Go to the bathroom of a non-geek, and you’ll probably find some fairly benign reading material — maybe a copy of Field and Stream, may be Real Simple, maybe the nearly-ubiquitous Chicken Soup for the [insert demographic here] Soul. Not me. I’ve got The Bloody Crown of Conan, a collection of three Robert E. Howard … Read more
Looking back over my Top of the Pile columns, and considering what this week’s might bring, I found that I was in something of a rut — I’ve got my standard comics that I get every month — X-Men, Conan, Ex Machina, Batman — but I haven’t been venturing very far from that core. That’s … Read more
Gaming comics top the pile this week as my copies of Knights of the Dinner Table #125 and Dork Tower #36 arrive, augmented by the sword and sorcery (though mostly sword) of Dark Horse Comics’ Conan #39. Rounding out the picks in this pile is the latest issue of Ex Machina, which sees a mysterious … Read more
I’ve got two vacations lined up for Summer 2007 — one short, one long — and hopefully a few lazy weekends I can spend ready books on the back porch or down the shore. As a result, I’ve slowly started to compile my summer reading list, and I’m looking for suggestions from readers, as well … Read more
The book review web site and blog Emerald City is ceasing publication. I’m sad to see it go — the site featured a wide range of speculative fiction web reviews, and its blog was a useful way to stay up on the scifi literary scene.
Despite the fact that I’ve been buying comics regularly for over a decade, I’ve only rarely reviewed them on Nuketown. That changes starting this week with the debut of my “Top of the Pile” column where I’ll be running down why I’m reading … and in what order. Almost every geek I know shuffles their … Read more
My autumn reading jag, which saw me tear through a half-dozen novels, petered out this winter as I ran into the slow, meandering text of The Difference Engine, a book that promised a steampunk revolution but got bogged down in its own minutiae. I haven’t done much better on the audio front, after a preachy … Read more
For my birthday this year I headed out to Barnes & Noble with my son Neutronlad for an afternoon of browsing books and drinking coffee. NeutronLad, being about 5 months old at the time, was enthusiastic about the outing, as only a baby can be, smiling, gurgling and generally looking forward to flirting with every woman … Read more
After a reading lull brought about by way too much painting in September, I’ve returned to my books with a vengeance. Science fiction dominates my reading list this time around as I return to Ben Bova’s “Grand Tour” of the Solar System with the hard science fiction novel Jupiter then have some fun with Vernor … Read more
As part of our home improvement project, I convinced my wife to turn our large interior foyer wall into a three-print gallery of sorts. The idea is that we’d put literary/magazine inspired prints there, which fits with the theme of our first floor (you can see the large wall-covering bookshelf in the library when you … Read more