On The Shelf, pt. 2

Been getting a lot more reading done lately, but not nearly enough. There’s just too much good stuff out there. In a way, I’m glad the summer TV season wasn’t that compelling, and the fall isn’t looking much better. I have enough to do without a full TiVo sitting alone and unloved in the living [...]

Cheap Is The New Expensive

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing has a great mini-review of a new book I now want to pick up: Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.
Cheapness, argues Shell, has ruined just about everything. Main streets, with knowledgeable clerks and friendly service, have been decimated by discount stores like Wal-Mart staffed with ignorant employees who don’t [...]

A Map of Thomas Pynchon’s Los Angeles

Thomas Pynchon — to whom I am very, very distantly related by marriage, which is one of the many fantastic benefits I owe to my endlessly wonderful wife — lived in Los Angeles while he was writing Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mark Horowitz of Wired argues that he’s the city’s greatest writer. That’s a little unfair, [...]

Harry Potter: ‘Deathly Hollow’

My science fiction twin, Kyle Smith, takes down Harry Potter in the pages of the New York Post. Smith says Potter is the perfect hero for Gen Y — dull, lazy, and entitled.
Harry, like many of his generation, is the Cosseted One from an early age. He’s told that he’s special, that he’s got awesome [...]

Vampirism Goes Viral

There are a few truths in this world. Nobody likes to pay taxes. Never get into a land war in Asia. And of course, vampires just will not die.
Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan have just released their entry into the genre, a novel titled The Strain. It’s about vampirism going viral, and the chaos [...]

Mixed Media

Because my daughter and wife are wonderful, I’ve had time to actually catch up on the new TV season, as well as read a few books, and see a few movies.
The rant about movies I’ll save for later, but the new books and TV shows deserve a couple of comments.
First, the books:
Supreme Courtship by Christopher [...]

Books of ‘07

One caveat: not all of these books came out in 2007; some were released in 2006, and I just got around to them. And this list is by no means a “best of” everything that was published this year — I haven’t read most of the critics’ picks, or even everything I’ve wanted to read [...]

What Are You Reading?

Crap, it’s October already. What’s on the shelf this month, and what have you just finished?
Just finished:

Making Money, another book in the excellent and hilarious Discworld series by Terry Pratchett
Not That You Asked, Steve Almond
No Dominion, Charlie Huston
Rant, Chuck Palahniuk. Although, really more abandoned than finished. Just didn’t hook me the way some of his [...]