Slow Reads

So although I have a specific reading pattern I tend to follow each month (LINK), there are a number of things I read that fall through the cracks.

1) Month-long Reads: During any given month I'll supplement my seven regular books with a book of non-fiction, usually essays, to read each night. As these books can take a month or longer to read, I don't often update them on my Goodreads list or even mention them on my blog. Current I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, and enjoying every bit of it.

2) Year-long Reads: A few years ago I received a horror anthology from one of my younger brothers that had a horror story a day for a year - usually these stories were less than a page long, but they were all a lot of fun. So, when I heard about Ryan Holiday and Stephan Hanselman's The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations of Wisdom, Perseverance and The Art of Living I had to give it a shot, and you know what - it's a pretty great read read! I'm about a third of the way through and find this book, read first thing in the morning gives me some pretty interesting stuff to think about all day.

3) Books my wife suggests: As my lovely wife is just as voracious a reader as I am, she'll often read a book that she know would be exactly my thing (for instance, she was the one who introduced me to the world of Charles de Lint), so every couple months she'll suggest something I have to squeeze in between my other books. Although she does suggest far more titles than I can immediately get to, I do keep a list and get to it when I've got time.

4) Other: And here we fit all the trade collection of comic books I read, as well as magazines, social media, and pamphlets, as well as all sorts of online content ranging from LinkedIn and Facebook posts to Doctoral Theses on Economics.

What can I say? Even for a guy who spends all his time reading it's often tricky to keep track of it all!

On Turning Forty

Tomorrow I leave my thirties behind, and hit my fortieth birthday; which, as is often said, is surely better than the alternative.

As a long time reader, I thought it might be fun to see what I was reading back in 2006 as I was leaving my twenties behind, so her goes, from my "Books Read" list from August of 2006, the last five books I read in my twenties:

The Door Into Summer, by Robert A. Heinlein
A 1957 Science Fiction novel by Heinlein that to be honeset I don't entirely remember - I'll lay odds it has something to do with a man abused by his fiance, who gets revenge using time travel and eventually marries her spunky and much younger sister. (SPOILER - after looking at a synopsis on wikipedia I'm pretty much 100$ correct).

The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks
A romance novel I'm pretty certain I read for one of my bookclubs; I actually have a pretty good recollection of the story and honestly it would be a pretty great entry into romance fiction for anyone.

The Godwulf Manuscript, by Robert B. Parker
This was the first of Robert B. Parker's Spencer novels, a series that would become my personal favourite in detective fiction and an author who's books I devoured, at the rate of one a month for years.

Never Cry Wolf, by Farley Mowat
A re-read for me at the time, but as one can never read too much Farley, Never Cry Wolf may be one of my favourite Canadian books period.  It follows the author through his government sponsored study to prove that wolves were a menace to be destroyed and his findings that pretty much the opposite was entire true.

Ring Around the Sun, by Clifford D. Simack
A recommendation from Stephen King, suggested as his introduction to alternate dimensions that would one day lead to certain story concepts in his Dark Tower series, It doesn't quite stand up for me as well as his 1963 novel Way Station, but is a fine example of great classic Science Fiction.

Lost Pages

To be fair, I'm one of those people who walk and read. This does mean upon occasion I'll get people saying things like:

"Hey Professor, leave some books for the rest of us"

or

"Watch out, your going to get hurt"

or my personal favourite,

"BOO!" Usually occurring with a jump in front of me.

but to be honest there are some unfortunate consequences that come with walking and reading.

For instance, today I got to the end of my book and realized I was missing the last four pages - and they could have fallen out (this was a used-bookstore purchase) anywhere in the last twenty block I'd just finished walking.

So now here I am, book of short stories in hand, and am four pages short of finishing my book because those four pages are literally gone.

Luckily epl has a copy.

And I brought a back up.

Marvel's Secret Wars: My First Pass

For a while now I've been reading up on the last few years of Marvel comics (specifically the "Marvel Now!" and "All-New" imprints) and for the most part have had a pretty good time. I've found some great titles; Greg Rucka's run onThe Punisher, Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers, and Ryan North's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl were all strong titles and one of them even made it onto my bookshelf for keeps.

