(1) 2020 REVISION. Radio Times sets off weeping and wailing with news that “Doctor Who series 12 WILL be delayed to 2020”.
Doctor Who series 11 just came to an end – but fans will have quite a long wait until the next full selection of adventures for the Thirteenth Doctor and her friends.
The BBC have confirmed longstanding rumours that the sci-fi series won’t be back on screens for a full series in 2019, with the twelfth season of the revived series instead airing in “early” 2020.
(2) DECK THE DALEK. The Baltimore Science Fiction Society completed decorating their Dalek at the end of the December business meeting, as they have done every year since 2001. Dale Arnold says –
Andrew Bergstrom made this lifesize Dalek for a playat Balticon 35 in 2001 and it was too nice to throw away…so we started decorating it for the holidays and have done so on with new decorations addedto the mix every year.
(3) EDITOR’S INSIGHTS. “Interview: Guest Lecturer Neil Clarke” at Odyssey Writing Workshops.
As a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop, you’ll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?
I don’t think there’s anything I’d raise to that level, but I do often recommend that developing writers and editors volunteer as slush readers somewhere. The experience gives you insight into the common mistakes most writers are makingand the distance you might need to start recognizing them in your own work.You’ll also see the current trends and get a good sense of your own place inthe field. I’ve yet to meet a slush reader who hasn’t underestimated their skill level. The rule for writers is to quit when you stop learning. Potential editors should keep going a few more months, just to see if they can hack the experience when it becomes routine.
Bonus advice: If you are still seeking your first sale, every editor I know wears their “discoveries” as a badge of honor. Saying “I am previously unpublished” in a cover letter is not a bad thing. When you do sell your first story, make sure the purchasing editor knows.
(4) INVERSE ROUNDUP. What would you think are “The Best Depictions of Real-Life Science in Science Fiction”? Inverse plans a series stretching through most of December discussing the best (not the most accurate) such depictions.
This December, Inverse is counting down the 20 best science moments seen in science fiction this year, whether it be on the big screen or small, in books, on stage or in the immersive worlds of video games. Our science and entertainment writers have teamed up for this year-end series to show how real-life science has been memorably —though not always accurately! — portrayed in the culture. Watch this space for more additions all month long.
On the list is – “‘Pokémon: Let’s Go’s Fake Poké Ball Science Is Absolutely Terrifying”:
Poké Balls have been a key part of the Pokémon experience, from the original GameBoy games to the recently-released Pokémon: Let’s Go, which even works with a specially-designed Poké Ball Plus accessory that lets you simulate the experience. And yet we still have no idea how Snorlax (a giant fat cat-like creature that’s 6’11” and weighs around 1014 pounds) fits inside a metal object roughly the size of a baseball.
The canonical — and nonsensical — pseudoscientific explanation is that Poké Balls shoot out a beam that converts the Pokémon into a form of energy. Sounds fun, right? Except it’s not. The only known way to legitimately convert matter into energy is through nuclear fusion. Even in that process, less than 1 percent of the matter is converted into energy, and the reaction is so volatile that it causes massive explosions.
(5) ODDEST TITLE. The winner of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year is Joy of Waterboiling by Christina Scheffenacker. The Bookseller, which sponsors the prize, noted that “for the first time in the 40-year life of the world’s most prestigious literary gong, a foreign-language tome” has won. Published in Austria by Asche Verlag, the book is eligible for the prize despite being in German because its title is in English.
(6) THESE BOOTS AREN’T MADE FOR TALKIN’. Was there ever anybody more impressed with Harlan Ellison than himself? Perhaps Gay Talese. Now available on YouTube is Harlan’s version of this legendary pop culture confrontation: “Harlan Ellison on Esquire’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ by Gay Talese.”
An excerpt and unused interview from the feature doc “‘Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris” by director Raymond DeFelitta (2007) || RIP Harlan Ellison
(7) CASTING CALL. Dublin2019 will be staging “Jophan!,” Erwin Strauss’ musical adaptation of the great classic of Irish fanwriting, The Enchanted Duplicator by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw, a fannish parody of John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Strauss is reaching out to the community for people interested in participating, either on stage, or in the orchestra pit, or wherever. There is no travel budget, so participants will have to already be planning to be attending Dublin 2019. Contact Strauss or the Dublin Theatre team at [email protected].
