Month: February 2017

In which I think about the future

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading9 Comments

51chrfXHMNL._SX277_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgI did something the other day that I haven’t managed to do in years:  I cleared out my Unread Books shelf in my bedroom.  It has been damn near a decade since I had less than at least a couple of books on that shelf waiting to be gotten to, and there have been plenty of times where the shelf was literally the entire shelf.

What can I say; I buy books.  Lots of them.

Anyway, I had a problem: the last book on that shelf was Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a book that I both 1) ought to read and 2) genuinely want to read.  However, I’ve discovered over the last few days that I absolutely do not have the necessary headspace available to handle reading Hannah Arendt.  This is depressing but true; I can’t do heavy nonfiction right now, and heavy nonfiction about antisemitism and totalitarianism is just not a thing I’m capable of.  So that’s gonna end up DNFed until I’m in a place where I can reflect and think more clearly.  I’ll get to it eventually.

Last night as I was having those thoughts about reading it occurred to me that somehow, despite being a fan of science fiction and fantasy for forty years, I’ve never read anything by Terry Pratchett.  I quickly downloaded The Color of Magic to my Kindle and read the first hundred or so pages last night.  And, well, now I think my project for 2017 is going to be to read every single Discworld book.  This somewhat conflicts with my previously-set goal to keep books by straight white men to no more than 30% or so of my reading.  I may amend that to no more than thirty percent of the authors being straight white men.  This sort of feels like a cheat but it’s my goals and my rules and I figure I can probably change them on the fly if I damn well feel like it.

What do you think?  Is 2017 the Year of Terry Pratchett?  Should I go for it?

Random music video time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music1 Comment

I Tweeted this last night and you all need to see it now.  I’m kinda exhausted and crabby so music from the 1990s is my best refuge at the moment.

#Review: DREADNOUGHT, by April Daniels

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

51CxH4-aSoL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgI don’t remember buying this book.  I don’t remember where I first encountered it, either, but it must have impressed me, as I must have pre-ordered it immediately.  I got a notification from Amazon that it had been shipped and actually had to look it up to figure out what it was.  And then I read the blurb and I was like, oh, right, this is definitely something I want to read.

I can’t call this the first great book I’ve read in 2017– it’s the third, actually– but one of those three was a kids’ book and the other was the third book in a trilogy.  So is it okay if I call this the first new hotness of the year?  It’s my blog, so yeah, it is.

This is one of those books where the premise will let you know right away whether you should buy the book or not: Daniel Tozer is a fifteen-year-old boy who happens to be the closest person when the world’s greatest superhero is killed, and he inherits the powers of that superhero, Dreadnought, when he dies.

And the first thing Dreadnought’s new powers do is remake Daniel’s body into the perfect body Daniel has always wanted.  Which means that Daniel becomes Danielle, and wakes up with unimaginable power and a woman’s body.

So that’s the first three pages, and there we go from there.  The broader beats of the story are sorta predictable, and you can probably imagine several of the complications that work their way into the story– friends, parents, a superteam that may not be what Danny thinks they are, and another high school friend who turns out to be a hero too.  The worldbuilding is solid (this is the first book of a series, so there’s room for not everything to be explained) and the action is solidly written– as fascinating as the premise is, you absolutely have to be able to nail action sequences to properly write a superhero novel, and Daniels excels at it.

So, whoever it was that turned me on to this book (Charlie Jane Anders blurbs it, so maybe it was her?), thank you.  I can’t wait for the next book in the series, and you should go read Dreadnought right the hell now.

I’m alive, I promise

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

The last few days have been pretty similar: work all day, get home pissed off and tired from work (two ten-mile days this week), log onto Twitter to find out what horrors the shitgibbon unleashed that day (threatened to invade Mexico and hung up on the Australian PM on the same day?  Sure!) and then go directly the fuck to bed.

Today I played videogames and read books.  I’ll try to come up with something interesting to say tomorrow, though.