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This week last year

09 lessons – How to fail at tomatoes

The biggest lesson this year was around tomatos. I did so many things wrong, it’s almost impossible to count them. Nearly every step along the way, I made a mistake. Most were recoverable, but it meant that we ended up with a crop of about a dozen tomatos from 16 plants. This is a miserable [...]

Subterranean goodies

A while back I managed to pick up a grab bag of books from Subterranean Press. I had no idea what they were going to send, but I’ve liked the authors they’ve printed that I’d already read so I figured I’d probably like their selections. Worst case, I would only get my moneys worth out [...]

Shortie reviews

I’ve finished a lot of fluff books lately, nothing real groundbreaking. Here’s the catchup:

Phantoms by Dean Koontz is the story of 2 women trapped in a town by an unknown agent of death. They’re joined along the way by police, scientists and one scholar whose theories are confirmed. This is one of Koontz better [...]

The Heart saga limps along

I’d been looking forward to the next book in The Looking Glass Wars series, Seeing Redd, for quite a while, so when I saw a copy I jumped at the chance to read it. I’d started with the short series of the Hatter M comic (which I loved, partially for the artwork and partially for [...]

Middling advice

My husband and I are looking at getting a dog. We’ve never owned a dog as adults, so I’m trying to get as much information as I can ahead of time. Sort of get a plan together so that we’re not too surprised when the dog comes home.
This has led me to the library, picking [...]

Not so crooked after all

This is the first of a series of short book reviews. The goal is to get through 50 books this year, each with a review. It’s only appropriate that the first review of the year should be of a book by a first time novelist, Warren Ellis. Ellis is a prolific writer of comics, but [...]

Pagliacci moves mountains

I am a feminist. This occasionally colors my perception of classical works, making it difficult for me to enjoy some of the pieces that are overtly misogynist or racist. Some pieces are presented in a way that makes it possible to put them back into context and remember they were written hundreds of years ago [...]

Who watches…

I’m late to the world of comics, just really getting into it now at the age of 32. But I think this gives me a bit of an advantage over the average joe who started reading comics as a teenager, believing that “pow” and “boom” are the height of literary sophistication. Starting later has pushed [...]

Tangerine Scarf

After listening to an interview with the author on NPR, I added The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf to my list of items on hold at the library. I was looking for soemthing to give me a bit of insight into the Islamic way of life since I don’t really have much [...]

War of the Flowers

I’d been avoiding War of the Flowers for about a year. The Forword to the story mentioned that some elements had been revised due to the events of September 11, 2001 to spare the reader sensibilities, but that others had been left as they were. There was an apology and a message stating that the [...]