Thursday, December 31, 2009

2009

Books I read this year.

  1. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K .Dick
  2. Daddy's Boy by Chris Elliott
  3. Store of Infinity by Robert Sheckley
  4. Scar Lover by Harry Crews
  5. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
  6. The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
  7. As Above, So Below by Rudy Rucker
  8. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  9. Into Hot Air by Chris Elliott
  10. Can You Feel Anything When I do This? by Robert Sheckley
  11. Lies Inc. by Philip K. Dick
  12. JPod by Douglas Coupland
  13. How I Learned to Cook, Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan -eds.
  14. All the Visions by Rudy Rucker/ Space Baltic by Anselm Hollo
  15. Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick
  16. Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica
  17. The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends by Adriano Sack and Ingo Niermann
  18. The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
  19. The Reach of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman
  20. Night of the Living Shark by David Bischoff
  21. Shadows With Eyes by Fritz Leiber
  22. The Wind From Nowhere by J.G. Ballard
  23. The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs*
  24. Vurt by Jeff Noon
  25. Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor
  26. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
  27. Journey Beyond Tomorrow by Robert Sheckley
  28. Help! I'm a Prisoner in the Library by Eth Clifford
  29. A War of Gifts by Orson Scott Card
  30. The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues by Harry Harrison

*indicates book that I started prior to this year and finished reading this year.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Monday, November 30, 2009

black monday

I went out to Gardner's today and bought these three books:
1. Night of the Living Rat by Doyle and Macdonald
This is the second book in Daniel Pinkwater's Melvinge of the Megaverse series. While I didn't really like the first one that much, I'm willing to give the series another chance. The first one was written by David Bischoff whose novelization of the movie War Games I'd read way back in the 80s. This one is written by 2 authors I've never heard of and whose whole names I've yet to discover.
2. Help! I'm a Prisoner in the Library! by Eth Clifford
I remember I bought this one at a school book fair when I was in elementary school. Lately I've been feeling nostalgic for all the old books I read in my youth. This is one I remembered and missed. I had to use my cell phone in the store to search and remember the author's name before I found it.
3. The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues by Harry Harrison
I have read every one of the other books in the series with the exception of this one. I've been searching for it for years. The last time I read one of this series was early '05 maybe. This one is clearly the prize pick of the day.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Local Used Bookstore

If you can't find it at 4421 South Mingo, you probably just haven't looked hard enough.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card: a man with a clear vision. Undeterring, Unyielding, vigilant, he knows what he wants to see: an Ender's Game movie. But before the award-winning novelist's hallmark work can get to the big screen, he's making damn sure the look, feel, design, atmosphere—Ender's Game's entire visual spectrum—is perfect. How does he plan to do that? By bringing the beloved property to Marvel Comics.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

highly recommended

I'm really enjoying Red Dwarf because it's 2 of my favorite things: sci-fi and funny. Speaking of which, here's a funny, sci-fi book I read a long time ago that I highly recommend. Illegal Aliens by Phil Foglio and Nick Pollotta. Here's a plot summary from Fantastic Fiction:
Prof. Rajavur and his 'First Contact Team' had been patiently waiting years for aliens to land on Earth. Leader Idow and the crew of the starship, All That Glitters, were just looking for an unknown planet where they could land and have a little fun teasing the primitive natives. So it was pure bad luck that the first humans the alien tricksters encounter is a ruthless New York City street gang, the Bloody Deckers. With more starships landing and the world in chaos, Rajavur and his First Contact Team have to move fast in a desperate plan to rescue the innocent aliens from the evil street gang! Then again, maybe they should join forces with the street gang to protect the Earth from the furious aliens? Best-Selling author Nick Pollotta and Hugo award winning illustrator Phil Foglio have packed this one-of-a-kind science fiction comedy full of thrilling combat, nuclear agents, planetary blockades, Omega Gas, the galactic police, Russian-doll-style Dyson spheres, a giant flying refrigerator, big juju, a high-stakes game of poker, space battles, warobots, the trail of the millennium, bar fights, naughty lingerie, lost civilizations, the United Nations Space Marines, lost civilizations, group sex, and delicious fried chicken.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Red Dwarf

