Justin Howe's Blog, page 26

Not the Best but the Stuck With

It’s the end of the year and everyone is posting their best-of-the-year list and I thought I would do mine a little bit different. These aren’t so much my favorite reads but books that for one reason or another have stuck with me and I’m still thinking about days/weeks/months after I read them. And as always these aren’t books published this year, but read this year.

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The Blackbirder by Dorothy B. Hughes: A pulp novel written in the early 1940s about a European refugee on the run in wartime U...

Favorite Reads: November Books 2016

Clay’s Ark by Octavia E. Butler: This was the first book I read by Butler years ago. I remember finding this exact edition at the library and reading it over the course of one summer afternoon. This is a weird book. A sort of cyberpunk Hills Have Eyes except the cannibals are the good guys. At some point five years in the future, the USA is a hellscape of misery and violence – and somewhere in the desert something from another world is breeding, reshaping humanity in an isolated settlement....

No, really. It literally is a cookbook.

One of the results of the English Civil War was the rise of cookbooks as a distinct genre. It makes sense if you think about it. You had former servants out of work, one-time nobles stuck in exile and/or broke, and a public nostalgic and eager to see how those nobles lived. As this was an era where “physick” and alchemy weren’t too far apart from each other you’d have a lot of cross over between the two: a recipe for bacon and eggs a few pages away from a recipe for a healing draught. Here’s...

What Games I’m Playing

What am I playing?

5e.

I ran a game for a bit until two TPKs got me a reputation in town as a killer DM. This made me sad, but my buddy took over the gaming duties. Now, I’m playing in his game and being the yahoo running amok. For laughs I’m a playing a goody two shoes who makes everyone’s life miserable.

I like 5e, but it takes forever to make a character and all the crunch gets to me.

(I’m also playing a f**kton of board games but that’s a subject for another post.)

What am I running?

Apoc...

The Thirty Years War

I’m reading CV Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War. I’m near the start of year three of the war. This is what has happened so far:

Bohemia needed a king but couldn’t decide on one because electoral college/religion. It didn’t help that the two potential kings were more or less identical taciturn, easily manipulated young inbred aristocrats with the names Fred and Ferdinand. No one cared who sat on the throne except some asshole Catholics and some asshole Protestants. What mattered was that Bohem...

The Steerswoman Series by Rosemary Kirstein

“If you ask, she must answer. A steerswoman’s knowledge is shared with any who request it; no steerswoman may refuse a question, and no steerswoman may answer with anything but the truth.”

So last month I breezed through all the books in Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman series. And now I want to tell you all about them because they’re smart and fun.

The Good… They’re limited in setting, POV, and scope. This is definitely a pet peeve of mine, but I much prefer stories set against a local a...

Favorite Reads: October Books 2016

This was a great month for books. I read a ton of fun stuff. Here are some highlights:

The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain by Diane Purkiss: I’ve been slogging through this for months, reading a chapter here and there and then putting it aside for weeks on end, but you shouldn’t take my slow progress as a judgment. It’s a thick history book and I can’t be blamed for wanting some occasional zap/pow/boom along the way. The weird...

Favorite Reads: September Books 2016

I made slow progress on a few book but didn’t finish them, put down others, read some short fiction, and so here we are.

I went on a binge of old school space opera. “A Planet Named Shayol” by Cordwainer Smith is some seriously gross, bizarre stuff about a man convicted to live on a horrifying prison planet. It’s a crazy ride and well worth reading if you like weird, SF, or weird SF. The picture above is the Virgil Finlay illustration for it. Smith has some notoriety for being an early CIA a...

On the Nature of Assholes

A theory of assholes:

You aren’t an asshole. You are being an asshole.

That’s an important distinction. Being an asshole isn’t a state inherent to your identity, it’s not who you are, but simply the state of being you are passing through at that moment. At some later moment, you may not be an asshole.

Now it’s possible you have a low resistance to being an asshole and the asshole path is so clearly blazed and marked it takes an act of extreme willpower not to go full asshole at the slightest...

Favorite Reads: August 2016

The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley: In a world where all women have died, a group of men live out their last lonely days in The Valley of Rocks, listening to young Nate tell stories that weave their past and remaining years into a cohesive whole – then the strange mushrooms start growing in the cemetery and everything changes. At times gory, at other times sublime, and definitely weird The Beauty’s a creepy read.

Persona by Genevieve Valentine: SF novel about a world where celebrity “Faces” represe...