Currently reading: Angado by E.C. Tubb
It’s taking me a little longer than I expected to finish this very short book I just got busy. I’ll finish it tonight.
My reading goals for the remainder of 2025.
- Finish the Dumarest of Terra Saga
- Read books 2 and 3 of Alan Dean Foster’s Icerigger Trilogy
- Read Mid-Flinx, by Alan Dean Foster
- Read a few standalone older SF Novels
- Finish the year by reading the last of the Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons.
Getting back to it
As I have noted, 2025 has been a rough year for reading. I actually deleted my reading blog about a month ago, but decided to bring it back under this new name. Thanks to @manton for 1)making it so easy to import blog archives and 2)making micro.blog hands-down the best platform for book blogging.
Looking at the imported posts it is clear that the beginning of my D&D game was the thing that destroyed my reading habit for the last year. No regrets. We are loving the D&D game, but there are only so many hours in the day, and starting a good campaign is labor intensive.
Over the last few months, however, I noticed that I’d gone back to my hold habits of sitting in my chair at night and just dicking around on the internet. Yes, I might write a blog post here or there, but I really have’t been spending all that time working on my gaming campaigns. Why? Because working on stuff like that is tiring, and I have a limited amount of energy. I’ve found that the campaigns (both of them) go just as well with two hours a week of prep time as they do if I sit and agonize over them all evening every evening. In short, agonizing over them is both unpleasant and unproductive.
I found myself, as in my pre-book blogging life, going to bed feeling like I’d not really done anything substantial “for myself” each day. So I have rediscovered the joy of turning off the computer, putting away the phone, paying no attention to the TV, and reading for an hour or two in the evening. Just as before, it lets me go to bed with a sense of satisfaction. It also prepares my mind and body for sleep a lot better than staring at the computer screen (even though I read on a Kindle for the most part).
Right now, this very moment, I have 3.5 months left in the year. My goal is to finish with 16 SF novels read.
I am back
Well, it has been a bad year for reading thus far. It is mid-May, 2025, and I’ve not read a single book.
The reasons? I returned to three times week aikido practice and I’ve been concentrating on running my Traveller and D&D campaigns.
The truth, however, is that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the games but not DOING much with them. Time I really should have been reading. My daily reading habit, thanks to this obsessive behavior, has fallen apart. That is about to change. I’m back on it. I have over six months left in the year, and I’ll read two books per month. So I’m setting my goal at 24 novels.
Well, I have taken a few months off reading. I have been giving my eyes a rest and working a lot on my new D&D campaign. But today I return to the 5% habit.
Reading Icerigger, by Alan Dean Foster.
I swear, no one does world building and alien/human relations like Foster. Dude is the best.
Finished Four-Day Planet
Finished Reading 2024: Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper 📚
This is the second chronologically in-universe of Piper’s Terro-Human Future History novels.
Compared to the first one, the Uller Uprising, I thought this was a better novel. More intereresting and compelling characters. Told from the point of view of a young journalist on a somewhat hostile planet, this novel moves along quite well. Solid early SF.
Podcast Episode 47: Various Things
In this episode, I talk about being too tired to read for the last week, and also about my role-playing game activities and some technology I’m planning to buy.
Podcast Episode 46: The Four Day Planet
An extremely short episode in which I talk about what I’m reading right now.
Currently reading: Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper 📚
Finished Dumarest 27: Earth is Heaven
Finished Reading 2024: Earth is Heaven by E.C. Tubb 📚
Another enjoyable Dumarest of Terra novel. The last three I’ve read have been essentially one long story, with lots of great action and some cool aliens. Really good. In #26 Dumarest gains possession of a ship, and at the end of this one he relinquishes it, as it is just too easy for the Cyclan to track a ship. Very very cool.
I’m 38% into Dumarest 27. It’s good. It’s nice to have a series I can come back to between other books. Kind of a bummer that I’ve only got about 5 books left.
Currently reading: Earth is Heaven by E.C. Tubb 📚
Finished Dumarest 26
Finished Reading 2024: The Coming Event by E.C. Tubb 📚
This book was a continuatoin of #25. A good, exciting tale. Early ends the book in the best position he’s been in, maybe ever. We’ll see what he does with it.