It's cold and Lister is resorting to book burning and dog food eating to the huge disapproval of Rimmer.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Friday, October 30, 2009

Thursday, October 29, 2009

feathers

Peep Show

If I hadn't finished reading Ticket That Exploded, I would have never known where the band Miranda Sex Garden got their name. This is the only song I ever heard by them and it's a good one. I still have the album it came on: Hideaway movie soundtrack.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

unfinished

The Ticket That Exploded
by William S. Burroughs
I started reading this many years ago and stopped reading it less than 50 pages from the end. I guess I didn't like it as much as Western Lands and Naked Lunch. Also I was grossed out by the repeated use of the words "rectal mucus" as well as pervasive descriptions of "hard cocks flipping out and up". This book will receive an asterisk on the annual list, indicating it's partially read status.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

secret stash

Best five picture results from my Google search for "hollow book".




Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Saturday, October 10, 2009

author reading

Chris Elliott reads from his book Shroud of the Thwacker at Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, San Francisco, CA, December 15, 2005.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Cooking with Cool Cleveland

Michael Ruhlman has worked for over a decade with the best chefs in the country. From his first best-selling food book, The Making of a Chef, and his next one, The Soul of a Chef, which focused on Cleveland's Michael Symon among others, Ruhlman's groundbreaking work has exposed, celebrated and delineated the shadowy backstage world of America's greatest kitchens and the chefs who run them. His previous book, The Reach of a Chef, zeroed in on the increasing popularity of food culture and celebrity chefs, tracing the lives of master chefs and showing what happens when they leave the kitchen for the TV studio and best sellers lists. His new book The Elements of Cooking, is an opinionated food glossary patterned after Strunk & White's Elements of Style, jam-packed not only with key cooking terms, but definitions towards an understanding of how good cooks become great. The book is designed for anyone from the beginner to the experienced chef. Cool Cleveland's Thomas Mulready spent time in Michael's own Cleveland Heights kitchen as he prepared a meal of roasted chicken, fingerling potatoes fresh from the local farmer's market, green beans with toasted almonds, all topped off with a nice jus made from the scrapings on the bottom of the pan. He talks with Mulready about how America has become the center of the food universe, the secret code of the kitchen, and the eight indispensable fundamentals of cooking.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

mostly free books

I took all my receipts from the past few years to Gardner's used books out on Mingo today. If you bring in $100 worth of receipts of past purchases from Gardner's, you get $15 worth of free books. They added them up for me and I had close to $125 in receipts which was worth $19.26 in books. Here's what I got:
  1. The Wind From Nowhere by J.G. Ballard
  2. Shadows With Eyes: Six Tales of Crawling Horror by Fritz Leiber
  3. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
  4. Vurt by Jeff Noon
  5. Hunter/Victim by Robert Sheckley
  6. Red Dwarf: Infinty Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor

These choices actually exceeded my free credit amount by $1.07. Still a pretty good selection for only $20.33 total. I still have no idea which one I want to read first.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

movie adaptations

The 10th Victim (Italian: La decima vittima) is an Italian cult science fiction film directed by Elio Petri in 1965. It is based on Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story "Seventh Victim". Sheckley later published a novelization of the film in 1966.

Freejack is a 1992 science fiction film directed by Geoff Murphy. It stars Emilio Estevez, Mick Jagger, Rene Russo, Jonathan Banks, and Anthony Hopkins. Upon its release in the United States, the film received harsh reviews. The story was adapted from a 1959 novel titled Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley. Aside from the most basic elements, however — the journey of a modern man into a future where everything is for sale, and the presence of a "spiritual switchboard" in which souls are suspended — the cyberpunk plot bears little resemblance either in tone or content to Sheckley's story.

