My spouse gave me the Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter secret project as a birthday gift. The books have started to come out and now I have a Speechify code for the audiobook of secret project number one, Tress of the emerald Sea.
Speechify is only on iPhone and I don’t have one. So I can’t use it. Sanderson has explicitly said that people who back to the Kickstarter are welcome to give away any codes that they aren’t going to use. He just doesn’t want people selling them. My friends either can’t use it because they don’t have an iPhone/ipad or they also backed the Kickstarter.
So if one of you want the code let me know. First person to reply of course.
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Written by someone who I’m pretty sure has not read any science fiction whatsoever. Of all the horrible “greatest” lists, this tops them.
Archive version: archive.ph
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Yes, the list is poor. There are some good recommendations in the comments such as Ray Bradbury. The comments also lists the omitted female authors including Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Shelley. Octavia Butler, and André Norton.
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The Netflix series finally made my wife interested enough in The Sandman to give the comics a go. It’s been great because I pick up the books from the library, she reads them first, I read them again for the first time in 15 years, and then we have a brief discussion. Not only do I get to re-experience the stories with limited memory of what happened, I also get to experience them through someone who came in without any preconceptions beyond the setup of the Netflix show.
And I’m grateful for that Netflix show because volume 1 stands out as such a huge disappointment. It’s unlike everything else in the series.
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Alright. I’ll cop to reading, and listening to, Clive Cussler’s Isaac Bell and Fargo series’.
They’re not overly complicated, so if I’m out running or biking and my mind wanders, I don’t miss much.
He’s a man writing women, but he’s not bad as that goes. The women in the Isaac Bell series (set in early 20th century) are probably more liberated and independent that one might expect, without making them anachronistic. So he talks about misogyny, but it seems only slightly presentist. He does not write about, or even strongly imply, sexual violence.
He’s decidedly anti-rich, anti-capitalist. Not just in his villains, but also in the odd rambling here and there.
Anyway, is like a nice candy. Not overly substantive, fairly enjoyable.
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I sold it to a Trek fan friend of mine this way “it’s like James Bond, Lower Decks”
Which it kind of is!
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Ha! That’s great!
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Greatly enjoying Richard K Morgan’s Fantasy trilogy of The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands and The Dark Defiles. A light touch of SF embedded in a far distant world where gods walk and beings from other dimensions have plans to take over everything. If you enjoyed the Takesi Kovacks stuff you should enjoy these as well.
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This is a great analysis by a fan of King’s work…
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Gabor Maté’s “The Myth of Normal” is #4 (Amazon) or #3 (Independent Booksellers) in 
but doesn’t show up on the 
charts. Maté writes from a professional background that, in theory, should be the similar to Jordan Peterson’s (whose book is in both the and charts). Both are psychiatrists active in mental health (thx @KathyPartdeux), both have worked with people dealing with mental illness and addiction (Maté in Vancouver’s notorious East Side), but they come to very, very different conclusions.
I’ll admit I find Maté’s thesis hard going; his work is as far from my area of competence as it gets. Where his observations and mine do overlap is midwifery, with which my wife and I had a super experience. I appreciate Maté’s emphasis on insisting on responsibility, but not blame, for the trauma our current society inflicts. His analysis is deeply kind and gentle to the individual, excoriating to the current broad Western social direction. I find myself deferring to his analysis, as much as it is a stretch for me to wrap my head around it, as much as it is painful to admit that he’s right.
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Jordo is a psychologist. He doesn’t have a medical degree.
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White Noisian Toxic Event
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Iconic cartoonist Bill Watterson famously retired at the height of Calvin & Hobbes’ success in 1995. Now, 28 years later he is coming back - but not for a kids comic strip (not that Calvin & Hobbes was ever just for kids).
The Mysteries is a new 72-page book by Watterson and fellow artist John Kascht are creating what is described as “a fable for grown-ups.” Scheduled to be published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in late 2023, The Mysteries has reportedly been in the works for years in what’s described as an “unusually close collaboration.”
“[In The Mysteries,] a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities,” reads the publisher’s description of the book. “Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns.”
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(we’re excited!)
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Can highly recommend this:
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I needed to read something positive so I picked up this book. I only made it halfway through the first essay before I started happy crying and had to put it down—so I think I picked the right one.
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