Podcasts

I’ve recently begun listening to podcasts on my iPod, pretty much downloading a new podcast every day. Granted, one of those podcasts is of a daily radio show out of Philadelphia – The Preston and Steve Show so there’s something new every day, but I usually throw something else into the mix. Unsurprisingly, that ‘something else’ is more often than not, a genre podcast. Unfortunately by the time I discovered Adventures in SciFi Publishing, creator Shaun Farrell placed the podcast on hiatus.

Another very good podcast I’ve been following is The Dragon Page Cover to Cover which is led by Michael R. Mennega and Michael Stackpole.

I just started listening to Scott Sigler’s Infected, which he released as a free audiobook through iTunes. I recall a very humorous brew-ha-ha over on Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog when Infected was published in hardcover.

I know I’m a little behind the curve with listening to podcasts, but I only got my iPod about a year ago, so forgive me.

So, does anybody from my millions…and millions of readers listen to any good podcasts?

Caine Black Knife, Dresden, & iPod

Continuing the weekly postings relating to Matthew Stover, I posted my review of his latest offering, Caine Black Knife, last night. Simply put, it was the best book I read this year, and I’ve already said how much I enjoyed MultiReal and Little Brother. Here’s the intro to my review of Caine Black Knife:

There is nothing in my life I care about more than story. There is nothing I know more about than the difference between a good one and a bad one. You’re betting my life and your future on what happens in the next day or two. Let’s go balls-out to make it the Greatest Fucking Show on Overworld. (From the Trade Paperback edition of Caine Black Knife)

After seven years, Matthew Stover brings readers back to Overworld and back to Caine. For readers who enjoyed the previous two novels in what is now dubbed the Acts of Caine sequence but wanted to get more of Caine, Caine Black Knife will be a welcome novel. This novel is all Caine and is a bit of a stylistic and tonal departure from the previous Caine novels. Whereas Stover played with narrative voice and point-of-view in Heroes Die and to a greater extent in Blade of Tyshalle, here the great majority of the novel is told in Caine’s voice in the first person narrative. A very minor portion takes place in the second person narrative, so Stover doesn’t abandon the shifting perspective entirely.

So, go read the rest of the review then buy the book.

I also finished, Blood Rites, the sixth installment the Dresden Files over the weekend; the series is turning into one of my favorites. My only gripe is that sometimes Harry is being a dick just to be a dick, but perhaps the revelations in Blood Rites will soften him up a little bit. I’ll be reading Backup shortly and hopefully pick up the remaining books in the series.

John Marco posted the awesome cover (below) art to his forthcoming novel, Starfinder, which sounds like a cool mix of high fantasy and steampunk. The world has steam trains, electricity, ornithopters and godlike races. How cool does that sound?


My iPod stopped working today for no reason. Since I got it from the spectacular Mrs. Blog o’ Stuff back in June, the thing has been my own little security blanket and I’m suffering withdrawal right now. I hope the folks at the Apple store in the mall can help out.

SFFWorld Status & The 100 book meme

I know some of the folks who visit here are members of the SFFWorld.com forums - we are experiencing some problems with the site. The backend software was recently updated, so hopefully the ship will right itself soon. I can't access the site from all the places I usually do.

I know iPods have been around for a few years now, but I finally got one last week. Or rather, Mrs. Blog o' Stuff, awesome wife that she is, gave me one for our Anniversary. I've got the 8 gigger and it is already nearly filled, although I won't be putting any of my old Aerosmith or Guns n' Roses on it since I could hear either of them at any given point if I tune into either XM or FM stations. I swear, those two bands are played more now then they were 15 years ago. I've heard enough of both bands in my life, don't need to hear them again. Granted Appetite for Destruction is a seminal album. Rant aside, one of the cool things is listening to stuff I haven't listened to in a while, as I load music into it. So, that's me, cutting edge.

Since a lot of people are doing it, here's my stab at the 100 book meme.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own so we can try and track down these people who've read six and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
(I read this in a really cool course at Rutgers - The Bible as Literature).
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
I hated this novel; I had to read it in an early English course at Rutgers. I still can’t decide if this or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the book I loathed the most from my English courses
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles– Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
(I took two Shakespeare courses at Rutgers– comedies and histories/tragedies so I read a bunch of them)
15 Rebecca– Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (If I haven’t read it by now, I probably won’t)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
(Well duh, see #33)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (Mrs. Blog o’ Stuff read this and keeps asking when I’ll read it)
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville (I was surprised how enthralled I was by this book that has a reputation for being boring)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (I read this waaay back in I think 4th grade, but recall nothing of it)
74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White (saw the movie)
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Only 24 of the above books read – wow do I feel like a plebe.