2013 Resolutions

Three, this year. I do believe if I can make at least 25 percent progress in each of them, my life will radically transform for the better twelve months from now. Without going into the details, here they are:

(1) Improve physical health. The goal is ENERGY! It’s been a long, long, long time since I’ve had a surplus of it.

(2) Improve mental outlook. I really, really want to THRIVE each and every day, not just SURVIVE each and every day.

(3) Resume that elusive writing career. This daily blog is mere TACTICAL writing. I need to resume the much more satisfying and potentially rewarding STRATEGIC writing.



Well, hope you have resolutions to, and I wish you the best of luck with them.

Have a happy, safe, healthy

New Year’s Eve!!!

2012 Hopper Best-Ofs !

Category: Best Fiction

Venus (2000), by Ben Bova

I (almost) literally could not put it down, reading it at every opportunity possible, every free moment over the action-packed span of a few days. And over every objection I could think of ...

Detailed for the SF buff, here.


Honorable mention:

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), by Victor Hugo

If you ever visit Paris, you must read this book while you are there. I can't decide which propelled the experience into a higher level, reading the book while being in the City of Lights, or being in that wonderful city while reading the book. A fine distinction, I'll grant, but one that can only make sense to you truly if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

My humble yet excited review, here.


Category: Best Non-Fiction

The Longest Day (1959), by Cornelius Ryan

Summer of 2012 for me will forever be linked to the Second World War. A half-dozen books, World War Two in Color, a bunch of documentary DVDs from the library. Verily the greatest generation fighting the greatest evil in modern times. Ryan is a great war writer; this book brought those lethal hours and days unexpectedly to life for me.

Coupled with a review of one of his other, not-as-successful works, here.


Honarable mention:

The historical fiction of Jeff Shaara (1996-2006)

Yeah, I've read about him on the Internet, and he seems to divide people into two groups: those who love him and those who hate him. Me, not being an exacting historian, I find myself in the first group. His novels helped me to flesh out history and bring it painfully, emotionally, excitingly to life.

Hard to rank them, but I read Gods and Generals, The Last Full Measure, and The Rising Tide in the spring and summer.


Category: Best Short Story

"The Bicentenniel Man" (1976), by Isaac Asimov

A beautiful, tearful story from a master of Science Fiction. Absolutely wonderful, a forgotten gem from my youth.

Reviewed here.


Category: Worst Read

"Heart of Darkness" (1899) by Joseph Conrad

Just. Don't. Get. It. Read it back in 1989 or so, didn't get it then. Read some Harold Bloom commentary. Still didn't get it. Read the Cliff Notes. Ditto. Re-read it again back in April. What a waste of time. It must be me.

Review, for the curious, here.


Category: Best Movie

Hmmm. Hard to tell, nothing comes to mind, and I see quickly scanning my movie reviews at the Hopper that none really stood out like Limitless from last year. Scratching my head for ten minutes didn't call anything outstanding to mind, either. If I had to choose (and I feel I must), I'll say that I liked a bunch of westerns from TCM. Two in particular: Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), starring Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, and The Big Country (1958), starring Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. Oh, and as far as modern film goes, I liked Resident Evil: Afterlife, watched with my buddy at his home theater in prelude to seeing Resident Evil: Retribution at the movies last fall. My cinematic tastes run the full gamet.


Category: Worst Movie

Bigfoot (2012), "starring" Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams.

A colossal waste of time. In fact, the biggest waste of two hours I threw away all year. It'd be better if I spent those two hours dead stinkin' drunk. Or staring at a wall in a vegetative state. Or reading one of those Obama autobiographies. Or reading Entertainment Weekly on the crapper. Or playing freecell on the laptop. Or reading some a bunch of lit grad student dissertations on "Heart of Darkness." Or - you get the idea. It was a truly bad rotten flick.

Review, for masochists, here.


Category: Best Hopper Phase

The Audio CD / Book in Conjunction

On a whim I decided to re-read Tolkien, though this time listening to it on audio CD as I followed along in the book. An odd, intriguing experience. Took me three solid months. Followed up by reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand in the same fashion.

The Tolkien Audio experience detailed, here.


Runners-Up

The Civil War histories, part 2, February - April, October
The World War II histories - June - September
The Shroud of Turin exploration - January
The Jeff Shaara historical fictions - April - June, August


Category: Best Song

Oh! Can't forget this one! Though 2012 was not a musical year for me (don't think I even purchased any music CDs in the past twelve months), I'm going to have to say, based on stuff I've been listening to online and through the backlog of old CDs, the Song of 2012 would have to be ...


