Have a good day tomorrow everybody, if you celebrate the holiday or it you don’t.

Giveaway: One commenter chosen at random will get a copy of Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi.

Greg Bear, Nebula Award winner, passed away on November 20, 2022.

Snoopy is part of Project Artemis. At least, a stuffed Snoopy dog is on the lunar vehicle.

The Onion posted this satirical article about Meta, Mark Zuckerberg and his avatar. Oh, come on, they just wrote what we were all thinking.

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Marion: I read The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach. I enjoyed it while I was reading it; I don’t know what I think of it yet though. I finally started a 2019 Hugo winner, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, and I’m so glad I finally did! This is everything I love in a book so far! And, apart from genre, Empty Shells, The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City is helping me learn more than I ever thought possible about incubators, hatcheries, political chicanery, chickens and eggs.

Sandy: Moi? Having recently read and enjoy... Read More

Joe Golem: Occult Detective (volume 1) by Mike Mignola (writer), Christopher Golden (writer), Patric Reynolds (artist), Clem Robins (letterer), and Dave Stewart (colorist)

In the first volume of Joe Golem: Occult Detective, we get two stories: a three-part tale called “The Rat Catcher” and a two-part one called “The Sunken Dead.” Taking place in an alternative 1965, these comics are situated in the "Drowned City," a post-flood New York city, in which canals and make-shift bridges out of boards crisscross the city's landscape. The art is dark and moody, and the images are as murky as the water flooding the city. It's a beautifully haunting set of images.

Joe, who is plagued by dreams of witches and a large Witch-hunting golem, appears to be a human private investigator working for the elderly Mr. Church to fight against occult forces in the cit... Read More

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin

Book Two in N.K. Jemisin’s GREAT CITIES duology, 2022’s The World We Make is full of action, suspense, humor and good fun. That doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t serious (the continued existence of our reality), but as she did in The City We Became, Jemisin lets herself have fun with a self-aware New York and its human avatars. In spite of the seriousness of the plot, this book is lighter in tone than the first one.

Here's a brief recap with a risk of spoilers for The City We Became. New York City woke to awareness, a living city, with human avatars — one representing each borough and one who represents the whole city. Neek (NYC), a gay, homeless graffiti ar... Read More

Does anybody have a turkey stuffing recipe that doesn’t call for onions? Seriously. If you do, and you’re willing to share, please put the link in the comments. Thank you!

Z-Library has been seized by the Feds for pirating and copyright infringement.

While overall the election results seem to lean toward support of democracy, in a few places, libraries were defunded. If you think education, reading, and books are important, this might concern you.

It looks like in-person or at least hybrid Read More

Stonefish by Scott R. Jones

2020’s horror novel Stonefish by Scott R. Jones is not your basic horror novel. I tend to forget that, like every other genre, horror has an array of subgenres, styles, and tropes. Even so, it’s hard for me to “sum up” what kind of horror story Stonefish is. I’m settling for futuristic-dystopian-gnostic-phantasmagorical weird horror, with Sasquatch.

Climate change and leaps in high technology have created the everyday world of Den Secord, who writes things for his generation’s version of the internet. Secord has an editor so I’m calling him a journalist. (“Content-provider” might be more accurate.) Den lives in a plural community called a crèche. Social changes have been driven by the noönet, which lets people interact with each other’s minds and emotions directly, in a vast network. You might think that would bring out a... Read More

Marion: In spite of internet issues and vehicle issues, I found time to read this week. I finished N.K. Jemisin’s second book in the GREAT CITIES duology, The World We Make. It’s vivid, action-packed and full of fun. I bought C.LPolk’s novella Even Though I Knew the End the day it came out. I love her depiction of 1940’s Chicago, especially the lesbian bar Helen the protagonist and her girlfriend Edith met at. The plot was familiar but the book is fast-paced and lovingly... Read More

Knock Three Times by Cressida Cowell

The third book in Cressida Cowell's THE WIZARDS OF ONCE sees our young protagonists on an adventure to collect the rare ingredients needed to banish the terrible Witches that have recently awoken all across Ancient Britain.

As difficult as it may be to find the scales of a Nuckalavee, it's even stranger to consider the team they've assembled to retrieve them. Xar is the youngest son of the Head Wizard Encanzo, while Wish is the daughter of the cold Queen Sychorax, two tribes that have been at war for generations.

To make matters worse, Xar is struggling with the Witchstain on his hand (the result of his ill-fated attempt to gain magical powers) and Wish has recently found out that she has magical abilities that can work on iron (though magic is strictly forbidden among the Warrior tribes).... Read More

The Killing God by Stephen R. Donaldson

I was not, to put it mildly, a fan of Seventh Decimate, the opening book of Stephen R. Donaldson’s GREAT GODS WAR trilogy. Book two, The War Within (2022), was an improvement, but marginally. The good news is that book three, The Killing God, is a big jump up, though the obvious bad news is one has to get through the first two to arrive here, begging the question of is it worth the journey? Warning: spoilers for the first two books to follow as I try to answer that question.

The long-awaited invasion of Belleger by the Great God Rile is about to commence. At the point of invasion, Kin... Read More

The World Fantasy Awards were announced. The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri took home the Best Novel award while Premee Mohamed’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight snagged Best Novella, and “(emet)” by Lauren Ring Best Short Story. The convention was held in New Orleans this year.

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are separating. Thanks to File 770 for this item.

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