It turns out I have three books left in the Dumarest of Terra series! So cool!

Currently reading: The Temple of Truth by E.C. Tubb 📚

Finished Reading 2026: Symbol of Terra by E.C. Tubb 📚

It’s been a good week for reading. I only failed to get my 5% read on one day, but I’v read a lot more than that the other days. Will be finishing a book today, and probably starting a new one. After this current on, only books 31 and 32 are left in the Dumarest of Terra series. I’ve been reading it for several years. As longtime readers/listeners (haha - are there any?) of this blog/podcast know, the Dumarest series is one of the primary inspirations for the original Traveller roleplaying game, which is why I got into them.

When you read these, or other books in the Traveller bibliography, what you discover is that the game was mostly influenced by adventure SF. The game is about adventure, and that’s what the Dumarest novels are.

I’m leaving on vacation next Saturday - 6 days from now. I think I will start Dumarest 31 today. Maybe I can get it knocked out before I leave, and then finish the series when I get home. That would mean four novels finished in March, even if they are short ones.

Well, I have been getting my daily 5% of a novel reading done the last few days, and then some. It feels good. Last night I sat in the front room with my wife, the cat, and the dog. We watched (sort of) Around the World in 80 Days and I read on my Kindle. We talked and laughed. I read. It felt so much better that fiddling around on the web.

Reading is the best.

My prefered way of reading is still the Kindle. It is just so much easier on my eyes. The Kindle and eBooks from Amazon are really the only tie I have left with Amazon. It is very rare for me to order anything from them now, though I suppose they have the claws in everything. I ordered some shoes from Zappos last week – yep – Amazon. I also enjoy Twitch a lot, and I do subscribe to a couple of channels that I enjoy. Yep - Amazon.

I have very mixed feelings about Amazon. On the one hand the pandemic would have been a lot harder without Amazon. The company provided an incredibly useful service. We were very isolated as my wife was going through chemo during the worst part of the pandemic.

On the other hand, I don’t really love the idea of employees in warehouses having to pee in bottles due to their work expectations. I don’t like contributing to the income of a billionaire scumbag bootlicker. The truth is, however, that we live within this system, and we have to just do the best we can to get by and make good decisions when we can. Pick our battles, I suppose.

The other thing I hate about Amazon, and this is probably the case with other online book retailers, but is worse with Amazon, is the increasing number of AI slop books being produced. Amazon willingly allows this shit to continue. Worse – a real author publishes a book, then some scumbag scans it into an LLM and then uses the LLM to create “related” books which they sell for about a dollar. There are a million problems with that. Sadly I lack the means to kill all the LLM companies and imprison their owners/designers.

Last year I explored going to some other kind of eReader. I spent about an hour at a Barnes & Noble store clicking buttons and testing out a Nook. It was a greatly inferior device. Slow. Glitchy. Horrible user interface. I was disappointed, because while B&N is certainly not perfect, and is also run by business scumbags, I doubt that B&N employees are pissing in bottles and wearing leg irons. They opened – GASP – a brand new brick and mortar store about 3 minutes from my house, right in our neighborhood. We’ve shopped there. My wife buys and reads physical books, so it is great to have that store so close. It is nice to browse. It is nice to talk to the people who work there, like we did in the Before Times.

There is a certain locked-in feeling too. I have nearly 200 books on Kindle. It feels weird to think of moving to a different system, even though the truth is I’ll probably not re-read many, if any, of them. It reminds me of the pleasure you have of seeing your bookshelf full of books you have read, that takes up a lot of space, but man it is cool to look at. Truth is, of course, you really don’t own an eBook on Kindle or any of these other platforms really. I suppose if you download an ePub format book, keep it saved on a hard drive, and keep a reader than can download and read it, that might be “ownership.” But like so many of these digital media artifacts you really don’t own them like you do a physical artifact.

Now, every time I talk about wanting some non-Amazon eReader, people on social media chime in about this or that “superior” eReader. Here’s the thing. I just want to read the book. I don’t want to have to download it to the computer, convert it from some weird format possibly, transfer it to the device. The Poison of Convenience is a very strong poison, and I have been poisoned strongly.

