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Cheaper Ironies: Why I'm Participating in NaNoWriMo 2011

http://mlberry.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-im-participating-in-nanowrimo-2011.html

Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Saturday, October 29, 2011. Why I'm Participating in NaNoWriMo 2011. Being the cynical cuss that I am, I generally look askance at online group activities such as National Novel Writing Month. I mean, c'mon. Who honestly thinks they can write a publishable 50,000-word novel in 30 days? But I've had a change of heart this year, and I've signed up for NaNoWriMo (*shudder*), as it's known. Why? Years NaNoWriMo has been in business = 12.

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Cheaper Ironies: Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Book Critics

http://mlberry.blogspot.com/2011/10/mommas-dont-let-your-babies-grow-up-to.html

Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Monday, October 24, 2011. Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Book Critics. I used to write a lot of fiction. I didn't publish. A lot of fiction, but I wrote it. I even finished a horror novel in the late 1980s, one about voudoun in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's right, I was 20 years ahead of the Shambling Dead Curve, all you zombies-come-lately! Correlation is not causality. I've come to the conclusion that the biggest dra...

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Cheaper Ironies: December 2011

http://mlberry.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html

Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Tuesday, December 27, 2011. Books I'm Looking Forward to in 2012. SFGate.com has already posted my list of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2011. So, what books am I eagerly awaiting in the coming year? Here's a short list, a mix of crime and sff/horror:. 1 Liminal People by Ayize Jama-Everett. 2 The Chalk Girl. By Carol O'Connell (January). 3 The Mirage by Matt Ruff. 4 The Troupe by Robert Jackson Bennett. Bennett's "The Company...

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Cheaper Ironies: October 2009

http://mlberry.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Friday, October 23, 2009. What with the Twitter and the Facebook and other distractions, I took a long time away from blogging and am trying to get back into the rhythm of it. Since July, I've contributed but two book columns to The Chronicle. The first covered new novels by Lev Grossman and Richard Kadrey, plus a graphic novel written by Ian Rankin. Earlier this month the paper ran my round-up of recent kids'/YA books of note. A couple...

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Cheaper Ironies: Comics Review -- "iZombie: Dead to the World" by Roberson and Allred

http://mlberry.blogspot.com/2011/02/comics-review-izombie-dead-to-world-by.html

Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Monday, February 28, 2011. Comics Review - "iZombie: Dead to the World" by Roberson and Allred. At this point, the living and/or walking dead hold almost no interest for me. Over the past five years, I've received more zombie and vampire novels, comics and pop cultural detritus than I can deal with, and still it keeps coming. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). View my complete profile. Follow me on Twitter. Books Im Not Reading.

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Cheaper Ironies: March 2011

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Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Monday, March 07, 2011. Off-the-Cuff Review: "Satori" by Don Winslow. As I noted in my last "Books You Oughta Read" post. Trevanian's thriller "Shibumi" is not a novel that cries out for a follow-up. It's been more than 30 years since the book's publication, and the narrative arc of its protagonist, master assassin and Go player Nicholai Hel, ends quite decisively in its denouement. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). View my complete profile.

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Cheaper Ironies: December 2009

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Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Friday, December 18, 2009. 5 Trilogies Worth Re-reading. The short days and cold nights put me in the mood for longer, more involved storytelling. I just finished Stieg. The Girl Who Played with Fire," the middle volume of the Milllennium. Trilogy, bookended by "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and the forthcoming "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest." ( Larsson. 1 The Quest for Karla by John Le Carre. Century. (The first volume w...

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Cheaper Ironies: November 2009

http://mlberry.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html

Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Friday, November 27, 2009. Holiday Books - Science Fiction/Fantasy 2009. The San Francisco's Holiday Books section will be published on Sunday, but you can already read my column online at SFGate.com. It's not really a "Best of the Year" list, though some will view it that way. There's just too much good material and too little time for me to say definitively, "Yeah, these are the genre's finest selections, no doubt about it.". My revie...

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Cheaper Ironies: Books You Oughta Read -- "Shibumi" by Trevanian

http://mlberry.blogspot.com/2011/02/books-you-oughta-read-shibumi-by.html

Interesting items. Dark mutterings. Books. Comics. And Tom Stoppard. Thursday, February 24, 2011. Books You Oughta Read - "Shibumi" by Trevanian. When I was a college sophomore, I had a conversation with my faculty adviser about popular fiction. She said something like, "Oh, yeah, I have a friend who writes spy novels. He uses the pen name 'Trevanian.'". Rather than saying, "Holy crap! I kind of blew her off. Nobody. Sanction," even more ridiculous. "Loo" proved even more popular with the reading pub...