Sunday, January 20, 2013

Books of 2012 (the Final Edition)

Hello,

As it is well past the end of the year 2012, it is the end of the year with my first real new year's resolution: to read a book a week. If you follow this blog with any regularity (and by that I mean you've gone back and read through old posts because I'm pretty sure nobody knew this existed before I actually posted the first list), you know that I completed that feat back in September . Upon completing that goal so very early in the year, I decided to keep going instead of quitting, so I forged ahead.

With about 3 weeks left in the year and 69 books read, I decided I'd go for broke and attempt to reach 75. Well, friends, I reached that number on new year's eve with several hours to spare! I was pretty excited to actually be able to accomplish that feat.

Before giving the final list, I wanted to go through and give a few “awards” from the list of books I read this year. I haven’t really thought this through, so I’m just going to wing it and come up with some “awards” as I think them up.

Best Book
The first award I can think of is the obvious "book of the year". This one is pretty tough for two reasons.

  • 75 is a lot of books to keep track of.
  • Many of the books that I read were in a series, and I read them back-to-back (to-back-to-back-to-back, etc.). This makes it difficult for me to differentiate between specific books in a series, especially those I read early on in the year.
However, I think I may just be able to come up with something. Judges, please tally the votes. And the winner for the best book Phillip read in the year 2012 goes to:
  1. Cold Days by Jim butcher!
Cold Days continues where Harry left off in the exciting conclusion to Ghost Story . Some pretty awesome stuff happens to Harry that will have exciting consequences in future books. We're just over half way in the series at 13, and I am definitely looking forward to where Mr. Butcher takes Harry in the remaining books. If you haven't read any of the Dresden files, I highly recommend them, especially if you like stories about sarcastic wizards living in a modern day setting. I belive it is urban fantasy at its finest.
Honorable mentions:
  1. Paper Towns by John Green
  2. Redshirts by John Scalzi

Best New Author
The second obvious choice for an award is best author. However, since the list contains the author I regularly use as the answer to the question "Who is your favorite author" (Neil Gaiman, if you don't know me very well), I'm going to go a different route: Best NEW author, i.e., the best author by whom, until this year, I had not read anything, which actually is most everyone on the list; it only excludes Butcher, Gaiman, and Paolini. And the winner is:

  1. John Green!
This really was a pretty tough decision. I found a few really good authors this past year, but the fact that I read every book Mr. Green has written to date, and the fact that each of the books are stand alone stories (not part of a series), pushes him above the others about whom I was thinking. You may have heard of Mr. Green from his role in one half of the internet video duo The VlogBrothers or more recently the Youtube internet learning sensation that is Crash Course . Mr. Green is a young adult writer, true, but his stories are excellent. Don't believe me? Just ask Time Magazine . Maybe you've heard of it. That's best fiction book. Not young adult fiction. Not children's fiction. Best Fiction. There are other places too. The Kansas City Star , Amazon.com , Oprah Magazine , etc. You get the point (that at least that one book is good; however, since that is not my favorite book by him, you'll just have to take my word for it).
Honorable mentions:
  1. Veronica Roth
  2. Brent Weeks
  3. John Scalzi
  4. Kevin Hearne

Best New Series
The next award I'm going to be giving out is the best series; however, like the award for best author, I'm going to restrict it to series I began in 2012. Otherwise, it'd be hard not to choose The Dresden Files . Also, I had to have read at least two books in the series in order to determine if the series is going to be good rather than just the first book in the series. So, the award for best series of books Phillip read in 2012 goes to:

  1. Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks
I picked up the Night Angel Trilogy randomly from Amazon because a roomate was playing Assassin's Creed , and a story about an assissin seemed to be dripping with potential for awesome. The Night Angel Trilogy follows a man called Azoth as he ventures from a young boy in the slums to become the Night Angel, the perfect assassin. As the best epic fantasy [*] I read in 2012, it was very enjoyable, and I highly reommend it to anyone who likes epic fantasies.
Honorable mentions:
  1. Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne
  2. Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth
  3. The Hallows by Kim Harrison

Most Looking Forward to the Movie
Number four! We're really moving right along here, huh. For number four, I'm going to do something that may or may not really make sense. Movies! Some of the books I read in 2012 are going to be turned into movies: some already have release dates, some have only had the rights sold for a movie and are more up in the air. Some I knew were going to be a movie before I read them, some I found out after I fninished reading the book. So, the fourth award is for the book I'm most looking forward to see the movie or think it would be a great movie and should be turned into one. And the award goes to:

