Looking for Your Next Book

 Any good theatre student could tell you that three is an ideal minimum number of actors to have on stage at a time because it offers the best opportunity for stage 'pictures.' Three characters also provides more conflict possibilities between characters while keeping the number of actors (often seen in terms of cost - especially for union houses) down. This book is ideal, then, for a number of different reasons. I enjoy reading plays simply for enjoyment (for those who haven't read many plays, it's very different experience and even those who read a lot of novels or short stories often find it difficult) but as someone who has worked in theatre for many years and who has directed at high school, college, and community theatre levels, I was often reading plays and thinking of their possibilities on a stage. One of the aspects I really like about a collection like this is simply the access to a diverse range of plays. For those of us who do like reading scripts but don...

 I'd heard that bestselling author James Patterson had written a new "The Shadow" novel and, being a fan of the pulp era literature, I wanted to check it out so I picked up a copy at my local library. Lamont Cranston and his girlfriend Margo Lane are out on a date in the 1930's.  Each has something special to tell the other.  Lamont plans to ask Margo to marry him and Margo plans to tell him that she's pregnant.  But before either can get to the right moment, Lamont realizes that the food has been poisoned.  Planning for something like this, since he is, after The Shadow, he rushes the two of them to a secret lab. Nearly 150 years in Lamont's future, teenager Maddy Gomes gets a strange request to meet from a lawyer.  She has inherited something special and unusual. She makes her way to a warehouse and discovers that what she's inherited is the body of a man, frozen. A doctor tells her that he's inherited the care for this body from his father who inher...

Despite the fact that I really like cats (I've had cats living with me for about half a century) and I really like science fiction - with John Scalzi being one of my favorite, working writers - I am always leery about picking up a book with cats as a leading or major character. I suspect this comes from reading some Andre Norton books with cats as characters, which I did not enjoy.  And so I looked at this new Scalzi novel with a very hesitant eye. Frankly, if it wasn't Scalzi, I'd have completely ignored it (of course there are presumably many who would pick this up because it has a cat on the cover). Charlie Fitzer is a bit down on his luck.  A former newspaper journalist now teacher at a small college, Charlie lives in his parents' old home, which irks his siblings terribly.  They'd much rather he moved out so they could sell the house and be done with it since they are technically the owners. Charlie would like very much to buy the local pub - the place he has ...

 I typically have not been very fond of epic fantasy. It's not that I don't like the stories or the characters or the fantastic adventures. It's the complex world-building that is involved in most epic adventures. Maybe it's an unknown learning disability or an undiagnosed ADD, but the more complex and foreign-sounding the names of characters and locations, the more challenged I am to read the book. When I struggle to understand the 'who' and the 'where' I generally can't enjoy the story. The very first sentence in the description on Goodreads would typically put me on edge: Inar is Master Builder for the Kingdom of Mishig-Tenh. Knowing this about myself and my reading habits, I will often eschew reading epic fantasy if I recognize that's what it is before I start reading. I did not know that's what this book would be, which is a good thing, because despite my struggle with some of the people and places, I enjoyed this book. Inar, the Master ...

 Juni Jessup and her two sister, Tansy and Maggie, have gone into business together in their hometown of Cedar River, Texas, opening a combination record store and coffee shop. Vinyl LPs are making a comeback after all, despite critics thinking the medium was dead.  But speaking of 'dead' ... finding a dead body in the supply closet just as they are looking to have a grand opening is not part of the plan.  Juni's life gets more complicated when their uncle, Calvin, already a suspect in the murder, disappears. And the police officer leading the investigation is Juni's EX-boyfriend (who passive-aggressively keeps putting himself back into her life). Convinced that her uncle would never murder anyone, Juni sets out to prove his innocence - which isn't easy since he's making himself look guilty - because Calvin is family and family is EVERYthing to Juni. As readers of my blog know, I'm not a big fan of most cozy mysteries, but the setting caught my eye and my in...

 It's the Galactic Cold War (book three) and as one might expect with a cold war, there are twists and turns and spies in all the politics. A terrorist attack has struck the Nova capital. Kovalic and team are under a lot of pressure to find out who did it and put a stop to any future terrorist attacks. But with every thread of evidence they follow, new threads appear and the whole thing is getting bigger and bigger and they can't help but question everything they've been led to believe to this point. The whole team, including the new member, Addy Sayers, takes their work seriously and won't let up until it's resolved, but the resolution doesn't look like it's anything they were expecting - and that scares them. Author Dan Moren has written a fast-paced spy thriller in space with this book.  The previous two books in the series (whole number books ... I see there are book #'s 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, and 3) were also thrillers, but this seems to take it a ...