But to immediately contradict myself, I do feel the pull of buying actual books. I mean, I have reading glasses. I am so - fucking - sick of supporting what is essentially a cloud-based streaming rental economic and creative ecosystem. THAT is why I’m so glad we never gave up or LPs or CDs. We never sold them. We buy new ones, and even better, now young people are tiring of the bullshit rental digital life as well. And with LLMs and the rest of the AI bullshit happening it is only getting worse. I feel like the only way to rebel, to have any sort of punk rock spirit, is to simply not participate. I am moving that way. It’s just rough because a lot of the books I read are 40 or 50 years old. I can download them to my Kindle in about 3 seconds, for 99 cents, or I can search the used bookstore and probably not find them, or I can order them from Amazon (see - we’re back to Amazon) or some other used book dealer and pay for postage, packaging that will might be recycled, and burn some gasoline having them delivered.

Life was simpler when I had good eyesight and there was no internet.

Ok, I need to stop typing now…

Currently reading: Goodreads by E.C. Tubb 📚

I’m nearing the end of this series, which I started several years ago.

I will start this somewhat long post by stating clearly that I am not a literary guy. I’m not that poorly-read, but I am not an expert on literary analysis of theme, characters, setting, or anything else. I’m a librarian, dirty old skateboarder, tabletop RPG gamer, and enjoyer of science fiction. So this post is really me, thinking “out loud”, trying to reconcile my enjoyment of some novels with the recently-revealed-to-me probable horribleness of their author.

So, the author of the Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons, died recently.

I’ve read the first three books. I’ve been waiting to read the fourth one as kind of a year-end “treat” one of these years. People who don’t like SF will pick them apart, of course, but I think they are really good. I enjoyed them. They are “out there” even as SF goes. They contain some wild SF ideas all worked into a fairly complex “world”.

I have to admit that while reading them there are some problematic elements. Stuff where I thought “hmmmm…this is kinda wrong.” I find that a lot of the more “literary” SF authors (Heinlein in particular) go off the deep end at some point and start exploring their own weirdnesses in their writing. Sometimes they do it early in their careers and it just gets worse.

Perhaps this happens in other literary genres? I have mostly read SF. That’s what I know. I’d like to think that current SF authors are a little more thoughtful and aware of when they are being creeps, or racists, or whatever. Example: It is hard to read Starship Troopers and NOT conclude that Heinlein was a fascist wannabe. And don’t even get me started with the sexual weirdness in Time Enough for Love. One can say that the author is “exploring” how notions of morality might change in the future, but again, it often feels like they are just indulging themselves.

There are some things in the Cantos, especially Endymion, that when I read them I thought “wow - he is really treading close to the line on this.” Uncomfortably close.

To be fair, that book also contains one of the most moving beautiful scenes I’ve ever read in a SF novel. A stunning, well-written, understated moment of care, tenderness, and rebirth on the part of the protagonists, especially when contrasted with its analog on the part of the antagonists.

Most of the time descriptions of sex, women’s bodies, etc are done really poorly by SF writers. At best they are clumsy. At worst they are offensive. That kind of thing is just really not in the typical SF writer’s skill set. I find it better if they avoid it altogether, or just minimize it. They just don’t do it well, and honestly if you are reading SF maybe that isn’t what you are looking for? [insert horny nerd comment here]

It’s no secret that HP Lovecraft was a fairly typical racist of his time. Actually maybe quite a bit worse than typical. I don’t buy the arguments that people back then “didn’t know it was wrong.” Still, I have read almost all his work, and I think I have listened to all of it on audiobook. It just feels like sometime between Lovecraft’s life and Dan Simmons' life things might have changed a bit more than they have.

