All posts by Carl V. Anderson

book news, Challenges

And for a 6th time I wish you, farewell

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(Image by Melissa Nucera, used with permission)

If there were any doubts, the last few days here in the Midwest (Greater Kansas City area to be exact) have driven home the fact very clearly: Summer is upon us! When the sun sets today it does not only set on fair Spring 2012, it signals the official end of the 6th annual Once Upon a Time Challenge.

Nearly 100 of you wonderful readers signed up to take this journey with us and whether you read just one book or many, or partook of one film or many, I hope that the path you trod on led to all the magic and wonder that you hoped for. Reading really is a hopeful thing, isn’t it. We are seduced by a book’s cover, or title, its author or its subject matter–or a combination of these–and the turning of that first page really is like stepping out on a path into the woods that curves just up ahead. We are not sure where it will lead us but we hope that the journey is grand.

The presence of a wrap-up post is never required for any of the challenges that I host, but my curious nature certainly likes to peek through the proverbial curtains to see where the last three months have taken you. After the jump you will find my wrap up followed by a place for you to leave a link if you did a wrap up post.

I’ll repeat this again before the end, but:

Thank you for participating. Thank you for the posts, the book, film and television reviews, the tweets and the link sharing on Facebook. Thanks for taking the time to be a part of this community, thank you for treating each other well and for making new friends. Thank you for making my duty as host no real duty at all. You all are amazing.

Continue reading And for a 6th time I wish you, farewell →

Personal Essay

A Nerd of Another Kind

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Well I did it! I officially became a nerd today. A Trail Nerd, that is. I paid my membership dues in dollars and also paid my dues in sweat. This morning I participated in my first official trail run, and as crazy as this may sound: It Was a Blast!!!

The event was the 2012 Trail Nerds Summer Intro 2.8 mile run. The run took place through a wooded local park on trails that were (by my unofficial estimate) about 90-95% single track, which means the bare area we were running on was about 2 foot wide in places and very difficult to pass. And, despite its advertisement as having “no major hills”, there were some “minor” ones that gave this trail-newbie a good kick in the pants, or shorts as it were. We were jumping over exposed roots and fallen trees, occasionally ducking under overhanging branches, and generally having one heck of a good time.

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Book Reviews, Science Fiction

Redshirts ~John Scalzi

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(Cover image: Tor Books)

Growing up you had a dream and the sky was the limit. Well, actually the sky wasn’t the limit, it was just the starting point. For you are a citizen of the Universal Union and your dream has come true. You are Ensign Andrew Dahl and you have been assigned to the Dub U’s flagship, the Intrepid. The universe has just opened to you and your future holds, among other things, exciting away missions on exotic planets lead by high ranking members of the Intrepid crew. Could life get any better?

You think not, until experience shows that a great many of the crew members die on these away missions, many in unimaginably unpleasant ways. You are tapped early on for inclusion on these all-too-frequent excursions and thus you have front row seats to the fickle finger of Fate. Beyond the ever-present danger, something seems not quite right about these away missions. And as you ponder this feeling you discover that the finger of Fate may not be so fickle. For her choosing seems to be anything but random, and her fashion sense leans to one lone member of the color wheel: Red.

Author John Scalzi’s latest book is many things, but mostly a riff on the implausibility present in all hour long weekly action adventure television shows, most notably the long-running series–Star Trek–and the well known joke at the show’s expense that can be summed up in one word: redshirts.

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Personal Essay

(It was) Time for a Change

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There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens

~Ecclesiastes 3:1

Years come and years go and so many of us find ourselves confessing silently (or to the world at large if you are a blogger) that this is going to be the year we do it: get (and stay) healthy. I have certainly done so publicly many times over the years. This year I skipped it. No annual weight loss or healthy eating strategy in my resolutions. It was time to stop talking about it. I had made that decision months before the dawning of 2012.

For several years now I have fought a losing battle with cholesterol. Note here that I define “fought” as taking medicine and doing nothing else AT ALL. My doc would put me on a low dose of meds and a few months later, after blood tests, I would get a call from her nurse instructing me to stop taking the medication “immediately”. Regardless of the medication, my lipid levels would be elevated to a point that obviously concerned my doctor. When this happened again in September I told her that I guess it was “time to grow up” and that I would take a more hands-on approach to lowering my cholesterol*–a promise which I promptly forgot as I entered the three-month-long autumn Eating Season.

In late January everything changed. I wish I could tell you what that magic formula was that flipped the switch, but I just don’t know. Perhaps it was me relating the very funny story at my grandmother’s funeral of our last meeting, where she declared (referring to me) that she never would have recognized me because she didn’t think she had a grandson that fat. Maybe it was seeing other family members with health issues that are exacerbated, if not caused, by weight and diet issues. Maybe I did finally grow up (in this one tiny area of my brain). Whatever it was that lit the spark**, I started a new lifestyle on February 1st and the results are these:

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book news

The Well of Ascension Read: Blog Tour Style

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(Image property of artist Christian McGrath)

I hope everyone has had a chance to venture forth into exciting and strange worlds over the weeks that we have been away from Luthadel and the rest of the Final Empire. For now it is time to return to our journey with Vin and Elend and the rest of the cast that we became so attached to in Mistborn: The Final Empire. It has been a nice break and now I am itching to get back to the story, I hope you are too.

I sent out an email recently indicating a change in the format of the group read for The Well of Ascension. We are going to do an experiment: hosting this discussion Blog Tour style. Several of you have volunteered to take question duty over the course of the next two novels and what I was envisioning is that each week one person would be the Discussion Host. That individual would post the questions for their section in a blog post on their site. I would email out the link when the post was up and we would all descend like locusts on that one site and have a week-long back and forth conversation about the section of the book we read that week.

The advantages of this would be to eliminate the pressure folks feel to get a post up each week at a specific time or essentially be left out of the heart of the conversation, would cut down on the number of sites we have to visit each week, and would potentially allow for more in-depth back and forth.

In addition to this change I was also going to suggest we limit the questions which would allow everyone to discuss what stood out for them in the section being read.

Deanna did a marvelous job coalescing all the above gobbledygook into this succinct explanation:

1. Discussion Host would post questions on his/her site.

2. Discussion participants would flock to that site, answer questions and discuss all in the comments of Discussion Host site.

3. Discussion participants do not create their own blog post with answers to questions (those answers goes under comments at discussion host site).

Then each discussion participant could do their own wrap up post (a review of the book) [at the end of the group read] if they choose to do so.

Sound good?

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