Words On Wednesday

I feel like autobiographies can be hit or miss and depend on a lot of factors; how interesting the person is or was, how well they wrote, and whether they narrated the audiobook themselves all play a huge role in how much I enjoy the book. Alex Trebek knocked it out of the park. I grew up watching Jeopardy! off and on. I was never one of those viewers that had it on every evening, but if I was channel surfing and noticed it, that was definitely one of the shows that I would gravitate to. Jeopardy! was nice because it didn’t have the lowest-common-denominator crowd work that a lot of game shows thrived on. The simple and straightforward delivery of interesting questions from Trebek, with contestants that generally seemed to know their stuff really appealed to my logos fixation. When Trebek was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and later died as a result of the disease, I was disappointed. In general, I don’t really get attached to celebrities or mourn their deaths. I didn’t know these pe...

Because of some work initiatives, I’ve started digging into books on leadership. My manager recommended a few, and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (or just “7 Habits”) was the first available from the library. With little else to go on, I decided it was a reasonable place to start. My expectations were admittedly set very low. At a glance, “7 Habits” looks like just another book about self-improvement, with a bunch of buzzwords and very little actionable material. However, I wanted to give it a solid attempt before I panned the book as complete trash. The funny thing about the habits themselves is they aren’t exactly hidden; Covey has them listed and described in plain view on his site. I’ll even drop them right here, it isn’t a secret. These are not some ancient gnostic wisdom that get you into an occult club. It’s just a way of thinking about things. Habit 1: Be Proactive® Focus and act on what you can control and influence instead of what you can’t. Habit 2: Begin With the...

You read that title right. This is a book report about a children’s book. My wife and I like to read to our children as much as we can. We want to foster a love of reading, increase their vocabulary, and all those other good things that come from reading a good book. Because of that, I’ve read a lot of children’s books. Some of them are pretty decent, others I hate to see the cover of, but rarely do they stand out as something that even I can enjoy. One exception is “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse” by Kevin Henkes. The general premise of the story is that titular character Lilly got a new purse, and she brings it to school to show everyone. She is so excited that she has a hard time paying attention, and her teacher is forced to take the purse for the remainder of the day. She is very upset at first, and says some unkind things to her teacher, but she later apologizes after some consideration. It’s a situation that most of us can relate to. We get some new toy or gadget that we are infat...

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 ...

I embarked on this book report endeavor for several reasons: partly because I was interested in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” myself, partly because a friend recommended it as his personal favorite book, and partly to prove to my 12th grade AP Literature teacher that I would stick to my word and read a book that I swear wasn’t required reading in that class, but she claims was. I started reading it for the first time (in my memory) back in college. I hadn’t previously read it, and I recognized that it was a classic work of literature, so I determined that I should read it for my own personal improvement. Unfortunately, I got distracted at some point partially through the novel, and didn’t finish reading it during that attempt. In any case, I did finally get around to consuming it in audiobook format, and am now a more well-rounded person because of it. As far as the setting goes, “Brave New World” is standard dystopian fare. Reproduction is left to labs, and human coitus is ...

After numerous discussions with my wife, I finally got around to reading Gary Chapman’s “The Five Love Languages.” While it is sheer coincidence, there probably couldn’t be a more appropriate book for this month, given Valentine’s Day is this Friday and this book deals pointedly with love. I picked it up originally after several discussions about how my wife more appreciates acts of service than any other love language. She gained exposure to the concept of love languages through various radio interviews, and knew of Dr. Chapman’s book, though she hasn’t yet read it. When she suggested it may help me understand, I took her suggestion and picked up the audiobook. My goal, as is probably the goal of many who pick up the book, was to become a more loving husband. I certainly care for my wife, and I wanted to be able to make her see that more thoroughly. If the proliferation of the book were any mark of its success, it couldn’t hurt to read. Dr. Chapman is no stranger to various bes...

