Under The Dome
Cloud AtlasI highly recommend Dreamhost.
Under the Dome by Stephen King; narrated by Raul Esparza What would happen in a little Maine town if it were suddenly cut off from the outside world by an impenetrable invisible barrier, a dome stretching across the town and trapping the residents inside? Things would devolve pretty quickly, apparently. A few thoughts: I’ve always [… Read More]
The Mephisto Club by Tess Gerritsen Rizzoli and Isles are back in their sixth adventure, facing off against a criminal who desecrates the corpses of his victims with occult symbols and strange rituals. And if that weren’t enough to deal with, they find themselves haunted by an elite club of crime-solving amateurs who’re convinced that [… Read More]
Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling Sterling’s novel follows a single mover-shaker through the turbulent politics and world of the far future human panoply spread across the solar system. Over the course of about 180 years, we see the way humankind expands, the whole breadth of people descended from Earth humans. It’s a good novel, with complicated [… Read More]
Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson It’s a little disconcerting how close Ronson gets to very scary people in this book. But his point, I think, is that even the very scary people are just people. Them details Ronson’s journey into the late 1990s and early 2000s subculture of conspiracy theorists, people who believe [… Read More]
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, narrated by Justine Eyre Beukes’ startling novel imagines a world where murder causes a kind of cosmic guilt that spawns an animal companion which the guilty must then tend on pain of his or her own peril. A dead companion animal causes a whirlwind of danger not unlike the ghosts [… Read More]
The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas When graduate student Ariel Manto finds a copy of the legendary and accursed The End of Mr. Y in a used bookshop, she spends her rent money to buy it. It isn’t long before she’s caught up in the mysterious secret the book holds to life, the [… Read More]
A rather disappointing journey into comics this month, I must say. Critical Millennium: The Dark Frontier by Andrew E. C. Gaska and Daniel DussaultCritical Millennium is a strange mix of juvenile comics tropes (particularly regarding the art used to depict women in the book) and a proposal about how we might end up heading into [… Read More]
The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndam Another winner from British SF master John Wyndam. The Kraken Wakes imagines an invasion of the Deep parts of our ocean by a malevolent force from the outer solar system (Neptune? Jupiter? I can’t remember). After they settle in and start mucking around down there, they show that they [… Read More]
Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi We read this for my science-fiction book club this month. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War continues the tradition of adventure space war novels in line with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Haaldeman’s Forever War, and Deitz’s The Legion. Humankind needs defending, and our main character will be launched into space to do [… Read More]
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre, narrated by John Lee Ben Macintyre has a strong sense for storytelling, crafting a tale full of vital details that bring it to life while providing the reader a strong sense of the history [… Read More]
Gun Machine by Warren Ellis Ellis’ latest novel follows the investigation of a burned out homicide detective in New York who accidentally uncovers an elaborately-built cache of guns in a tenement apartment. His life gets much more complicated when it turns out that every one of the dozens of guns he found have been used [… Read More]
Zombie, Illinois by Scott Kenemore When the zombie apocalypse starts in the second city, it’s not just corpses that crawl out of the ground, but the secrets they keep. This book serves as a kind of partner for his earlier novel, Zombie, Ohio, in that the former was about rural life during the apocalypse and [… Read More]
Even though I stopped my regular blogging in mid-October, I didn’t stop reading. I certainly don’t have time to go back and write reviews of all the stuff I read, but I do like to keep track and I know you need to know what I’ve been reading. So here are the last of the [… Read More]
Even though I stopped my regular blogging in mid-October, I didn’t stop reading. I certainly don’t have time to go back and write reviews of all the stuff I read, but I do like to keep track and I know you need to know what I’ve been reading. So here are some more books I [… Read More]
Even though I stopped my regular blogging in mid-October, I didn’t stop reading. I certainly don’t have time to go back and write reviews of all the stuff I read, but I do like to keep track and I know you need to know what I’ve been reading. So here are some more books I [… Read More]