 Okay, before I get into what I read in October and what I'm reading now and what I bought or acquired in October, first of all, the YouTube subscribership here is at $592 as of today, October 31st. Eight more and I'll be at actual $600. So everybody please press the like button down there and please subscribe and become a patron. There's a link in the description below for my patronage site at 50th Street and speaking of which I want to thank my three patrons by name. They are Darren Vanaria, Greg Kruski and Sean Bell and I did get permission from each of them to thank them by name here on the video. So guys, thank you. All three of them have been with me for more than a year, I believe. I just have the three patrons. They totaled $26 a month. So again, please go become a patron. If you've been watching, I've been doing a lot more than the science fiction book reviews recently. So you're supporting the book reviews and all of my other work too. Greg Kruski wrote me a very kind email complimenting me on the book reviews. He said that it was my review of Hal Clement's mission of gravity, which was years ago, I think three years ago, that led him to me. He said something along the lines of that I consistently addressed the things that he actually wants to know about the book, which is an important point because that's why I started doing the short book reports in the first place, book reviews. I always say book reports as if I'm a sixth grader standing in front of a class. Maybe I should keep calling them book reports because it was important to me, and this is one of the reasons that I don't watch most book reviewers on YouTube. It was important to me to be very concise and get to the point about what the book is actually about, how it's written, what kind of a job I think the author did, and get all of that condensed into a very short amount of time. Because I see so many book reviews where the reviewer just gushes about how much they love the book, and they go on for 12 or 15 minutes, and they don't tell you what it's actually about or what kind of style it's written in, how the author addressed something or other. I think it's possible to address those kind of things in just a few seconds, maybe even in just a sentence or two. If you noticed the last few reviews, I've been starting with a teaser that's only one sentence or so, and then doing my little music introduction, and then a 30 second description, and then I talk a little more about the book. That's what I'm going to continue to do. I'm going to start the video with a one sentence encapsulation of what I'm going to say after the introduction. Now, about what I read in October, at the beginning of the month I finished reading Hex by Thomas O. Lee Wavell, that was my most recent review. I gave it a more glowing review than I usually do, if you haven't seen it, go back and see it. I really liked the book. And I also finished the Callisto Symphony, which is going to be my next review, and it's going to be the opposite of Hex. You shouldn't miss this one. I also finished reading The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. I was both impressed and disappointed with this at the same time. This will be, I think, my second review of November, and I'll explain what I mean by that. In my last monthly roundup, I introduced these two books, Robert Sheckley's Shards of Space and Children of the Wind by Kate Wilhelm. These are story collections. I've read a few of these, and it's Robert Sheckley, so it's fantastic. This will be one of my reviews in November for sure. This, I'd never read Kate Wilhelm before, and I was very excited about reading some Kate Wilhelm. The first story didn't do anything for me. I started reading the second story and was bored with it immediately. So I moved on to the final story in the collection, which is the big award winner here. It's called The Girl Who Fell Into the Sky, and I was immediately bored with it as well. But this is such a well-known author that I'm going to try to push through these and finish these so I can review the book someday and talk about it with some authority. Now, about the books that I bought in October. After the big book apocalypse in September, and I still have to publish my video of The Chamberlain Bookmine in Jacksonville. That is coming, and it will be on the 50th Street channel. So go look for that. Well, I said I wasn't going to buy any books in October, or I was going to try to avoid it. But I did. In fact, the day before I recorded the last monthly Reads video, I bought these at a local library. Not the library that I usually go to, but they had a really nice bookstore, too. 50 cents a piece. A tiny hardcover edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And, uh, this. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. That's quite an intimidating title. And it's got them listed alphabetically by title of nursery rhyme, not by subject. This is something I'm going to dig into. This is the kind of thing that you could spend an afternoon just thumbing through and enjoying just for its own sake. And it has this strange, like, almost hospital grade plastic cover over it, which caught my attention. Again, these were 50 cents a piece. Uh, the other stuff I bought. I went to an actual bookstore, retail bookstore, which I never go into. Barnes & Noble. They had this on sale for five dollars. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I've never read any Octavia Butler. I have a couple of her books. I didn't have this one, so I got it. And I visited another local bookstore, which I rarely get to. And I got these. Blue Heart by Allison Sinclair. This is another female author and a book series that I've never heard of. Big book. Look at this. And, uh, this. If you don't recognize this, The Girl with All the Gifts by Irmar Carey, which is another one of these books that I've been hearing an awful lot about. I hear nothing but praise for it. I started reading it just this morning. I read the first three chapters and it's very engaging. But it's always a mistake for me to say that I'm enjoying a book before I finished it. Because every time I do that on camera, it turns out to be a mistake. Um, and then I was at a local dollar store and they had stacks and stacks of these, five dollars a piece. Giant Stephen King hardback books, Dr. Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, which is not a book that I'm familiar with. Um, and I mean this one. I'm familiar with The Shining. Haven't read it. Maybe I should read The Shining first. And then just yesterday, I published an unboxing of something that came in the mail. It's a DVD of Space Janitors. If you've not seen Space Janitors, you need to go see that. Um, really funny stuff. Really good for science fiction fans. Um, I'll leave it at that. The, uh, oh, the other thing I did, uh, dollar store has these four packs of Marvel comics. I don't buy current comics anymore. I don't, uh, I used to read comics in the 70s and 80s avidly. When I try to read mainstream comics, Marvel and DC these days, I don't recognize any of the characters. I can't tell what's going on. The stories make no sense. The art is usually really bad. But they had these four packs for five dollars. This has a Skrull Girl number three in it and Thor's Plural Thor's number one. I don't know what else is in it. I think I'll do an unboxing of it because I haven't done an odd comics episode in a long time and there's a reason why is because I wanted my next episode of iComics to be, to also be the next installment of my 2001 Space Odyssey epic review. I still need to do that someday. And once I've finished that, then I'll go ahead and do more odd comics episodes. I think that's it. Please remember to like this video and subscribe to me here and also go over to my 50th Street channel and subscribe over there. I'm publishing new videos on 50th Street literally every day. There's been a couple of times when I haven't been able to get one up every day, mostly because I'm having trouble uploading videos. The little minute and a half unboxing that I uploaded yesterday took 20 minutes to upload, so you can imagine what a 15 minute video takes, three hours, four hours, and then they fail, and then so it takes all day to get one video up. So that's usually why I fail to get a video up every day, but at 50th Street I'm trying to post a video every day. So please go to 50th Street and please subscribe there. Once I get 100 subscribers at 50th Street, YouTube will allow me to get a custom URL for that channel. So please go do that. Next review will be Callisto Symphony and I'll try to post that tomorrow. See you then. Bye. Please remember to press that like button. It helps my videos get seen. And then subscribe so you can come back next time. I do science fiction book, TV, and movie reviews all the time, and please consider becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below.