Over the last couple of weeks I read through the first three books of the "Song of Ice and Fire" Series by George Martin (not that one). They are richly detailed page-turners. The last book that was so hard to put down for me was probably "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet", by David Mitchell ( Read more... )

So, Neal Stephenson and some of his friends in Seattle got into sword-fighting and other Western medieval martial arts, and some of his friends are authors. And so of course when you are producing creative projects there's always a feeler in your brain checking for whether something could be a new project, so it is not surprising that they decided ( Read more... )

Mein Gott - apparently there are 132 episodes of Daniel Pinkwater reading his stuff. From what I can tell so far most of the material is from existing audio books. In any event this is a concentrated, specialized archive of a precious resource.

"In the Blink of an Eye", Walter Murch ( Read more... )

Dead and crap!

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There were enough words I didn't know that I started writing them down.  I lost the list for the first two-thirds of the book, but here are a few from the second list I kept.  Suffice to say that those playing Scrabble against Mr.  McCarthy would be well-advised to think twice before challenging.

tiswin - a Native American adult beverage ( Read more... )

A decent thriller.  The most disappointing thing about it is that Gibson's crazy prose, like, "the sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel", or "A Mongolian girl with cheekbones like honey-coated chisels", is practically MIA.  There are still some good passages, viz:

The Chinese he was most familiar with these days was along the ( Read more... )

Except for noting that the new movie's porn version should be "Hairy Peter and the Odor of the Penis", this is all book spoilers -

( Did I mention spoilers? )

I decided this morning to take care of one of my Things To Do Eventually items.  At first I thought I'd watch all the extended Lord of the Rings movies without a break (OK, some breaks, not like the FOAF who watched all the Planet of the Apes movies in a diaper).  But after about ten minutes, I decided I really should save this for after I buy a TV ( Read more... )