The above description was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia entry for Freejack.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Blog to Book

Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica
This is one that I've wanted to read for a long time. I've read the blog, which I highly recommend. I wish Cook Rant would start updating again, maybe he could get a book deal too.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

paperback writer

Bought this at B&N the other day, paperback. It was a toss up, which one I was going to get. Right next to it on the table was American Lion, also in paperback.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Ultimate Book of Spells


was a cartoon that was very similar to Harry Potter in which it had a young boy who discovers he is a wizard and magic is real and goes to a special boarding school to develop their talent. He soon discovers there is an evil wizard trying to take over the world and he must stop him with his two new friends and a talking book This show was also known as UBOS which is the shortened title. It aired on YTV in Canada.

Friday, July 3, 2009

All the Visions

Here's a book by my favorite author, Rudy Rucker. It is one I'd never heard of. I saw a copy of it for sale on Amazon for something like $3, so I ordered it. Turns out, it's actually 2 books in one
It is back to back with this one: Space Baltic by Anselm Hollo. Never heard of him but I'll read it anyway. This is a first, should I count it as one book or two? Since they are both very short and share a cover and one spine I will count it as one book. It is also a first in that since I could find no usable images of the covers on the internet, I simply shot pictures of the book, under lamp light with my cell phone and sent them to my e-mail. Problem solved.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

food book

How I Learned to Cook:
Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs (Hardcover)

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Douglas Coupland

The unique author of Generation X and JPod, Douglas Coupland, is on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Visual Bibliography


An complete overview of Philip K. Dick publication historry of his Science Fiction novels. More than 425 books covers are presented at a frenetic tempo dictated by Tito Puente's drums.

Monday, May 25, 2009

buy or steal this book

I bought this book in a convenience store or grocery store back in the mid to late eighties. I was on Freewheel with my dad and we were camping in some small town in rural Oklahoma, so I had some time to kill. This was a really good book and I highly recommend it. The main thing I remember about it is that it educated me about something that I had never heard about before: Absinthe. Anyway a few years back, I was flipping through the channels on TV and an interesting movie was on. A lot of it seemed familiar. They went to a commercial and when they came back they mentioned the name of the movie. That's when I learned that this book had been adapted into a film in 1997. I didn't watch the whole thing, but I'd like to someday. So once again, awesome book, it has a talking vase, and Amazon has hardback copies for a penny.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Rest In Peace

The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.
His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

books n drugs

I came across this interesting list in my secondary read yesterday. Imaginary drugs from literature, film and television. Check it out:
  1. Soma - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
  2. Moksha - Aldous Huxley, Island
  3. Moloko Plus - Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
  4. Can-D, Chew-Z - Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  5. D, Mex Hit - Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
  6. Vurt - Jeff Noon, Vurt
  7. Ecstacide, Faith Salts, Christendine, Buddhine, Algebrine, Authentium, Amnesol, Duetine, and many more - Stanislav Lem, The Futurological Congress
  8. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash*
  9. Kryptonite - Joe Shuster/Jerry Siegel, Superman
  10. Magic Potion - Albert Underzo/Rene' Goscinny, Asterix the Gaul
  11. Spice or Melange - Frank Herbert, Dune
  12. Glitterstim, Carsunum, Ryll Spices - Star Wars literary universe
  13. Number Twelve - Nick McDonell, Twelve
  14. Space Honey - Futurama
  15. Synthehol - Star Trek: The Next Generation
  16. Chemical -Ray Loriga, Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore
  17. Abulinix - Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision

I like how almost all of this list is science fiction. I can think of one they missed: Dylar - Don DeLillo, White Noise. While hyperlinking this post, I came across this list of fictional medicines and drugs. It's a much longer list which draws from a broader range of sources, including songs, cartoons and video games

*currently reading

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Rudy being Rudy

One of the many reasons I like Rudy Rucker is the videos he does like these. He's just goofing around with a camera, enjoying nature. Just a regular guy, like me.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Friday, March 13, 2009

Here's Rudy

I'm so happy to be reading Rudy Rucker again. He's not just my favorite author, he's also a teacher, a blogger and an artist. I thought this was a good video to post here as I am currently reading a book he wrote about an artist named Pete.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Saturday, February 28, 2009

1978

This was the first book I ever read. I was in first grade at the time. I remember laying on my back on the kitchen floor, in an apartment in Edmond, reading about Henry Huggin's dog. I would later read many other Beverly Cleary books. Books about the Quimbys, Otis Spofford and Ralph the mouse.