(8) NETFLIX SHELL GAME. Reporting for SYFY Wire, Christian Long says, “Netflix announces a new Ghost in the Shell series as part of its growing anime slate.”
It looks like Netflix is reviving another groundbreaking anime for its ever-expanding platform.
The streaming giant just announced Ghost in theShell: SAC_2045, which is set to premiere sometime in 2020. Based on Masamune Shirow’s classic manga Ghost in the Shell, which premiered back in 1989, it explores themes of consciousness and individuality through the lens of artificial intelligence.
(9) GLOWING BLACK HOLES. On December 14, the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination presents “Sir Roger Penrose: Lecture on Hawking Points”.
In this special lecture, we are very pleased to welcome Sir Roger Penrose back to the Clarke Center to explore how Hawking Points –Stephen Hawking’s prediction of glowing black holes– explain the nature of how our universe was formed and if there are others like it.
Sir Roger Penrose, the celebrated mathematician and physicist, is an Emeritus Professor at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford and winner of the Copley Medal and the Wolf Prize in Physics — which he shared with Stephen Hawking. He has made profound contributions in geometry, blackhole singularities, the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the structure of space-time, the nature of consciousness and the origin of our Universe.
Friday, December 14, 2018 — 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. Kavli Auditorium, Tata Hall forthe Sciences, Division of Physical Sciences & the Clarke Center, UC San Diego. RSVP required; pleaseRSVP here
(10) TESSER OBIT. [Item by Mark Blackman.] Gary c Tesser (1952-2018). NY fan Gary c Tesser (small “c” with no period to be demure) died on Saturday night, December 8, after a lengthy battle with cancer.
He was one of the first 2 people in SF Fandom I met (in September 1970; he was recruiting for the Brooklyn College SF & Fantasy Society) and introduced me to apas (notably TAPS) and to Lunarians, of which he later (in the early ’90s) became President. He was my closest friend for many years. Dubbed “Captain Doom” and self-dubbed “The Plucky Red Ace”, he was a fannish legend, his habitual lateness (“the Tesser Effect”) and unique sense of logic were the inspiration for a slew of “Tesser Stories.”
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born December 9, 1848 – Joel Chandler Harris. American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist who is best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Yes he’s white and the stories are about the ‘Brer Rabbit’ stories from the African-American oral tradition but he’s widely accepted by all about having done these stories justice. James Weldon Johnson called them “the greatest body of folklore America has produced.” (Died 1908.)
- Born December 9, 1900 – Margaret Brundage. Illustrator and painter. Working in pastels on illustration board, she created most of the covers for Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938. Her work is collected in The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage: Queen of Pulp Pin-UpArt. She was one of the very few women artist in the industry, a fact not known as she signed her work as M. Brundage. (Died 1976.)
- Born December 9, 1934 – Judi Dench, 84. M in the Bond films GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Aereon in The Chronicles of Riddick, Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, Society Lady in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Miss Avocet in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Her very first genre film in the late Sixties, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was poorly received by critics and I recall her role being a mostly nude faerie.
- Born December 9, 1953 – John Malkovitch, 65. I was pondering if I was going to include him then decide that Being John Malkovich which won him a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor was enough for me to include him. What a strange role that is! He also shows up in the dreadful Jonah Hex film and played Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach in the Crossbones series.These are selective highlights.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- Sunday’s Brewster Rockit takes what may be a hopeful look at the Simulation Hypothesis.
- The December 3 Brewster Rockit saluted Stan Lee.
(13) OUT OF A HUNDRED. AbeBooks.com list of “100 (Fiction) Books to Read in a Lifetime”, says Steve Davidson, is 25% genre or genre-adjacent. Davidson continues —
The genre titles listed are classic works that have endured on bookshelves for decades, if not centuries.
Isn’t in interesting (?) that of these titles that have demonstrated longevity, continued relevance (and, as a side note, continued sales that dwarf just about everything else) each and every one ofthem is not only “science fiction”, but each and every one of them is social commentary? “Political messaging in fiction” as somehave called it?
Not trying to resurrect a dead horse here, but it’s interesting nonetheless that SF’s enduring works — the classics — are all united in this way.
(14) THEY’RE NOT RELATED. James Davis Nicoll worries about these things. Your mileage may vary: “SF Novels That Get Special Relativity All Wrong” at Tor.com.
