What Time is the Super Bowl?

2015 Big Game Kicks off at:

Eastern 6:30
Central 5:30
Mountain 4:30
Pacific 3:30

Frank Miller's Ronin

This isn’t bad, but it feels like Miller is just clearing his throat in retrospect. The art is less developed, and the central conceit is laughable, just existing to get the action going (there is an ancient warrior’s spirit attached to a blade that is found in the near future of new York, and a biomechanical Artificial Intelligence brings him back to live where he fights a demon that was also attached to the blade). It’s worth a read for fans but it feels dated by the author’s own subsequent works.

Science For Her by Megan Amram: Really for Nobody

So......

Amram is funny on twitter. I've bought some books by people that I liked on twitter. They have been hit or miss.

Maybe it is the conceit here or something else, but this just missed for me.

The introduction starts with a joke, where it is dedicated to all these people, who are her "Best friend when...".

It's a little clever at first.

Then it goes on for ten pages. It was one of those things where I was hoping that it was funny then it stops being funny but then it gets really funny. Well, that, but it never got funny again. It was actually kryptonite for me. I tried reading a bit more, but that beginning was such a bad experience that I became very defensive as a reader and was looking for reasons to set the book aside. I did, and moved on.

Lacking Magic: Terry Pratchett's "Dodger"

First off, I am a huge Terry Pratchett fan. Or at least I have read and loved all the Discworld books. I liked Good Omens too, but when I read that I thought of it more as a Neil Gaiman book.

That said, I did not like this book. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

I kept reading hoping something would happen that caught me into the world, but it never did.

I couldn’t believe either of the central characters, their relationship, or the antagonism. The world is interesting, but Terry is an old hand at Victorian London. The difference is just that in all the other books it is called Ankh-Morpork. The difference is that on the Disc there is magic, both the kind the Wizards practice, but also between the author and the reader. There is none of that in Dodger.

Not Just Mommy-Blogging: Jenn Mann's "People I Want to Punch in the Throat"

I have to be honest – the author was never on my radar.

I am not in her demographic. Jenn Mann is a mommy-blogger of some sort. If I would have known that, I might never have picked up the book. Reading the book showed that she was from an area of Kansas I have some familiarity with. When I was in Grad School at Kansas State, we had kids from all over the state. There was a special breed of rich and entitled kids that we could talk about just by saying the name of the county they were from. The kids were the “Johnson County” kids. Mann writes about their mothers.

I only learned this because I picked it up. I only picked it up off the shelf at my library because of the title. Bravo to whomever came up with that one.

I’m glad I did pick it up tough. The stories are fresh and funny and real. Perhaps they are too real. I myself have never been a mother, or a parent for that matter, but the stories hit home in a way that produced just a bit of anxiety as I was reading them. It was a fun country to visit when you had Mann as a tourist guide, but I’m glad I’ll never have to live there.