  1. The Host by Stephanie Meyer
I know, Stephanie Meyer?! What am I thinking? Truth is, I really liked this book. The premise is that sometime in the future (there may be a date given, but I don't remember it if there is) an alien race has come to Earth and completely taken control. They do so by physically taking control of human bodies: attach themselves to the spinal column and hook into the brain, and the only way to know if someone has been "possessed" (for the lack of a better word) is to look at their eyes: the aliens leave a silver ring around the eyes of those they have possessed. And of course there is a resistance of humans. Warning: it is still a Stephanie Meyer novel, so there is a lot of romance involved. If that's not your thing, or you think you can't get over it, do as the Hunter would say and skip it! However, I'm looking forward to the movie, and I really hope they don't screw with it too much.
Honorable mentions:
  1. Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth
  2. Caster Chronicles (Beautiful Creatures) by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
  3. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Character I'd Most Like to Meet/Hang out With
This supurlative (when did I change it from "awards" to supurlatives? Oh well) is difficult to determine. I mean, there are a lot of really cool characters in 75 different books. And just as many different reasons to meet or spend time with a person. There are just too many variables. However, with all that said, there is a character that stuck out to me as one who would be absolutely swell to spend time with:

  1. Oberon O'Sullivan from The Iron Druid Chronicles .
Okay, so I made up that last name to make it sound more plausible. Oberon is an Irish Wolfhound belonging to Atticus O'Sullivan. The cool thing about Oberon, though, is he can communicate telepathically with Atticus and a few select others. So, I'd have to be able to hear Oberon's thoughts for this to really live up to expectations. Atticus can take care of that, though (if he's there, that is. I guess he'd have to come along. I didn't really specify rules to this little adventure). Anyway, Oberon is incredibly funny and smart. In the books, he's constantly having verbal (mental?) sparring matches of wit with Atticus (and constantly coming out ahead of the 2000 year old druid). He's still a dog, though, so he bargins to get things like time with a French poodle (or two) or a particularly delicious brand of sausage (any type of meat, really). His humor consists mostly of the types of things I like (geeky television shows or movies, puns or other lexical humor, etc.). On top of all that, he's a dog, so I'd get to play with a dog, something I haven't been really able to do since before I graduated from high school.
Honorable Mentions:
  1. A from Every Day by David Levithan
  2. Margo Roth Spiegelman from Paper Towns by John Green

World in which I'd Most Like to Live
Nearly all of the books I read in 2012 were fiction (only one was non-fiction, though several were realistic fiction). With fiction, usually comes a different world, either a completely new world (epic fantasy) or a change to the world in which we live (many different things: urban fantasy, dystopian, sci-fi, etc.). Most of what I read was either urban fantasy or dystopian fiction.So, which world would I most like to live? The answer is:

  1. Scott Westerfeld's world in Uglies .
(Caveat to award: Uglies world before Tally goes and messes everything up.) Uglies is set in the distant future after we (as the human population) killed most of the population when a bioweapon was created that made oil unstable, thus causing cars, along with oil fields, to explode. The really important part, though, is upon turning 16, everyone is turned "pretty" through government funded cosmetic surgery. When you're pretty, lots of cool things happen: you get sent to a special part of town where everything is provided for you (just ask the wall, and you get what you want!), you go through everyday going to party after party, you have no responsibilities or obligations, etc. Then at some point (I don't know the specific age), you go through another round of surgery to get turned into a "middle-pretty", which is less "OMG! She's so hott!" and more "I can really trust what you have to say, sir!". "Middle-pretties" are just adults with jobs and kids.

The world just seems like a pretty awesome world in which to live. Yes, there are problems (it wouldn't be a good story if there weren't), but people living there don't know about them (and I can't really tell you without giving spoilers).
Honorable Mentions:
  1. Kevin Hearne's world in Iron Druid Chronicles .
  2. John Scalzi's world in Redshirts

Best Looking Cover
This one's actually really hard to decide. The old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" doesn't apply to the way I look at books. I will look at a book and decide whether I just straight don't want to read it or if I'll give it a chance to sell me with its synopsis on the back. In other words, I'll determine that I don't want to read a book based on the cover, but I don't believe I've ever decided to read a book soley based on the cover.

