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what are the haps

Works at Dinosaur Comics Lives in Toronto TOTALLY MARRIED Speaks all of the languages ever Born on October 20th

BOOKS READ IN 2011

Inspired by Emily’s list, I kept this list going to about mid-year, when I stopped because of Machine of Death.  That’s why it’s so short!  HONEST.

  • 1001 Nights of Baccus (Eddie Campbell) - I love Eddie Campbell, and this is a bunch of shorts about keeping the God of Wine up with a story so the pub won’t have to close. Fun because the style of comics changes with each story (the one told by a mime is silent farce, for example).
  • The Magicians (Lev Grossman) - I kept expecting I would start to hate this book, but it never happened, and I ended up staying late to finish it. Smart misunderstood kid, bored with life, finds magical doorway to a magician school and learns that magic is real. BUT, it turns out magician school is a lot of work and magic is hard and basically all his problems are the same. It’s fantasy, but it’s adult and written almost like Asimov had written it: fast plot and thinner characterization, which is not always a bad thing. I enjoyed it quite a bit!
  • Catch Me If You Can - I saw the movie years ago and I guess I thought it’d be a fun, interesting, charming read? Nope! Turns out that in real life most cons are about betraying some small trust a stranger puts in you, and trading their reputation up for larger trust from others. Woo hoo? The best part was the front page of the book, where the CEO for the company where this guy is working now has an introduction where he makes an amazingly pathetic pitch for his security company, and ends with, I kid you not, “ps: Be sure to ‘catch’ the new movie based on this book this summer!” Amazing.
  • Consolation - half the book takes place in Toronto shortly after it was founded, and half takes place in the modern day. The history parts are terrific! The present-day stuff is a slog to get through to get to the history stuff, and THEN, at the end, the twist is the history stuff is all a (historical) fiction written by one of the lame-o characters from the present day! It was dumb and actually weakened the history stuff. Half this book is really good!
  • Veins - a book Drew put out that he sent me because he thought I’d like it and he was right. I laughed out loud several times and texted some of the best parts to friends. Really enjoyed it! It’s written Joey-style, with lots of small chapters.
  • Chess (novella) - pretty good! Two dudes play chess for very different reasons.
  • Lonico - given to me as a gift, it turns out it’s a solid novel about a town in a mountain, cut off from the world for generations, and a town in the valley below, also cut off for generations. The two populations meet and there’s a lot of cool stuff about decay and independent development of societies in the middle!
  • Zombie Short Stories - I read it to remember how to write short stories for Machine of Death! Tore through it in about three days, some good stories, some duds, but pretty good!
  • Hackers - Joey recommended it as his favourite book. It’s a breezy read, but fun, and made me proud to be a programmer. The Sierra chapter was the most interesting for me as I’d known all these names growing up, and this was a lot of behind the scenes how they got there kind of stuff. The followup chapters written 30 years after the book came out were less interesting, surprisingly.
  • At this point Machine of Death stories started being read and I read NOTHING ELSE FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR BASICALLY.  So add a billion short stories to this list, each of which actually has a little review, but it’s secret (it’s so Matt and David and I could discuss the stories and remember which was which)

Later I will post my list for movies and also… VIDEO GAMES

January 5 at 8:42am
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I create a comic called Dinosaur Comics and I a run an awesome network called Project Wonderful and I even have my own Twitter account

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