About Fred

February 2017

As I said in my last post, I spent the first couple of days of February down in Florida. I was there with my family for a week, visiting relatives, biking, walking along the beach, basically just hanging out. It was fun. And if the weather back in New York wasn’t the rudest of rude awakenings, it was still a lot colder when my plane home landed than when it took off.

Anyway, otherwise it was a pretty uneventful month for me personally. A holiday, a snow day, and the usual assortment of stories, books, movies, and music.

The stories

I read some I liked, some not so much. I’m also busy reading submissions for Kaleidotrope. Anyway, the 2017 originals I particularly liked:

  • “Later, Let’s Tear Up The Inner Sanctum” by A. Merc Rustad (Lightspeed)
  • “Probably Still the Chosen One” by Kelly Barnhill (Lightspeed)
  • “Run” by C.R. Hodges (Escape Pod)
  • “Some Cupids Kill With Arrows” by Tansy Rayner Roberts (Uncanny)
  • “To Budapest With Love” by Theodora Goss (Uncanny)
  • “Milla” by Lorenzo Crescentini and Emanuela Valentini (trans. Rich Larson) (Clarkesworld)
  • “The Dark Birds” by Ursula Vernon (Apex)
  • “The Lily Rose” by Emily B. Cataneo (The Dark)

And the reprints:

  • “We Are Not These Bodies, Strung Between The Stars” by A.C. Wise (Pseudopod)
  • “Nilda” by Junot Diaz (This Is How You Lose Her)

The books

I’m including three books here, even though one of them I read most of in January, and another I finished reading on March 1.

I think my favorite was easily Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, which I read for my monthly book club meetup. The easy tagline for the book is “a Chinese-inspired Game of Thrones,” but I think it does a lot of other really interesting things with its characters and the way it develops them. It’s also full of a lot of really nice moments–including, but not limited to:

“Read a lot of books and try a lot of recipes,” Jia said. “When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.”

“I refuse to believe in the futility of change, because I have seen how the lowly dandelion, with time and patience, can crack the strongest paving stone.”

The second of the three was Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll, which was interesting but not exactly my favorite Carroll novel. It includes this nice line, however:

The keys that unlock the heart are made of funny materials: a disarming phrase that comes out of the blue, nowhere, a certain sexy walk that sends you reeling, the way someone hums when she is alone.

I like Carroll’s work, and one of the things I like is that I don’t always know what to make of it. But one problem there is that I don’t always know what to make of it.

The third and final book I read (mostly) in February was Uprooted Naomi Novik, which I also read for my monthly book group. Like most of the group, I found a lot to really like about the book, and a lot that was worthy of discussion, but I didn’t necessarily love the book, or expect to find myself re-visiting it ever again.

There weren’t any particular quotes that spring to mind here, but I did like this little exchange:

“He lived for forty years in a monastery illuminating manuscripts before anyone noticed he wasn’t growing older. He was always a little surprised to find himself a wizard, I think.”

The movies

I watched 11 of ’em. Too many of them were Resident Evil movies. Moonlight and The Edge of Seventeen were my favorites, and the ones my thoughts keep returning to, but John Wick 2 was also a lot of fun.

  • Interview With the Vampire:

  • Underworld: Rise of the Lycans:

  • Resident Evil: Afterlife:

  • Resident Evil: Retribution:

  • Underworld: Awakening:

  • Finding Dory:

  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre:

  • The Edge of Seventeen:

  • Moonlight:

  • Self/less:

  • John Wick: Chapter 2:

The music

I listened to some of it.

January 2017

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Almost the end of February and I’m finally getting around to posting my monthly round-up for January. What can I say? It’s been a busy year so far, and it doesn’t show any signs of letting up. (I mean, a genuine madman in the Oval Office isn’t helping matters anyway.)

But what are you complaining about? You’re just the imaginary blog reader I made up in my head!

Really, though, I have begun to suspect that nobody else is reading these posts, even the few who occasionally did so in the past. But hey, whatever. They help me keep track of things, which is maybe all that matters.

And it’s not like there’s a lot more to report. I spent the last couple of days of January (and the first couple of February) down on Sanibel Island in Florida — which is where the photo above comes from — but otherwise it was a pretty uneventful month. I mean, for the day to day, my Twitter feed is the better place to go.

Here’s just where I keep track of the stories, books, movies, and music I encountered in the month. So let’s get on with that, shall we, gentle (and likely nonexistent) reader?

The stories

I read a few I really liked. 2017 originals:

  • “A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting” by Charles Payseur(Flash Fiction Online)
  • “Alexandria” by Monica Byrne (F&SF)
  • “Bodies Stacked Like Firewood” by Sam J. Miller (Uncanny)
  • “Women’s Work” by Amelia Aldred (Flash Fiction Online)
  • “Goddess, Worm” by Cassandra Khaw (Uncanny)
  • “The Whole Crew Hates Me” by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed)
  • “Soliloquy in a Cheap Diner Off Route 66” by James Beamon (Apex)
  • “BlueBellow” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Strange Horizons)
  • “The Regression Test” by Wole Talabi (F&SF)
  • “Next Station, Shibuya” by Iori Kusano (Apex)
  • “Still Life With Abyss” by Jim Grimsley (Asimov’s)
  • “Vegetablemen in Peanut Town” by August Marion (Escape Pod)

Reprints:

  • “This Is How I Wish to Be Restored” by Christie Yant (Lightspeed)
  • “Holding the Ghosts” by Gwendolyn Clare (Escape Pod)
  • “The Quiltmaker” by Mike Allen (Apex)
  • “Cold Print” by Ramsey Campbell (Pseudopod)

The books

I finished two books in January, both of which I really liked: Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey and The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. The former was the latest book in the Expanse series, which I believe I am physically incapable of not reading as soon as each new book is published, and the latter was a novella I read for my (now regular) book club. I don’t have a huge amount to say about either book — you should have joined my book club if you wanted lengthy discussion — but I did enjoy them.

