Lovecraft is fun. I recently found great audio Lovecraft, read by Wayne June. I highly recommend that, especially with Halloween coming.

Finally got around to reading Tuesdays With Morrie, thirteen years later. Newsflash: it's a tear-jerker.

Don't tell me how it ends, but I hope Morrie pulls through.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. With some ROM thrown in. And a pair of Iron Fist one shots from my old neighborhood comic book shop.

What?!? I didn't even know he was sick!

Just read and loved Mira Grant's FEED, in which young bloggers are recognized as the nation's most important journalists in the year 2040 now that the zombie apocalypse has come and the mainstream media did such a shitty job of reporting on it. Zombies, online reporting, snarky attitudes, and a presidential election -- hell, it's practically IMWAN: The Novel!

DO NOT READ, I repeat, DO NOT READ:

David Weber's Out of the Dark. I enjoy the alien invasion/human resistance book. And that was what I thought I was getting. But what I got was an incredibly dry, repetitive (all the aliens have the same internal monologues about Earth's technology, wonderful roads, and illogical inhabitants - you get the same thoughts pretty much every time we change character viewpoints. And the humans think pretty much the same thoughts too.) and overly technical book. I could maybe have slogged my way through this but I decided to skim to see if the action pick up and boy was I surprised when Dracula popped up to save the day. Yes, Dracula. Turns out the aliens piss him off and he decides to make some of the remaining human resistance into vampires to straighten things out. Worst book in a long time.

Jeez that sounds really really terrible Wayne.

That sounds very similar to a big writing project my kid turned in. He is nine.

It was. I regret the money spent on it. I'm glad I didn't read all of it though.

The movie is godawful, but I've heard good things about the Claremont novels that continue the story.

It does sound like something a free-associating kid would make up.

Read them a long time ago - not bad, not bad at all.

Stories About Sally, a 1949 children's school reader about the lives of a young girl (she'd have been about the same age as my mother) and her family in a bright and cheerful postwar world. Like many textbooks of the time, it had lots of quite pretty illustrations. I first read this in grade school, when I found an old copy lying around a teacher's classroom. Our school district never seemed to throw anything away. So I discovered Dick and Jane readers and such that were no longer actually used in class.

Funny how your childhood memory works. I remembered Sally as always traveling somewhere by plane, train, etc. Now I see that her travels were only a small part of the book. They're just the parts that I fastened my attention on while skimming through it all those years ago.

I'm trying to read The Sword Of Shannara, but I ain't feeling the love.

http://trueai.blogspot.com/2006/01/part ... anies.html and other explorations surrounding Penrose-Hammeroff Consciousness Theory. News articles. Little Essays Towards Truth by Aleister Crowley.

Plan to visit the passengers towed back to our harbor today!

I finished Towers of Midnight, book 13 in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (now being finished by Brandon Snaderson from Jordan's notes). Actually, after reading the book, I was confused by a few points, so I went back and listened to the audiobook version of the previous book (The Gathering Storm), and then listened to the audiobook version of Towers of Midnight. Some of my confusion was because I had forgotten or misremembered parts near the end of the previous book.

I think Sanderson is doing a very good job completing the series. Things are certainly moving along in the books. They seem to read similarly to the ones Jordan wrote (of course, I think it helps with the familiar feeling that the audiobooks have all been read by the same team so they all sound familiar).

One of the other points that confused me are apparently because the different story lines going on in the book are not synced in time. This seems an odd way to do things to me. But it explains how a character from one storyline suddenly showed up hundreds of miles away in one of the other threads. But a very odd way to arrange things...and I'm still not sure how the different arcs sync up in some places.

There is a lot of Perrin material in the book, and after the way (I thought) that the Perrin story line bogged things down in some of the middle books, Perrin has not been one of my favorites... but that story line moved along well, so I don't mind. Other characters were pretty impressive in their arcs.

One more book and we are done. Apparently I have to wait until "early 2012" to read it.

My Life in France by Julia Child.

Julia, an American, mind you, went to France and found Paris and the people absolutely WONDERFUL.

No wonder she turned out like she did.

The worst part is that in reading this out loud to the wife I am pathetically assassinating the occasional bits of French language. It's embarrassing.

I'm glad Stephane can't hear me.

Picked up The Book of the Living Dead. Edited by John Richard Stephens.

Reanimator is in it. I've wanted to read Herbert West's first story for some time. I, also, want to see what was used in the movie.

What a coincidence! I just re-read At the Mountains of Madness, by Lovecraft. It's a fascinating story, in that



I read the "Reanimator" stories years ago. I don't plan to read them again. Too sick for me.

Bad Girls of the Bible and What We Can Learn From Them, by Liz Curtis Higgs. It profiles various female figures from the Bible who had notable shortcomings in their lives. The author says that she can identify with them more than those who are portrayed as living the right way all their lives. Can't say I like the author's writing style all that much, but the book does give food for thought.

I drifted off Lord of the Rings over the Christmas break and got in to Conan, which of course leads me into Burrough's worlds of fantasy.

Just finished Chessmen of Mars (vol. 5 of the Barsoom series), and am going for At the Earth's Core next. We'll see where I'm at after that and if I'm ready to jump back into the lengthy Lord of the Rings saga. While excellent thus far, it's hard to pass up the quick and easy reads pulp fiction provides.