January
Soulless wasn't quite the book I hoped it would be, and I nearly put it down several times.
Farewell, Kage Baker. You did a hell of a good job while you were here.
February
The question of pricing for electronic books has been very contentious lately, erupting this past weekend into unilateral action by one of the major booksellers in the US against one of the major publishers.
Alternatively, if you want to avoid me, the above schedule will also help suit your purposes.
March
I started this round of Book-A-Day with an ulterior motive: I wanted to clear out the clotted artery of my already-read stack, to get myself to write quickly and succinctly about books soon after I read them, instead of letting them simmer to do them "right"...and then, often, forgetting what I wanted to say and just tossing out something anyway.
I just hope he doesn't realize that, and start adding commentary and extra features to the smaller books, so we all feel compelled to buy them as well!
April
Comics, as a medium, is absolutely loaded with insane premises, genre books more than anything else.
And this is a great book for younger readers -- though they'll be even more eager to pick it up if you can manage to hide how educational it is!
May
This will be quick and possibly desultory; I want to get done so I can watch Sherlock Holmes with The Wife.
So this may be an offshoot and a sidebar, but it's a pretty good one.
June
If Ignorance Is Bliss is an apparently well-researched (there are no actual notes, but many references about certain quotes or names being difficult to run to ground) book of quotes, edited by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson.
I can think of half-a-dozen writers who should have this phrase tattooed on the inside of their eyeballs.
July
Reality can be a slippery, tricky thing -- particularly in fiction.
Or maybe something else unexpected will happen in the next volume; I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
August
I felt like presenting the author credits in the title as if they were a law firm -- since so many comics credits feel that way, particularly with the long list of random suits in the front matter of corporate comics collections -- but, to be nice, I'll untangle them before there's any confusion.
At this point, I'm not going to give up on Ex Machina -- I still remember how good it was in the early days, back in 2004 -- but I'm not as hopeful as I'd like to be.
September
Everything has its time; we all know that.
Good for them, I suppose.
October
Yes, I'm still reading books about the many attractions of central Florida -- as previously chronicled in Book-A-Day entries # 192, 214, and 224.
And we probably won't, either, unless one of us is a huge Ghost fan.
November
Strange Tales
credits four series editors, one collection editor, two editorial assistants, an assistant editor, an "editor, special projects," a "senior editor, special projects," an editor in chief, a publisher, an executive producer [1], and a Senior Vice President of Sales (for no obvious reason, unless everyone thinks that David Gabriel would have made a really good editor, if his life had gone differently) -- not to mention a partridge in a pear tree and at least ten ever-lovin' lords a-leaping -- so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't spend any more time trying to figure out who did what to make this these stories exist in the first place or turn them into a book.For the reader who can do that, Transition is a high-powered story engine, driven by one of the best writers in the business -- and he comes closer to a happy ending than he's done recently, which may help win over those more traditional SF fans that like stories of body- and universe-hopping.
December
Sword and sorcery books rely on journeys for much of their plots -- not quests, precisely (or not too much of the time), but important journeys, for treasure or work, to find something or save someone or get away from somewhere, usually with more than a bit of urgency.
And if you just really like any of those areas, you'll probably find a lot to love here as well.
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