August 31, 2018

  • Thought

    The air show is happening in Toronto which means it is VERY noisy right now.

  • Review

    3.5 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    The Price You Pay (Aidan Truhen (pseudonym), 2018)

    Whoa. This is one in-your-face crime novel. Not for the faint-of-heart. That said, it can be fun to get inside the head of a charming sociopath every now-and-then. As long as you can get out again.

    I saw someone guessing this is a Nick Harkaway novel and I’m pretty sure it is.

    I am a fucking asymmetric criminal startup. I got limited expertise in criminal strategic warfare. I hotdesk and I outsource and I franchise, but what I mostly have is a core concept, forward momentum.

     

  • Thought

    Isn’t this poster gorgeous? Those fonts!

  • Thought

    I’ve been working on my blog for most of the summer (with help, I’m not a WordPress geek by any stretch of the imagination). My next goal is to automate distribution of posts from the blog to social media.

August 26, 2018

  • Review

    4.5 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    Ball Lightning (Liu Cixin, Joel Martinsen (Translator), 2005/2018)

    Liu Cixin really is a worthy successor to A.C. Clarke – the first author I became obsessed while a mere wee tike). This is a new English translation of an older novel that doesn’t quite have the expansiveness of Three-Body Problem, but was still a joy to read.

August 23, 2018

August 22, 2018

  • Review

    2.5 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    The Beyond (Hasraf Dulull, 2017)

    None of this makes any sense at all!

August 21, 2018

  • Review

    3.0 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    The Commuter (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2018)

    Dumb. Fun.

August 18, 2018

  • Review

    3.5 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)

    Not a fan – at all – of superhero movies, but this was fun. As with Deadpool, if they go for humor I can get behind it easier.

August 17, 2018

  • Review

    1.0 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (Mike Newell, 2018)

    An old-timey romance that features beautiful shots of the Guernsey island landscape but otherwise is weak and problematic. We’re still making movies about women falling for their Nazis captors in 2018?

August 11, 2018

  • Review

    3.5 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    The Incendiaries (R.O. Kwon, 2018)

    A great debut novel by R.O. Kwon. Cults and terrorism examined from a new angle. Maybe it’s “cult adjacent” more than about cults.

August 4, 2018

August 1, 2018

  • Review

    3.5 rating based on 1,234 ratings

    My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)

    Moshfegh writes wonderful stories about damaged women doing terrible things. This fantastical story of a woman going to extreme lengths to avoid the consequences of her life didn’t please me as much as her earlier novel Eileen, but it was satisfying nonetheless.