4.26.2024

4.26.2024 

After some years that felt fairly derelict, I want to get back to writing about creativity and creation. 

 

I think that I shall resurrect Word as a place to do that. 

I’ll go back to reviewing each book I read, and also more broad writing on creativity and the importance of the act of creation to humans. 

Books this year so far: 

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell 

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell 

The Devil Crept in by Ania Ahlborn 

Trying by Yamada Hobi and Elise Hurst

May Update

Glorious spring weekend here in Vancouver. Today we slept in, went to see an impressive production of the Verdi opera Don Carlo, walked along the harbor, made deep-dish pizza, read and wrote a bit. The professor's birthday is mid next week, and I've declared a moratorium on travel for the month of May. The last few have been fascinating whirlwind of new job, new games, loads of travel, and more than a little writing, reading, and editing.

The Arc is just about ready to go live. I plan to release it on Amazon's Kindle platform, hopefully before month's end. It's a nasty little tale set in Houston Midtown just before a great hurricane smashes into the coast. The Arc is a horror novel in which several not-so-nice people meet something much worse. I did the original draft back in 2010 when we first moved to the third coast. Not for the squeamish. I'm quite excited, because a Houston artist whose work I admire, Give Up, has agreed to do an original piece for the cover of the book. His creepy poster art was papered on many of the abandoned buildings which inspired the novel. So if you like horror, stay tuned!

Otherwise, I've been working on book 2 of the Western, the sequel to Last Call at the Rusty Nail. It still needs a lot of work, so no promises on delivery date.

In the meantime, a couple of reviews!

Merry Post-Christmas! It's time for a new and mighty update. As a matter of fact, I expect to give you several over the next few days. It's a sacred duty to myself to not let one year morph into the next without having jotted down a review, however paltry, for each book I've read that year, and getting it posted here for my imaginary army of readers.

A quick personal update, as well, something akin to drawing a line on the wall to measure a kid's height: I'm living in Houston still, with the Professor. We've found a nice little enclave called The Heights, where we reside in a cool modernist tower just a few blocks walk from several bars and restaurants. More importantly, we live less than a mile from our good friends The Senator and Dr. KMK. In fact, tonight we'll be having dinner and wine with them while we have an "Organize the Library" party -- to move their collection into the wonderful new library room they've built. I'm still working as a director at Certain Affinity, a fun boutique game development shop in Austin. My family in Austin is all doing well; as strange and fun as ever.

I've written three books in the last three years. Two cover topics in game development and are published by Focal Press. The third is an unpublished horror novel set in a decaying city on the bayou... And I know that one of my New Year's resolutions will be to write another in 2012. I've promised myself it'll be fiction, probably fantasy.

Proofing process finished for Social Game Design -- now it's off to the printers, and will be availible on Amazon and store shelves by the end of the year!

Two more reviews! Hot, fresh, kinda messy, and late-night. Just like you like 'em!

Can't believe it's been 7 months. Yikes!

But luckily, the book readin' continues, and I've got some fun reviews all set to share!

Unfortunately, (or fortunately) I'm fat in the middle of another new book project right now; one with some rather insane deadlines. So it may be a few weeks still.

But rest assured -- these two goals I vow:

1) I'll get 2011's books all posted before the end of the year. I've not yet missed a book (I think) or a year since I started this thing, and this won't be the first. We're closing in on 10 years before too long -- wanna make sure they're good!

2) I'll get the broken index on the side fixed, so the links to reviews actually work right.

In the meantime, as a teaser, some of the interesting stuff I've read and need to post about:

City of Thieves
The Kraken
Where There is No Doctor
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (again)
Full Dark, No Stars
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
The Monk and the Riddle
A Wise Man's Fear
Horns
Caught
The Windup Girl
Elegy for April
Little Brother
The Devotions of Suspect X
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Rogue Island

But for now... Work needs my attention, and The Professor is telling me it's bed time, and I still owe my publisher another 15k words in about a week, so...

Until later,
-tf

23 new book reviews added!

Now off to New Orleans for NYE!