With that said, I'm just going to go with the book that I actually did not know anything about when I bought it, so therefore, you could make an argument that I judged the book and bought it because of its cover (maybe...). Let's not be completely crazy here; the book does have a good looking cover too, but I just don't have any idea how to judge which of the 75 books I read has the best looking cover. So, with that, the book that Phillip read in 2012 with the best looking cover is:

  1. Divergent by Veronica Roth
I mean, it has a fireball on the cover! That's cool, right? That's plenty enough reason right there for it to have the best looking cover of the books I read in 2012. Then you add the other stuff and BOOM! great stuff happens. There's a gold circle around the fireball that is also on fire! And the city skyline in the background (Chicago, if you can't just recognize it) on the bottom of the book. You know how I like Chicago (maybe you know that. I do. Believe me).
Honorable mentions:
  1. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan
  2. Beautiful Redemption by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Finally, without further ado, here's the list:

The list is sorted alphabetically by the author's last name, so it’s not in the order I read them. Also, the links are to the form in which I read them, i.e., if I read the paperback edition, I put a link to the paperback, if I read the hardback, I put a link to the hardback, if I read it on my Kindle, I put a link to the Kindle edition, etc., though sometimes the hardback is not available on Amazon, and I don't understand why. I don't get anything from you purchasing books from these links; I used Amazon because that's where I bought most of them. Feel free to purchase from anywhere else if you so desire.

[Insert catchy sign off here]

[*] I'm defining "epic fantasy" here as a novel that creates an entirely new world (different from the world in which we live).There are similarities and differences to our world, but the majority of the world must be created by the author: countries, cities, system of governemnt, money, etc. Epic fantasies usually involve magic, but I'm not sure if my definition requires magic.

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Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Book Tree Fini

Hello,

I realized I didn’t ever put up a picture of the Book Christmas Tree with lights on it like I said I would. So, before I take it down, I’ll provide what I promised.

Tree with Christmas lights without lights on in the room. Tree with Christmas lights with lights on in the room.


There that is! Let me know what you think in the down stairs window (aka, the comment box).

[Insert catchy sign off here]

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Sunday, December 9, 2012

Book Tree

Hello,

Last night I mentioned working on a Christmas tree made of books. I tried again today and came up with better results. It still is not as impressive as some you find online, but I just don't have the books to do it really well, either the type or the quantity. So here's what I've got so far. The image on the left is the original idea, the image on the right is my attempt to recreate something similar. I need to get some lights to go around it, but I don't think there's much else I can do to make it look better.

Original Idea. I got this somewhere on Tumblr. Sorry, I don't know exactly where or to whom it belongs. My attempt.


Let me know what you think. I'll post another picture when I have the lights.

[Insert catchy sign off here]
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Thoughts while Failing to Build a Christmas Tree

Hello,

This may get a little depressing, so reader be warned.

Yesterday while at work, I was listening to this podcast entitled Geek Friday. This in itself is not entirely out of the ordinary, as I often listen to something while working, and I attempt to listen to Geek Friday every week. This week, however, the hosts started talking about a BBC News article about Lego blocks and the theoretical tallest a stack of blocks can get before the growing weight of the top blocks simply crushes the bottom block. This is an absolutely fascinating question, so I went in search of the article (it was not too difficult, as they posted a link in the show notes). So I read the article and all was well. However something caught my eye (actually my co-workers eye, but it’s all the same, really). The first normal line of text reads thusly:

There has been a burning debate on the social news website Reddit.

A burning debate!? (would love to use an interrobang here, but alas, I do not know how)!? I just had to find out how exciting this was. (Don’t worry, it was lunch time, so I was using my time).

This, however, is what led me to my small existential crisis. If I had only known…

From the get go, just a little bit down the page, we have a fascinating response to the question by duggatron (it’s the first post with any substantial length). I read it, and I was like, hey cool, I understand most of that. And ooh, an FEA. I did that in senior design. For completeness, I will include the entirety of the post.

This may be a little bit too simplified to get an accurate result. Taking into account the fact that it's hollow is going to make a big difference, both because the brick will have significantly less structure and because you will get stress concentrations at the corners of the brick.

Also, the compressive strength listed on that chart isn't to failure, just 10% strain. Using the flexural strength might be a more accurate metric for failure. The cross sectional area of a lego brick is about 182mm2 if you account for the hollowness, so the stress per block is actually closer to 0.0001341MPa/block or 0.01944psi.

