Well, I started the year off with a whimper. This book was glowingly recommended to me by a good friend who has led me in the past to some good stuff, so I jumped on it. I was disappointed, but the let-down was actually a little freeing, because I had just started another book she recommended, and my disappointment in Taking What I Like allowed me to give myself permission to put the other one down.* This is a book of short stories tied together […]
Just a Spoon Full of C12H22O11
SciFan Magazine, Dayne Edmondson, Richard M. Mulder, and Patrick Hodges, Editors (2017) This anthology is a little different than most. Not only does it include science fiction and fantasy short stories, but it also contains excerpts from new science fiction and fantasy novels. It’s an interesting way to read a bit of a novel and see if you like it or not. Clever. I’ve marked the excerpts with an asterisk. Across the St. Lawrence: A Tale of the Pendragon Empire by Teel James Glenn – […]
Challenging isn’t always satisfying…
I’ll admit, I mainly sought out and purchased this book because of the praise for The Arrival (which I just saw last night and was fantastic!) and wanted to know what all the fuss was about before seeing the movie. The Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of ten short stories by Ted Chaing. Instead of commenting on each story individually, I’m going to pick a couple of my favorites. Story of Your Life is hard to summarize for me – I found it heartbreaking, yet […]
Immigrants! We get the job done?
Getting through Drown, a collection of short stories by Junot Diaz, took me close to a month. This delay was due to my very bad, no-good month of January, which included some emotional fall-out after the inauguration and the first two weeks of this administration. I can thus say that the stories in the book can be divided like so: Read pre-Trump vs. read post-Trump. Obviously this wasn’t Diaz’s intent – after all, it was published in 1996 – but personally, for me, the short stories […]