It’s not my birthday yet, but we celebrated it today. My mom and dad got me this porch bench. I’ve been meaning to get one ever since I moved in here, I just kept putting it off. For a while, I did have an old wooden bench there, but that one wasn’t meant to be outside and eventually it started rotting. This one is steel, it also won’t hold water, so I think it’ll last a long time.
I really enjoyed this book. Gustav Gloom and the People Taker is the first of a series by Adam-Troy Castro.
Gustav is thought to be the saddest boy in the world. He lives in a dark house and has only shadows to keep him company, at least until the What family moves into the house across the street.
It’s an adventure that takes place in a big, scary house where nothing makes sense at all. I laughed a lot while reading this book. I’d say the Gallery of Awkward Statues was my favorite chapter.
I just sold my story “The Assassination of Stonewall Jackson” to Fantasy Short Stories. At this time, there is no concrete publishing date, but the editor hopes to have it out around May.
I’m going through my to-read list, and looking up the titles on Amazon. It looks like some of these books are not available in Kindle or any other ebook format.
Reading paperbacks and hardcovers and whatever else comes out in print, that has always been hard for me. Even when I was kid. I would strain my eyes when reading books. I probably would have read more if that wasn’t the case.
At some point, I started using magnifying glasses and that made reading easier, but it’s still a pain holding a magnifying glass while reading a book. It’s hard to get comfortable that way. I read George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords with a magnifying glass and that’s a huge book.
Then I discovered ebooks and my reading really picked up. With ebooks, I can resize the font and make it clearer. I usually read Kindles, but I’m open to other ebook formats.
As much as I want to read one book or another, if it’s only available in print, I’m not likely to buy it, unless it becomes available in an ebook format. There are still some publishers that don’t release titles in ebook formats and I really wish they would. I feel like I’m missing out on some books, but I don’t want to struggle to read them.
At least the Pistons didn’t break my heart tonight. They were around twenty points behind until sometime in the third quarter, when they blew past the Timberwolves. Final score, Detroit 131 – Minnesota 114.
In my review of Sly Mongoose, I said “I’m guessing Buckell had a better grasp on the craft, or at least the series, when he went to work on Sly Mongoose.” But now that I think about it, that’s probably not it. It’s probably not so simple to pinpoint what it was that made Sly Mongoose come out so well. Sometimes the writer just does better than he does other times and sometimes one story works better for the reader than another story. It could be either and it could be both.
Well, I just finished The Apocalypse Ocean. I feel The Apocalypse Ocean and Sly Mongoose weigh pretty even on my scale of what’s good and what’s great.
The Apocalypse Ocean is the fourth book of Tobias S. Buckell‘s Xenowealth series.
The Doaq is terrorizing Placa del Fuego. Kay, the leader of a criminal organization, wants the Doaq gone because its undermining her power. But the Doaq is a powerful creature with a wormhole for a mouth and even Pepper has to run from it.
Far as I can tell, The Apocalypse Ocean is the last of the Xenowealth novels and I don’t know if Buckell plans to continue the series. I know there is a collection of short stories set in Xenowealth. I’ll probably pick that up if I start missing Xenowealth too much.
I think Xenowealth is the first series I ever finished. I’ve been reading books my whole life, but I’m not sure that I ever got to the end of any multiple book series. At least I can’t recall any that I have finished. I read a few books of Stephen King’s Dark Tower. The last Ice & Fire book I finished was A Feast for Crows. I read the first two Harry Potter books.
Nope, I don’t think there’s any other series that I’ve finished.
I’d been dropping change into this house-shaped coin bank for years. Today I got it all out and put it in rolls, because it’s all going into a savings account. The coin bank yeilded a lot more than I expected.
Oher news: I’m watching Gran Torino and making spaghetti.