It’s a more than a little strange to be writing about the last of my Summer 2016 reading list in Winter 2017, but damn it, I told myself I was going to write this column and I’m not letting myself[…]
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Category: Books & Print
Off the Bookshelf: Island Reading 2016
One of my family’s long-standing traditions is spending time at our friends’ cabin on Butler Island on Lake Champlain. It’s rustic in the extreme (though less so than the early years) with minimal power, an outhouse, and (thankfully) no Internet.[…]
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Top of the Pile: Battleworld!
The Marvel comic book multiverse collapsed in upon itself in Summer 2015. As the various worlds ended, a new one was forged by its all-powerful god, Doctor Doom. This new world — Battleworld — drove a summer’s worth of of[…]
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Why I have a Summer Reading List
Why do I have a summer reading list? Two big reasons: 1) because I need time for myself, to be alone with the book, the plot, and the mental scenery I’m constructing and 2) because it gives me a project that[…]
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Summer Reading List 2016
I’m a creature of habit, and I know it. I love my pork roll, egg and cheese sandwich for breakfast, my Mets baseball, and X-Men comic books. In the summer months, this manifested as kicking back with a new Lost[…]
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Off the Bookshelf: Winter’s End
I have a bad habit of saving all of my heavy reading for the summer. Don’t get me wrong — I love my summer reading list, but my brain’s happier when I keep reading throughout the year. Starting around Thanksgiving and continuing through to early March, I aimed to do exactly that. I put together a short (well, short for me) reading list.
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Off the Bookshelf: Summer’s End 2015
Summer is long over, and the end of the year is looming large. Fortunately I can look back on a summer and know — despite all the long work days — that I read a hell of a lot of books.
I ended up reading all but one of the novels on my summer reading list, while adding several additional tomes. I planned to read 12 books and five graphic novels. I succeeded in reading 15 books and nine graphic novels.
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Top of the Pile: All-New, All-Different (but mostly the same)
It’s been largely a comic-book-free summer in Easton, Pa. thanks to Marvel’s Secret Wars. The publisher canceled all of their existing comic book titles in favor of new crossover Secret Wars books that revisited classic storylines (Civil War, Inferno, etc.)[…]
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Summer Reading List 2015
Begun, this summer reading list has.
The core of my summer reading list should look pretty familiar. There are new Lost Fleet and The Expanse novels, earlier volumes of which have been on my list for years. There are also new novels by some of my favorite authors — Neal Stephenson, Alastair Reynolds, Ernest Cline — that I’m eager to read.
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Top of the Pile: Axis, Saga, Captain Marvel
The comic book pile has grown large over the last few weeks, partly because I was busy with family and work, partly because I knew I’d have time to catch up during Christmas week. Topping it is Marvel’s crossover event Axis, in which the Red Skull (augmented by Charles Xavier’s brain … I kid you not) tries to take over the world.
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