Book Review | The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha

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Summary from Goodreads

Based on the award-winning blog 1000awesomethings.com, The Book of Awesome is a high five for humanity and a big celebration of life’s little moments and the underappreciated, simple things that make us happy, from popping bubble wrap to hitting a bunch of green lights in a row, to waking up thinking it’s Monday and realizing it’s Saturday. With wise, witty observations from writer Neil Pasricha, this treasure trove is filled with smile-inducing musings that make readers feel like kids looking at the world for the first time: AWESOME!

AwesomeCover

I’m hesitant to admit this, but The Book of Awesome is a book I thought of as little more than fluff. I cynically regarded it as a fun little novelty that was an easy sell to the casual reading masses, but it exposed to me the jaded husk of a man I can sometimes be. While I expected a read that would present forced enthusiasm over little things for a cheap laugh, I instead got something humorously sincere and genuinely relatable.Read More »

Mighty Thursday #1

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The Amazing Spider-Man: Election Day

By Marc Guggenheim and John Romita Jr., 2009

ElectionDayCover

Summary from Goodreads

It’s the climax to a year’s worth of Spider-Man stories as questions are answered and Spidey’s new world is rocked to its core. Who’s the person terrorizing people as Menace? Who’s behind the Spider-Tracer Killings? Who’s going to be the Mayor of New York City? Marc Guggenheim and John Romita Jr. have all the answers.Read More »

Movie Review | Suicide Squad

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IMDB summary:

A secret government agency recruits a group of imprisoned supervillains to execute dangerous black ops missions in exchange for clemency, which inevitably leads to chaos.

SuicideSquadPoster

Suicide Squad, directed by David Ayer, is the latest installment in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) of films, following Batman v. Superman which released earlier this year. There is a very apparent divide in the reception of this film, with a lot of critics receiving it poorly while fans seem to love it and believe critics are being unfair. For my part, I liked it, but it had a lot of problems.Read More »

Mighty Thursday #0

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I’m a great lover of comic books, but unfortunately I have a tendency to read them infrequently. There are also a great many titles I’ve accumulated in my library that I’ve had for a long time yet never gotten around to reading. Some of these are random volumes that I can’t even recall buying, while others I specifically wanted to read, yet let that desire fall to the wayside after purchase.

Mighty Thursday is my effort to remedy this, where every week I will choose a comic book volume — either off my shelf or newly purchased — and review it. Most of the time this will be one I’ve never read before, but sometimes I will reread a title for the fun of it.

The only requirement I have for these new weekly posts is the medium itself, so while a lot may be focused on the numerous superhero trades I’ve accumulated over the years, I will not be excluding books that fall outside of the genre. Comics are a wonderful art form and I want to explore them more regularly.

Regular posts will begin next Thursday.

Short Story Review | Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was by Paul McAuley

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Summary

“Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was” by Paul McAuley is a complex sf story about politics and xenophobia when human colonists on an Earth-like planet are faced with the possibility of reaching out to alien cultures, especially when a big organization that has previously done harm is in charge of the operation.

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While a little long-winded, I have to admit it was the title of this story that grabbed me more than anything else. While I was aware it was a science fiction story, I love the more terrifying implications of a title like this. I love obscurity I can wrack my brain over, even if I won’t get clear answers. This is easier said than done, however, and unfortunately this story did not quite hit the mark.Read More »

Video Game Review | Virtue’s Last Reward

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Virtue’s Last Reward (VLR) is a 2012 visual novel adventure game developed by Chunsoft for the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita. The game is the second installment in the Zero Escape series, following 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors (999), which was released in 2009. While I have not formally reviewed 999 before, I have written about it quite glowingly. Being a visual novel the game primarily features lengthy narrative sections broken up by “Escape Rooms,” which are environments where the player character Sigma must investigate and solve puzzles in to progress.Read More »

Book Review | Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction by David Seed

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Summary from the inside cover:

Science Fiction has proved notoriously difficult to define, but has emerged as one of the most popular genres of our times; not only in literature, but also in drama, poetry, and film. David Seed explores this often unconventional genre in relation to themes such as science and technology, space, aliens, utopias, gender, and its relation to time past, present, and future.

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Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction by David Seed is part of the extensive Very Short Introductions collection published by Oxford University Press, containing nearly 400 volumes on a wide array of different subjects. This volume — 271 — discusses the science fiction genre, focusing on its key trappings, such as voyages into space, technology, and alien encounters.Read More »

Book Review | Suspended in Dusk, edited by Simon Dewar

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Summary from Goodreads:

DUSK. A time between times. A whore hides something monstrous and finds something special. A homeless man discovers the razor blade inside the apple. Unlikely love is found in the strangest of places. Secrets and dreams are kept… forever. Or was it all just a trick of the light? Suspended in Dusk brings together 19 stories by some of the finest minds in Dark Fiction.

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While I love horror as a genre in film and gaming, I’ve only had minimal experience with its literature. To help remedy this, I decided to not only pick up some horror fiction, but go out of my way to find something more obscure. I dug up a business card I picked up at Fan Expo last year from Books of the Dead, a horror publisher, which led me to this anthology. Since each story is rather short, I will not be summarizing any of them in a specific way.

What I will say is the book is unified by a dusk motif: in some way or another each story incorporates this time of day as an idea, figuratively and/or literally, such as a peculiar event occurring during this time. Dusk is rarely a crucial aspect of each story, more of a narrative aesthetic that connects them all together.Read More »

TV Series Review | Orange is the New Black Season Four

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Piper

Following the completion of season three, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Orange is the New Black going forward. As I said in my review last year, the season didn’t have a crystal clear focus. The cast continued to be stellar and the characters compelled me as they were further fleshed out, but a lot of the season felt like the series was getting a little too comfortable with itself. Many ill winds were blowing for Litchfield that season however, promising a lot while only going as far as laying a foundation. Season four built upon this foundation a phenomenally structured season, making good on the foreshadowing of season three, and giving us their darkest season yet.Read More »

A Beginner’s Advice: Reading the Good and the Bad

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Dark&Stormy

Today, I want to extend some advice I continually try to follow in my pursuit of writing fiction: that you should be reading as much as you can, as often as possible. This of course extends to other storytelling mediums as well, whichever you want to be writing in. While this is probably obvious, what I feel can be overlooked, however — which I too am guilty of — is that you should read, watch, play, etc. as much outside of the genre you’re interested in writing about as possible.Read More »