Love,
-tf

First, let's get the apology out of the way... No updates since March???! Terrible. Undisciplined! Shameful!

Luckily, I've read lots of books since then, and am committed to posting them all this afternoon!

In the days since March 2010:

We moved from our Midtown condo into a great townhome in the Heights. The Professor has become acclimated to her new job. I've continued bouncing between ATX and The Third Coast. I wrote a new novel called The Arc, for which I'm now seeking publication. My book, Distributed Game Development, was released by Focal Press. Various family dramas have unfolded, but none to a tragical conclusion, for which we can be thankful. And we've learned that we more or less love living down here; lots of good friends, etc. We're off tomorrow for a NYE vacation in The Big Easy.

But first, the books!

New Year, new posts!

It's been far too long!

Since my last post, we've moved twice. First into a treehouse apartment in the Austin Arboretum, now into a three story tower in Houston Midtown. Still working with CA, and RS starts a new job with FBJ next week. I finished a book of my own, Distributed Game Development, and it will be on store shelves (likely very few of them) by late March.

Of course, I've been reading lots, and for the first time have violated my rule about getting a year's books all posted before the end of the year!

I need to post on:
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris
Club Dead by Charlaine Harris
Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris
Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris
Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris
All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris
From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris
Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris
The Box by Richard Mattheson
Shadow Country (Killing Mr. Watson) by Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country (Bone By Bone) by Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country (Lost Man’s River) by Peter Matthiessen
The Red Cross Guide to First Aid by The Red Cross
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahari

Stay tuned! The posts will be coming soon, I promise!

-tf

And on the third day, it continued raining. But no one here complains because we need it so badly. The professor is away on Cruiseapalooza, and I'm taking a break from working on finishing the book. Which means it's time for a long overdue update! This set were read in June and July of 2009, while still living in South Austin. I'm writing this from an apartment in North Austin on a rainy Saturday in Septmeber.

So I've let another season get behind me without updating. Shame on me.


But today I had a fun little conversation about a few books, and remembered that I'd been remiss...

First the personal update, then posts covering January through April 1st. Now, April still seems like three lifetimes ago, but it's late enough tonight, I've got some new demands on my time, and I don't want to do Mrs. Carter and Mr. Rushdie (among others) the discourtesy of hurried posts. So you'll just have to live with a few new books for now!

The Professor and I are still living in the house in South Austin. I'm now a free agent, no longer under the employ of the racecar shop in Vancouver. It's sad to say goodbye to that beautiful city and some of the friends there. But I'm not too sorry to have had to do a lot less travel this spring, and I'll not miss some elements of the job. On to newer and better things!

In other news, the Professor is now officially esquire tambien. So that's cool. The future is otherwise uncertain, and as Terminator reminded us this past weekend, there's no fate but what we make it. So wish us luck with whatever that ends up being.

Now, back to the books!

It's worth interjecting here that these posts are made in the order in which I read these books. This is one reason that there is often a significant delay between posts -- many times I've not had a chance to go back and write a review of something, so while many later books have already had their writeups done, the posting of the whole is delayed.

It's important to me to stick to these two rules -- that I not write about any book I don't actually, completely finish. (There are a LOT that I only make it 2/3 of the way through and just get bogged down, distracted, leave them in another country, whatever.) Also, I refuse to post out of order -- to my mind, everything you read is influenced and weighed against the stockpile of knowledge and memory in your head. To read David Foster Wallace (RIP) without having first read Pyncheon is to miss much of the tradition in which the former is working. More succinctly: Revelations makes little sense without Genesis.

Who cares about all this? Likely just me. I'm not aware of anyone who reads this regularly, or even occasionally. Though, now that Facebook and Twitter have brought all us so much closer, it's possible that readership has increased! If you are out there, dear reader, add a comment and let me know!

Written from a 2nd floor study, grey day, Austin Texas, with the memories of Christmas and family fast fading in my mind...

-tf

Merry Christmas to all!

Having just had a few days to catch up on R&R, I'm just about to post a ten-pack update in an effort to get this page caught up on the year's reading!