The movies

  • Black Mass:

  • The Birds:

  • Bringing Out the Dead:

  • The Visit:

  • The Sweet Smell of Success:

  • The Brothers Grimm:

  • Solaris:

  • Now You See Me 2:

  • Bridge of Spies:

The music

My monthly mix of stuff I heard and liked:

A brand new year

Welcome, everyone, to the year two-thousand-seventeen. I hope you’re seated comfortably. Let us begin.

I’m hopeful for this new year, because…well, because you sort of have to be, don’t you? The alternative really doesn’t do anybody the least bit of good.

Twenty-sixteen was a difficult year, for a lot of reasons — not least of all because of the US presidential election, following (for so many months) on the heels of the disastrous UK Brexit decision. Sometimes I worry about this sorry little world we live in. But hope, and working to make my little corner of it better, is really all I can do in the new year.

I hope you find ways to improve your little corners, too, and I wish you all the very best in 2017.

And now, some music.

I don’t really do “best albums of the year” or anything like that, but I do put together a mix every month of songs that I like. If you’re one of the imaginary people I’m writing this to now, you may have even seen some of those playlists earlier in the year. Then I try to pull together a combined mix, something like two songs from every month.

So that’s what this is. Some of the songs are from 2017, some are just tunes I heard somewhere along the way. Either way, these are songs I really enjoyed and wanted to share as we stumble forward into the new day. Enjoy!

December 2016

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And there it is, the end of the month, and the end of a year. Just a quick write-up of the month. It was mostly uneventful, a couple of weeks at the office (plus the yearly holiday party), and a couple of weeks on vacation. And there was Christmas, which was very nice. I hope yours was too!

As usual, though, there were some stories, some movies, and some music.

The stories

I managed to not finish any of the books — three at last count — that I’m currently reading. I did, however, read thirty-two short stories. Favorites included:

The movies

I watched ten movies in December. (I had some time off.)

  • A Streetcar Named Desire:

  • Don’t Breathe:

  • Don’t Think Twice:

  • The Jungle Book:

  • For the Love of Spock:

  • And the Band Played On:

  • The Lobster:

  • Eyes Without a Face:

  • The Philadelphia Story:

  • Double Wedding:

  • The Thin Man:

  • The Big Sleep:

  • After the Thin Man:

  • Ben-Hur:

  • The Tomb of Ligeia:

  • Postcards from the Edge:

  • Arsenic and Old Lace:

  • The Revenant:

  • Swiss Army Man:

  • The Masque of the Red Death:

The music

November 2016

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So November. I think it’s safe to say that the first week of it did not play out as expected. The many long weeks since then have pretty felt just like shell-shocked aftermath. It’s anybody’s guess how exactly things will play out over the next four years, but it’s almost guaranteed to be difficult and ugly on a lot of levels.

But Thanksgiving was nice, so there is that.

Anyway, beyond the holidays — which was just me, my sister, our parents, and my sister’s cat — and politics, November was a pretty uneventful month. I read one book and thirty-two short stories, watched sixteen movies, and listened to a little music. It was that kind of month.

The book

I read Company Town by Madeline Ashby for my monthly book group. And I didn’t much like it.

It wasn’t terrible, but I think the group largely agreed with my own assessment: there’s way too much going on in the novel, with too few of its threads connecting or being resolved. And the ending…ooh boy. It’s rare to find a book where you want many, many longer stretches of exposition just so you can better know what’s going on and who everybody is. The book’s pacing is really weird, and it really does feel like working on a mystery without any clues.

It seems to set itself up for a sequel — despite rumors it’s a one-and-done — but I don’t think I’d read more. Maybe another book by Ashby, or even a completely rewritten and expanded version of this book, but no, not a sequel.

The stories

I read thirty-two short stories in November, upping my one-a-day habit all the way up to two-a-day on a couple of occasions. (I took all of Thanksgiving week off from work.) These were my favorites:

  • “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies” by Brooke Bolander (Uncanny)
  • “Kamanti’s Child” by Jennifer Marie Brissett (Uncanny)
  • “The Place of Bones” by Gardner Dozois (F&SF)
  • “Where I’m From, We Eat Our Parents” by John Wiswell (Daily Science Fiction)
  • “Project Earth Is Leaving Beta” by J.W. Alden (Flash Fiction Online/Nature)
  • “Spirit Tasting List for Ridley House, April 2016” by Rachel Acks (Shimmer)
  • “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar (Uncanny/he Starlit Wood)
  • “Migration” by Tananarive Due (Nightmare)
  • “Natural Skin” by Alyssa Wong (Lightspeed)
  • “A Shot of Salt Water” by Lisa L. Hannett (The Dark)
  • “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)

All but the last two were from 2016. I don’t set out to read current short fiction and nothing but, but it does often turn out that way. After last month, when I read a whole bunch of much older reprints, I was probably due.

The movies

  • All the President’s Men:

  • I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House:

  • The Hitcher:

  • 13th:

  • Arrival:

  • The Neon Demon:

  • Sunset Boulevard:

  • Duel:

  • Sing Street:

  • Martin:

  • Seven Men from Now:

  • Hell or High Water:

  • Chunking Express:

  • Carnival of Souls:

  • My Left Foot:

  • Big Fan:

The music