Sometimes life never gets back to normal; it just normalizes with the new complications. Which is how I find myself writing again, in fits and starts, and running around town trying to find a kid’s trenchcoat, paint, and 3 pumpkins that’ll stack so I can have 3 racoons in a trench coat, pumpkin version.
…No, I originally wasn’t going to enter the pumpkin decoration contest at Day Job, until several of my coworkers quite innocently, with no malice aforethought, noted that they expected the limits of my creativity would be to bring a pumpkin with “Scary” scribbled on it in sharpie.
Spite. It gets things done.
Anyway, as I’m starting to dig out from under everything, I’ve found that I’ve been not-reading and not-watching things for so long that my computers have forgotten what podcasts I used to like, and the kindle app on the new phone is swamped with all my Calmer Half’s library and won’t show mine…
I need to care enough to fix that, and dig out the fifty or so partially-finished books from a year ago that are somewhere among the hundreds? thousands? in my library, and restart them.
And then, there’s also catching up on podcasts… (What do you mean. I have a year of All Secure Podcast to catch up on? I don’t have that much time in my life in the next three months!)
Ah, well. So, of course, what I need is to pick up yet more things to read or listen to in the copious amounts of free time I don’t have. Which brings me to my question:
Read any good books lately? Listened to any awesome podcasts or things that left you thinking that was worth all the time you spent that you’ll never get back? Learned anything really cool?
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “What Are You Reading?”
Well, for crazy science stuff for crazy scifi, there’s always Isaac Arthur:
https://youtube.com/@isaacarthursfia?si=EI1k-4Hpvc7NxKMd
He does have a bit of a speech impediment, so he does sound a tiniest bit like an Elmer Fudd who is utterly enthusiastic about owbital wockets. Yes, he does joke about it.
I’m going back and reading Robert Aspirin’s Phule’s Company books. I have the first 3 in paperback, but they had the later sequel’s cheap as eBooks so I picked some of those up as well.
New fiction, but not new books. Chaney/Mixon “Last Hunter” series. On book three at the moment.
I’m rather grateful for my intolerance of podcasts – that is one thing that I don’t feel frantic about catching up on.
I just read a neat memoir called “Stuffed” by Patricia Volk, whose father ran one of the Morgen’s restaurants in New York City.
It’s an interesting glimpse into a part of New York that I will never know, both for cultural and temporal reasons.
I read it somewhat by accident—I thought it was a memoir/cookbook, but that’s because I happened to open it randomly to the one set of facing pages that had a couple of recipes! I’m glad I made the mistake, though. It was a fun look at a unique time and place.
I finally got to the final (so far) book in the Prince Roger series, We Few. It seems rather different from the first three books, but the story is quite good.
Some production issues, though. The format of one continuous (no chapter breaks) makes setting the book down for a while harder to do. OTOH, my body gives a hard no at reading a 480 page (on Kindle) book in one go. There’s also a few times when there’s a scene change that takes a while to figure out that it really was a scene change. Gimme a break, guys!
On the gripping hand, it’s a good book.
Some unmemorable reading, getting caught up on various series I’m in the middle of. Of the things worth mentioning, there’s Jason Cordova’s <i>Mountain of Fire</i> (in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series), Melissa Olthoff’s <i>Shadows May Fall</i> in the Hit World Valkyries series, John Van Stry’s <i>War Child</i> in the Wolfhounds series, and Kacey Ezell and Chris Kennedy’s <i>The Conqueror’s Promise</i> in the Ashes of Entecea series.
And the long flights I was on over the last two weeks let me get 6 books closer to current in the Four Horsemen universe.
I’m rereading Tim Powers’ <i>My Brother’s Keeper</I> (a 2023 book) because it’s the best thing he’s written in years (he’s written several reasonably good book in the past few years, but this one is <b>great</b> — comparable to <i>Anuibs Gates</i>).
And I’m starting to reread all of John W. Campbell/Don A. Stuart, in preparation for panels at Libertycon.
Just want to second that My Brother’s Keeper is great, and great fun. I just read it a few weeks ago.
I’ve been reading E. M. Foner’s To Homeschool on Mars. And H. Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, because he lays out so clearly the problems with the great assumptions and fallacies of so many Grand Ideas in economics. And he did it in 1946, updated in 1961 and 1976.
Tower of Silence, by Larry Correia.
Just started Vertigo by Harald Jahner on the Weimer Republic, so already learning a lot.
On the lighter side, I’ve been going through the Agatha Christie ebooks i picked up at the recent $1.99 sale. Even when I’m pretty sure I remember who did it, I enjoy spending time with her characters and, unlike when I was younger, enjoying seeing how she sets everything up.
I’ll be excited when there’ll be a new Dorothy Grant book to read.
John Ringo’s substack . . . and LMAO as he complains that his MC isn’t letting him destroy the Earth . . .