Stained glass bookmarks & a live event
Did you see that the Knicks won? How cool is that! Also: The World Cup matches thus far have been surprising. I am not a ramblin’, gamblin’ man,* but if I was, I would have lost everything on the matches so far. The results are often surprising and you know what? That’s wonderful to watch!
*It is interesting to note that in the sixties and seventies, people used to “ramble,” but the practice disappeared entirely by the eighties. Nobody sings about rambling anymore, but Led Zeppelin and Bob Seger made it sound like it was a compulsion. They had to ramble in the same way that Darth Vader had to obey his master. [James Earl Jones voice]: “You don’t understand the power of the ramble.” What I need now is an anthology album with different artists getting back to rambling.**
**I don’t actually know what rambling is, apart from verbal rambling, and we may have lost the meaning of it in the forty-odd years since the practice fell out of common use. If one wanted to ramble now, what exactly would one do?
Tomorrow (June 16 at 2 pm eastern) I’ll be doing a live event on Instagram and Twitch with author Jo Miles, who wrote the forthcoming THE FINAL CHRONICLE OF YENEH, which I highly recommend. We’ll be having a swell old time discussing portal fantasy and xenobiology and we’ll also take your questions and give away a few books! We hope you’ll join us. On Instagram I’m @kevinhearne and Jo is @jomileswrites, and if you want to watch/follow on Twitch, you can find me at twitch.tv/kevinhearne.
And under the heading of OH HEY THAT’S NIFTY, these stained glass bookmarks featuring Atticus and Oberon are gosh darn spiffy. They are transparent and project their colors onto a surface but also kind of catch the light in interesting ways as you tilt them. There’s a ton of pictures at the link so you can see what I mean, but I’ll share one of them here:
Aren't they cool? I love that in the circle above Oberon there’s a wolfhound up top and a black poodle on the bottom with a heart motif. These bookmarks are licensed, which means the artist has done all the legal stuff she needs to do to make these, and they have my approval. Most of the money goes to her, and YAY! Because she made that art and it’s awesome. The percentage that comes to me I’ll be donating to a food bank here in Ottawa. So if you buy one or both, stuff happens:
1) You get a spiffy bookmark
2) You support an artist
3) You feed some hungry people
Is anyone else watching Widow’s Bay on apple tv and loving it? Because it’s probably the best show around this year? I’m delighted that it got renewed for a second season because it’s top-shelf stuff.
As for what I’m reading:
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet?
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time.
Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn't so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.
Prepare to meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe's time-travelling offer in order to:
- confront the man who left them
- receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by Alzheimer's
- see their sister one last time, and
- meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi's internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?
Consider Phlebas
The first book in Iain M. Banks's seminal science fiction series, The Culture. Consider Phlebas introduces readers to the utopian conglomeration of human and alien races that explores the nature of war, morality, and the limitless bounds of mankind's imagination.
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.
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