Stay tuned for details on a few Rushdie novels, some sci-fi, bad horror, economics, the memoirs of a few presidents, and my first review of a graphic novel!

Happy Holidays!

-tf

Oh, so far behind!

Last post was read in January! In Oxford! Since we've had fiction in Texas, How-To books in Vancouver, Lit'ra'ture in Honduras, and Horror in Houston!

Hopefully a real post coming up soon, but a few things I'd like to visit with myself about:

Taft by Ann Patchett
The Iron Council by China Meville
Darkfall by Dean Koontz
Winning by Jack Welsh
The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
Demonology by Rick Moody
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I promise to at least TRY to get to all of these before the end of August.

Meantime, I'm grinding away on NFS - but things are looking good!

The Professor finished her summer with the fine people of FBJ in Houston, and is now working our in Silicon Valley. We had a great group vacation to Roatan, which reawakened my interest in scuba diving. Vancouver has been beautiful this summer, and the team up there is really coming together.

Family all seem to be well.

More soon, I hope.

-tf

Been quite a long time since I've posted anything. About to fix that.

I'm here in Houston, TX for the last week. The Professor has been doing a nine week rotation through the white wizard's tower of a prominent downtown firm. So we've been living in a small place in Midtown, among the ferraris, crackheads, and high end resturants of central Houston.

Sixteen new book posts coming up, ranging as far back as January of this year.

In our lives: A formal tonight, tuxedos, gowns, and partying until dawn. Then one more week here with the Senator, the esteemed KM, and other fine new friends. Then we're back to Austin for a few weeks, with a brief detour through LA, followed by two weeks in Vancouver and the Gulf Islands.

Cheers,
-tf

A few moments of personal reflection. An update on the varied aspects of my life which might interest anyone who reads this, and may serve to amuse me in future years when I glance back at this post:

First, an apology for whatever has happened to the font on this page, which has turned any number of symbols, from the common " to the slightly less common -- into some silly block. I'm going to experiment with changing the font on the page, but if I were REALLY going to spend any serious time on this blog, I'd first post on the 15 books I've recently read that I've not yet written about. Some of them were even great, like Bill Bryson's works...

The Professor and I are both home tonight at our house in Hyde Park after an enjoyable and low-key afternoon of celebrating Vic's 60th birthday. We had a water-balloon fight on the back deck of the house, and MF & SKF made some incredible dinner. Yesterday we attended Eyore's birthday down in Pease Park, and enjoyed a relaxing hippie vibe with the Keep Austin Weird crowd.

I'm still jet-setting between Austin and Vancouver, which is enjoyable though frequently exuausting. The Professor is finishing up her first year of law school, and it's safe to say she'll be happy to have it behind her. We're leaving in a few weeks for Houston, where we'll be spending about nine weeks this summer while she does a summer associateship with a big firm down there.

MF is working at a sushi-bar again this spring, and seems to be enjoying it immensely. LAF is working for a web-developer, and enjoying it not-at-all, but she has a new puppy named Reece, who is delightful, and I suspect that she'll really enjoy living here this summer. SKF recently won an award for her pastel work, so we're all very proud of her, and she's still kicking much ass on the real-a-tor front; displaying an impressive amount of adaptibility and business savvy. Vic says he is now "the cat's gardener."

So for now, I'm off to read in bed until The Professor finishes reading her Con Law.

Goodnight,
-tf

A quick personal update before we return to the books:

I read all of these back in Vancouver over the early summertime. I'm now back in Texas, living in scenic Hyde Park near the UT campus. It's nice to be home. I'm still nine or ten books behind in posting, but trying to devote a little time to playing catch up.


The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy’s wrote The Orchard Keeper long before All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men had catapulted him to near the top of the short list of those the NYT Book Review considers to be the best living American authors.

The Orchard Keeper lacks the ferocity and might of Blood Meridian, or the attention to cultural beauty of his Cities of the Plains novels, but does keep a nice focus on natural beauty. There are many loving stares at ice forming on the edge of streams, the behaviors of animals and trees, and so on. If this sounds a little sleepy, well, it is. But the novel isn’t dull exactly.

