McNelis.biz

I’ve read TWO books, and completely forgot to talk about one when I finished it.  In my defense, we were heading out to Nashville when I read it.  So what to talk about first?  I suppose you’re probably more interested in the Nashville trip than the books I’ve been reading so I’ll start there.

First, I hate rain and lightning.  Ok, generally I like it, but last Friday morning our flight was supposed to leave Chicago at 7:40 in the morning and we pushed away from the gate on time.  Then?  The weather shut down the airport because of rain.  So we sat on the tarmac.  For two hours.  Then, they decide to take us back to the gate when it starts to lightning, do you know what that means?  They can’t push us back to the gate.  We sat there for three hours before taking off on the bumpiest flight I’ve ever had.  Thank God it was only an hour long flight.

We got down there and picked up our rental car and drove out east of the city to Lebanon and drove through a state park out there before eating some great barbeque in Lebanon at a Nashville BBQ chain called Witts.  It was great, I had ribs, Chris had pulled pork, a good kick off on our journey.  Then, exhausted, we checked into the hotel and took a lonnnngggggg nap.  When we woke up we checked for food recommendations at the hotel’s front desk.  By the way, if you don’t know this already, most hotels have a list of non-chain food places and directions from the hotel handy to give out.  We’ve found this to be really useful in our last couple of trips to check out some local fare.  We ended up at a southern / soul food place called Monell’s where they sit you family style with other people.  We met a group of interesting and nice folks there and enjoyed some AWESOME fried chicken, corn pudding, collard greens, corn bread, mashed potatoes….it could go on and on.

The next day we drove west of the city through White Bluff to the Montgomery Bell state park and hiked around and saw some really beautiful areas.  We also had breakfast at a little dive called Hog Heaven, which was pretty good.  In general we found that we really liked the area west of the city a whole lot, and if we decide that its Nashville for us, then thats the general area we’d like to be in.

We also checked out the Vanderbilt area that night and the next day and took in an arts and crafts fair at Centennial Park, which was a fun and relaxing way to end our trip before heading back.

All in all, I think we both really really liked Nashville and the people we met were awesome, even if we don’t necessarily agree with all their world-views.  As we’ve been talking, Chris has been saying that the more she thinks about it, the more she likes it.  So now we’ve got to plan our Portland / Portland-Seattle trip to help us make our final decision since we could, today for example, buy 20 acres in White Bluff that is wooded with a creek along the back of the property for under 80k.

Now really quick I’ll cover the two books.  Number 23 was called The Haven and was loaned to me by one of my co-workers, Q.  It was a sci-fi / fantasy novel where dogs were the most feared creature on the planet and pretty much all the animals can talk.  It was a little strange, but right up my alley.

Number 24 was also loaned to me by a co-worker and was Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s Kafka By The Shore, an intense metaphysical coming of age store with some fantasy elements thrown in to help with the overall pace and meaning of the book.  This one is going to take quite a while to digest, the book is filled with riddles that aren’t ever really completed, but that is part of the joy of this book.  It allows the reader to complete the puzzle and get a different meaning out it each time its read.

I started Number 25 this morning, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, also the author of No Country For Old Men, which I read late last year.  Once I finish that one up I’ll have some more stuff to add.  I also need to start blogging more regularly in general, a once-a-week book post just isn’t cutting it.

24 down, 26 to go.

I finished number 22 late last night, a book called The Eight.  The Eight centered around a fictional chess service given to Charlemagne and subsequently bequeathed to a soldier that defeated Charlemagne in the first match played on the board.  The Montglane Service as it is called is a mystical item that many people seek in “The Game.”

I won’t get into the details, but it had some Da Vinci Code kind of elements to it, though I would not put it in the same playing field.  Not because one is better than the other, but its not a fair comparison, the stories are too different, even though they resolve around, to some extent, solving puzzles to survive.  There was also a lot more mystical / magical happenings in The Eight than there was in ‘the Code.’

Today I started a book loaned to me by a co-worker, called The Haven by Graham Diamond.

22 down, 28 to go.

