Category: reading

  • Half-penny Thoughts — 27oct25

    As I am reading The Chronicles of the Black Company, a blurb on the back struck me as being something of an important statement when it comes to stories and how they are written.

    “With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.” [emphasis mine]

    – Steven Erikson, author of the series: Malazan Book of the Fallen.

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  • Bookhaunting and a little flirter

    Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

    Yesterday, I took the twins out shopping for used books. Even if they don’t find something that captures their fancy, they still enjoy the act of seeking for hidden treasures. And, while I try to keep engaged with these young tween women, there are very few activities that we can agree on being exclusively in the realm of “fun” to do together. Treasure hunting for books is one of them.

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  • Reads — “Flood” by Stephen Baxter

    I’m in the home stretch on this hard science-fiction novel of the peri-apocalypse and I think the biggest takeaway so far is…

    I’m not the target audience for science-fiction novels of the peri-apocalypse, hard science or otherwise.

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  • Reading progress — 19oct25

    Since deciding to take up reading at the end of August whenever I feel compelled to scroll on the internet, pick up a video game for distraction purposes, or give in to the statement, “I’m bored”, I’ve managed to knock out twelve books which amounts to what is just shy of 5000 pages, by Goodreads’ account. That includes an audiobook that I finished during that time (I include audiobooks as “reading”, because I largely listen to them while driving, and this one would only contribute about 300 pages to my total).

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  • The Windup Girl

    I’m just finishing up a “biopunk” dystopian bit of scifi, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. I’ve been meaning to get around to reading it for several years now under the false premise that I believed it to be something more steampunk in flavor. I keep thinking that steampunk as a subgenre really holds a lot of promise, but I must keep finding the clinkers to read, or that thinking is flawed in some way. I’ve never found a steampunk novel that has actually held up to that promise, which makes me slightly sad.

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