Derek > Recent Status Updates

Anybody whose read my mystery reviews knows how I feel about coincidences in their solution. So why is Nate ambushed in the same county where Joe Pickett's daughter was attacked? I'd say more but apparently Status Updates don't respect spoiler tags...

"I would never have found it if it hadn't have been for a set of traffic lights." Aside from the superfluous "have", I'm getting pretty annoyed by the mounting co-inkydinks.

"It would be easy to dismiss the zoologist as an extremist, but in the twilight world of Middle East politics he was in the moderate wing of Saudi public opinion."

Unlike most Western politicians, Hayes get that the Saudis are no friends of the west.

"Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you're fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn't help but think of how many times I had violated our nation's deepest values in order to protect them."

I guess it's something that he still thinks of that—I suspect most of the spooks never do—but I'm still not going to believe it's necessary.

When he describes a photo of a woman walking with her children towards a death-camp gas chamber, it's so vivid I can see the picture.

who am I kidding... I'm never getting back to this...

I'm having some major problems with this. "People said he was borderline Asperger's..." WTF? Is that supposed to mean ANYTHING? I'm borderline Asperger's. So, I'm smart and I have trouble expressing my emotions or looking people in the eye. So far, my major reaction is "Gag me..."

odd story as might be expected from Simmons

Interesting resonance with the title story in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others

hmm. Thought I was supposed to be reading SF...

No wonder my 2014 reading list was so short--when I started my 2015 challenge, it showed books already read this year...

Who am I kidding. I'm never going to get around to finishing this. Not nearly as good as the first episode in this series.

I've reached the point where I hate reading books on paper. Here I am trying to make notes, and I have to dog-ear the page!

Graham Joyce has died. And I only just got introduced to him! http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/09/grah...

The story begins with an impossibility—at least I'm pretty sure it's impossible—when a pike removes 5 year old Terry's two smallest toes. Now, I grew up with pike, and we always said they would take toes (or other more fleshy appendages if you happened to be skinny dipping!), but nobody every really believed it. I still don't… I think. But this clearly sets the tone for the rest of the book.