When I got my Kindle 2 I first went apeshit stocking up on the massive collections of writers’ complete works. Having grown up in an extremely rural area, I had to catch as catch can on big series, and my gaps in those like Burroughs’ Barsoom novels were sometimes laughably vast.

I’m now reading all of the Barsoom novels - in order! - and having a blast. It’s not like these are seriously involved serials in which order matters all that much, but it is fun to know, for example, why the Therns hate John Carter so much. But that’s all in later books.

This first one is a re-read. I first encountered it as a young teenager and was carried away by the adventure and strangeness of it all. To return to it as an adult is to relive that pleasure to a degree but also to be pleased at how well it holds up. I now see how chaste it is - when I was younger it seemed racy beyond belief, all these naked people - and how charming. I look forward to the rest!

If you’ve ever sat there and wanted to throw something heavy into your television because of the hopeless narcissism and/or stupidity of the annoying contestants on Survivor and its ilk (and I am one of these, obviously) and wished something truly serious would happen to them, this is the book for you.

As is to be expected in a Brian Keene novel, there is lots of nauseating detail as the monsters eat the innards and other parts of various victims. There is also some shocking content (i.e. rape) that, while actually germaine to the story and arguably would damage its plausibility were it left out or glossed over is, well, shocking.

It’s a quick read, Castaways, but you don’t expect a roller coaster ride to take all day, now, do you?

The first short in this odd little collection is pretty much unwatchable if you’ve any tendency toward migraine, even if you violate the horror-watching stricture against watching with the room lights on. Screechy noises and way too much strobe; I wound up having to skip it.

To a degree all of these films are like that; focusing more on camera tricks/effects and strange noises instead of narrative. I have no problem with that ordinarily but here it wasn’t enough. I was not scared, just annoyed, and relieved it was over.

A pity because I wanted so to like it.

I’ve never been one to long for it to be a different season than it is. I like them all. But this book is REALLY making me wish it was summer right now. I want my garden!

On a more serious note, this is deeply informative and idea-laden. Lots of recipes that are all meant to bring out the actual flavor of the fruits and vegetables under discussion. MWAH!

Brian Keene recommended Transmetropolitan to me personally during a visit to my FLCS, so I decided to have a look. Having never read any before - and my comics guy wasn’t too familiar with it either - I ordered Volume 0 first thinking it would be a prequel-type thing. Well, it’s not, but that’s OK. It’s a magnificent collection and it has sold me on the series (hurry up with Vol 1 already!).

Spider Jerusalem is a great character, part Hunter S. Thompson, part the unnamed narrator from Notes from the Underground, part Warren Ellis, all entertaining and bitterly funny. For this collection pretty much anybody who’s anybody in comics art got a crack at drawing a page or two, with stunning results. The range of interpretation is amazing, yet still recognizably Spider. If you have a favorite artist, he/she is probably in here somewhere, with some sneaky reference to his own stuff buried in a page.

Fantastic book!

Further proof that Alastair Reynolds is a righteous dude worthy of my adoration… out the blue my mother (72 years old, the one who got my into science fiction at a disgracefully early age) found his website and wrote him a little fan letter asking if he was planning a sequel to this great, great book.

He wrote her back almost instantly saying yes, in fact, he’s of the same mind. He’s just got to come back with a suitable crisis for Dreyfus to tackle.

I’m sure that won’t be a problem.

Woohoo, Prefect sequel. Woohoo, writing to my mom!!

It’s all good, but the standout for me is “Birdie Brain” evocative of some kind of E.M. Forster character reacting to modern technology AND sounding like it would be quite at home in the soundtrack of a Benoit Sokal game. Quite an accomplishment.

It’s not too often that a singularity/cyberpunk novel sends me rushing to reorder my Netflix queue to bump up a French historical costume drama to the top, but Accelerando has done that. It references “Queen Margot” so much that I decided it needed to be the next in my queue instead of somewhere in the 90s. Now I just have to hurry up and finish the flicks I’ve got so I can see it!

I really like the Pixies, so I had high hopes for this film, about which I’ve heard nothing but good. Maybe my hopes were just too high, but LoudQuietLoud did not really do it for me. I felt like I’d seen it all before, one big cliche rockumentary from start to finish, with the exception of the relationship depicted between the Deal sisters, which was nice. The concert footage was enjoyable of course, but nothing I hadn’t seen before. On the whole, well, I would have been better just busting out my CDs and ripping them to my iPod, which I have since done.

Where do I begin? I don’t even know how this turned up in my Netflix queue, but I’m glad it did. I laughed long and loud and stupidly at this silliness. The notion of an Illuminati-like conspiracy to keep a deathmetal band’s fans and cultural clout in check. The outrageous (and contagious) Scandanavian accents of the fastest and second fastest guitarists in the world. The motorcycle with four sidecars. The over-the top wrongness of the plotlines and sight gags. Oh my face!