I gravitate towards certain SF sub-genres, such as stories featuring relativistic travel. I’ve encountered a fair number of such sub-genrebooks in which it is clear that the authors did not, emphatically NOT, understand relativity. This article features novels in which authors have wrestled with Mr. Einstein and lost three falls out of three.
As you know, there are two essential foundations of relativity.The first is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. The second is that the speed of light is invariant regardless of one’s frame of reference. Every single SF novel in which reference is made to time as measured by the ship as “subjective” and time measured by the Earth “objective” is wrong: everyone’s clocks are right, even if they don’t agree with each other.
(15) PLEONASM DETECTED ON JUPITER. The Traveler is a bit jaded about Poul Anderson’s prose in the latest IF: “December 9, 1963 Indifferent to it all (January 1964 IF)” at Galactic Journey.
Some examples: Anderson likes to wax poetic on technical details. He spends a full two pages describing what could have been handled with this sentence: “I used a neutrino beam to contact the Jovians; nothing else could penetrate their giant planet’s hellish radiation belts or the tens of thousands of thick atmosphere.”
Two. Pages.
(16) ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING: Jason has compiled another “year’s best” at Featured Futures, which includes 29 stories of science fiction, fantasy, and their various permutations: Year’s Best Short Science Fiction and Fantasy #2 (2018 Stories).
This second annual virtual anthology of the year’s best speculative fiction differs in four primary ways from last year’s Web’s Best Science Fiction #1 (2017 Stories) and Web’s Best Fantasy #1 (2017 Stories). Rather than restricting my coverage to web magazines as in 2017, I added coverage of several 2018 print magazines which created a much larger pool of stories to choose from. Thus, the word count for the “best” stories has increased from 140,000 to 250,000 words. Further, those words were evenly divided between two volumes of science fictional and fantastic stories but have now been combined into a single volume with three sections of uneven story and word counts. Finally, because of some of this, I renamed it to Year’s Best Short Science Fiction and Fantasy.
What hasn’t changed is the principle of selecting (to repeat the first introduction’s quote of the late Gardner Dozois) “only those stories that honestly and forcibly struck me as being the best published during that year, with no consideration for log-rolling, friendship, fashion, politics, or any other kind of outside influence.” And there’s still the same qualification to that: for variety’s sake, if multiple stories are by the same author or have strikingly similar elements, I try to select only one. Similarly, I’ve attempted to sequence the stories for a varied reading experience rather than any other principle.
(17) THE ONLINE PALEONTOLOGIST. BBC reports “‘Digital museum’ brings millions of fossils out of the dark”.
The bid to create a “global digital museum” has been welcomed byscientists, who say it will enable them to study valuable specimens that are currently “hidden” in museum drawers.
(18) MR. RICO’S ARTIST. Andrew Liptak interviews Stephen Hickman for The Verge: “An artist on creating the retro art for a new edition of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers”.
You’ve provided cover illustrations for some of Heinlein’s works before — how did working on this edition stack up to those works?
The main difference is that I had quite a bit more time on each of my previous illustrations to refine and finish the paintings, which were done just for book cover images.
A cover is like a small movie poster, designed to compete with literally hundreds of similar tiny posters for the attention of potential buyers in bookstores. On the other hand, illustrations for the interior of a book should be approached a bit differently. They can be more quiet and thoughtful in their presentation, in terms of color mood and content, which is relative in the case of a book like Starship Troopers, naturally.
(19) YODA CLAUS. Business Insider tips readers to “27 creative and unexpected gifts for ‘Star Wars’ fans of all ages”. Two examples –
PANCAKE STAMP
LUGGAGE TAGS
(20) TODAY’S HERESY. An NPR writer throws down the challenge — “Dear Internet: Goats In Sweaters Are Cuter Than Kittens In Mittens”.
The goat pics turnout to be about more than making people go “awwwwww.”
The caprine fashionistas are featured on a calendar, the sales of which have benefited local organizations in Varanasi, India, where most of the images were taken.
Christy Sommers, who takes the photos, first noticed the cuteness that is clothed goats in 2010, while living in a village in northwestern Bangladesh as a Fulbright scholar studying rural primary education. Now she considers the project as adding “net happiness” to the world and helping to share a little slice of life from parts of the world that Americans don’t often get to see.
(21) THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY. Netflix dropped a trailer. The show airs February 15.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Dale Arnold, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Jason, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael J. Walsh, Carl Slaughter, Alan Baumler, Steve Davidson, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
They just had a one-year hiatus on Doctor Who. Sheesh.
