Steven's Notebook

Ah January — a time for setting goals and making resolutions to change. So many of us do it, yet by the end of the month so many of us have gone astray, reverting to our old ways. This month’s book is one to help us define and stick to our resolutions by forming new […]

This time ’round, my Book Of The Month is actually two books: Mary Robinette Kowal‘s The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky. Dr. York, the protagonist here, is a smart, hard-working survivor of an immense environmental disaster. Along with a team of brilliant and talented — and often petty, sexist, and condescending — scientists, pilots, […]

November’s #book recommendation, a true-life adventure, a detective story to uncover it, and more: “a story of remarkable athletic prowess: On the treacherous mountains of Crete, a motley band of World War II Resistance fighters—an artist, a shepherd, and a poet—abducted a German commander from the heart of the Axis occupation. To understand how, McDougall […]

Yay! Another new Star Wars book – this one in support of Solo: A Star Wars Story. That movie gave us some backstory to Han Solo; this novel gives us more and sheds light on the history between him and Qi’ra as well as (the first?) mention of an ancient Jedi manuscript, The Annals of […]

Atlanta Georgia, 1948 – quite a different city than we know today. Darktown is a historical novel telling the story of the first negro police officers here; men with what has always been a difficult job, made even tougher given the racial bias of the time. Many pages were, like those of Colson Whitehead’s Underground […]

on October 25, 2011 I wrote a post on Getting highlighted text from the Amazon Kindle. Most of that still applies, but Amazon has changed several pages’ address and formatting. The info formerly at “your books” is now read.amazon.com, and “your highlights” is now “your notes and highlights” at read.amazon.com/notebook.

quoting another reviewer: Between the World and Me is written as a letter/essay from Coates to his fifteen-year-old son, trying to come to terms with what it means to grow up as an African American male in 2015. …no sugar-coating, no careful racial diplomacy, no worry about mediating opinions to cater to what white people […]

More zombie cows, this time in the United States. It sounds like one of those books you think will be silly, gross and the perfect book for middle-school boys. And yes, that is true, but there’s more to Zombie Baseball Beatdown. “There could be millions! Total zombie apocalypse!” Joe said then he looked thoughtful. “That […]

It started with the cows. Flesh-eating, sex-crazed zombie cows. In England. That right there should be enough of a review to get you reading. And to give you enough warning — should you feel that you need it — that there will be gore and violence of a somewhat cartoon variety. I picked this up […]

In the hospital, there is a woman. Her hair, once blond, hangs in tangles down her back. She doesn’t remember why she’s in such a terrible place – just a tea party long ago, and long ears and blood… Suffice to say, this is not Walt Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland,” and not a book for […]