrets and has burdens laid on top of her from the moment she arrives in town.  The first three chapters or so take place in the real world and the Second Chronicles breaks the tradition…

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Food Rules by Michael Pollan

One of the first books that really got me thinking about what I eat and how I eat it was Micahel Pollan’s In Defense of Food.  His mantra for this book was simple-Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.  Michael doesn’t care about Carbs or Fats-he cares about the chemical and the artificial hiding in plain sight pretending to be food.  The villain in his stories is The Western Diet-lots of processed food, lots of the holy trinity of fat, salt, and sugar, and not too many vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Food Rules contain a list of 64 guidelines…

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Against All Things Ending

Stephen R Donaldson writes about people you don’t like doing things you don’t understand.  But I still have a soft spot for him.  Among the first books I discovered on my own were the three books of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever.  These were kind of a cross between Alice in Wonderland, Lord of The Rings, and Dune, with a touch of The Wizard of Oz tossed in for good measure.  I loved these stories. The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were a little less cheery than the first, and the first were about as cheery as a…

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