From a plotting standpoint, we’ve got a couple of characters whose fates are intertwined and bound in purpose to one another by a long cold killing committed in self defense. The glacial, but steady invasion of modernity and progress into the Tennessee Valley provides the other impetus for change here, as an old man and a boy run afoul of the law.

This is a beautifully written novel; McCarthy has a skilled ear for regional dialog, a trained mind for precision in language usage, and a sincere love of rural spaces. It’s not his best, but it’s still light beyond what most ever accomplish.

I'm also very excited to note that McCarthy has just released a new novel called The Road, which deals with my favorite topic: APOCALYPSE! I'm off to the bookstore to buy it!

Shall I apologize for taking so long to post again? What would be the point? I'm the only one that ever looks at the site, except for the occasional student looking to plagarize thoughts on some book or another, I suppose. Did Google send you here? Drop me a line if you end up using anything I said here in your book report. That's about the quality of analysis and writing you'll be getting here, so hopefully it'll fit right in.

While I'm erratic on posting, I promise that I'm not erratic on consuming the books, nor have I forgotten any. Here are the ones which are getting posted tonight, on this cool evening in early May in Burnaby, BC:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Yeah, yeah, I know...)
Esctasy by Irvine Welsh
Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
Books of Blood Volume 1 by Clive Barker
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I've got another two or three that I've finished, or almost finished, just haven't had time to jot down any thoughts on yet.

I'm off for the Great State of Texas next week, where I'll be celebrating the brilliance of my beloved Professor, as well as her inevitable aging, and the existance of my mother, and mothers everywhere, I suppose. Since plane rides are good for this sorta thing, expect more in the week or two after I return!

-tf

Ah-ha! Catching up!

It occurs to me that since this blog is really only updated when there's nothing else going on that it's sort of a chronicle of the lulls in my life. But, since it's focus is solely on my one sided little ramblings on the books I read, I guess that's okay.

It's a rainy spring night in Burnaby. I'm in the basement thinking about the government with Dylan and Mouse.


Golden Days by Carolyn See

Golden Days was recommended (and loaned) to me by someone whose taste in most things I admire quite a bit. Typically, her appreciation for books is no exception. Throughout my life there’s no doubt that this person has given me more influential books than has almost anyone else. So I approached Golden Days with a lot of excitement.

A hundred pages in, a little puzzled, I was still excited, hoping that the goodness would start anytime soon. But, alas, no. This book didn’t deliver what I expected it to ever, and, in fact, never delivered anything I even thought was very good.

Golden Days is the story of a young to middle-aged mother of two living in the California Hills. In the tumultuous months before nuclear annihilation she goes about her life, getting involved in romances, self-help cults, investment groups, and all the other hallmarks of late seventies era Californian upper-class WASP entertainment.

Then again. I wasn’t ever there. So I might have it all wrong. I give her credit for being true to time and place. I believe this is what it was like there and then. But for whatever reason, it didn’t work for me as sci-fi and didn’t work for me as social drama. The feminism [am I still allowed to use the word?] seems archaic in our post post post everything world. (For example, the nuclear missiles as male dominated cock fantasty thing has already been beaten to death by 2006. Already even a rock & roll cliché by 1985.)

And maybe that’s my biggest complaint. It’s an apocalypse where everything pretty much just continues as normal. I think. Hints of distant war, then a vague description of it’s aftermath through the same consumerist, middle-aged sunglasses. I understand Updike does the same thing in Towards the End of Time? Anyone?

A few months ago I might have had some details more clearly. And again, maybe it’s just a chronicle of a city I’ve never much liked in a time period too flaky to be retro, with no real payoff at the end.

In the interest of full disclosure:

Yes, Mike & I did make a replica of the sign in Lonesome Dove which was so convincing a forgery that Vic was worried we'd stolen it from the museum at SWT.

Yes, I do know what Uva Uvam Vivendo Varia Fit means. I think about it often.

-tf