My reading this past month has been very fragmented, and I blame Catherynne M. Valente. In an early-August posting (or “toot,” as they are known) on Mastodon, she mentioned that voting for this year’s Hugo awards was coming up soon, and that buying a voting-only membership in
Started August 11, 2026, finished August 15, 2026 Richard Helmling and I have been emailing each other for a year or so now, ever since I discovered his book Athena: Emergent and he gave me encouraging words about mine, The Immortal Remains. I consider Richard a friend and a good
(This was originally published on Big List Energy at Medium.com) I recently served on a jury for a murder trial. Though I learned a lot of stuff during the trial about DNA evidence, tracing cell phones, and determining time of death (don’t believe anything a TV medical examiner
Started 7/21/26, Finished 7/24/26 If I really enjoy a book, I’m likely to want to read it again, and Mick Herron’s espionage story Slow Horses has surfaced from the murky depths of my To Be Read pile for a fresh look, five years later.
Started 7/13/26, Finished 7/18/26 I have a lot of respect for Christopher Tolkien. The son of ridiculously famous author J.R.R. Tolkien, he spent most of his adult life going through his father’s works and trying to make sense of the embryonic notes and
This is my memoir of serving on a jury in King County, Washington, in June and July 2026. I'm not attempting to make any particular points; I wrote it mostly as a record of an interesting experience. The Crime This was a murder case. The victim, a Black
Read 7/4/26 - 7/9/26 As I’ve mentioned before, my family has been watching the excellent Poirot series on PBS over the last few months, and now and then I enjoy an episode so much I’m inspired to go read the original. This time around it
I’m a restless writer. I move back and forth between writing tools like a child changes crayons. I recently spent part of a weekend reviving an old interest in the Vim text editor, rebuilding my configuration file and installing plugins that made it friendlier for writing prose. Then I
Read June 20 - July 1, 2026 I’d been looking forward to this, a history of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (affectionally known as the OED), and was a little disappointed because I thought there should be more to it, but in the end figured author Simon Winchester
Read June 23-29, 2026 This is an old book, published in 1980, which I picked up for some historical research. It’s subtitled “The Essential Guide To Home Computers,” though it’s probably not what people expected when they read it. The microcomputer revolution really got started in 1974
Read 5/31/26 - 6/14/26 I haven't had much interest in short stories, but I'm trying to change that as I work to increase the number of stories I read at one time. The latest part of that effort was Mary Ladd Gavell'
Read May 22 - June 7, 2026 I've been cogitating for a couple of weeks on what to say about Alix Harrow's The Once and Future Witches. Put simply, I found it a really good book, and like most books I get caught up in, it was