I want to preface this review by saying that this is a novel that was translated from its original French. I wasn’t aware of that when I picked it up, and that wouldn’t have affected whether or not I read it, but I feel like I need to note this. I think this fact has […]
Read moreI 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, and I just don’t feel like this was one of the better ones. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t stand out either. Admittedly, I have […]
Read moreZombie 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 any more than spatter-fests? Mira Grant–a pseudonym of Seanan McGuire–has transcended the normal tropes to write Feed, a socio-political story about a world after a […]
Read moreI have to wonder if people who were not old enough to remember 9/11 can have any concept of what it felt like to live through that day. I am extraordinarily lucky that I was not personally touched by the events of that day, and yet I doubt that anybody in America can truly say […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Jack Holloway works alone, for reasons he doesn’t care to talk about. Hundreds of miles from ZaraCorp’s headquarters on planet, 178 light-years from the corporation’s headquarters on Earth, Jack is content as an independent contractor, prospecting and surveying at his own pace. As for his past, that’s not up for discussion. Then, in the wake […]
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“Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as […]
Read more“We are awfully lucky to be here–and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of our appears to be quite an achievement. As human we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it […]
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