Being a Knight of Arthur's Roundtable requires an oath to serve and protect but thanks to some shenanigans on the part of Merlin, those knights live a very long, obsequious life. They are not quite immortal, though from the perspective of mere mortals, they would seem to be.  When the world needs them the most to fulfill their oaths and protect Briton (and all humanity), they are raised from their buried tombs, under great, protected trees, and sent forth. Nothing but true death will stop them until they've met their duty. We first meet Sir Kay, rising from the earth, not knowing what awaits him, but certain that it's something serious or he wouldn't be awakened. Not far away is a large complex making a racket and pumping noxious fumes into the sky.  He hears a woman scream and takes action. Shortly thereafter, the plant blows up and from the giant flames rises a great dragon which takes flight. The woman, and now Sir Kay, fights against corporations polluting the earth...

 Alice Price-Healy (of the Price family) has spent 50 years looking for her husband.  Now she's got him, along with Sally - a young girl who's been trapped in the other dimension with Thomas - and life hasn't simply returned to where it was when he went missing.  Alice and Sally don't bond well, each suspicious of the other, but they have Thomas as a common interest.  Nothing is the same for Thomas, though he's glad to be out of the strange dimension where he'd been trapped. Together, the only thing for them to do now is to return home.  But 'home' isn't particularly safe - there's a war going on between the Price Family and The Covenant of St. George.   The Price Family are part of a group of cryptozoologists who are dedicated to protecting all supernatural creatures from being discovered by humanity.  The Covenant of St. George is a group of people who are dedicated to upholding one ideal - anything that was not present on the Ark with Noah is...

Have you ever been curious about the process of making a major motion picture?  Why not read about, in fiction form, from a man who's been on the inside for decades.  The story... A well-recognize and lauded movie director has taken on the task of adapting a 1970's comic book into a major superhero movie. We follow the director, his producer, their new-to-the-business production assistant, a cast of seasoned pros and fresh new faces, and the whole gamut of crew and technicians as they prepare and shoot the film on a tight timeline in remote areas of New Mexico. But before we get to the making of the movie, we spend some time with TREV-VORR/Robert Andersen - the man who created the Firefall comic book that was published by an underground publisher (back in the days when there were few small press comic publishers). But before we get to the making of the comic book, we spend some time with Bob Falls - the distant uncle of Robert Andersen. Falls has served in the Vietnam War...

 High school sucks.  And if you aren't one of the jocks ... worse, if you are branded as one of the outcasts or  freaks by your 'peers' ... then school years are miserable. It's not uncommon for students in a situation like this to have fantasies of getting special powers that would allow them to deliver some kind of retribution.  But what if, with those powers comes a proportionally powerful monster? A group of four high school friends in a rural Arkansas town discover this very problem. Their friendship bond is based on the fact that they are each routinely picked on by the bullies in the school.  They accidentally open a portal to a different dimension and are endowed with superpowers. But opening that portal also allowed the demons from the other dimension to enter our own time and Earth.  Now the four "Freaks" (they decided to name their collective by taking the name they were called by their bullies) must protect their families and friends and stay a ...

 You could take an entire university course just studying the works of Ernest Hemingway, so trying to sum up his importance in a blog post would be both presumptive and trite. But if, for some reason, you aren't already familiar with Hemingway's work, this short story might be a good place to start. Big Two-Hearted River is, at best, a short story - not even a novelette. But combined with a foreword by John N. MacLean, which is almost as long as the story, we do get a novella-length work. This story (a Nick Adams story, for those of you might find that interesting) is possibly the epitome of a nature love story. Nick, a WW1 veteran, needs to clear his head and so he goes away to camp and fish the Big Two-Hearted River. And that's really all there is to it.  No big plot.  Just man and nature as simply as possible.  This is emphasized by Hemingway's sparse language and short, clipped sentences. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his ...

 Lennon Pierce is the son of U.S. Presidential candidate, Senator Camden Pierce. He's a bit of a wild child (he's been arrested a few times for things like drag racing) and doesn't seem to take life too seriously.  That's about to change when he's kidnapped, put on a place and strapped into a parachute and then pushed out. He's fortunate enough to think through his actions and pull the ripcord to engage the parachute. He is not so fortunate, however, in his place of landing.  The intention of the kidnappers is to send Lennon into The Q - once the state of Texas, now a walled off quarantine zone from the last pandemic.  There's only one gate in or out of The Q and no one is allowed to come out because they carry the virus, and no one goes in willingly.  Lennon's been given an antidote which will protect him for 48 hours - meaning he has two days to get from the southern-most point in The Q to the gate at the northern point.  The territory inside The Q is ...