Tag: recent reads

Recent Reads: Astonishing X-Men (Warren Ellis run)

May 3, 2013

ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, EXOGENETIC, XENOGENESIS: Sometime back Warren Ellis said he was never going to write for Marvel again. After reading this trilogy of story arcs, I really wish he’d stuck with that. I gather the X-universe storylines have taken a turn for the bleak recently, but I liked GHOST BOX less than anything else of Ellis’s I’ve ever read, and less than any X-story I’ve ever read, including what I considered to be the god-awful Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely run that culminated with Cassandra Nova. The art in GHOST…

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the essential kit

gender parity

April 29, 2013

So after reading Juliet E McKenna’s quite terrific blog post about women in SF/F, I became curious as to the percentages of books I read by each gender (only because this guy is trying to balance his own gender parity in reading). Since I’ve been keeping an annual reading list since 1998, I could offer up a very thorough look at fifteen years of my reading proclivities. I haven’t got the time right now to do a 15 year retrospective (if somebody else wants to, have at!), but it was…

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Let It Bleed - Jeri-Smith-Ready

Recent Reads: LET IT BLEED

April 18, 2013

LET IT BLEED is book 3.5 of the WVMP RADIO urban fantasy series by my friend Jeri Smith-Ready, and is what happens when the publisher decides they want four books instead of five and the author turns the salient events of book four into a novella to offer her readers for free so she can wrap up the series in a way she feels is satisfying. This is in every way awesome. And the novella is, in and of itself, fine. My problem is with a decision Jeri’s made for…

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the essential kit

Still not doing it…

April 3, 2013

I’m still not running any, but boy, I sure can think of a lot of Kickstarters that would be fun to do. :) No: there are other projects that need finishing first. But even so. :) Speaking of them, though, Judith Tarr’s second Kickstarter is in its last week, and is mere dollars away from the next goal. I have great hopes of a last-days surge putting it up to $10K, which would be SO COOL. Go go Kickstarting Judy! And while I’m admiring Judy, she’s written a terrific article,…

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the essential kit

Recent Reads: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

March 28, 2013

I haven’t read this in decades. It still works. :) I was a little surprised at the fairy tale qualities that I didn’t remember from childhood, but even so, they were less Fairy-Tale-Weird than most, er, non-invented? fairy tales. I mean, fairy tales make no sense at all in terms of “Oh hey, a glass mountain, oh look, a magic flying saddle appears to help me climb it!” Right, but, er, why did the magic flying saddle appear at all? Where did it come from? This makes slightly more sense…

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