I'm Glad My Mom Died (McCurdy)

I'm Glad My Mom Died
by Jennette McCurdy (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book club choice, but it got 0 votes, which is surprising because I thought I'd voted for it. It was the first one available for the library. I read it, without the audiobook. I get the feeling that the audio might've been difficult to listen to, both storywise and the way it was told.

Jennette appears to have OCD but she is diagnosed as Mormon. That attempt at humor as about on par with the tone of the book. Her mother dreamed of being a star and wanting that for her daughter. Jennette has older siblings, but she is the one that got pushed into acting. And she always did everything her mother wanted because she loved her mother and her mother loved her and wanted the best for her. Or so she believed to be the case at the time. Much of the narrative is written in the naive voice of a person who came to an ephiphany much later in life.

Unlike other Disney stars who came from wealthier background, McCurdy's family was poor, and her mother, a hoarder, delayed paying bills and kept the creditors away as best as she could. She also leans heavily into the story that she's a cancer survivor. McCurdy's big claim to fame, as far as her resume was concerned, was her ability to cry on command. THis was something casting directors looked for and it got her many parts.

Problems arose at puberty when her body started to develop and she wouldn't be able to play kiddie parts any more. Her mother encouraged her to become anorexic. Other mothers notice and told her mom, not realizing that she was the cause of it. Anorexia later gave way to bullima when McCurdy got more successful and got start binging on food.

Her big break was, of course, iCarly, where I know her from, although I likely saw at least some of her earlier bit parts. She refers to the person in charge there simply as "The Creator" and never names him. The Creator is able to control her with the promise of her own show when "iCarly" wraps up (years in the future). The first time he meets with The Creator alone, without her mother (whose cancer has returned), he gives her an alcoholic beverage, which she drinks because she wants to make him happy, and this is followed by some massaging. Not many details are giving here but when the show ends, her "team" (lawyers, agents, whoever) on a conference call tell her that there's a $300,000 bonus for her so long as she never talks about the Creator's behavior. To her credit, she calls it out as hush money and refuses to take it. To her further credit, in the book she includes her reaction after the call as "did I really just turn down $300,000?" Even after a successful series, McCurdy may be well off but she isn't exactly wealthy.

She goes into details about Sam & Cat, the followup show she did with Arianna Grande when she'd been promised her own show. McCurdy was denied chances to pursue a movie career while shooting "Sam" but Grande was allowed to leave to do singing performances. One time, she missed so many days that the episode was rewritten so that her character was locked inside a box for the duration of the episode. McCurdy had to act opposite a box and Grande's line were dubbed in later. A final straw happened when McCurdy's promised directorial debut was canceled because someone threatened to leave the show if she directed it. (Grande isn't named here, but no one else had that clout.)

Along the way, we read about her first kiss, her real first kiss, her first adult relationship, losing her virginity, and her therapists. The book is divided into Before and After her mother's death, and it's quite a while into the after that she starts to piece everything together.

This was an interesting and a quick read. I don't know if I would've read it if it hadn't come up an option for the book club (and was immediately available). Had it been a different actress, say from any of the children's shows that I didn't watch with my kids, I probably would've returned it to the library as soon as I knew that it had lost the vote.

I also write Fiction! Thank you for finding and reading my page. You can now order my newest book Burke's Lore, Briefs: A Heavenly Date / My Damned Best Friend, written by Christopher J. Burke, which contains the aforementioned story and a bonus story. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon.
Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

Raising Caine (Gannon)

Raising Caine
by Charels Gannon (2015)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This is the third book in the "Cainverse", which started with Fire With Fire> and Trial By Fire, and in fact follows immediately after the events of Trial By Fire where we meet the representative of the Slaasriithi (a big reveal for book 2). While the Consolidated Terran Republic is near the Arat Kur homeworld, a K’tor ship arrives. We learn more about the K’tor, which takes some of the mystery out of them, and their own representative states the same thing. This causes the Slaasriithi to move up their scheduled trip home because they fear K'tor treachery. As a result, Caine finds himself en route to the current Slaasriithi homeworld.

At the same time, there is a renegade bunch of K'tor who have been, basically, disgraced in the eyes of the familes (to use a Mafia analogy in place of the scientific/genetic one). There are sleeper agents in place that are activated who help take over a Republic ship and try to ambush the Slassriithi ship before Caine can reach their homeworld.