(drum roll)


En Bateau, by Claude Debussy

Betcha didn't see that coming!

Only cuz I find the melody a perfect combination of playfulness, freedom from care, and a certain degree of haunting nostalgia.

Can be heard here.


All right - 2013 - Bring it on!

Snowbound, Sorta

Keeping with their frantic, frenetic compulsion to panic us easily-frightened sheep, the Weather Men have us all believing the entire northeast corner of the US will be snowed in this weekend. So I head out early to get some snowbound reading, in my never-ending hunt to recreate the perfect snowbound reading day (winter 2002, when it was just the wife and I, and I read an entire book on the Apollo space program).

Actually, allow me to back up a bit. I woke up at 3:15 that morning, tossed and turned, surrendered to some heartburn (gotta cut out the turkey lunch meat and bread ... and, uh, the beer). Went downstairs to the office for five hours and went through bills at a glacial pace whilst watching The Day of the Triffids on youtube. Good times.

Little One had another little one sleeping over with her, so they and Patch were watching some Disney movie in the morning. I did the errands myself, including a library run to the most forbidding biblioteca in the county: er, the County Library. Ya gotta pay for a parking space there, and it's as close to urban as we get out here. Yet went I did, and scored a handful of intriguing tomes.

Then we went to my nephew's birthday party out in the sticks just as the snow was starting to come down. In reality it was hail, and there was no accumulation until we got to my brother's house about 25 miles north-northwest of us. There was pizza. There was cake. There was a lot of snow on the ground when we left. Took us over an hour to get home, and, let me tell you, it was scary. The Impala nearly failed us, swish-tailing and struggling up and down the icy, steep, winding hills that "the sticks" are known for. A plow almost plowed us off the road. It was a stressful, nerve-wracking trip home, but once I got home, I was happy.

What'd I get? What'd I get?

Okay, I'll tell you:

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved, by Colin Wilson. What a treasure for a crypto-para-ab-normal enthusiast as me! Plus, history's mysteries stuff. Leonard Nimoy would have an orgasm reading this book! (Ugh, sorry about that ...) And Wilson wrote one of my all-time favorite horror/SF novels, The Mind Parasites.

The Science of James Bond, by Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg. I'm a moderate Bond fan, but I love the way the authors take down some of the more, mm, fanciful aspects of the Bond movies / novels. Favorite chapter titled, "Some Thoughts About Secret Bases." As a potential Bond villain, this supplied a lot of practical information for me.

Strange Brains and Genius, by Clifford Pickover. Thumbed through it and it looked quite fanciful, chock-full of potential weirdity trivia that I need to pack into this blog more often. Read other books by Pickover, and he's always an interesting read.

Two books on religion, subject for another post early in the new year.

And a somewhat too-cerebral book entitled Many Futures, Many Worlds, a collection of essays on SF. And by "somewhat too-cerebral" I refer to hoity-toity literati who tend to drain the fun out of a subject (though one essay is written by Gary K. Wolf, author of my all-time favorite SF novel from my youth, Killerbowl). I'm really reading it to compile a list of short stories and novels I have not read yet but should. Halfway through, and that list includes -

"Nightfall", by Isaac Asimov (never read that classic)
"The New Reality" by Charles Harness
"First Contact" by Murray Leinster
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
"Moxon's Master," by Ambrose Bierce
"The Lion of Comarre" by Arthur C. Clarke
"Scanners Live in Vain," by Cordwainer Smith (see comment for "Nightfall")
The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle

So much to be read, so little time.

Anyway, while the girls were outside playing in the snow, my wife hands me the latest Entertainment Weekly to read. We've been getting this magazine for years; I think one of my wife's friends got a subscription for us one Christmas and it just keeps going. I always throw away renewal notices and bills, but the damn issues keep coming, week after week after week.

Well, this issue was the Best Of / Worst Of of movies, teevee shows, music and books, of 2012. I agreed with perhaps 75% of their assessments, of the movies, shows, music and books I was familiar with. Which was about a quarter to a third of what they reviewed. I am in agreement with the oft-voiced about that the culture is a cesspool, and I try to spend as little precious time as possible in it. I am truly sorry for the "culture" my children will inherent and, ugh, swim in. After reading this issue, my main take away point was - to get on the Best Of list you'd better be either gay or a liberal or both. But at least a liberal. Sigh.

Well, off to share a burrito and watch some TCM with the wife once the children are in bed.

My Best Of / Worst Of lists for tomorrow's post ...