 All right, it's time to talk about what I've been reading and what I've been collecting in November. This batch of books that I found for a dollar each at a local comic bookstore, but he had this spinner rack full of books. Most of them were romances and westerns, but he had this one section of sci-fi books and for a dollar each, I mean, come on. I don't know anything about this. DF Jones, don't know who he is, but it's a dollar. Now here, I've got an Octavia Butler book. I've always wanted to read Octavia Butler. I've never gotten around to it. This is not one of the titles that I've heard of associated with her, but it's a dollar. I'm really looking forward to that Barry B. Longyear Manifest Destiny. As it says on the cover, this book includes Enemy Mind, which of course the movie was based on. I guess that's what the cover is supposed to be as well. I did not like that movie, by the way. I remember seeing that when it came out and I didn't like it. Contacted by Carl Sagan. Never read it. It's about time I got around to it. A dollar. Again, how could I pass it up? The movie is an excellent movie. It's one of the best science movies ever made, really. It has a couple of major problems though. Number one, Matthew McConaughey. That was the first time I ever saw Matthew McConaughey and I disliked him from the beginning. And number two, the scene where she meets her father on a tropical beach while she's traveling through that wormhole. It was nonsense. It almost ruined the movie. A friend of mine and I saw it together and we agreed that if you remove that one ridiculous scene, you would have an almost perfect movie. And we also thought Godzilla should be in it. But that's true for every movie that we saw ever. This audio book called Gravity by Tess Garrison. Four cassettes. Never heard of it. Never heard of her. It says on here, she's better than Palmer, better than Cook. Yes, even better than Crichton. Supposedly that's a quote from Stephen King. I doubt that's true. But I'll certainly give it a listen. The Virgin of the Dinosaur. I got this, I ordered this by mail. I read this book 10 or 15 years ago. I wrote a short review of it on Goodreads. So I know I read it. But honestly, I don't remember a thing about it. I thought it was a collection of short stories. But no, it's a novel. That'll show you how little of it I remember. Which is surprising to me because I love this author, R. Garcia E. Robertson. He wrote one of my favorite series of short stories in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine. I don't think the series has a name. One of the titles I remember was The Bone Witch. I'll have to look up the titles of that series of stories. Anyway, I loved his short stories so much. They were very vivid. I've never forgotten them. I don't know where to start explaining them. They have a very complicated world. In fact, the first time I ever read The Fluted Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, I thought it was R. Garcia E. Robertson. And when I reviewed the Bacigalupi book last month, you know how much I loved his work. So if I at first confused him with this guy, then you can imagine how much I love this guy's work. But I don't remember this book, but I know I read it. This I found on the same dollar rack from that comic book store. Touched by an alien. It's just too funny to pass up. Catherine Kitty Kat joins forces with gorgeous aliens to protect the earth, kick evil enemy butt, and save the day. Apparently there are seven books in this series. And this is number one. Whoever was talking about it coined the phrase Alpha Centauri male, which I thought was hilariously funny. All right, some other stuff. I bought this locally at my local bookstore, the one I always go to. I was not thrilled with the one other Philip K. Dick book, which I reviewed just last week, which was Duane Dorie's Dream of Electric Sheep. I've always been familiar with his short stories. I'd never read any of his novels. Wikipedia says he's written 44 novels. I was astonished. But this is his other famous one, Ubic. And thumbing through the chapter titles, each one of them has a little rhyme at the beginning. It's like a jingle for a commercial. And the word Ubic is being used to describe every kind of product imaginable from cars to household utensils to insurance. So I'm gathering that the word that the title Ubic is referring to the word ubiquitous. And also reading the description, there's going to be time travel involved. So I'll give it a chance, but I'm not enthusiastic about it. It's the book Run by William Slater. If you've been following my reviews, you know how much I like William Slater. This is apparently his first novel. That my second review was for House of Stairs, which was his second novel. And this was apparently his first. And I said in one of my recent monthly roundups that when I read his book, The Last Universe, it was the first time I had seen a teenage girl being the protagonist in one of his books. But apparently his first novel does have a teenage girl as a protagonist. So there you go. I just hadn't read enough. We'll see. Plainiverse. I talked about this when I reviewed Flatland. I had never read it, found a copy online. This looks so interesting. I'll just have to just have to give it a try. I'll definitely review this one way or the other once I'm done with it. Again, I'm rereading anything box, which I've reviewed already. But I'm going through these few of the stories beginning to end the title story. Anything box. I just read. It's an astonishingly good story. I've said it a number of times before, and I'll say it again, Zen Henderson is amazing. I pulled these two books out. I've had these for a couple of years, but I noticed them on the shelf. I wanted to mention them. This is a collection of stories about superheroes. And I'm finding it really boring. I'm finding it really boring. I stopped reading partway through. This is more than a year ago. Superheroes just don't work in prose. They're a comic book contrivance, and they really only work in that medium. Every time I read stories, prose stories about superheroes, they read like someone who's writing outside of their medium, outside of their area of expertise, some random author saying, I'm going to write a superhero story, and they don't really know anything about superheroes, and they don't know how to write them. And everything they write has been done before and been done better by experts. The same thing here. I have exactly the same review of this, L. E. Modessit. He is called a science fiction author. But the stories that I was reading in this book, again, they read like someone who's writing outside of his genre. Every story is just kind of blah. Every premise he starts with has been done before, usually many times, and done much better by experienced experts in the science fiction field. That's about it as far as new acquisitions. I don't have anything really new to talk about other than, oh, I got this in the mail yesterday. I had ordered a copy of Singularity by William Slater, but this arrived instead. Letting go of perfect is today's perfect Christian woman, a perfectly ridiculous concept. It's some sort of Christian self-help book. They sent me the wrong book. And in the same delivery, I received this. If you watched my reviews of the Kano computer, you heard me talking about wanting a remote control for a computer. Well, this arrived, and it works. I may do a separate review of it. It's not perfect, but it appears to do the trick. All right, I may have some other stuff to rant about, but I can't think of it right now. That's it for the time being. I'll see you in my next review sometime later this week. Bye.