For those of you who don't know what BayCon is, it's a sci-fi fantasy convention held in the San Francisco Bay Area that is mainly focused on writing and writers. There's also gaming and other fun things, but the panels tend to center on more literary topics. Every year, they have a writer Guest of Honor, and this year it was David Brin.

Full disclosure: I was not at BayCon this year, and in fact haven't been for the past couple of years. The con had a change of venue, and I really didn't like where they ended up. So, I can't speak from first-hand experience about what happened this weekend, but ...
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TNT's limited series The Alienist, based on the book of the same name by Caleb Carr, follows three main characters: Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, our titular alienist, who seeks to understand the minds of those afflicted with mental illness; John Moore, an illustrator for the New York Times, who assists Kreizler by lending his eyes and his pen to the investigation; and Sarah Howard, longtime acquaintance of Moore and the first woman to be employed in any capacity with the New York Police Department. The show takes viewers on a tour of 1896 New York's seamy underside of boy prostitution and police corruption as Kreizler and his allies race to catch a serial killer. The first ...
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Today I received a book that I ordered from Amazon that will no doubt feed my love of words. It's called Dictionary of Word Origins, and it's exactly what it sounds like. It doesn't give definitions of words, but instead traces how they came to be in the form that they're in today, and how their definitions changed over time. I expect that this is a book that I'll dip into randomly, just to partake of the many tidbits inside. For example, the word "hermit" comes from the Greek word for "solitary", and it migrated to English via medieval Latin and old French.

While this particular bit of info is a little ...
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Zombie novels have show up on bookshelves more and more lately. They’ve even invaded the classics, as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies can attest. But how often are these tales ...
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I feel like I'm one of the very few people who read this book and didn't feel the urge to rave about it. I read a lot of hiking memoirs, ...
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