So, back to Dan Simmons. I read the first three books in the Cantos over the last few years. I was told that his horror writing was good. Unlike many authors I enjoy I did not really read anything ** about** Simmons, other than a tiny bit about his background. Since his death a lot of criticism has been surfaced of both his personal views and some “problematic” stuff in his work. It seems like the personal views are, indeed, pretty bad. And when you read about his personal islamophobia and conservative dumbass-ism, it is really hard not to view even his better work through that lens.

And that is a bummer.

A lot of authors step in a big pile of dookie from time to time. One of my favorite SF novels, Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg, has a really clumsy intimate scene. It was written in 1970. Modern readers would certainly rip it apart. Silverberg was born in 1935. It’s clumsy, includes dopey descriptions of a woman’s body, but is about what I’d expect from a novel of it’s time. I will say that for all its clumsiness it is short and not just totally gratuitous. It’s a short, standalone SF novel. Now, it is certainly possible to write an incredibly offensive short novel, but I think when an author starts into these “mega-work” series of long novels maybe it just gives them too much freedom to indulge the dumber or more offensive parts of themselves.

It also feels like the more “noteworthy and literary” the author (Heinlein, Simmons, etc) the more prone they are to fall on their face. I have read well over a dozen SF novels by Alan Dean Foster over the last few years. Foster has written a ton of books. He is known for doing lots of movie novelizations. A lot of people consider him to be kind of a “workman” author. I’ll admit his work usually doesn’t change my life, but taken as a whole his Humanx Commonwealth novels present an interesting setting and the stories are fun, exciting, and imaginative. Foster writes adventures.

In all the ADF novel’s I’ve read, I don’t think I’ve seen a single description of a woman’s breasts. Somehow Foster manages to write entire novels without bouncing boobily down the street. The only description I can think of that is even approaching a “bad description” of a woman’s body is in the Icerigger trilogy, in which one of the woman characters is chubby. In one of the Commonwealth books Foster talks about a male Thranx (an insectorid race) admiring a female’s ovipositors, which are twitching as if she is interested in him. I have wondered if Foster included this as a joke – kind of a dig at authors who love to describe women’s sexual characteristics. Considering that none of the other novels I’ve read have any of that stuff, I feel like it is meant that way. I emailed Mr. Foster, who did respond to an earlier email, but he has not yet responded. He’s a busy man.

You could, and I’m sure someone would, argue that the Humanx Commonwealth suffers from being a paternalistic colonial setting. Maybe so. It is a futuristic interstellar government of different planets that have been terraformed, invited into (but not forced), or otherwise added to the polity. Humans have spread to to other worlds and over the course of centuries formed a close relationship with the insectoid Thranx species. Thus – the Humanx in the name. It is colonialism? Hell, I don’t know. Is the United Federation of Planets, in Star Trek? I don’t think it matters, really. I feel like if you write novels, currently, to never cross any accepted line you might have some pretty homogenous and boring novels.

This all reminds me of when I found out that at least a couple of members of the band X are morons. It is disappointing.

I will probably read the final book of the Cantos, Rise of Endymion, this year. I will of course be reading it through a different lens than I read the previous three books.

Finished reading 2023: The Deluge Drivers by Alan Dean Foster 📚

I’m getting kind of a slow start this year, but here’s book #1. This is the final book in the Ice Rigger trilogy by Alan Dean Foster. Like all his stuff I enjoyed this book.

I can’t remember if I have discussed this before, at least in writing, on this blog.

This is about my reading practice. Why I started it. It’s about more than reading.

In October of 2022 we drove to Mississippi to pick up our dog, Riley, who was then a 9-week old puppy. The previous couple of years had been rough. In November 2019 my mother died, after 4 years of dementia. We thought we would be getting some relief, but then in early 2020 the Covid pandemic hit. About halfway through 2020 my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. She spent the 2nd half of 2020 in chemo, then in February of 2021 had surgery. All of that during the pandemic.

I had always really been the picture of mental health, but the stress of all that, plus the fucking Trump presidency, gave me a serious case of anxiety. Eventually I dealt with the anxiety, but some damage was just permanent, I think.

