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A light introduction to the subject, Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth includes many sweeping generalizations. I’m more excited about another recent book, Don’t Know Much About Mythology, which I’ve just begun.

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I’m a great fan of Kage Baker’s Company novels, but I found The Children of the Company annoying.
It’s not really a novel, first off; it’s really an amalgamation of short stories. So forget about narrative flow. It’s just patched together by the character Labienus.
And Labienus is a most unpleasant character, for second; he’s a disaffected [...]

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A dose of adversity is often as needful as a dose of medicine.
A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he gives up.
Make serious decisions in the last few days of the month.
The mightiest oak in the forest is just a little nut that held its ground.
Regenerate your system through diet [...]

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IKEA opened in the Boston area and I decided I had to try it out this evening. What a trip! It is enormous, larger even than the new IKEA store in Philadelphia. It was packed. There were security people directing traffic from two blocks away. And this at 7 on a Saturday night.
I took notes [...]

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I’ve signed up to beta test a different kind of display for Amazon. Half of my visitors will see a standard link, and half will see a rollover link that displays more information about the book. (You’ll continue to see one or the other on every visit as long as they have their beta test.)
I’ve [...]

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A Friday Tenâ„¢ list just a bit early:

From Grandma Tracey: an interest in publishing. Grandma Tracey wrote a history of Imperial Valley, where I grew up, and published a newspaper.
From Grandma Sutton: a love of sweets. At least I think that’s where it came from. She gave us fresh-baked bread with butter and white sugar [...]

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James Clemens’s Shadowfall is subtitled: Book One of the Godslayer Chronicles. Cheesy, isn’t it? But I liked it. It isn’t horror, it’s fantasy, although it is assuredly dark (rape, mutilation). And there are gods, and there is slaying.
There is an intriguing system of magic, and characters who aren’t easy to pigeonhole as "good" and "bad."
While [...]

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Doc Smartypants, Larry, and I saw Juman…er, Zathura last night. There were some definite good things about it: We saw it for free. The astronaut was cute. The special effects were great. I want to live in a house like that in the worst way. But in the end I found it a disappointing movie.

Scary [...]

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Apparently a Nebula Award-winning author, I’d not heard of Robert Metzger before. The back cover of CUSP certainly has an astounding list of blurbists: David Brin, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and Robert J. Sawyer, each touting it as hard scifi. CUSP starts out as a near-future hard scifi story, but it quickly enters what I’d [...]

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Ten languages I’ve at times thought I’d like to be able to make myself understood in (or to understand, in the case of dead languages):

English (not, unfortunately, always a given)
French
Dutch
Yiddish
Swahili
Mandarin
Icelandic
Old English
Latin
Hebrew

See, I’ve always had this vague, unrealized dream of being a polyglot. Unfortunately, it has remained a dream, as even my six years of instruction [...]

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