First thing is first, my youngest brother, Scott, is getting married. He and his fiancé are up for a free wedding, and you can help.  Its easy, just send an email to <a href=”emailto:keraandscott@wbwb.com“>keraandscott@wbwb.com</a>!  Here is what Scott had to say in the email he sent out.

Hello everybody.  I’m sorry to bother you all with this email, but I do have a favor to ask you.  My fiancée Kera and I are finalists in a radio station contest to win a free wedding.  The voting just started.  All you have to do to help us is to send one email (they only allow one email per email address) to keraandscott@wbwb.com under every email address you use.  If you could forward this email to anyone you know and ask them to help us as well, Kera and I would very much appreciate any support you can offer.  Ask them to email keraandscott@wbwb.com under every email address they use as well.  We’re going to need every vote we can get to win this wedding that Kera and I may not be able to afford otherwise.

If you’d like to see the website for the essay that Kera wrote to enter the contest and some engagement photos of Kera and I, you can visit it at
http://www.wbwb.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=561&Itemid=2 .

Thanks for doing this everybody.  I can’t tell you how awesome this is.  Any votes you can cast will make a huge difference.  Anyone else you can send this to would help also.

Thanks everybody, and at the least, please pray for Kera and I as we continue to prepare for the sacrament of marriage.

So please, please send some emails and help them get this done.  Scott is a youth minister, Kera is about to enter medical school, and because they are all old-school don’t want to live together before they get married, but are both moving away from “home” to be together in Ohio in the fall.  Maybe not the best financial decision, but if they get this wedding, they’ll be married by then and it will be a moot point.

I finished the 21st book of the year today over my lunch hour. Midnight in the Garden of Good Evil had long been a favorite movie of mine, and I had just never gotten around to reading the book. It was quite enjoyable, though the story took a lot longer than I was expecting to get into Jim Williams and the murder of his lover. Still, it was a fun read and filled in a lot of information that just wasn’t part of the movie, nor did it need to be.

I’m not sure what the next book on my agenda is, though the library may be in order for me soon, though I think there are still a couple of books on the shelf at home that I’m interested in reading. Tomorrow I’ll have another book that I’m working on. Then I’ll hopefully post some pictures by the weekend of the two tables I’ve made this spring. One has been done and in the living room for a while, the other one I’m in the process of finishing.

After two weeks, or somewhere thereabouts, I finally finished The Great Chicago Fire. Can you guess what it was about? Actually, your guess would have been only marginally accurate. I was expecting a rundown of all the various causes of the fire and how Chicago ended up in the situation it ultimately faced. Instead I got a refresher course in turn of the century architecture in Chicago.

Not that I don’t find that thoroughly interesting on the whole…Devil In The White City is one of my favorite recent reads (from last fall), so I had a pretty good primer on the subject, especially as it pertained to Sullivan, Burnham, Root, Olmsted, The Rookery, and of course the World’s Columbian Expedition. This book seemed to cover that part of culture in grave detail. It also formed a bit of literary criticism on popular fiction coming out of Chicago at the time and told the story of those fictional characters. The book itself was non-fiction, and I would have prefered to hear the story of some of the people that actually went through it, not a sensationalized piece about non-existent people.

In the end I’m glad to have read the book, but it was a long and difficult read that I just was not able to get in to at all, and never got emotionally invested in it. It wasn’t one of those books that I was inspired to find time to read. Now I’m on to my third John Scalzi book on the year, The Androids Dream. That one definitely starts out…differently than one might expect a novel to begin. But I’ll get there a couple of days hopefully.

Until then, 20 down, 32 to go.

Hey folks,

I’m in the process of changing my ISP for my sites, with this one being the first to move. Hopefully it will go smoothly, but there will be some down time as it gets going.

*Update* All the posts and mcnelis.biz has been migrated to the new hosting. I learned a bit on this, like my 600 or some odd posts are too many for a single wordpress import. Breaking it into 2 chunks made it happy though.

