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June in Review
Books Acquired: Slam by Nick Hornby Songbook by Nick Hornby Saga, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples Saga, Volume 3 by Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples The Unwritten, Vol. 6: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words by Mike Carey, Peter Gross Books Read: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett The Time Machine by H.G. Wells It’s been another slow reading month. I got a little distracted by video games, to be honest. Steam had one of their big sales, and while I didn’t really buy much, the talk around it put me in the gaming mood I suppose. I also wasn’t really feeling my current audio book,…
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Saga, Volume 1
Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan Illustrated By: Fiona Staples Published: 2012 Publisher: Image Comics Collects: issues #1 – #6 This is a space fantasy, I guess, which is actually a fairly unique genre for me. I’m not sure I’ve read much that involves space travel, magic, aliens, and swordplay. I guess it’s a little Star Wars in that regard, but more on the fantasy side. It’s also a little Romeo and Juliet, having two star-crossed lovers from opposing races in a long-running war. She was a jail warden and he was a prisoner, but now they have a newborn together and are trying to avoid the armies of…
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The Serpent of Venice: A Novel
The Serpent of Venice: A Novel by Christopher Moore Published: 2014 This is the sequel to Moore’s 2009 novel Fool, but only loosely so. The jester Pocket, with his monkey Jeff and his virile giant of an apprentice Drool, land in Venice on a mission for his queen. He is to try and stop the merchants of the city from orchestrating a new crusade in an attempt to profit from it. The mission goes wrong almost immediately, and it then turns into a tale of revenge and intrigue. Fool was a comedic retelling of King Lear, and this novel takes on The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Poe’s The Cask…
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The Classics Club – Year Two
The anniversary of my signing on to The Classics Club flew past without my noticing a couple months back. I am now twenty-three books into my fifty book goal and there’s three years left, so that should be no problem at all. The list so far: The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues by Plato (Sometime BC) Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (1623) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876) Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883) King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard(1885) The Strange Case…
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May in Review
Books Acquired: The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell The Magicians by Lev Grossman A Cook’s Tour – In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin Rebus’s Scotland by Ian Rankin The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret…
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Knots and Crosses (Inspector Rebus, #1)
Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin Published: 1987 Ian Rankin is one of those authors that I’ve always known about but never had any desire to read. It’s too overwhelming to start on something that’s already nineteen novels in, and it’s hard not to see the writing as a case of quantity over quality when confronted with a back catalogue of that size. I should know, being a fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (forty books in and still going strong), that this line of thinking is complete nonsense, but that’s what comes to mind. I don’t think it helps that these books fall into the crime genre, which can…
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Arthur Conan Doyle Interview
Arthur Conan Doyle was a very interesting man. He’s best known for writing what may be the most logic-driven character to ever exist, Sherlock Holmes, in stories which time after time proved the seemingly mystical to have rational causes. While doing so, he also spent most of his life investigating and publicly supporting spiritualism, often famously promoting acts that were later debunked. This is an interview that was posted on Reddit earlier in the week in which he explains how he decided to approach writing the Sherlock Holmes stories. He’s clearly fed up with the character and is much more interested in his spiritual investigations. I don’t know if there…
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Book Banning Attempt
This year my old high school distict has had a bit of publicized controversy. A man named Dean Audet petitioned to have The Perks of Being A Wallflower banned. “Last time I checked it is illegal to distribute pornography to minors,” said Audet, who objects to sections that he says include young people having sex, graphic instructions on how to masturbate and child molestation. He has sass, I’ll give him that. Get a class full of teenagers, tell them that somewhere in the story there are graphic instructions on how to masturbate, and watch the percentage of students completing the book skyrocket. Anything that gets kids reading is a good…
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The Martian
The Martian by Andy Weir Published: 2011 Narrated by: R. C. Bray On a manned mission to Mars, a NASA crew left their mechanical engineer for dead on the planet’s surface as they lifted off to return home. Now Mark Watney must find a way to survive with limited supplies, and broken equipment, until he can find a way back to Earth, where no one realizes he’s alive. Commander Lewis was in charge. I was just one of her crew. Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be “in command” of the mission if I were the only remaining person. What do you…
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Annual Book Sale Haul
A local newspaper here organizes a huge annual book sale, which happened this past weekend, and it’s always one of my favourite events of the year. Which is a little sad, but let’s not dwell on that. All of the books are donated, and the proceeds go to local literary programs, so it’s a good excuse to buy way too many books without any guilt. It’s $1 for a trade paperback, $2 for a larger paperback, and $3 for a hardcover. Over 500,000 books were donated this year, and they made $158,150 ($2,000,000 since first starting the sale seventeen years ago). It’s a two-day long event, and until mid-afternoon there’s…