The Bookaholic

For those of you who don’t know, John Scalzi has been writing a blog for ten years.  Ten years! That’s pretty much forever in internet time.  Whatever (said Scalzi blog) is a blog I read every day.  Why?  Because Scalzi is smart, funny and entertaining.  Even when he manages to say something I disagree with (not often), he’s smart, funny and entertaining.  So what’s not to love?

(In addition to being a blog writer of note, he writes highly entertaining science fiction novels.  His most enduring fame, however, comes from the Bacon Taped to a Cat incident.  Apparently, he has a bacon fetish.)

To commemorate the auspicious event of Ten Years Blogging, he’s published a book containing some of the best posts of the last ten years.  When I say you need to read this book, I’m quite serious.  You will laugh (unless your sense of humor was surgically removed at a young age).  You will think (unless the public school system trained that quality right out of you).  You will be entertained.

And as a bonus, the introduction was written by Wil Wheaton.  Wil Wheaton, people!  Not only do you need to read this book, you need to own it!  Seriously.

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This is the first book in a series by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.  Because I found the second book in the series among the hundreds of books I own, and because I just can’t read a series of books out of order (well, except for J. D. Robb’s Eve Dallas stories), I requested this book from Booksfree.

The main idea behind the story is that some incredibly ancient intelligence has ripped the heck out of the very fabric of space-time, and reorganized the planet (Earth) so that it has chunks of land (including people and animals) from virtually every band of time… from the days of the woolly mammoths right up to 2037.

Needless to day, this creates a few conflicts, not the least of which are the conflicts the earth (or Mir, as they chose to call it) has with itself as it attempts to integrate Ice Age glaciers with modern pollution and global warming.  In other words, the weather sucks.

And all the while, these strange metal objects are watching everything that’s going on.

At the very end of the story, one of the characters gets sent back to her proper space-time.  That’s where book two picks up.

Like everything else Sir Arthur ever wrote, there’s a heavy dose of actual science in this science fiction.  I’ve never been disappointed by any of his works.  Come to think of it, I’ve like everything I’ve read by Stephen Baxter, too.

If you are a fan of the science end of science fiction, you’ll like this one

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This is an adorable little book with delightful quotes and oh-so-precious photographs of mother and daughter animals.

It’s impossible to pick a favorite picture, because they’re all so wonderful.  I have managed to narrow it down to either the lynxes or the porcupines or the kangaroos or the meerkats or the penguins or the cats or the ducks or koalas or the sheep or the lions or the polar bears.

It was much easier to pick out favorite quotes.  I found two I really liked.

A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.  (Victor Hugo)

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.  (Eleanor Roosevelt)

It’s a small book, but one that would look nice on anyone’s coffee table.

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Ho boy.  Rachel is in all kinds of trouble in this book.  A demon with Alzheimer’s shows up.  She’s got another demon owing her a favor, which is definitely not as good as it sounds (and it doesn’t sound good).  And good ol’ Al shows up again.

There’s more than the usual angst between her and Ivy.  Jenks is his usual pixie self (but I’m worried about Matalina).  Ceri gets scary.  (Ha ha!)

Oh… and the Focus?  Yeah.  Interlanders have figured out it wasn’t destroyed and Weres are being murdered (covered up to look like suicide).  Wanna know who’s killing them?  (Nah, I’m not telling.)

Trent is going to get married to that nasty Ellsabeth woman.  What a creep.

Piscary is out of jail.  Not good.  But it works out in the end.

And Harrison killed off one of my favorite characters!  Yo, there’d better be a damn good reason for that and I’ll be waiting on the next book to discover that reason (because the one you garner from this book is a little on the lame side… in my opinion).

Yes, one last thing… don’t go down that same road Laurell K. Hamilton is going down.  Sex is not a necessary part of the book, ok?  It’s distracting and breaks the flow of the book.  Thank you.

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This book showed up in my mailbox last week.  I don’t know why.  It’s an advance reading copy, and I have no idea how I managed to get lucky enough to get one of these.  Naturally, the book when right to the top of my To Be Read pile.

After a slightly rocky and confusing start, I was zipping right along with the action by the end of the first chapter.

There’s all kinds of supernatural and psychic fun going on… vampires, demons, scary Navajo spirits walking the earth.  It turns out our heroine, one Liz Phoenix, is the leader of a band of demon killers and seers who fight the good fight to fend off Armageddon.

