Words On Wednesday

I love all things coffee. When I saw PBR hard coffee at a nearby ABC store, I had to give it a shot, even with the unusually high price point. I’m no stranger to coffee-alcohol fusions. I’ve had my fair share of coffee-based mixed drinks, as well as traditional beer styles with coffee included. The only one I’ve mentioned here was the Thunderstruck Coffee Porter from Highland , but there have been plenty more before and after. I’m always on the lookout for the next spin on coffee and booze. For what it’s worth, I haven’t found one yet that I didn’t like. A few weeks back, I was cheating on my usual ABC store with another one that has a slightly larger selection. While we were perusing the aisles, my wife pointed out this curious hard coffee from Pabst Blue Ribbon. Initially, I dismissed it. PBR is supposed to be cheap, not good. And with a 4 pack of cans at roughly $10, that was way out of the normal range that I’d spend on PBR. Even for stuff I really like, that’s a hard sell. How...

It’s been a long time since my last Book Report segment, and I’ve read a lot of books since then, but this series seemed most relevant. Oh, right, and this is a series, not a single book. Anyone who has read Sanderson can tell you that he does fantasy right. His worlds are large and complex, but he doesn’t drone on about them in the style of Tolkien. His characters are deep and dynamic, but none is singled out as the real main character. In short, his writing is just plain amazing, pretty much every bit of it. One note about the books in “The Stormlight Archive” series, though: they’re huge. Over a thousand pages per hardback book, and 45 hours for the shortest audiobook. These things are not for the faint of heart. They are large time investments, but they are worth it by an enormous margin. Book one, “The Way of Kings,” is a little slow to start. It jumps around to different character perspectives, and at the beginning, these characters have no clear link to one another. However, as ...