Category: Books

“The Dispatcher” by John Scalzi

Took me a while to get around to it, but I finally picked up John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher yesterday morning and polished it off before bed. Some mild spoilers (depending on your definition of “spoiler”) below....

A little Calibre trick: Set series order in metadata

Many book series do not make it abundantly clear what order the series is in by book title. If you are reading, say, Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, it’s not clear from book titles what order the series is in. So you finish Ringworld and then you are ready to...

Happy Public Domain Day! Or is it?

Today isn’t just the start of a new year, it’s Public Domain Day in the United States. Works from 1927 enter the public domain today, making them free to copy, share and remix....

Shakespeare, yea or nay?

Is Shakespeare mandatory for a well-rounded secondary education? After more than 400 years, it’s reasonable to ask whether the canon is due for an overhaul, or to be chucked out of the window entirely....

Amyl and the Sniffers, Fraidycat web follower, Mogwai

Let’s shake some of my browser tabs and see what falls out. Fraidycat web follower / feed reader RSS has been on the decline since Google snuffed Google Reader. Many sites, these days, don’t even support RSS. It’s a problem. One solution that might fit the bill for many...

Not with a bang, but a whimper: The Stand collapses

Stephen King, and all of us, keep coming back to The Stand trying to get it right. First published in 1978, The Stand has been re-issued with an additional 500 or so pages in 1990, adapted as a miniseries in the early 90s, a comic series by Marvel from...