This is a series in the same vein as the Anita Blake and Rachel Morgan series.  Since I really love those characters and stories, it’s no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed Any Given Doomsday.  I’ll be watching for her second one next year!

Oh, and if anyone has any idea how I managed to score an ARC, do let me know.

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Not just any meme, but my favorite book-related meme… The 5-Book Meme! Take five books and grab a sentence from each (from specific spots in the book) and create a new paragraph. The books I used:

1. Meditation in a New York Minute by Mark Thornton
2. Fingerpainting on the Moon by Peter Levitt
3. The Beginnings of Buddhism by Kogen Mizuno
4. Beginning SQL Server 2005 Programming by Robert Vieira
5. For a Few Demons More by Kim Harrison

And the paragraph you’ve all been waiting for…

Our lives are lived at warp speed. And yet, there was a surprising if ungainly fluidity of rhythm and grace to this man’s movements that mysteriously added a sense of spaciousness to the air. Perhaps out of concern over issues of this kind, Shakyamuni never advocated the life of the Order for all people. How does it do it? “They’re really good for breakfast,” I said, and with his arm over my shoulder, we both hobbled back to my car.

Weird, huh? But I like it. And will do this meme again… you can count on it.

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Dr. Braverman explains in great detail how the imbalance of four neurotransmitters in your brain (dopamine, acetylcholine, GABA and serotonin) cause pretty much everything that ails you.  He’s got tests you can take to determine your dominant neurotransmitter and what deficiencies you might have.  While he does lay out a plan for righting what’s wrong, it involves two aspects that I find difficult to live with.  The first is getting your doctor on board in case you need a prescription drug of some sort.  The second is a diet plan.

I’m not knocking his research and program; this stuff might work for some people.  But if I have to eat stuff that grosses me out, I’m not going there.  According to his quizzes, I have a GABA deficiency and ought to be eating things like oatmeal, yogurt, liver, dark-meat fowl (and what is THAT??), mushrooms and fish.

As much as I’d like to be the picture of health, if I can’t do it avoiding foods that make me gag, it just isn’t going to happen.

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Although one of the cover blurbs proclaims, “Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs — move over,” I didn’t find this book as intriguing as either of the other two authors.  Perhaps with a few more books under her belt, Fox will be able to create a more dynamic character in Detective Sargent Kate Farrer.  I certainly see the potential… absolutely.  That said, if you like Cornwell and Reichs, you’ll probably like Fox, too.

It took me a while to figure out the story was set in Sydney, Austrailia, because it was only an off-hand reference once or twice.  Silly me… at first I thought it was somewhere in the UK.

And now, let’s talk about the people who write the synopsis without ever having read the book.  Cut that out.  Sometimes it’s just little things that are off, but it’s still highly annoying.  Kate Farrer did not take a “four-month leave from the force when the stress of the job threatened to crush her,” she took a three-month leave to recover from the psychological terror of being kidnapped and tortured.  A very slight difference, I’m sure.  But one that gives you a very different first impression of a character.

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I have yet to read anything by Scott Adams that I didn’t love.  God’s Debris is his first non-Dilbert book, and it’s a doozy.  Is it fiction?  Is it non-fiction?  The jacket blurb is almost as good as the book, so I want to share that with you.

Adams describes God’s Debris as a thought experiment wrapped in a story.  It’s designed to make your brain spin around inside your skull.

Imagine that you meet a very old man who — you eventually realize — knows literally everything.  Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life: quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability — in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense.  What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything?

You may not find the final answer to the Big question inside, but God’s Debris might provide the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read.  The thought experiment is this: try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality.  Share the book with your smart friends.  Then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.

I’m going to pass this book along to some of my smart friends (and then eventually release it through Bookcrossing).  I’ve got a tasty beverage ready and waiting.

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Written in 1976, the same year I graduated from high school, this book contains gems of wisdom that have stood the test of time.  Now granted, had I read this book when I was 18 years old, my reaction to it would have been similar to my daughter’s reaction to many things I say to her now…  “Yeah.  WHATever.”

I’m also going to come out of the closet here as a graduate of Landmark Education… mostly because a whole lot of what Dyer is saying in this book is echoed in virtually every seminar and course I take through Landmark.  It all seems like common sense to this 50 year old woman, but I think it should be an essential read for anyone who has any kind of negative feelings about themselves.

Because really…  we’re all beautiful people and completely worthy of a fabulous life.  (Crap.  Do I sound like an aging hippie??)

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