Good morning and Happy New Year to all! We spent a wonderful New Years Eve yesterday and last night by doing a lot of nothing. After another epic Christmas visit to Colombia, the four of us were happy to lounge around with full abandon for scheduled activities, binge watching Wednesday and eating Chinese food. Wednesday is...
Brazil is out! Argentina hangs on by a thread! Spain has been out! And U.S.A....well, sadly, that's old news now. As a family we've enjoyed the hell out of this World Cup cycle, and the timing couldn't be better. This fall we just started watching Premier League and La Liga (thank you, Fubo TV), my...
I confess that I finished reading The Killer Angels a month or so ago. I kept wanting to write about it, but decided what I really wanted to do was watch Gettysburg, the 1993 film based on the book, to tell you about yet another fantastic book-to-movie adaptation. But, alas. The Killer Angels book-to-movie adaptation...
Last month I read Deep Work by Cal Newport and what Cal had to say about work, focused attention, connectivity, email, and especially social media, had an immediate effect on my behavior. Cal's entire body of work centers around technology, social media, focused attention, productivity, and other related topics. Deep Work is his Big Idea...
I finally picked up Bird Box, long after the 2018 hype over the Netflix movie adaptation, and the trending cultural references and hilarious memes about blindfolds. I thought it was an entertaining read with a fast-paced, linear storyline that's airtight. There's very little meandering or monologuing. Josh Malerman is not making a cultural statement with...
I had Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea sitting on my bookshelf and decided to read it. The story isn't what I thought it would be, plus it moves too slowly for contemporary readers. Same with the Disney movie staring Kirk Douglas. But, the book changed the Science Fiction genre when it was published in 1870...
There's lots of reasons to write pulp novels. One reason is that pulp novels sell, and a writer should never discount what readers want. If you're a beginner looking for a quick book that will improve your storytelling, here is James Scott Bell's book, "How to Write Pulp Fiction," available on Amazon. When you're a...
I came away after reading this book with an 'aha' feeling about the intenet. I learned about this book a while ago on NPR and it came to mind recently when I wanted to find a book about the internet. Or rather, the physical internet. This morning I went running and finished, Tubes: A Journey...
The Blade Runner movie is based on a novel with the odd title, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This novel started the franchise with the original 1982 movie staring Harrison Ford, and more recently, Blade Runner 2049, produced in 2017 staring Ryan Gosling. The original novel is something of a distant cousin to both...
This is a short list of war novel picks for service members. They don't all feature Americans, or American service members for that matter. But a little empathy goes a long way, and sometimes we're not the best ones to tell our story. I'm switching gears from science fiction to read and review a war...
