Well fans, 2018 is over. It was consistent, in that I didn't quite make a number of goals I had for myself, but I made a good showing in all of them. It is interesting that in 2017 I hit every goal I set for myself, and in 2018 I didn't really hit any of them. Is that a life lesson? Success is an all or nothing proposition? Sounds like a writing exercise waiting to happen ;)
I read 46 books in 2018. While I didn't get to my goal of 52, I will repeat what I said last year: I was blessed by these books. Even those that seem frivolous have affected me and how I think about the world. I feel like I'm just a little bit better than I was a year ago due to what I have read. So with that I recommend that you consider a reading goal for yourself. It might just be one of those "shoot for the stars, and hit the moon" type of things, but I'm confident it will be positive for you.
I should report on my ancillary goals I added last year to read within certain genres. To be honest, I didn't track this at all this year, so I'm just going to count up what I did and be surprised with you.
Self Help/Business (11)
Fantasy (26)
Religious (2)
Well, that is what you get when you don't track a goal, friends. I was supposed to get at least 12 in each category.
I'm resetting on the same goals and hope to improve this year. Have a great 2019! See you in a year!
Monday, December 31, 2018
A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer
A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian GrazerMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book was not my favorite. The stories of the movie industry and other Hollywood tidbits were interesting, but the theme around curiosity was way overdone. It was an example of taking one word and extending its meaning to take in all adjacent concepts. In this case those concepts included innovation, creativity, and persistence. These are not the same thing, but the author kept trying to push them into the same box. The attempt to equate them turned into an unstructured rambling of sorts, not unlike the rambling you would expect from a Hollywood movie producer I guess. I mean, he put in almost a whole chapter about his hair! What in the world! I didn't even know who this guy was when I picked up this book, and I don't give a rip about his preferred hairstyle. It was very odd. All I can do is chalk it up to ego.
The closest parallel for me to this book was The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington. There is the feeling that they woke up one day and said, "I'm famous. I want to write a book." But then they found they lacked enough content to meet the publishers length quota, so they start pulling in adjacent stuff to spread the covers a little further apart. Perhaps I'm being overly critical of books by non-professional authors, but these are my honest thoughts, so there you go. Flaws and all. I can only hope that one day I write a book, and it gets published, and then when I get roasted on Goodreads I can regret all of these honest posts about how I felt about other people's books.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson
White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon SandersonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
My son got these graphic novels by Brandon Sanderson for Christmas, so it was my turn to take the first one for a spin. I don't usually pick up graphic novels. I read a few comic books as a kid, and the drama levels were usually too high for me, but given my fanboy status for Sanderson products I decided to put that aside and give this graphic novel a chance. I pulled on the beanie I got for Christmas with a shash mark on the forehead, and sat there in my new t-shirt featuring Kaladin and Sil, and dug in. Sanderson is a prolific novelist, so his stuff had to read different than a pictorial soap opera, right?
Well, the story and the world are well done. In Arcanum Unbounded earlier this year I had gotten a glimpse of this world, and the extension in this book did not disappoint. However, I did not find the graphic format helpful. Sanderson does a great job of creating his worlds with words, and I've never felt like I was missing anything. Here, I had detailed color graphical representations of his world and characters, and I felt like I had less. The characters looked too similar, and I ended up relying on the dialogue to figure out who was who. While you can get immediate details on scenery, and a feel for the environment, I just didn't get the feel of an arid desert, the way I would have had he described the characters experience.
In creative writing there is the maxim to "show, don't tell" which is good advice. As a writer your primary medium is words, and you want to tell the reader everything you want them to know. Instead you are supposed to hold back and show them what is happening in a scene, and let the reader learn what they need to know. While not a frequent reader of graphic novels, I think the opposite might be true here, to a degree. The primary medium seems to be the art, where you are showing everything rather than telling, and the pendulum might be swinging the other way. I felt starved for description and detail, even though I had more concrete images to help me visualize what was happening.
Again, I'm out on a limb here, not being a frequent consumer of this format, but I'm just sharing my opinion. It is still a solid story, but if I had a choice, I'd ask for the full text version.
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