In September of 2021, after her surgery and the beginning of physical therapy, my amazing wife sat down at her desk and began working 10-12 hour days to complete her dissertation. She graduated that December. To this day I am just so proud. The next year we did something she’d always wanted to do. We got a dog. She found our little Riley at a farm north of Vicksburg, Mississippi. We drove there one day, picked him up, and drove home. That was a long day.

Neither of us had ever had a dog. My wife was as prepared as a new dog owner could be, but honestly neither of us had any idea what to really expect of a 9-week old sheltie. It was massively stressful. Now, looking back, I know that he was actually amazing. He’s a great dog. He learned the ropes as fast as a puppy possibly could. But for a good 4 months - maybe 6 – our lives were almost 100% about the dog in a way we just were not expecting. I’d get home and she was worn out from trying to nurture an energetic pup, teach him to pee and poop outside, and play with him because he was non-stop. I swear, the first time he finally one evening layed down and went to sleep at about 8pm, rather than going hard until bedtime, I had never felt such relief.

So, we had gone through all this difficult shit, and now we had a dog. I’d get home from work and she’d be completely worn out, so I’d take over with the puppy.

Now, post-pandemic and post-cancer there were other issues that were stressing us out. I still had massive generalized anxiety. And let’s face it, when you get home from work you aren’t usually filled with energy in the first place, but I dredged up enough every day to play with Riley and help my wife.

BUT – I felt like I had nothing going on for myself. I wasn’t out skateboarding. I hadn’t returned to aikido yet after the pandemic died down a bit. Post-cancer is very hard on everyone involved. I felt like I was giving all I had to give, to everyone but myself, and I was miserable. First-world privileged miserable. Yes, I loved and still love my wife more than life itself. Yes, I love that dog. I loved him from the first day we had him, even though he was driving me crazy. But you can love everyone in your life and still be worn-out and miserable. And I was. The problem with that kind of misery is that it can easily turn to resentment. Resentment is really really really bad. You don’t want that. I didn’t.

I’m not proud to admit that I was feeling so bad. I gave all I had willingly. I would do it all again. But I think everyone - everyone - needs a little something for themself every day. Look at all the mothers out there who slave away for others every day with nothing for themselves and often no appreciation. Think of the parents who come home, work there asses off at home, take the kids around, and have nothing left for themselves or their spouse. This is the case with most people. It’s the way our society is structured, and it is 100% fucked.

So I started thinking. What can I do so that every day I do something for me, so that I feel like I’ve done something I’m interested in, where I go to bed at night feeling like even though I gave 95% of my life to other beings today, I still kept 5% of it for me, in order to stay sane and remain the kind of husband I want to be? Something other than staring the the TV, endlessly watching stupid shit on the internet, or just staring into oblivion.

The answer was reading.

I could read any time I had a few extra minutes. I had to overcome the stupid idea that reading can only happen if I have lots of available time. That is a fallacy. People I know who read many books every year tell me their secret is reading when they have a few minutes available and always having a book with them.

I also had to overcome the idea that I needed absolute quiet to read and concentrate. I needed to learn to read while we sat in our front room with the TV on. This took a while. I had to learn to read in such a way that if my wife or I wanted to talk to the other, like healthy couples do, it was not an interruption of my reading and some sort of catastrophe.

It took a while to rebuild my ability to concentrate after many years of being an internet idiot.

I set my goal – to read 5% of a novel every-damned-day. That is easy with a short novel and harder as they get longer, but honestly it is a very doable number. It also means you finish a novel every 20 days, at least. Some days I’d find myself able to read more than that. But I did at least 5% almost every day.

And here’s the thing. Some night’s I’d stay up an extra 30 minutes to get that done after everyone had gone to bed. Sometimes I’d get it done during my lunch hour, or after dinner. Regardless when I got it done, I went to be every night knowing I’d done what I needed and wanted to do for my family and done something I enjoyed and that gave me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

I started the reading project in April. I logged my progress on goodreads.com and created this blog and podcast as a way to add to my experience by writing and thinking about what I’d read. By the end of the year I’d read 26 science fiction novels.

