O-Dark-Thirty

Look at that Amazon ad in the upper right corner! "Fuzzed" out the page, but otherwise I didn't edit it. I checked the news on CNN and realized that the advertisement in the upper right of the page is MY book! Organize Your Kindle Book Title in Excel ! Right on the front page! How cool is that? So I captured it for this post. Okay, I realize that CNN is targeting me and nobody else will see the ad, but ... My book on CNN - makes me smile, even if it is just an illusion. It is a great book. Just the few tricks on using Excel to Transform data are worth the price.

The Lions of Al-Rassan by G.G. Kay is a complicated tale. It doesn't have the sweeping scope of the popular Game of Thrones series but the world of Al-Rassan is comfortably familiar, based as it is on the Iberian peninsula of our own world (well, at least somewhat). The story is as compelling as Martin's series, though, and Mr. Kay's characters are as fully developed as any in the genre. That doesn't answer your main question, though. Should you buy this book? Tough question, and probably a bit hard to answer. Do you like compelling characters? This book has them. Not all the characters were three-dimensional, but the ones who should be were. By the end of the story I actually had tears in my eyes; that might have been allergies, but I don't think so. Do you like heroes? Villains? Heretics? Zealots? Oh, yeah. You can find them here and you won't be disappointed in them. How about intrigue? This book has subtle plots within plots,...

There's been a lot of talk about the views of the writer, Orson Scott Card, author Ender's Game. Some people won't see the movie of his views. That's entirely their right, but personally I have a different opinion. What a load of crap. I never agreed with the socialist views of Jack London and I still love his stories. Ender's Game is a great book. I just read it again to make sure it was as good as my twenty-plus years of memory told me. It is a great read, probably one of the majestic tomes of science fiction. Our society screams tolerance. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you truly believe in tolerance, then you also truly believe the intolerant have the right to feel that way. Let it go and find your own freedom. The lessons you take from the book will depend on who you are and might change in different phases of your life. That's okay and one of the things that makes Ender's Game a great read. The book doesn't s...

I just finished reading the first eight books in the Star Force Series by B. V. Larson at Amazon. Okay, so far these are the only available books in the series, but it is clear from the end of the eighth volume that Larson plans to write more. There's this one little thing he hints at during that last book … The Star Force books are not Heinlein and I have to think that anyone who makes that comparison is not really thinking about it. Larson's books are fast-paced and full of action. Honestly, I don't think you can go three pages without something blowing up - and that's the kind of book it is. These books are fun, pretty quick to read and full of action. These are what I consider popcorn books - I'll read them, but they don't change my life or make me think of the world differently. Some of the reviewers say the characters are pretty two-dimensional, and I heartily agree with that assessment. That doesn't automatically make a book good or bad, in...

I just finished reading Wil Wheaton's newest book, Just A Geek and I liked it, so I added his website to my list of favorite blogs. I don't always appreciate his language, but I'm more sensitive to foul language than he is. It's probably a recovery thing, but that's another story. Wil's book is really a compilation of his blog posts with some linking discourse added in. I don't mind that style, so it worked for me. He's entertaining, and insightful (at times), though you have to get a little bit past his "pity me" writing. In all fairness, that's really what the book is about - his journey from self-pity to self-actualization and it was easy to read. It's a good look at who Wil Wheaton is, and those stories are (mostly) refreshing. It isn't that long a read, not much longer than my book  My Mother-in-law Misadventures   and is in the same sort of writing style (Cory Doctorow, actually, ha!). Hmmm. Maybe Wil would like my book ...

I'm a fan of the Humble Bumble community. Wait, I mean HumbleBundle . Sorry about that. The business model is odd but attractive. They advertise that you pay what you want for the bundle, though there is a minimum price (good call, folks). If you pay more than the average payment amount you get a bonus. That's clever, because over time the average keeps going up since people want the bonus material. I like the model. I'm not extravagant, so I usually bid just a bit more than the average price to get the bonus. (See, that raises the average. Escalation archetype !) The Humble Bundle people put out loads of good stuff. I started buying software bundles from them a few years ago and still do occasionally. They've branched into books, too and I'm a fan of that. I don't know if they are related, but there is also a new kid in town - StoryBundle . Since I don't go to the same website, I suspect they aren't related, so it was a little bit of a mind-tri...

I like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (If I say I like a writer, that doesn't mean I like the person. It might, if I know the writer, but unless I specify, I mean that I like his/her writing and what he/she writes. Also, I use the masculine form of the third person pronoun as the generic.) I liked his work when I first read it in High School, and learned to love the way he handles language when I was at CMU and my roommate N would sit in the hall and read Vonnegut. I also learned to like mushrooms on pizza while I was there, so some good things do come out of college. I've not found a writer that I like so much in a lot of decades, so Vonnegut's death in April, 2007 was a sad time. (I thought the same thing as when David Gemmell died - we will never see such stories from them again.) So I captured the entire text of Harrison Bergeron and put it into the Notes of my Outlook so I could read it occasionally. The formatting isn't good, but the story is still one of my favorites ...