I’m a big fan of data, and that includes the books that I read or listen to. However, the means by which I have recorded what books I consume has shifted over the past few months. I started with a spreadsheet  on my Google Drive. The main pieces of information I wanted to maintain were the book, the order, and the reading dates. In addition to books that I had already finished, I kept a few rows without order or date to indicate books that I wanted to read. This solution worked perfectly fine for my needs. However, I started gradually folding in Goodreads  for some additional functionality that it offers. Notably, it has a social element where you can see what your peers are reading, what they’ve rated books, and even promotes reading challenges where you commit to a certain number of books for the year. For a while I used both methods concurrent. It wasn’t really much effort to add books to either, and they both had their own benefits. Eventually, though, I starte...

As a fan of both “Blade Runner” and “Blade Runner 2049,” I finally decided to read the original inspiration book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick. At least… I think I did. The book that I read was technically titled, "Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” but that seems to be a rebranding of the original book after the success of the first movie. I read a science fiction book about androids. Beyond that, I can’t be certain. I was curious how the book and movies might compare, since movies based on books are frequently inferior to the source material. The biggest problem that I see with movies based on books is how little time they have to expound on the characters, events, and themes. This is certainly still the case with “Blade Runner.” The book has much more commentary on social class, as well as the dynamic between real and synthetic. Character interactions in the book have much more depth, with much more nuance in reason and motive....

I figured “Dracul” would be the perfect book for this post, as the prequel to the book that I wrote my first book report segment on almost a year ago to the day. Source:  https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91hTAsQX2xL.jpg My first exposure to “Dracul” came from an announcement of a book signing with the author at my local library. As much as I enjoyed Dracula, I was tremendously interested in a related work, written by the great grand-nephew of Bram Stoker himself. Plus, the book serves as a sort of clash between Bram Stoker’s real family and his fictional characters created within “Dracula.” As with many works, the library only offered “Dracul” in physical book format, and I haven’t had the chance to sit down and read a proper book in a long time. I expressed this disappointment on Facebook, in the comments of a post promoting the meet and greet event. Surprisingly, the library’s social media team followed up with me, ordered cd and mp3 copies of the boo...

Over the past several months, I have read through both "The Hobbit" and all three (six?) books of "The Lord of the Rings." I was tempted to write on each of these works individually, but I decided that I didn't want to tie up a third of the year on Tolkien, and would just write on all of them at once. Since I won't count "The Silmarillion," and I would never read it anyway, these books cover my entire exposure to the world of Middle Earth. Since these phrases get me the most dirty looks and criticism of anything related to literature, I'll go ahead and throw them out there. 1, I've never seen any of the LotR movies, and I have only seen the first "Hobbit" movie, and only because some friends were going to see it in theaters and they invited me along. 2, I did not really enjoy "The Lord of the Rings" books. I'll expound more on both of these, but I didn't want to mislead any readers and get their hopes up th...

Despite not writing a book report post since "Jekyll & Hyde" back in November, I have continued reading. Quite a bit actually. Unfortunately, that left me with a sort of indecision about which book to write on. In reading order, I have since finished: "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry" "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories" "Jane Eyre" "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" "The Hobbit" "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" "The Old Man and the Sea" "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" I am currently working on "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," and at this point, I think it might be better if I hit all of Tolkien's stuff in a single post once I finish the last of the trilogy. As for "The Chronicles of Narnia," my book club at work is tentatively working on...

I’ve always been interested in writing a story, and lately I’ve been revisiting the idea with a more approachable technique. Instead of knocking out a full novel in one fell swoop, I might publish a number of different stories in more of a serial format. When considering what I might write a story about, I’ve had several different ideas: a drug addict who sees large buildings and construction equipment as monsters, a high fantasy work that serves as a more literary telling of the adventures I’ve had across several MMO games, a post-apocalyptic tale of a society rebuilding from disaster. Each of these is obviously unique from the others, and if I were to commit to one, I would be stuck with it for the duration, even if I might want to entertain one of the other ideas. If I let myself switch, the stories might get caught up in the literature equivalent of development hell, and never actually publish anything at all. To avoid this unsavory scenario, I considered that I might write mor...