44/100 on the book list. By my count 27/100 are what I would call “genre or genre-adjacent”, but there’s room for argument on some of them. (E.g., I’m counting Animal Farm but some might not.)
Car crash today. Got sideswiped.
I’m okay. Dora is okay.
My elderly car is probably totaled.
I ache. I’m told I should expect to feel worse every day for the next three days, then plateau, and only then start to slowly improve.
But, importantly, not dead, not maimed, not bleeding, and neither is Dora.
Lis: That’s terrible news, sorry to hear you got banged up!
(16) Around here that’s more like “Once More With Felines,” amIrite??
(edited to add: Lis, I’m glad for those things you’re not, and sorry you had to go through that.)
I think I’ve read about a third of the books on that list – maybe more, because I can’t remember which of the Russian novels I’ve read, and some of the authors I read not-that-book-but-another. (A lot of them were school assignments.)
Lis, I’m glad you and Dora are okay. I’m sorry about the car.
I’d rather see one good season every few years than a mediocre season every year. If they need time to keep quality up, I say so be it.
I still don’t think it’s one of the best five SF shows on Tv, but this year is a lot better than any of the previous five.
(21) what do I want from this? four words: zombie cyborg Gustaf Eiffel.
Lis Carey,
I’m glad you and Dora are okay. Please look after yourselves.
(I hope you haven’t suffered concussion or worse. Do be on the lookout for symptoms just in case.)
51 and a half on the book list. I want credit for trying 3 times (and failing) to read War and Peace. Weird list, why is Hemingway on it twice?
Happy Birthday, Dame Judi! Very true that Peter Hall had a bad case of the Sixties in directing the Dream movie, but you should see it for the cast alone: Dame Judi & Ian Richardson as Titania and Oberon, and Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren as Hermia and Helena.
Sorry to hear about car accident, but relieved that Lis Carey and Dora are OK.
29 of those books for me.
And here’s a lesbian Viking metal band singing about kittens:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=849133331807971&id=481779211876720
“The world ends in 8 days. I have no idea how to stop it.” “I’ll put on a pot of coffee.” I love it.
(1) My impression is that after the sadly lackluster later Capaldi seasons the Beeb were not prepared to commit properly to the next season until after they’d seen how Jodie’s first went down. So all the work commissioning stories and developing production plans starts now, instead of while the season was airing as it should have done.
Daft really. Doctor Who makes so much money in overseas sales they should be backing it to the hilt.
I didn’t see these mentioned in other threads, but maybe I missed it. In any case, Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger are on sale at Amazon US for $1.99.
Thanks for the title credit. 25 books for me of the list of 100.
@Lis: Glad you and Dora are uninjured.
RIP Harlan Ellison
Still can’t believe he’s gone.
@Lis Yikes. Glad you and Dora are all right.
15) Oftentimes for me, feature, not bug.
Oh and here’s a scroll item. Apparently BBC 4 Extra is broadcasting episodes of the audio version of The Prisoner that Big Finish has been doing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001f2x
Lis, also glad you & Dora are all right.
List: 15/100, if I’m counting correctly. And I’m mostly OK with that. I was happy to see that Romance of the Three Kingdoms made the cut, at least.
23/100
Lis: “I’m so pleased you’re not dead!”
Buy me
Read me
Scroll me
File me
Lis: Glad you and Dora okay. Car crashes are rough in the best of circumstances, and the car-totaling kind are miserable experiences.
4) Poke Balls work the way they do because SHUT UP! That’s how!
13) 42 out of 100. Would have had ten more but there are several I have not (yet) finished. Some of those (and I’m lookin’ at you, Ted Dostoevsky!) I started back in the late 1900s.
56 for me, including War and Peace. Which really isn’t that intimidating any more; many doorstopper SFF novels are almost as long. The only tricky part was keeping names/nicknames/patronyms/titles straight, because one person could be called three or four different things over the course of a page or two depending on the status/relative rank/formality of their interlocutor…
@Lis: I’m glad you’re not seriously hurt.
That list of “books to read in a lifetime” feels like an odd mix; that it includes The Catcher in the Rye makes me wonder how many of the other perennially “popular” books listed are mostly being assigned by (and possibly purchased by) schools, for students who may not actually read them, rather than being read because people want to (for any number of reasons).
