Category: Books / Novels / Writing


  • Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel My rating: 3 of 5 stars Found the writing pretty dry. Plenty of characters who go by their name, nickname, or title. So it was easy to lose track of what is happening when reading in little spurts, which probably set me back about 25% my normal pace just from…

  •   Read 75 books. I should be at 18.75 read by this point. So, 18 is pretty good. Hit 25,000 pages. I should be at 6,250 pages read, so my 6,270 is on pace. Finish series already started. I finished the Millennium series (one book) and make progress on both the Robot and Expanse series (4…

  • I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed. Lee Felsesnsteinin The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson The story I tell about how I ended up working in information…

  • Click-bait: 11 Ways To Love Goodreads Even More I use the stats for my resolutions to decide how many books to do in any given year and especially picked 25,000 for this year because of the low page count. The app is how I ever remember to add what I am reading and finished. A couple…

  • Living in the Bible Belt, sometimes the only association people have with my name is the book in the Bible. Which is fine. I mean who would honestly recognize… Ezra Klein Ezra Koenig Ezra Miller Ezra Cornell Ezra Pound Ezra Taft Benson before the book? Recently I did get a rather weird question. Ezra is…

  • I went to buy a book. There were a chaos of options in the used list at the same price. Because these were used, there were descriptions of quality headlined with: Acceptable Good Very Good Like New All but new were represented at the cheapest price level. So naturally I looked through the very goods for the…

  • I try to set achievable, measurable resolutions. Read 75 books. In 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, I set the goal for 52 even though I kept reading far more. Hit 25,000 pages. Last year dropped below 20K, so I really need to get the average back up to something respectable. Finish series already started. 24 of the 75…

  • OK, the year is completely done, so here is where I am with each resolution. Read 52 books. The goal was 52. I read 70. My Goodreads user challenge. Looking at pages, I managed to read 19,669 compared to an average of 21,815 for the prior four years. So while the number of books is good, they were lighter. (I think my…

  • The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon My rating: 5 of 5 stars In this near future, science has figured out how to intervene with children to prevent autism. Lou and his friends, have to navigate the difficult choices when a cure becomes potentially available. It explores experimentation, work policies, social pressures, and what it…