Mr. Burke's Reading List

Rocket Fuel: Some of the Best of Tor.com Non-Fiction , Bridget McGovern and Chris Lough, ed. (2018) Even though I'm on the mailing list for Tor.com , probably since the first time I downloaded a copy of 1632 or something else, I rarely check out their website unless I see links to specific articles posted elsewhere on social media. One such link brought me to this ebook. I didn't know what to expect from the title. Well, that's not exactly true. I know what I expected: non-fiction with a name like "rocket fuel" meant that this should've been a lot of stuff about space and planets and stuff like that. That's not what it was. That's not to say what I got was bad, just unexpected. Even though this is a work of non-fiction, many of the essays deal with fiction, from the perspective of fandom, or just deep analysis of some facet of the work. I enjoyed some more than others, and some I might've enjoyed more had they been about half the size...

Clean Room , My review was erased. I'm not re-writing it now. I'll get back to it. (sigh)

Eternals , by Neil Gaiman (2007) Placeholder for review. I had two days left on my ComicXology subscription, and I search on Neil Gaiman . I struck pay dirt with Eternals . I didn't really know a lot about the Eternals from Marvel lore, only that they've been around a long time. If I remember an old What If--? correctly, they were created by the Sentinels, which also created Inhumans. Or something like that. It's a damn shame that I didn't have Neil Gaiman's name listed as a hashtag, before now. That is something that needs to be rectified in 2019.

ROM , 2016-2017 About a month ago, I saw a link to download from free digital comics. Found a few that I might read and clicked. When I tried to open them, my iPad brought me to the App Store and the ComicXology app, which I would need to read the comics. Upon opening that, I found that I ha a free week of unlimited comic reading. (Exactly a week, not a minute more.) The immediate questions were: what do I want to read, and where do I begin? Many comics have continual story lines that don't seem to have a definite beginning, and some of them never end -- or at least wouldn't within a week. You can't even assume a story starts with issue #1 these days. In the list of suggestions, I spotted ROM . I read every issue of the original run of ROM: Spaceknight, although I might have missed crossovers when he appeared in other comics. I didn't buy a lot back then. I knew that he was brought back because of a "Free Comic Book Day" comic which amounted to a f...

Pedro & Me: Friendship, Loss & What I Learned , by Judd Winick (2000) This edition contains a foreword written in 2008, and was published in 2009. For all my recent complaints about graphic novels, I finally found out that was actually what it was supposed to be, and it's been in a "to be read" pile for years now. Pedro & Me came to me from the Port Chester-Rye Brook Public Library, most likely through a nearby science fiction convention. (That would've been the recently departed Lunacon . Sigh.) Pedro is Pedro Zemora, who along with Judd Winick (the "Me" of the title) and others, was a part of The Real World: San Francisco in 1994. I didn't watch it, and I had no interest in the series or the ones before it. Frankly, I couldn't tell you the difference between the Real World and, say, Big Brother . But Pedro's story is worth reading. Judd is a cartoonist from Long Island. He applied for the Real World, and when MTV call...

Space Team , by Barry Hutchison (2016) The full title of the book is Space Team: Screwing Up the Galaxy so you don't have to! , and I believe I got the capitalization and punctuation correct. An editor might've suggested different. This book was downloaded as a freebie. If I remember correctly, it was probably one of those "first book in the series is free" deals, to get you to read one and buy the rest. Nothing wrong with that, so long as the books are good. Wellllllll .... So how many books are in this series? I just checked, and it seems, as of this writing, that there are 13 of them. In three years. If they're making money, more power to him. Maybe it's a model to try out for my own writing. Okay, so the story starts off like some is trying too hard to be Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchet or just, you know, funny. It isn't too clever, but it's what's there, so let's so with it. Cal Carver is a criminal, and he's in prison, b...

The Alienist , by Caleb Carr (1994) Like many, I saw the series, The Alienist on television, and then decided to find a copy of the novel. Like many, I decided to get it from the library, so there was a wait. Still, I managed to read it earlier in the year (before summer vacation), but I didn't get around to writing it up until the year was almost out. So I don't remember everything about it. That's the main reason I try to write these things in a timely manner. Having seen the show, I put faces to many of the characters in advance, which is usually helpful (except in those instances where someone is woefully miscast). The story tells the tale of a serial killer in 19th century New York City, during Teddy Roosevelt's tenure as Police Commissioner. He charges Dr. Lazlo Kreizler with solving a set of grisly murders involving a disaffected portion of the underclass of society. Namely, poor immigrant boys that dress up like girls for the benefit of "gentle...

The Great Passage , by Shiwon Miura (2011) This was another of the books that Amazon allowed to download that time when they had 12 world books available for free. The story was a little confusing at first. In the beginning, we are introduced to Kohei Araki, who as a boy was fascinated with words and loved the dictionary. Next thing we know, he's close to retirement after having worked on dictionaries for Gembu Books for thirty-seven years. Although we begin with him, it isn't his story. Araki needs to find a replacement who can continue his work, and bring his dream project, The Great Passage , to publication. Thanks to Nishioka, one of the few employees in the dictionary department of Gembu, Araki finds Mitsuya Majime, an odd fellow who works in the sales department. After an interview, they discover that they are kindred spirits in the love of and fascination with words, and how to define them precisely. Majime is introverted and awkward, which makes it diffic...

The Black Tides of Heave , by Jy Yang (2017) The Black Tides of Heaven was a free ebook from the Tor.com Book of the Month Club. It amounts to one of two twin novellas, which establish the world of the Tensorate series, by Jy Yang. I was drawn to it because it seemed different, and, yes, because it was free. Likewise, as part of a "book club", I thought it might lead to a discussion, either now or when I see some like-minded friends at a up-coming convention. That's not likely to happen at this point. While I'm glad I read it, I had a problem immersing myself into the fantasy world being created. On the very first page, we encounter the word "slackcraft" as something not to be used by the Great Abbot Sung to climb the 800 steps of the Great High Palace. I let this slip by in the first instance, not knowing whether that was some kind of magical incantation or transport. Later uses of the term "craft" also left me wondering if they w...

P is for Peril , by Sue Grafton (2001) The sixteenth installment of the Kinsey Milhone series finds Kinsey mixed up in two mysteries, as the background 'B' story takes up a good portion of the book. The main mystery involves a missing persons case. Dr. Dowan Purcell disappeared nine weeks earlier and hasn't been located yet. His first wife is started to get worried now because he had gone missing once before but eventually returned. Kinsey briefly ponders if he'd faked his own death, as happened in an earlier case of hers. But Fiona, the first wife, believes that he may still be alive because his passport is missing, along with a bit of money. Add in possible trouble at home with wife number two, Crystal, and mounting evidence of medical billing fraud, and it doesn't look good. While all this is going on, Kinsey is once again looking for a new office. She's been renting space from Lonnie Kingman, but they are relocating. She finds a space at a re...