But as I worked through each of these titles I kept seeing the same logo again and again:

There is only Secret Wars

Which led me to the Jonathan Hickman series Secret Wars - which he had been leading to in his Avengers and New Avengers tiles (both fun reads as well). Secret Wars is sort of a reboot series for Marvel, effectively letting them merge all of the massive number of storylines they have into a more cohesive universe.

So last year every title I had been reading either finished with a "The End" (darn it - I forgot to mention Mark Waid'sDaredevil - AWESOME!), or the promise of Secret Wars. Having now read the main event, I can say it's pretty fun, but it does require more Marvel know-how than I had with my 2012-current readings of their titles.

I'm currently reading my way through the Secret Wars tie-in titles, Warzones and Battleworld, which together amount to about 42 different trade paperback collections; and most of these tie in with even older Marvel titles I'm unfamiliar with; I'm currently reading Battleworld: Runaways (based on a 2003 series), Warzones: The Infinity Gauntlet (based on a 1991 series), and Inferno: Warzones (based on a 1989 series) (Although I would read Deadpool's Secret Secret Wars as the Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn Marvel Now! series was simply a delight).

Although I had some familiarity with The Infinity Gauntlet, I'm not actually familiar with the backstories of any of theseSecret Wars crossovers, and as a burgeoning Marvel fan, I'm starting to feel a little left out.

Also the newest production line is called "All-New All Different" so I'm not sure how much of this back story I need overall. But, as I look back over this very post, there are at least seven series I really REALLY enjoyed, so I think I'll be staying on.

My Reading Habits This Week have gotten complicated...

Due to a series of library due dates, an inability to renew popular titles, and my own hubris, I'm currently working my way through three novels and a comic book series at the same time.

Like most people (I assume), I normally pick up one book and read it until I finish and then pick up another, but I'm currently reading Charles de Lint's urban fantasy novel Memory and Dream,  Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and Justin Cronin's The Passage, as well as the recent Marvel comics title Ghost Rider.

Kind of like the film Inception, I'm reading my comics at an accelerated pace (5-6 issues a day), while reading The Alienist at about 100-pages-a-day, The Passage at about 50-pages a day, and Memory & Dream at about 25-pages-a-week.

My books are about, in turn, a ghost, fairies, a serial killer (probably) in late 1800s New York City, and the end of the world via Vampire Apocalypse.  

And they're all really good!

Hopefully by the end of the week I'll be down to three books and if I'm lucky I'll be down to two books by the end of the Easter long weekend, but we'll see how much free time I end up with.

Reading can be tricky!

So I'm reading the Outlander series now...

A few years back for one of my book clubs I read Diana Gabaldon's 1991 novel Outlander (originally published as Cross Stitch) and was pretty impressed.  At the time I hadn't had a lot of experience with Romance novels (my tastes normally move more in the "Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland" direction), but was really surprised at just how great this first novel was.

Flashing forward to last year, my wife (who has read the entire series to date) and I began watching the recent Ronald D. Moore television adaptation, and I admitted that I would have to check out this series and soon.

Or as my wife likes to say "If you can spend a whole month inflicting me with Twilight the least you can do is read something good once in a while..."

Point taken.

As I read horror, fantasy and science fiction works each month I've noticed that Fantasy tends to work best in series readings, so for the next year, give or take, I'll be checking out some time travelling historical romance fiction.

Image Credit 
Outlander Series image from
https://www.pinterest.com/explore/dragonfly-in-amber/

Book Review: Pinocchio

Growing up I read a lot of books, through elementary and junior high and even into high school I averaged four to five books a week, every week without fail.

As I've always been a fan of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, I made my way through a lot of children's fables and fairy tales, which are filled with some of the most awful things you can imagine and then tend to aim them at kids (Cooked in an oven, eyes pecked out by birds, or bed-time forever, anyone?)

Like most people however, I've read a lot of what you'd expect and not a lot of what you might assume - like Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883).  I saw the movie as a child, enjoyed the magical transformations, the epic adventure and even singing along with "When You Wish Upon a Star", but had never actually read the original source material.

So a couple weeks ago I picked up the Gris Grimly illustrated version (which is pretty darn amazing), and set down to learn about this little wooden boy.