Since calculating the failure stresses by hand would take a while due to the complex shape, I just did it in CAD and used finite element analysis to figure out what force would lead to stresses that exceed the flexural strength. The resulting FEA plot is here: (i.imgur.com/1QQF7.jpg) and here: (i.imgur.com/oOuFQ.jpg)

Based off this analysis, my estimate for the number of bricks is about 220,000 bricks resulting in a failure stress of 11.04ksi. That would be a tower around 2.112km high.

Edit: Some people have pointed out that some of the assumptions I've made are impractical.

First, people have mentioned the change in gravity as a function of height. The inaccuracy from this is pretty low. The acceleration due to gravity at the equator at sea level is 9.78049m/s2 vs. 9.77432m/s2 at 2000m source. That's a difference of ~0.063%, so it's a fairly safe assumption to ignore it. Remember, the Earth's diameter is over 12,750km at the equator. A 2km tower is insignificant by comparison. Second, people have mentioned the fact that the buckling in the tower could limit how high you could actually build. My solution assumes that you could stabilize the tower in some way so only the weight of the bricks is taken into account. Another way of visualizing the problem as simply the number of bricks is to think of it as an inverted pyramid of 220,000 bricks (mentioned here). If the pyramid looked like this, only with the center filled in, the pyramid wouldn't have to be very tall. The perimeter increases by two bricks each layer, and the center of layer x is equal to the number of bricks on layer x-2. That means the pyramid would have 236 layers, or just over 2.3m high.

Pretty exciting stuff, right? I couldn’t be content with that, though, because for some very odd reason, I enjoy reading comments even though I know they make me angry most of the time due to the complete lack of tact most of the internet possesses. So, I kept reading down the page until I go to the next lengthy block of text; this one dealing more with equations and less with CAD drawings. It was interesting in its own right, and I understood what they were talking about, though they weren’t really dealing with the actual question at hand. Main equation used shown below.

The buckling force is F=(pi x pi)xExI/(K x L)2.

Then I continued down the page to get to the next block of text. This one is what really threw me off. Again, for completeness, I’ll provide the entirety of the comment here. (Warning, contains language; I cannot control the internet!).

Now, this is going to be lost in the sea of envelopes you just received from replies to you, and I'm perfectly fine with that. But I have to say:

I'm so fucking lost. I'm so. fucking. lost. I can't even imagine what you just spent the time to think out. It kinda hurts. The reason it hurts is because part of me understands. Part of me thinks "Okay, yeah, yeah. Just following basic formulas here. I don't remember the formulas, but this is just advanced applications." I understand the ideas, but not the math. And then I hit FEA. And then you just start piling other factors on top of it. And my brain just... hits a wall. It cannot compute any farther than this. You have made me hit critical load. And it scares me. Seriously, all I want to write in this comment is "NERD!" and be done with it. And move on. Pretend it didn't happen. Go on with my life.

But... your comment, these past two comments may have just changed my life. For the last two years I've thought, "Hey, if I go to college, I should get a degree in Engineering. I know I don't know much advanced math because of how my schooling played out in high school, but I've always been okay at it, and I liked physics before I had to un-enroll from that school. Maybe I can do that, and see where it takes me, and maybe if I'm lucky end up with a job up-state at Microsoft. That would really be amazing, and I'd really love to be a part of that environment."

And now... I'm afraid of that path. Not because of the work it might take to do it, but because I'm afraid that I might not be able to do it. That I might not even be able to start to comprehend the calculations that you just did. Even though my field of engineering wouldn't be the same yours. I'm afraid of looking at a problem in a book and feeling exactly what I just did looking at your work in something relatively insignificant. That feeling of helplessness. Inability. I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I can learn more advanced math anymore, I don't know whether or not I'll look at it and think, "Okay, so this... this goes here... and then... and... maybe... hrm... okay, okay... I think I've got it." like most other things I've dealt with, or if instead it'll go, "...What. Wait. No. What? ... I can't even. What? Fuck. What? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. ..." It scares the shit out of me. I feel so stupid. I feel so amazingly, fucking stupid. I know I'm supposed to be smarter than this, that I could do whatever I wanted if I tried to do whatever I wanted, if I developed a sense of motivation and forced myself and became eager to learn these things, but now I know that that's not true. I very well could try as hard as I wanted to, and not get any farther than where I am now. But that's setting a limit on myself, that's not saying "Oh, if only I did this a certain way things would be better. If I did [blank] I would end up with a better job. If I was [blank] [blank] I wouldn't have to be so concerned about wondering the next time I found a girl who liked me because she would just be there already. If I had [blank] I could do [blank], If I [blank] [blank] I would/could [blank] [blank] [blank]." That's forcing myself to realize that, no, that's now how it works. Sometimes you just can't do [blank] at all.