After I finished Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” I asked my local library for recommendations. Jess from the Multimedia & Fiction desk suggested  either “The Woman in Black” by Susan Hill, “By Gaslight” by Steven Price, or “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson. As the title of this post reveals, I decided to go with Stevenson. “Jekyll & Hyde” references are nearly everywhere, in numerous different platforms for fiction. As with “Dracula,” I figured that it might improve my appreciate of these allusions by reading the original source material. Furthermore, I could get a .txt file of “Jekyll & Hyde” from  Project Gutenberg to supplement the audiobook, in much the same way that I did with “Dracula.” The format of “Jekyll & Hyde” was surprising. From all of the representations I’ve seen in other media, I expected a sort of omniscient narrator that saw both Jekyll and Hyde, as well as the transition between the two. Instead, th...

What is NaNoWriMo? November, for the uninitiated, is National Novel Writing Month. Realistically, anyone can write a novel at any point in the year, requiring as much time as they want. To participate in NaNoWriMo properly, however, you must write at least a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. As such, it’s a little late to start for this year’s NaNoWriMo, but you could always start planning for next year. Source: https://nanowrimo.org/ As Kristian Wilson explains, there are numerous different ways that writers can approach NaNoWriMo. Most notably, there are people who plan a story and characters in advance, and there are others who begin writing at the start of November with very little forethought. Wilson describes these individuals as “plotters and pantsers” (Wilson, 2018). Either method is acceptable, per the official rules of NaNoWriMo. “I want to write a novel one day,” said many a would-be author at some point in their lives. Frankly, I’m sure a...

I figured Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” would be fitting as the first reoccurring Book Report post, being the first book that I’ve read (listened to) in a long time. Considering this single novel is the basis and origin of most modern vampire lore, I’ve always been interested it. I remember playing Castlevania as a kid, even though I knew nothing of the novel then. Basically any modern representation of vampires uses Stoker’s work in some form or another as reference material. Source: https://audiobookstore.com/audiobooks/dracula.aspx My first exposure to the actual text of “Dracula” was in a “Topics in Language and Literature” class at Upstate. The class was a neat fusion of literature and technology, and easily the most interesting English class I’ve ever taken. For one assignment, we had to “not read” a Victorian novel . In short, it was an exploration to  learn about a novel of our choice without actually reading it. For the assignment, all we had to actually read was the fi...

I’ve been looking for a new monthly segment to complement Thirsty Thursday Eve , and I feel like a “book report” or sorts would be the perfect idea for it. Making a monthly obligation to write about a book or short story that I’ve read accomplishes a number of goals. First and foremost, it gives me more incentive to read. I love reading, I just don’t have much free time to do it lately. Committing to at least one piece per month is a fairly low investment, I’d say. Plus, with my recent discovery of how awesome audiobooks are, I can listen to the book while I work. Setting aside 15 hours or so of uninterrupted time during a month for reading is difficult. Listening to 15 hours of audio while I work is something I already do in less than a week with music. I enjoyed writing the originally one-off book report on  John Updike’s “A&P” a while back, but if this is going to become a regular thing, I want to give it a little more structure. Most importantly, I want to have posts t...

Note: If you haven’t ever read “A&P,” I encourage you to do so. It is a short read, and currently available to read for free here and here . “A&P” is a short story by author John Updike. This first person narrative discusses a young man Sammy, and his experience when a group of scantily clad girls walk into the A&P store in which he works as a cashier, and ultimately spur him to quit his job. Updike’s short story is typically met with a wide variety of opinions, as evident from its goodreads profile . A vocal majority strongly dislike the work, criticizing it for the misogynistic narrator Sammy, as well as seemingly lacking a good point. Some others consider the story tolerable, but nothing special. The apparent smallest group, including myself, consider “A&P” a classic, giving valuable life lessons in a small and entertaining package. On the surface, it is completely understandable to consider that “A&P” is a shallow exploration of a teenage boy’s blatant lu...