The book is a really quick read (less than a day for me and largely I'm talking about coffee breaks, my lunch hour and the bus trips to and from work.  The story is a delight to read, although may work better chapter-by-chapter over a series of readings, as much of the narrative is repetitive (Pinocchio is willful, told to think about what he is doing, acts without thinking, and is punished), and there are some very sudden and violent acts portrayed throughout the story as well (let's just say things don't fare very well for the cricket...).

In the end, the original Pinocchio is a pretty fun read, the boy is likable and the semi-self awareness of all puppets in the story is more than a little thought provoking.

Why it is ok to give up on a book series

For the last few months I’ve been working my way through Phillip José Farmer’s The Dungeon, a shared-world fantasy series that was published from 1988 to 1990.

Let me go back a quick step here:

1) A shared world fantasy series is one where different authors continue the story forward from novel to novel, think of it like an elaborate, and book series length, game of telephone.

2) I started reading this particular series because one of my favourite Canadian authors, Charles de Lint, wrote two instalments (Volumes 3 and 5)

3) I tend to be a sucker for series, whether the 50+ books in the Dragonlance series, the expanded Universe Star Wars Novels, or the increasingly depressing, but always engaging Wild Cards series (edited by Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin)

So a series really has to let me down for me to decide to jump off during the last book...

Strongly influenced by pulp magazine stories of the 1920s and 30s and involving everything from dimension hopping to dinosaurs and spaceships, The Dungeon, at first glance seemed pretty tailor-made for me. I've read a number of series with different contributing authors and when done correctly,, shared world series can be fascinating and exciting for a reader who wants to get different perspectives on the same world.

The Dungeon series starts out all right, and then with each new author just seemed to get better and better, yes de Lint was a high point for me, as he found ways to make the stories move faster and also came up with some very interesting plot twists and great character moments.

The problem actually came when I hit about page fifty in the final volume. Author Richard Lupoff (who wrote the first book in the series) seems to have either not read the rest of the series or simply decided to ignore it - he comments about the adventures of the protagonist, Clive Folliot by going into in-depth description of his adventures in book one, and then simply mentioning there were other adventures as well.

The book seemed incredibly dismissive of the rest of the series and as each book ended on a cliffhanger, also managed the ruin the one presented at the end of book five by IGNORING THE ENTIRE THING! Seriously, I could have finished the book and had worse things to say, but after being figuratively slapped in the face by the first few chapters, I decided it would make more sense to state the following.

It is ok to put down a book you don't like - even if you've read everything else in the series and this book promises to give you all the answers you've been craving since you began. The best part about any entertainment medium is that as the consumer (reader, player, audience, etc.) you have the right and the ability to simply say

"No Thanks".

Sorry for my rough words (as a Canadian they may be less rough than yours, but trust me, they're pretty bad here).

December Reading Plans

Happy December Everyone!

Having entered the final month of 2014, I’ve got eight books ahead of me and hopefully a couple weeks I can dedicate to clearing out the various magazines, comics and trade (collected comic) collections I’ve gathered over the last year.

Most exciting for me will be the first three volumes in Phillip Jose Farmer’s The Dungeon series, a six-volume collection that has intrigued me for years as I came across various volumes at various used-bookstores, and as I found earlier this year that volumes three and five were written by Charles de Lint, I’ve now got the excuse to finally buckle down and check them out.

Each year after I’ve finished my various pre-selected reads, I hit the magazines and comics I’ve added to my collection – top spot this year goes to the zombie-themed Afterlife with Archie, followed by the Hack/Slash Army of Darkness Crossover, and hopefully catching up with Astro City again.

So Harlan Ellision circa 1975 just told me how to read his book...

…and seriously, as a long-time reader of horror and other dark genres, I'm think I'm going to follow his advice.

In his 1975 collection, Deathbird Stories, he begins the book with a Caveat Lector (literally, Let the Reader Beware):

It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole. - H.E.

It's interesting for me, as someone who has only read one Ellison book to date (his 1975 nonfiction book The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television), how quickly I'm willing to take his warning at face value.

For me, horror novels are always personal favourites, but rarely do they pack the same punch as horrific short fiction, which can shockingly drive or insidiously worm elements or themes directly into my mind and leave afterimages of themselves for years to come.

So although Deathbird Stories was going to be my next read, I think I'll actually slow myself down to one story a day and pick something else to be my primary focus, because honestly - if Harlan warns you about something, you better darn well listen.