Our other assigned reading included both Orwell books, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Catch-22; I think reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was my own idea.
There’s also an odd mix of more-or-less-classics and things that are a lot newer (like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).
I suspect this post is my usual “wait a minute” response to things that are basically “here are some books I liked and/or think are important” being presented as somehow authoritative. If so, it’s less irritating than many such lists.
The tricky part of War and Peace for me is the 100-page philosophy dump after the book itself has wrapped everything up that’s wrappable. Holy Ayn Rand, Batman! Strictly speaking, I didn’t finish the book, I guess.
These books are made for huckin’
And that’s just what I’ll do…
Lis, I’m so sorry that happened to you, and glad that you and Dora are all right.
49/100 on the book list, with some classics towards the end I was unsure of.
38/100. In several cases, I had read other books by an author, but not the one on the list.
Achy, alive, have rental coverage.
Waiting for the state police to call back, after they called while I was on the phone with my insurance company, and I decided the state police could wait.
Lis, glad that you and Dora are all right. Sympathies on dealing with accident reports and insurance companies.
I’m so sorry, Lis. Get better soon!
I’ve read 38 of those books, and deliberately NOT read at least 10 others. I dispute that these are 100 books anyone MUST read, though To Kill a Mockingbird might just make such a list for me.
@2: I want to know what that is hanging under the Dalek — and why.
@11: I hope everyone has seen Dench in Tea with the Dames, in which Dench dishes with Maggie Smith and others who have been so honored for their acting.
@20 SJWC smackdown!
There are 34/100 on the booklist that I’m sure I finished; my out-of-genre reading has been light, but there are several school assignments in there. (I didn’t finish Moby-Dick even though it was assigned.) I vaguely recall reading Les Miserables (not an assignment, just bored in a small town) but it probably was not unabridged so I don’t count it; I did finish The Brothers Karamazov (same reasons, plus it was the first play I did serious backstage work on). I think @Vicki Rosenzweig is correct about the … personalness? … of the list, and possibly too kind; there are several lightweight works (not to mention the outright repulsive …Tattoo) that I think will be ignored in a few years but have attention now due to having been made into recent movies.
@Lis — good to hear you (and Dora) are still in one piece and re-mobile.
@Chip
I think that’s Errol the swamp Dragon from Terry Pratchett’s Guards sub-series
@Chip
I looked at it and figured out that it’s a dragon. (The wings are droopy, hiding most of it.)
(14) Lately I don’t see so many stories that get relativity wrong–not counting ones that don’t take it seriously at all. This is a place where I think the Internet has made things better; a writer who wants to use relativity as part of his/her story can find all kinds of online material to explain things and relativity calculators to make it easy to compute the effects.
As for the detail about ship time vs. Earth time, I think that’s a nit. Yes, he’s absolutely correct that any two different frames will each measure the other as moving slower, with the caveat that if you change frames, you’ll always “discover” that the new frame (the one you switched to) was “right.” By analogy, imagine two people on opposite sides of the earth, each convinced that the other was upside-down. If either one teleports to the other side, he/she will arrive upside down.
That said, the sidereal frame (the one with all the stars and [in most stories] almost all the people in it) is a very special frame in that everyone (just about) has to eventually return to it. That means it always “wins”; everyone who travels eventually comes back to it and concludes they were the ones whose time was contracted. So I don’t see a real problem with talking about it that way.
Glad you’re okay, Lis
I’ve read 50ish of the books, happy to see The Crysalids on there, one of my favorite books which rarely gets mentioned among sci-fi classics.
13) I’m at 34 out of the 100. Got some catching up to do!
Would you believe I have *still* never read To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, or Animal Farm? Shame on me!
Glad you’re okay, Lis! Car wrecks are the pits! I’ve totaled two cars, once when I wasn’t even all the way out of my own driveway, so I know how shocking they can be!
Lis: so sorry to hear about your wreck! My experience has been similar to yours in terms of getting sorer over the 48 hours after the wreck. I recommend showers or baths as hot as you can stand it every few hours or at least right before bed and right when you get up. Also ibuprofen if it’s somethi g you can have. You can take up to 800 mg at a time safely over the short term (4 of the standard issue over the counter 200 mg pills—learned this from a nurse roommate years ago and has stood me in good stead. Just don’t do it for more than a couple of days at a time).
