A Green Mushroom

Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors these days and I just found out that he released this novella Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell a while ago and I somehow missed it. I remedied that situation. My favorite thing about novella length fiction is being able to sit down and read the entire thing in one session.  This one was no exception.  I read through the novella in one night and really liked it. Sanderson creates a new world with a new system of magic and superstition, as he usually does.  It's always interesting to see which direction he takes it.  In this world it seems to be built up around puritanical belief systems.  I'm not a person that likes too much religion in my fiction, but  Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell does a great job of using it as source material but not lingering on it. The story follows Silence, a character who owns a waystop along a dangerous road through the forests and the White Fox, a b...

Marvel Unlimited and comics have derailed my normal reading patterns for the past month or two, but I'm slowly drifting back toward my normal amount of book reading. In doing so I finished the second book in the X-Wing series, Wedge's Gamble. This continues to be a great Star Wars series in their Legends universe.  I loved these books as a kid and they're still holding up now.  I'm surprised that they are as good as I remember. I think I read them as they were released so I never realized how closely the series is tied together.  The first two books flow right into one another in a way that's great.  A newcomer could pick up book two and start with it, no problem.  But someone who has read the first book will see more connections and get more out of it. In Wedge's Gamble Rogue Squadron is tasked with taking down the shields surrounding Coruscant so that the Rebels can occupy it.  The Rebellion is looking to finally overthrow the Empire's seat of...

I just saw Syp do a post on his top 10 books of 2010 and thought I would do something similar.  Not to steal his thunder, but just because I love to read and I don't write about it on this blog as much as I would like to.  So here are my favorite books that I read in the past year. Old Man's War by John Scalzi An amazing take on space marines and unlike most of the science fiction I've read before.  Reading this and then immediately going back to read Starship Troopers (one of my Heinlein favorites) showed me how the same topic can be covered in completely different ways.  Scalzi is one of my new favorites and his sarcasm keeps me coming back for more. The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks This gritty take on an assassin's world is simply amazing.  Parts of The Night Angel Trilogy are brutal and actually made me cringe or have to take a break from reading which is a new experience for me.  The lows experienced by the characters and the harsh re...

Only a few days after writing about how I want to buy a Kindle soon my uncle sends me this! He doesn't read my blog, but his timing was perfect.  I had just talked to him the other week about how much I read on my ipod touch Kindle application and he was telling me all about the updated Kindle he had just ordered.  Turns out he got the new Kindle and decided to send his old one to me, for free!  I love my family. I've been reading The Black Prism, which just came out, on my new (used) Kindle and I'm really liking it.  On the ipod touch I inverted the colors so that text was white and the background was black.  It helped with eye strain a bunch, but it doesn't even come close to how nice the digital ink is in the actual Kindle.  It really does feel like reading from a piece of paper. By the way, The Black Prism is a fantastic book by Brent Weeks and you should check it out if you need new reading material.  For a hardcover copy it costs $25 ...

I've seen a lot of discussion about digital books - also called e-books - around the internet lately.  I'm an avid reader and I think it's really interesting to watch as the form of literature consumption evolves.  Most of the posts I've seen prefer either books or digital books.  But I, on the other hand, love both!  Why not? Why does everything have to turn into this or that?  Why can't both forms continue? The convenience of digital books is awesome.  I can get into a good book series and the moment I finish a book I can start downloading the next book in the series and be reading it within a minute.  Not to mention that most digital copies of books are cheaper than psychical copies.  Digital books can all be contained within one device and I carry around my ipod touch almost everywhere anyway so now I have a multitude of books at my fingertips.  The ipod touch has backlighting too, which means I can read in the dark.  The kindle...