The new President of the United States, Stephen Blades, gets the traditional "welcome to the job" letter from the outgoing POTUS, and while he expects the usual words of encouragement and advice that one president gives to another, he gets something entirely different: aliens are out there in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter …
Month: May 2019
Where I’m Calling From
Over on “Required Reading …” I posted a review of a recently read book that was on my reading pile for this project and I thought I would cross-post here.
Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?
Donate.
While I do enjoy reading short stories, I’m not the biggest fan of making my way through short story collections, especially those by the same author. I can imagine that it’s because I’m so used to reading novels that when I go from story to story, I expect the continuity that comes with going from chapter to chapter of a novel. So I guess that’s why it took me the better part of three years to read this collection of stories by Raymond Carver.
This book, which is an anthology of his short stories, is a holdover from college, a purchase required by a professor in my advanced fiction writing class. I can’t remember reading beyond just a couple of the stories back in the late Nineties, but I did remember that my professor was trying to use Carver as an example of a writer who could fully develop very…
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This American Life
A couple of weeks ago, I read a piece in the Washington Post where the writer lamented how podcasts have taken over our ears and that blah blah blah problems for people without actual problems. Seriously. It's one of those cranky white male laments of how "podcasts are taking over something something something" and how …
The Freedom is Tyranny of the To Do List
So it's late April-early May of 1997 and I'm sitting my dorm room working on yet another take-home final exam and out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, one of my roommates walks in and asks, "How are you going to forget to take your finals?" I take a minute to turn my attention away …
Shrill
For episode 10 of Required Reading, Stella and I covered biography, autobiography, and memoir as a genre. Had I read Lindy West's Shrill back then, I would have heartily recommended it on that episode. If you're not familiar with Lindy West, she is a writer who was a longtime columnist for Jezebel and currently contributes …
Secret Origins #15, 18
My steady look at Secret Origins continues--though I have to admit here that I'm not picking one up the minute I put another one down and take breaks or read something else between them--and here we have newer, updated origins for characters that I, at best, was only ever marginally interested in: The Spectre, Deadman, …
Thor by Walt Simonson vols 1 and 2
About a year ago, Amazon was having one of those massive Kindle graphic novel sales that was all Marvel books (it may have been because Infinity War was coming out) and I think I bought what had to be a couple of hundred dollars' worth of digital trade paperbacks for $.99-$2.99. Among them were the …
Personal Archaeology 3: From the Nosebleeds
There were times when I felt the genius flowing from my finger tips; there were times when typing felt like I was straining a wrench against a very tight bolt. But no matter how easy or hard it was, I managed to make my deadline every week for three and a half years, until twenty …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 3: From the Nosebleeds
What’s On My iPod?
I've been meaning to review podcasts here since it's one of my four categories, but unlike, say, books or back issues that I'm reading or movies I'm watching, these aren't pieces of physical media and a number of them are ongoing in the same way a television show would be, but a number of podcasts …
Secret Origins #17
In this issue, Gerry Conway, Carmine Infantino, and Tony DeZuniga take on an updated origin for Adam Strange while Roy Thomas, E. Nelson Bridwell, Howard Simpson, and Bob Lewis give us the new origin of Dr. Occult. It's the first pairing that I was a little wary of, considering that up to this point, Thomas …
The Uncollecting 