It's fucking terrifying. This is more terrifying than every near death, every what if, every if only, all rolled into one. All of those put together couldn't even hit the halfway mark of what I just experienced. My heart hurts. My brain hurt first, but then after I realized it, I could physically feel my heart just sink a little, and beat a little slower. The part of my chest where it's at is warmer than normal, I can sense where my heart is, I can just feel the pulse it's sending out, I wouldn't consider it a beat, I'd consider it a wave. It feels like a wave pool. And I can feel the defeat in it. The sadness. It feels like my mom died. Or my little sister. Or like I just got dumped again after 2 years in a relationship, that moment of realization after the initial shock, after the fight had ended and an hour later after all the anger had ebbed away, the feeling of utter disbelief that what I loved so much was gone, left with only myself and my thoughts for the months to follow...

I think the worst part is, tomorrow it won't be different. I'll revert right back to thinking "If I go to college I'll go for a degree in engineering." But I'll know, too. It won't just be that. I know my real thought will be "If I go to college I'll go for a degree in... business. That sounds good. More money there anyways." and from there I'll push into politics. And from there, well, we've seen how it typically ends up. I promise that's not how I intend it to be. That I'm not a right-wing anything, let alone an extreme one. I feel like Anakin. Maybe this is how people like Murdoch get started, with a feeling of failure, followed by pure hatred for ever experiencing it. A need to gain power so that nothing can ever provide that sensation again. So that he can instead exert it over them, not the other way around. Maybe he started out thinking "I can't wait. I'm going to run the best newspaper that ever existed. We'll expose all the wrongs, so that the people can turn them into rights. I might not be a hero, but I'll change the world." Maybe.

tl;dr You just gave a 19-year old an existential crisis

I found myself empathizing with this person, this 19 year old on the cusp of a major life change. My life doesn’t match his/hers completely as I have already completed college with an engineering degree, but the overall though process is still the same. After reading this person’s existential crisis, I had one of my own. Here I am with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from one of the top engineering schools in the nation, and I don’t really feel good enough. I feel like I just got by though school, not really learning anything practical. I know people say that most real knowledge comes with on-the-job training. That's not really the point though. You would think that after spending five years at an engineering institution, I would be able to comfortably calculate the required mass to crush a single Lego block, and right now, I don't think I could just come up with the equations and do it all by myself. I've got no back-of-the-envelope math skills to speak of.

So that's where I am on this Saturday evening: thinking I'm not really smart enough to cut it in the real world as I struggle to emulate this Christmas tree made of books and utterly failing to do so. It seems fitting that I would be failing to do something engineering-like while thinking about how I'm not possibly a good engineer.

[Insert catchy sign off here]
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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

Hello,

I made my first foray into the graphic arts to make an entry into this little competition by an author of whom you probably haven't heard (Robyn Schneider. Pseudonyms include: Violet Haberdasher). Her new book is titled Severed Heads, Broken Hearts, and in the novel, a little Asian child gets his head chopped off on a roller coaster ride at Disney Land on the first page, so you know it's going to be pretty awesome.

Anyway, she challenged her followers on Twitter and Tumblr to create a cover for the book. The official details are here. Right, she does Youtube videos as well. So, I decided I would attempt to create something despite my complete lack of knowledge on the subject because the slight opportunity that I could win a signed ARC. But hey! I watched ATH do this sort of thing for three years when I lived with that fellow. So, I should, with some sort of magical Georgia Tech osmosis, be able to do this! Anyway, without further ado here is my attempt to create art.


She reads the first chapter of the book here, in case you're curious to hear about the magical decapitation (it's magical because it happens at Disney!).