Back to eleven books a month!

Or at least eleven books for this month - yup, April 2014 had me beat my average monthly reading for the last three years by four.

Which is pretty nice as I've got more than a few massive stacks of books I've been meaning to read for a while - first of all the 107 tiles waiting on my "for later" list at my local library, than the eight boxes of classic Science Fiction sitting in my garage, and that doesn't even count the entire shelf in my study dedicated to my collection of books to be read - and also my kids various collections that I've been perusing for the last few years.

I have to admit I'm finding Charles de Lint's second novel Moonheart to be a bit of a chore, the build up is pretty slow, and although I'm enjoying the male characters I'm finding the female ones to be a bit simple so far.

Anyway, next month has got a lot of cool titles on my list, including Orange is the New Black, Half Bad, and the second Divergent novel, Insurgent.

Free time is pretty darn cool!

My Next Author

Last month I finished reading Never Go Back (2013), the latest of author Lee Child's 18 books about Jack Reacher.  As I dedicate one of my books each month to reading through the collected works of a specific author (before Child it was Richard Matheson, and before that it was P.G. Wodehouse and Robert McCammon), it is now time to decide who I will be beginning with next.

So starting this month I'm going to give the works of Canadian fantasist Charles de Lint (pictured left) a try.  I've been collecting his books on and off for years in my various used bookstore runs, so tomorrow I'll begin with his first novel The Riddle of the Wren.

To date I've only read one of his books, the 1987 book Jack the Giant Killer, which was listed as a recommended read in one of my Changeling: the Dreaming Role-Playing-Game Books.  I read it in the late '90s; it was excellent and the reason I started collecting his books almost fifteen years ago (yikes!).

Anyway, I'm hoping the experiment will turn out well, over the years my wife has read an awful lot of his books and tells me I'm in for a treat.

Why I Don't Read the Inside Flap of books

Right now I'm reading the book The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway for one of my book clubs.

At two chapters in I can tell you it involves truckers, a world existing in the aftermath of something called "The Go-Away War" and is sort of like Earth (many of the same cities, movies and cultural concepts are there) but clearly is not our Earth.

I have to admit, after I finished the second chapter and was still unable to say where in the world this story was taking place a part of me wanted to read the inside flap of the dust-cover, you know the bit that gives you a brief plot summary to help you decide to purchase/read the book?

But here's my problem - I'm reading the book already, do I really need to know exactly what the overall story is about or should I just trust the author to take me to some interesting places with some interesting characters.  As of yet I haven't read any summary or review of the book and honestly I don't think I will either before I finish it.

Looking back at all the books I've read in the last couple years I realize that I really don't tend to read the inside flaps (or brief plot outlines online) anymore - I trust the authors I like and as many of my books are either based on recommendations from friends or come off of lists of "best 100 books" I tend to trust that whatever the story is about it's probably worth my time.

Things I've Noticed: Making time for reading is important

In case I haven’t mentioned it before; I like to read, a lot – actually a whole lot.

On average I read roughly 100 books a year and I’m not counting articles for school, single issues of comic books, magazines or newspaper articles.

Now, a lot of people ask me, “how the heck do you find time to read all those books?” and honestly, it’s pretty simple.

1) I do a little bit of prep work to ensure I have stuff to read when I need it

The first rule is pretty easy to follow – as one of those horrible people who wake up early in the morning, I stick whichever book I’m currently reading next to my coffee maker and get five to ten minutes every morning to read before my morning cup is ready, at which time I stick my book in my jacket pocket… hmm…

1a) Have a jacket with pockets that can fit most books

2) I carry a book with me everywhere.

On the bus, on car trips, to the grocery store, pretty much everywhere, because I’ve always found if I have a book and get stuck in a big line at the store, I’m doing pretty good, but if I forget to bring a book with me, my bus trip/car trip/grocery store trip suddenly has plenty of stops and pauses that would have been perfect for me to spend time reading.

3) I limit how much time I spend watching TV/playing games/etc.

Because otherwise, I’d be very knowledgeable in terms of Honey Boo Boo (which to be fair, I’m fairly knowledgeable about) but would get nowhere near the amount of reading I like to get done each day completed.

So there you go, if you like to read, plan ahead, keep a book on you, and cut down on your other stuff so you have room to read.