I’d been meaning to read one of Sir Terry Pratchett’s books for years now, and had never gotten around to it. Thankfully, my book club gave me the perfect opportunity. (Also, when I drink tequila, sometimes I start book clubs. That’s how my life works.) Mort is a lighthearted fantasy novel about a kid (named Mort,Read more
In Modern Romance, comedian Aziz Ansari teams up with sociologist Eric Klinenberg for a humorous exploration of what it means to date and find love in the modern world. In our grandparents’ era, finding “the one” wasn’t so complex. You’d meet someone cute in your neighborhood, and before you knew it, you’d be married. As Ansari explains,Read more
It all started with the taxidermied raccoon. I don’t normally read memoirs or books about depression, even if they do promise to be funny. A little too real, a little too close to home. In general, I prefer my books to be set in other worlds, other times, other cultures. I want to experience somethingRead more
The sunrise is golden and lovely, The birds chirp and twitter and tweet, You woke me and asked for some breakfast, So why the fuck won’t you eat? When I was a child, I was an extremely picky eater. For years, most of my diet consisted of buttered pasta, because I refused to try newRead more
Jonas is good with a sword, but he has no common sense (or other talents, for that matter). After getting arrested for a brawl outside of a tavern, he ends up being sentenced to help guard a woman named Rime on her travels. Rime is secretly a wild mage, and wild mages aren’t supposed toRead more
You know how in Star Trek and other stereotypical sci-fi shows there always seem to be characters who exist only to die in horrific ways in order to create drama and a sense of danger? In Redshirts by John Scalzi, a group of newly arrived crewmembers on the Intrepid quickly find that everyone’s really weird aboutRead more
The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard is the fourth book in the Johannes Cabal series. Even though it’s not the first in the series, it can function relatively well as a standalone. I haven’t read the earlier books, but was able to jump into this one quite easily. Johannes Cabal is a necromancer. He’sRead more
The Weirdness by Jeremy Bushnell is by far one of the most bizarre books that I’ve ever read. The protagonist, Billy Ridgeway, is a fuck-up. He’s given up on his dreams of being a writer and settled for a life where he (barely) scrapes out a living working at a New York City deli. HeRead more
I bought How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston because I thought it would make a hilarious coffee table book and/or conversation piece. Race is one of those taboo topics that people (myself included) aren’t comfortable talking about. Since Baratunde Thurston writes for The Onion, I hoped he’d be able to talk about racial issuesRead more
While shelving books at work, I happened to come across Daniel H. Wilson’s “How to Survive a Robot Uprising.” The title made me chuckle, so I thought I’d give it a read. Written by a robotics researcher, the premise of the book is a humorous look at how robots work and how to thwart theirRead more