Monday, February 23, 2009

unintentional re-read

While reading the book of short stories by J.G. Ballard, I came across a story that I quickly recognized as having read once before. A story called Billenium in which the Earth's population has become a worldwide over-crowding problem. People are forced to live in small cubicles with a roommate, like prisoners in cells.
I could not remember where I had read this story before, so I looked at some of the other J.G. Ballard books I had set aside. Vermillion Sands and The Terminal Beach. These each had a bookmark tucked into the last page, indicating a fully read book. I had forgotten that these too, were short story collections which, it turns out I have probably already read. Billenium was among the stories in one of the two books, along with a couple in the new book that I haven't gotten to yet. Most of the current read is new to me though, and it led to my discovery of two books that I've read, that I was unaware of. I'm only about halfway through.
This has happened before, I special ordered The 57th Franz Kafka by Rudy Rucker from Borders one time. It arrived and I began to read it, when I realized that the first story was one thaat I recognized from another short story collection that I'd read a few years earlier, Gnarl! I compared the two books side by side and only read the four chapters in 57FK that I found didn't appear in the table of contents of Gnarl!.
So I re-read Billenium. It was short and memorable. They discover an unused room but end up sharing it, subdividing it, subletting the space and eventually end up packed in like sardines again just like before. I don't usually re-read books, unintentionally or otherwise. But I have before and might do so again.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Sunday, February 15, 2009

J.G. Ballard

The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard

Another bargain book from Amazon.

Other books I've read by this author:

Concrete Island, The Drowned World, Hello America

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Danzig's Books

I saw him in concert in OKC, Nov. 18, 1992. Rock City Cafe with special guests White Zombie and Kyuss. This is the concert where I punched out some drunk little mexican indian looking guy for trying to fight me. Then later I got dropped on my head in the mosh pit and woke up twenty minutes later at the bar. Good times.

Where do books come from?

Fascinating.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

if/then

I often times have trouble deciding what book to read when I finish one book and am ready to read another. Last time I noticed on Rudy Rucker's blog a mention of his favorite author: Robert Sheckley, so I chose Sheckley. I have a huge stack of unread books that seems to get deeper every year.
So I decided to do a fun little experiment. One that I could blog about here. In order to help me decide which book to read next, I will use the outcome of Super Bowl 43. The teams are the Arizona Cardinals vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers. The books are Scar Lover by Harry Crews or Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. Since Arizona's never won a Super Bowl, they will represent Haunted, since I've never read Palahniuk before. I assume that since Pittsburgh's won so many Super Bowls that they will be favored to win. They represent Crews since he's one of my favorite authors and I've read as many books of his as the Steelers have been in Super Bowls: 6. A Feast of Snakes, Body, Car, Celebration, Knockout Artist, and The Mulching of America. It's six, right? I know they've won 5, and lost one to Dallas in 95.
So, anyway. If the Steelers win, then I read Scar Lover by Harry Crews next. If the Cards win, then I read Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk next.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Currently Reading

Daddy's Boy by Chris Elliott

with rebuttals by Bob Elliott

I got this book for a penny on Amazon.

I've read one other book by this author. That was Shroud of the Thwacker. It was funny, but not nearly as funny as his sitcom, Get a Life, or his many appearances on Late Night w/David Letterman.

Friday, January 2, 2009

Spacetime Donuts

A video review of Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker from AngrySciFiNerd. That was book #9 of '08 for me. Rudy Rucker is my favorite author, BTW. As the reviewer notes, it is a hard to find book. I found my copy at Gardener's Used Books.