I enjoyed this one a little less because there were spots that it got a little bogged down. For example, it was pretty obvious that the K'tor renegades were going to take over the Republic ship, but it dragged out for several chapters at the beginning of the books, with several POV characters, even though I knew that half of those characters were going to die and their defense would come to naught. The only reason for the protracted struggle, I'm assuming, was so that the ship would have a particular amount of damage and so much of its resources would've been consumed or destroyed. A second contention was the two Slaasriithi planets that the Caine and company set down on. The Slaasriithi don't terraform exactly. They shape their biomes by introducing their own.

The science is over my head, but to its credit, from what I've read outside the book, the science is spot on, making this hard scifi and something that's been hand-waved. One planet is tidal locked to always face its sun, which leaves a habitable ring around the perimeter. Again, there are elements to the story here, and stuff will happen that may make a difference later on, but it seemed to take to long. Ditto for the second planent, until it occurred to me that the book would finish here and that they wouldn't make it to the homeworld before it ended. Caine's previous encounters with the primitive Slaasriithi proved invaluable to his survival as well as defending a water strider on this planet. Even as a saboteur was in their mix.

I did enjoy the book, and Caine and company are still pressed into service, if only because they know that going back to Earth and rejoining civilization is impossible. They'll all wind up in some "retirement community" where they'll be watched over for the remainders of their lives, no matter what anyone promises.

I did try to finish this be the end of 2023, but there were still 100-200 pages remaining, so it became the first of 2024.

Other stuff to read before I move on to "Caine's Mutiny". Gannon has a way with titles.

Disclosure stuff: I've met Gannon on a few occasions at a science fiction convention. We've hit some of the same parties. "Acquaitances", not "friends".

I also write Fiction! Thank you for finding and reading my page. You can now order my newest book Burke's Lore, Briefs: A Heavenly Date / My Damned Best Friend, written by Christopher J. Burke, which contains the aforementioned story and a bonus story. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon.
Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

Signal Fires ( Shapiro)

Signal Fires
by Dani Shapiro (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a pandemic book club pick. It received a mixed reviews.

A car accident and its subsequent coverup affect the lives of a family of four -- and likely the family of the deceased -- as well as a family that doesn't even move into the neighborhood for years.

The book opens talking about all the possible future of Misty Zimmerman should see survive this night. I thought we'd see some of this. We did not. The girl who dies is pretty much an afterthought except for when (some characters believe) she extends her influence from the beyond, enamating from the tree under which she died.

The book then jumps to the 21st century. And then back to 1999, and 2010, and all over the place. I was curious if this book would work better as a linear narrative, not that I would read a copy of it should someone present me with one, but it sees like the structure and the feelings replaced the plot of the novel, as little of it as it was.

Biggest complaint among the club members is that not one of the characters were likable, least of all the fellow you weren't supposed to like, the only one always referenced by his last name, Shenkmen. The mothers in the book get short shrift. They get pushed aside pretty quickly without much to do.

Shenkman is not a great father, and it doesn't help that he doesn't know how to get through to Waldo, who appears to be on the spectrum, which may have been a result of the umbilical cord being wrapped about his neck during his delivery on his kitchen floor by Dr. Ben from across the street. Note that after his birth, the two families apparently never spoke to each other again despite living across from each other for a decade.

After Waldo runs away and gets rescued, Waldo explains about super galactic clusters. Rather than getting upset again, Shenkman has a change and calmly asks Waldo to tell him more about the super clusters. In any other novel, this would be a significant turning point. Instead, ten years later, Shenkman, suddenly a widower, is the one reaching out to Waldo (not that Waldo ever reached out to his dad), and Waldo is basically a little shit. If the point was too little, too late, something should've been said ten years earlier that Waldo was going to resent his father forever.

Instead, Waldo finds friendship in the man who delivered him, who is the same man who covered up a crime in 1985. He's not a particularly good man, especially when compared to Shenkman. Again, basically no one was found to be a likable person in this book.

It was interesting but there was much to it. Just a lot of jumping around, two off-screen deaths, and an affair that gets forgiven (offscreen) and leads to a confession at an AA meeting without any consequences. The one thing that everyone appreciated was that it did take the Covid shutdown into account in its timeline and it affected the characters. Needlessly inserting politics wasn't appreciated.

This was another book that I listened to (read by the author) and read concurrently. This may become a thing for me.

