My friend Will, the same guy who recommended Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion to me, told me to read Old Man’s War at about the same time. I had read the Amazon Kindle sample of Red Shirts a while back, and seen Scalzi on the Forbidden Island episode of Tabletop, but that’s all I […]
The book is far less intriguing than the real-world game that stems from it. It’s clearly created in the same thinking of young adult thrillers like Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but the book is so blandly following that formula that I really couldn’t care less about what […]
If you’ve had a long sit-down with me, you may know that I didn’t have a good experience with college. Most of it was spent being angry; neither appreciating the work I was doing nor pushing to do the work I cared about in the little spare time I had available to me. It’s a first-world […]
When you need to teach or explain an idea, you may find greater success by using examples, imagery, and stories rather than defining the idea explicitly. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to be right – using just the right words to make everything accurate. While correct, those words may be lost […]
A fail for 2015. I’m tapping out on the book The Call of Cthulu and Other Weird Stories. The tough thing is that of what I read, I really did enjoy. It creeped me out in a good way. In particular, I told like 500 people they need to read the story “The Picture in the […]
I loved every second of Hyperion, and the only note of disappointment I have with it was how unresolved it was at its end. Thankfully I’m a lucky reader who knew full well more content was to follow. I pity the science fiction fans of 1989 who had to wait for this sequel to become available.
When I started reading this book, I didn’t think I’d have to be smart to talk about it. Turns out, you kinda have to be smart to talk about this book — at least to do so without being called an idiot by its author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (also known as NNT). But then, he’s likely to call you an idiot regardless.
Amber wrote on her blog about how we both see ourselves as readers, but when you look at how many books we’ve read this year– we’re not really readers. We just see ourselves that way and we should better strive to meet that expectation.
I’m pledging to finish 15 books between now and the end of 2015.
Alex Gustafson