Courtesy of Tor and their bitchin’ email list, I just finished my 2nd eBook yesterday for free, courtesy of them. I must say, this is a great way for them to get people to read a book they otherwise might not. Case in point is Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell, the first in what to this point is a 3 book sci fi arc. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up, but now, being the serial story kind of guy I am, will probably buy the next two books in the series soon.

So yes, Tor, good plan on that marketing. Same thing also happened with me for John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, though admittedly I’d been planning to read that series for some time.

The nice thing about the Tor program is that you can download the book as a PDF, HTML, or in a mobile format, so I can toss it on my phone to read during my commute, or any time really, when I have a few minutes and am a little bit bored. They also don’t put any DRM stuff on them, which means that if I really wanted to I could forward it to a friend, Scalzi even suggested people do that with his Old Man’s War…just asking not to put it up on a torrent site, which I think is completely fair.

So yes, Crystal Rain got off to a rocky start for me, the diction of worlds main characters drove me kind of batty at first, and I still don’t care much for it, but with the entire book, the context of the diction / accent makes sense now.

This was my 19th book to finish on the year…technically the 20th started, but it was a much quicker read than The Great Chicago Fire, which because I wanted something non-fiction, jumped in front of Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream.

Chris and I are headed down to Indianapolis tonight to spend some time with my family. We’ve not been down there since Christmas time, so it will be nice to see everyone. My youngest brother is going to be pretty excited, I think, since I can snag 3 Orioles v. Cubs tickets for May 26th. The Orioles are Scott’s favorite team and the three of us, my other brother Ryan, and Scott, were talking about going to that game already.

So now its Friday, I ain’t got a job, I ain’t got shit to do. Ok, so I do. So I will. Until next time.

19 down, 31 to go.

Much to my surprise I finished Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades over lunch today. It was a very very quick read…I was disappointed it was over. I really do like Scalzi’s style of writing, I’m kind of bummed I didn’t pick up Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades sooner.

One thing I noticed while reading Whatever today (and I’m sure on other occasions as well), that Scalzi prides himself that his novels can stand alone, despite being a part of a series. I must agree with him on the Ghost Brigades, you can get through it having not read Old Man’s War, but having read it added another dimension to the book. I look forward to picking up The Last Colony sometime soon, as it will close out the story on this universe…at least for now. Maybe John will decide to write another saga, perhaps about how the Colonial Union got started, ect. Then again, maybe part of that is covered in The Last Colony.

Anyway, outside of that, Chris got home last night. Of course her luggage didn’t. As a matter of fact, the last time she saw her nice new blue suitcase was when she checked it with British Airways in Chicago. Yeah. Over a week, having to replace things in a foreign country where trying to ask for Socks was sometimes a difficult proposition. I know she still saw some neat things, but I think it pretty much ruined her trip because of the amount of stress it caused. I feel really bad for her. But I’m glad that she’s home safe.

Back to books….the next one on the list to read is another Scalzi book, the last of his for a bit, and is The Android’s Dream. I’m interested to see how that turns out. Its in no way related to the other of his books I’ve read, and I look forward to it. After that I might pick up book three of The Dark Tower…or who knows what else…we’ve got a number of things on the bookshelf I’ve not read yet.

18 down, 32 to go.

Or The Drawing of the Three. Stephen King, Your mom…same ideas. I finished up the 2nd book in the Dark Tower series yesterday. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as The Gunslinger. It was interesting and I got to see a whole lot more of the universe the characters are interacting in.

Nevertheless, I’ll continue on with the series when I find book 3 from the library or something like that. In the mean time I picked up John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades this morning and started reading. I read the first book in this series, Old Man’s War, a week or two ago as an e-book. This one is a paperback.

This puts me back ahead of the reading curve for my goal too.

17 down, 33 to go.

Greetings and salutations. I don’t know how many of you know Chris, but….I dropped her off at O’Hare yesterday for her trip to Italy.

I got the call this morning that she landed safely. Her luggage on the other hand decided to take a side trip…not sure where exactly….but what can you do.

So yeah, wish her fun until she gets back a week from today.