I also write Fiction! You can now order my newest book Burke's Lore, Briefs: A Heavenly Date / My Damned Best Friend, written by Christopher J. Burke, which contains the aforementioned story and a bonus story. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon.
Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

2023 Year in Review

This is a summary of the books that I read in 2023. A couple of blog entries have not been made yet.

The following books were Pandemic Book Club books

• Signal Fires - (This entry has not been written yet.
• Clown in a Cornfield (Cesare)
• Elder Race (Tchaikovsky)
• A Terrible Fall of Angels (Hamilton)
• Cult Classic (Crosley)
• Wrong Place, Wrong Time (McAllister)
• The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Moreno-Garcia)
• The Atlas Six (Blake)
• Eggs in Purgatory (Childs)
• What Moves the Dead (Kingfisher)
• The Sea Beast Takes a Lover: Stories (Andreasen)

Of these, Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Eggs in Purgatory and A Terrible Fall of Angels were my favorites, but the latter was too much set-up with a lot going on. A couple were quite dreadful. The rest were interesting. Some of the other group members read more books by Blake or Kingfisher.

I've read three books in the Eggs series by Childs. I stopped after three because I couldn't get paper, ebook, or audio for book 4 from any of three libraries. I recently discovered that NYPL also uses SimplyE, which has rights to distribute some materials that Libby does not. So I started book 4.

Several of these books, I listened to as well as read, which helped get through some of them. Also, they were good to listen to as I was walking.

The following books were Pandemic Book Club alternatives, meaning that they didn't win the vote, but I reserved them from the library before I knew what the winning book would be. They looked interesting, so I read them as well.

• The Library of the Unwritten (Hackwith)
• Witches of New York (McKay)

I enjoyed both of these as well as the book of the month. It was a good month (or two).

These books were Audio Only. I listened to them while I was out for walks. I would like to read them at some point.

• Gods of Manhattan -- audiobook (Mebus)
• U is for Undertow (Grafton)
• A Dead Djinn in Cairo (Clark)

Obviously, I will read the Sue Grafton book at some point. The other I will nominate for the book club the next time it's my turn. The Djinn novella is a reread. I searched for audiobooks and it popped up. There are, I believe, 4 novellas, of which I have read 2. Hopefully, I can listen to all four of them.

The following books were my own picks. Some were free downloads. Some were library books. Some were from Kickstarter campaigns.

• Yeti Left Home (Rosenburg)
• Pumpkin Blend (Layne)
• The Fox's Fire (McPhail)
• Bedeviled Eggs (Childs)
• Harald's Adventure Wares (Redd)
• Steampunk Leap Year / Steampunk New Year (Lucci)
• Hobbies for Androids (Fenn)
• Trial By Fire (Gannon)
• Eggs Benedict Arnold (Childs)
• Cibola Burn (Corey)
• Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic (Doidge)
• T is for Trespass (Grafton)
• Fire With Fire (Gannon)
• The Bookshop and the Barbarian (Stang)
• ePulp Sampler, Vol 1

Oddly, almost all of those are series books. Two are Chuck Gannon (and I'm just finishing the third book). One is James S. A. Corey, which surprises me because I thought there were two of those. One Grafton mystery and two Childs cozy mysteries (Cackleberry club).

Magna

• My Hero Academia Volumes 32-25 - up to date
• My Hero Academia: Vigilantes Volumes 1-15 - the complete series (the first 13 books were read in 2022, but nothing was recorded in the blog. Libby has details.)
• My Hero Academia: Team-Up Missions Volumes 1-2 - this is what I'd like to see more of in the series, side missions outside of the big picture story line.
• One Piece Volumes 39-40 - I've been away from this for years and couldn't find where I left off, mostly because so of it was unfamiliar, but I remember Water 7.

Miscellaneous

• More Gaming Books - mostly a bunch of stuff written by Phil Reed. I need to document this stuff so it can inspire my writing.
• A Firkin of eSpec Books - this is not posted yet. I've been reading more Kickstarter freebies.
• Some of the Best From Tor.Com 2016 Edition -- not finished yet, basically I'd forgotten about it from earlier this year, but I do have a draft file of what I have read so far.

Analog and Other Old Magazines

• ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact March 1973 (not much read)
• ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact February 1973
• ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact January 1973

My three-year experiment ran out of steam. It couldn't survive my book club and my delving into the Expanse and the Caine-verse.

And that's about it: 27 books (plus my own book), 9 or 10 volumes of manga, 2 1/2 old Analogs, 3 audiobooks (only) and a smattering of short stories and gaming books.

Here's looking to 2024!