[Insert catchy sign off here]
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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Books of 2012 (so far)

Hello,

I finished reading the 52nd book, so I can now release the list. Not that it’s been a secret or anything; if someone has asked to see it, I’ve shown it to them. It just hasn’t been published anywhere except my account on Evernote. So, without further ado, here’s the list:

  • The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie - The First Law Trilogy [1] 
  • Before They Are Hanged - Joe Abercrombie - The First Law Trilogy [2] 
  • Magic Bites - Ilona Andrews - Kate Daniel [1]
  • Magic Burns - Ilona Andrews - Kate Daniel [2] 
  • Magic Strikes - Ilona Andrews - Kate Daniel [3]
  • Magic Bleeds - Ilona Andrews - Kate Daniel [4]
  • Magic Slays - Ilona Andrews - Kate Daniel [5]
  • On a Pale Horse - Piers Anthony - Incarnations of Immortality [1]
  • Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card - Ender [1]
  • Forgotten God - Francis Chan
  • The Maze Runner - James Dashner - Maze Runner Trilogy [1]
  • The Scorch Trials - James Dashner - Maze Runner Trilogy [2]
  • Interworld - Neil Gaiman 
  • Odd and the Frost Giants - Neil Gaiman 
  • The Fault in Our Stars - John Green 
  • An Abundance of Katherines - John Green
  • Paper Towns - John Green
  • Looking for Alaska - John Green
  • Let it Snow - John Green, Maureen Johnson, & Lauren Myracle
  • Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green & David Levithan
  • Knightly Academy - Violet Haberdasher - Knightly Academy [1]
  • The Secret Prince - Violet Haberdasher - Knightly Academy [2]
  • Dead Witch Walking - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [1]
  • The Good, the Bad,and the Undead - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [2]
  • Every Which Way but Dead - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [3]
  • A Fistful of Charms - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [4]
  • For a Few Demons More - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [5]
  • The Outlaw Demon Wails - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [6]
  • White Witch, Black Curse - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [7]
  • Black Magic Sanction - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [8]
  • Pale Demon - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [9]
  • A Perfect Blood - Kim Harrison - The Hallows [10]
  • Hounded - Kevin Hearne - Iron Druid Chronicles [1]
  • Hexed - Kevin Hearne - Iron Druid Chronicles [2]
  • Hammered - Kevin Hearne - Iron Druid Chronicles [3]
  • Tricked - Kevin Hearne - Iron Druid Chronicles [4]
  • The Host - Stephenie Meyer
  • 1984 - George Orwell
  • Inheritance - Christopher Paolini - Inheritance Cycle [4]
  • Divergent - Veronica Roth - Divergent Trilogy [1]
  • Insurgent - Veronica Roth - Divergent Trilogy [2]
  • Old Man's War - John Scalzi - Old Man's War [1]
  • The Ghost Brigade - John Scalzi - Old Man's War [2]
  • Redshirts - John Scalzi
  • Blood Opium - Robert Serwatka
  • The Way of Shadows - Brent Weeks - Night Angel Trilogy [1]
  • Shadow's Edge - Brent Weeks - Night Angel Trilogy [2]
  • Beyond the Shadows - Brent Weeks - Night Angel Trilogy [3]
  • Uglies - Scott Westerfeld - Uglies [1]
  • Pretties - Scott Westerfeld - Uglies [2]
  • Specials - Scott Westerfeld - Uglies [3]
  • Extras - Scott Westerfeld - Uglies [4] 

The list is sorted alphabetically by the author's last name, so it’s not in the order I read them.

I’ll go back and put links to my “reviews” as I write them. For some of the series, I’ll probably write a “review” for the entirety of the series rather than the individual books. It’s just easier that way for everyone. Well, mostly me. 

[Insert catchy sign off here]
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Welcome Back

Hello,

I used to write things here. Then I got this crazy notion that I didn't wish to be searchable on the Internets. This crazy notion caused the deletion of most things linked to my name. Now, I'm not saying I'm any saner now than I was then, and I promise nothing in the realm of regularity. However, I feel that I may have some thoughts or feelings that require more than 160 characters and want to post them somewhere other than segmented on Twitter (@philliphgreene if you care).

One thing that I definitely feel that I will be doing is something with books. I challenged myself to read a book a week this year, and I have already completed that a few months early. Therefore, I have a lot to say about the books that I have read (or at least a little to say about each book). I haven't actually finished the 52nd book at this particular moment, but it will be shortly forthcoming. A list of the books I have read this year will probably be the next post when I have the opportunity.

[Insert catchy sign off here]
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