To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I bought this book fourteen years ago during an especially gluttonous trip to a book sale not long after my youngest was born. It would have been the autumn after my mother’s diagnosis and but, what, four months before her death? Eleven months before our move to Springfield? A long time ago, to be sure, […]
As you know, gentle reader, I am about half way through James Blish’s short paperbacks collecting episodes from the Star Trek series (see also Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3, Star Trek 4, and Star Trek 5 for the recent re-reads or click here to see earlier and future re-reads–which will include the […]
To be honest, when I finished Star Trek, I went looking for a Chuck Norris memoir I have somewhere in my office, but I came across this book instead, so I read it to fill in the Celebrity Memoir category in the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge. Although, to be honest, I might be stretching the […]
I bought this book, along with Firefly: The Official Companion Volume One and Firefly: The Official Companion Volume Two at my last trip to Calvin’s Books in Branson in June of last year. I also got the Serenity: The Official Visual Companion, and that would probably have been the next published–this book came out in […]
When I bought this in 2007, I said: I have seen like five minutes of Babylon 5 in my life, and I’m buying a book tie-in? I blame it on book-acquisition-drunkeness. In the fourteen years since, I have not seen any more Babylon 5. I thought back then that this was a tie-in novel, but, […]
This book is a British science fiction novel from B.O. (Before Obama). The copy I have is an Advanced Uncorrected Proofs version that I picked up some time ago at a book sale along with other ARC and proof copies of books. Which explains some of the typos I found, although fewer than one might […]
This book is a fifty-year-old collection of science fiction short stories from some of the luminaries of the business. It includes: “Beyond Bedlam” by Wyman Guin. In a world where individual humans are split into two distinct personalities through medication and the personalities take turns with the body, one man stops taking his meds and […]
What a difference a couple of years makes. Two years ago, we went to a book fair in Arnold and I thought it was in the middle of nowhere. We approached from one side, from the north. This time, though, we came from the south, and I realized that the church was on the corner […]
Well, it surely comes as no surprise that I’ve been on a Star Trek kick lately. I’ve read a number of books in the last couple of months (see this, this, this, and this). Last week, on Tuesday through Friday nights, I watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, […]
Well, I hadn’t been in much mood to read for a number of days, which explains why it’s taken my 10 days to complete another book not written by Tolstoy or Hugo. Instead, to get myself back into the game, I picked up one of the Star Trek novels I bought at some time in […]
When I saw this book for $.33 in the new secret cheap books back room at Hooked on Books in Springfield, I had to have it. After all, Levar Burton is the former host of Reading Rainbow and star of The Midnight Hour. As I have mentioned before, I think one of my collecting niches […]
Generally, this is a prelude explaining the dearth of posting, gentle reader, but this story is unrelated to the dearth of posting. That particular ennui stems from not being particularly interested in posting political hot takes because I’m not convincing anyone and venting my spleen is not actually letting any fresh air into my spleen […]
Last night, I attended a la-di-da technology group banquet in a suit and everything. I was not nominated for any awards, but my beautiful wife is on the board of the organization. So off to the event I went. It included a lovely dinner and everything. I spent most of the mingling time sitting at […]
I only read 76 books this year, but I did close out some series–well, at least I read all the volumes in certain series that I owned, including the Executioner whose books I started picking up about a decade ago, some children’s books that I bought before I had children, and re-read some volumes of […]
Wilder begins a cheery post entitled The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I with a quote from Star Trek: “Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek Oooh, oooh, Mr. Kahtter. I know which episode that comes from. Not only did I read the short story […]
Okay, apparently I did not do the comparison in the book report for Firefly: Still Flying (I compared Firefly to Battlestar Galactica because of a famed reboot). But a more apt comparison might be to Star Trek. Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987, roughly 20 years after the original series. When TNG appeared, […]
So one of my goals for this year was to read all the comic books I own. Well, to finish reading the comics I’d purchased, not read all the comics I owned again. Last year, I organized my comic books into short boxes and stored them. However, I had another short box of comic books […]
Dustbury has a long-running series called Strange Search Engine Queries where he rounds up the week’s strangest search engine queries that lead people to his site. I would do a series like that, but I don’t have my stat counter configured properly (or don’t pay enough) to see search engine queries leading to my site, […]
As some concede defeat in the Fifty Book Challenge, you, gentle reader, have suffered through no fewer than 96 book reviews this year (and one forthcoming). Here’s my list from 2005*: Blood on the Arch by Robert J. Randisi Three Survived by Robert Silverberg Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe edited by Byron Preiss From a Buick […]