Came here to ask a question tho—some sort of Twitter pile on going on right now in comics twitter about Richard Meyer/“Diversity & Comics” guy. What’s the story there? Is this a comics gate person? Google wasn’t too helpful with whatever is the most recent development that set off the current schadenfreude fest.
Sometimes the most time consuming thing about social media is coming in in the middle or tail end of some kind of drama and feeling compelled to try to learn the back story!
We* haven’t viewed it for a while, but the Peter Hall/RSC MSND with Judi Dench as Titania (and yes, her costume seems to be mostly body paint) strikes us as one of the best around–also featuring (in addition to those listed by Mab) Ian Holm and David Warner. I recall it as the production that emphasized the danger of the world of the fairies and that made Oberon’s benediction at the end make sense.
* Meaning me and my-wife-the-Shakespeare-teacher.
@Lis, glad no serious injuries. My roommate and I recommend arnica (available as gel or cream) for bruises and muscle pain. Hope you both have a swift recovery and no insurance isssues.
@Kip, I read War & Peace in high school. I read the epilogue and was so offended at Kitty’s complete transformation into a woman who cared for nothing but her family. She lost all her personality, became a total slob, and completely subsumed herself into what Tolstoy apparently felt was the perfect wife and mother completely undercutting the previous thousand pages or so…
Lis, glad to hear you and Dora are okay.
130 39/100, though any list with Sidney Sheldon on it is highly dubious.
I like big books, and I cannot lie…
The silicon chip inside his head
contains yakuza files
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
The assassins going to make them stay at home
And Jonny doesn’t understand it
He always thought Ralfi was as good with gold
And he can see no password
‘Cause there is no password
What passwords do you need to remove?
Oh, oh, oh tell me why
I don’t like mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I want to load
The whole data down
Glad you fine, Lis
Jayn:It exists.
__________________
Got sucked in to reading Swordheart at my work lunch breaks and over the weekend — which since that involved using my phone time, meant far far less File 770. I want to (re)read the whole thing aloud to my husband. I think he’d like it but he’ll never get around to it himself.
Lis: Glad you’re ok. Do take the next few days very gently; your info is correct but for some people the bottom end of post accident aches is excruciating and you do not need that.
Thanks, everyone!
I’m being very careful with myself right now. The plans for the week include taking my car fund and my sister, and going car shopping.
Either 41 or 42 out of 100 for me. (I can’t remember if I’ve read A Town Like Alice, or have just seen the film.)
(There are several that I wouldn’t consider to be worthy of being on a must-read list.)
He’s basically the guy who kicked off Comicsgate. Has produced many YouTube videos explaining how women etc. are ruining comics and ginned up many a harassment mob.
Lis, very happy to hear you and Dora are ok. All the best of luck sent to you for your car shopping.
@Lis
Sorry to hear that, but glad you and Dora are both basically alright. If it’s similar to being hit by a car — try to keep up some gentle movement, the worst thing is stiffening up. I was a bit emotionally shakey for a couple of days, too.
@Cmm
Meyer is one of the main ComicsGate guys. I don’t know what the latest thing is, but yeah, he’s been up to no good for some time now.
26/100 on that list and another five I couldn’t finish because I hated them or they bored me to tears (Raskolnikov, I’m looking at you). Interestingly, I haven’t read the sole swedish book on the list, it is trapped somewhere in the dungeons of Tsundoku.
Ive only read 23 of those, 24 if I count clockwork orange, which I tried three times in various stages of my life and never made it past page 20.
Cliff, the thank you for the kitten song! I will have to look into that band some more, that was good stuff.
(13) 48/100
30 on the list, plus one I’m not sure about. Several that I’ve tried and bounced off of.
—
Re. Odd Titles. I confess that I just picked up a book, and about 75% of the reason it came home with me was the title: Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. (The remaining 25% was the fact that it was blurbed by Neil Gaiman, who has always shown excellent taste in what he’s willing to blurb.)
—
1963: I suspect I like some excess scientific exposition (as opposed to other types of excess exposition) more than the Traveler does, but I may have to agree with him about this story. Much as I love Anderson, this is not one I remember fondly.
—
Umbrella Academy: I know I read some of the comics, but I don’t remember very much about them. I do remember them as reasonably enjoyable, though, so I’m going to look forward to the adaptation unless and until I hear some reason not to do so.
(13) Was that really 100 books? I only got 9, but then I almost never read mainstream, being an SF snob.
(14) I got a higher percentage here.