I had a similar experience in 2024, though I think by that time I had learned to enjoy this practice without being a dickhead about it. I could, in fact, be a dickhead if someting interfered with my 5%. I don’t actually think that’s unreasonable. I mean – please - Universe - just let me read my fucking 5% today and not be fucked with and I’ll be a fairly good human being!

Last year, 2025, it fell apart, but for good and fun reasons.

In 2025 I decided to increase the number of RPG sessions I ran in my two campaigns. That takes time. Time is a scarce commodity. I love my reading, but I really really wanted to increase my gaming. My wife plays in one of the games and she was getting to be a great player. And I love the rest of our groups. They are my best friends. Getting to do something fun like that with my wife every week was good for us as a couple and good for us to be around other people. It has been a massive success. It’s easier to do now that our dog is older and is just such a good boy! So I’ve been spending more time on game prep.

But here’s the thing. A lot of my game prep time is wasted. It’s me farting around, getting distracted, and not really getting the job done. I am more effective when my time is a bit more constrained. That means I’ve been wasting time. I should have been reading.

So last night, March 1, 2026, I returned officially to the 5% per day habit. Today I got it done at lunch. It’s not a chore. It was really fun. A great way to spend my lunch hour.

It is harder than just dicking around on the internet. It is harder than watching TV. Reading (and I mean reading with your eyes not listening, though I do value audio book) is an active process. You are not just been feed entertainment. Your brain has to be working, organizing, keeping track of stuff. imagining. It is not a passive form of entertainment.

So, read. Just read. Open a book and read it for fun.

Finally - yes- we adore this little dog so much it hurts. He is just so good.

If I don’t read for a while a weird inertia builds up. Like picking up the book and started to read becomes harder. Taking the first step. It is beyond stupid. Finally I picked up my Kindle last night and I’m finishing the excellent book I’ve been reading. It is so much better than any movie I could watch, better than anything on the computer.

Devoting time to my roleplaying game campaigns really messed up my reading last year. I tend to sit and stare at the screen, get distracted, and waste time, rather than really working on the games. This is time I should be reading. Correcting this problem.

Finished Reading in 2025: Mission to Moulokin by Alan Dean Foster 📚

As I have previously noted, I finished this book last night.

It was a solid SF adventure, the kind typical of Alan Dean Foster. An interesting alien culture and world, exploration and discovery, political machinations, fighting, etc. I started the third and final book in the Icerigger trilogy.

This is the first time I remember a character in one of Foster’s Commonwealth novels actually referencing events from another novel. In this case, Skua September mentions that he wants to go to the planet Alaspin, in which he has an adventure in the Pip & Flinx series.

As always, there are issues discussed in this book but Foster doesn’t bash you over the head with them.

Currently reading: The Deluge Drivers by Alan Dean Foster 📚

Finished Reading in 2025: Mission to Moulokin by Alan Dean Foster 📚

This week, while looking for articles on Alan Dean Foster’s Sentence to Prism, I found Andy Johnsons Classic Science Fiction blog. It is quite to my liking.

Classic SF with Andy Johnson.

I don’t really reflect that much in my posts here regarding an author’s typical themes, prose style, etc. Andy delves into that a bit, and I like it a lot. Maybe I’ll start writing a bit more about the books I’m reading.

I’m very excited to find this blog. It perplexes me that more people aren’t into blogging in general.

Currently reading: Mission to Moulokin by Alan Dean Foster 📚

Starting this today, the 2nd in Foster’s Icerigger trilogy. Should be solid.

Finished Reading in 2025: Angado by E.C. Tubb 📚

I don’t write a lot about the Dumarest books. I just read them. They are solid pulp adventure tales and actually well-written. This one was different however, as the character Angado was the first instance of a gay man being interested in Earl. The author, E.C. Tubb, handled the character really well. There was no “oh my God he’s gay!” moment. It was simply there.

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.

Planning to finish this book today. Angado by E.C. Tubb 📚

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.

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.