Hitting The Stacks
Sunday April 12, 2009 • Howard Tayler
I don't get much opportunity to read these days. Especially not this particular April, with XDM eating my free time for lunch (and dinner, and bedtime snacks, and breakfast, and second breakfast...) But I am trying. For instance, I'm listening to The Wheel of Time on audiobook while doing inking, coloring, or other image prep. After over forty hours of that (2.5 books in) I'm hooked, and Michael Kramer and Kate Reading's voices are now writ deep across my brain. Sometimes I hear them when I'm drawing, even though the iPod is playing music. (You two need to cut that out, okay?) Brandon Sanderson, the author who will be finishing Robert Jordan's epic, is a friend of mine. He and I podcast with Dan Wells over at Writing Excuses, and we hit the gym together a few times each week. And during all this time he has NOT told me how the epic ends (I haven't asked, he's not allowed to, and he's honest to a fault.) He did warn me last year that it was going to be significantly longer than the 250,000 words he originally contracted for. Tom Doherty's decision to split that last volume into three volumes was definitely the right one. Brandon has talked to me about it at length, and blogged about it in what I feel is a must-read for the hard core Robert Jordan fan. But I digress... I have books I'm trying to read, rather than listen to. Today I'm picking up Contact With Chaos by Mike Williamson. I've liked Mike's previous books (the six of them I've read, anyway) and this one is proving fun, too. Also on the stack: Walter H. Hunt's A Song In Stone. If you dig historical fiction, or anything Dan Brown-ish, this book should be perfect. Oh, and it's still in print in spite of the fact that the Wizards Of The Coast imprint under which it was printed was canceled. The whole line is just "Tango Uniform" to quote Walter. Fortunately you can find the book pretty easily through Amazon, and your local bookstore should still be able to order it. I'm halfway through The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and I'm not sure I'll finish it. The concepts are brilliant (though the book is not nearly so groundbreaking as it claims to be) and have already changed the way I think about my career path. This one was a gift (not sure from whom, but thank you!) and I'm glad I got as far through it as I did. I'd tell you more about the stack of books on my nightstand, but I'd rather be reading than blogging. Blogging feels too much like work, and it's Sunday after all.
