Frog and Toad are wonderful, full stop. It’s a collection of collections, with 4 parts, each of which has a handful (5?) of short stories. You can read the individual stories or go through them all back to back (as I did over the last few nights). The stories are thematically related, but there’s no real plot between them, so no reason to read them in any particular order.

I think my favorite part of reading this is sharing just how wonderful the relationship between Frog and Toad is. They may argue sometimes, but they’re always supportive in the end and really great friends. Also, I love doing voices. For me Toad ended up with a deep ’toadlike’ voice and Frog somehow ended up being Mouse from the Matrix… Who knows.

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Without reading more than the summary and without having read much if at all from the LitRPG genre before, the first 10% or so of Sufficiently Advanced Magic felt rather strange. We open with the protagonist, Corin Cadence, going into the Serpent Spire, “a colossal tower with ever-shifting rooms, traps, and monsters”. The description of the tower and the rooms and especially the magic of the world feels rather like someone took a role-playing game rulebook and wrote a book about it. And… it turns out that’s exactly what LitRPG novels are supposed to feel like.

That part of the book continues to feel weird to me throughout–it’s the hardest of hard magic systems, with overly specified classes of mana and magic, with well defined levels and powers for each of them. I actually like that sort of thing, but there are long sections of exposition that get a bit hard to stay focused on.

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The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

Digital Minimalism makes a strong claim that modern smartphones and social media are every bit as addictive and dangerous as any number of more well known drugs and that we’d be well put to cut out or at least drastically reduce the amount of digital ‘clutter’ in our lives.

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Well that’s a lovely connection

James Harriot (pen name for James Alfred Wight) was rural veterinarian in the middle of the 20th century in rural England. Once he turned 50 his wife encouraged him to follow his dreams and actually write a book, so he took his lifetime of experiences and stories and … started writing about football. Which didn’t work out. Eventually, he turned back to what he knew best with stories of the life and times of a country vet.

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It was bad enough that Americans insisted on driving themselves everywhere, but Los Angeles in particular seemed to depend on individual cars the way other, more intelligent cities depended on public transportation. And their reward for this individualism was to spend hours of every day in gridlock. Petra thought it was a perfect example of American “independence”—selfish, lazy, and with a complete lack of foresight.

Not entirely wrong.

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How do you connect a plane crash based on two overlapping terrorist plots, hidden mob-like family, a Mexican revolution based on bringing back the might of the Aztec empire, an Egyptian revolution based on fundamental Islam, a Roman ship far from where any Roman ship has any right to be, and the lost Library of Alexandria?

Carefully. Very very carefully.

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Which is how I ended up being the only one who could help. As a null, I don’t have any particular magic powers—just the opposite, really. I negate all the magic within a certain radius around me, creating a magic-free bubble that has me as its center. In theory, if Marko stayed within that area, I could keep him human for a short time, and he and his wife could make a baby the old-fashioned way. Assuming, of course, we could all get past the extreme awkwardness that would be involved.

It was weird, but it was far from the weirdest thing I’d done lately. The leaders of the Los Angeles vampires, werewolves, and witches all paid me a retainer to clean up supernatural problems that arose in the city. When things were quiet, as they’d been for the past couple of months, I was free to pick up freelance work.

Most of the time this involved shepherding vampires around during daylight activities, but two weeks earlier, I had been paid to attend a witch’s beach volleyball tournament so I could make sure her opponent wasn’t using magic to cheat. A few days before that, I’d accompanied a crowd-shy werewolf to a taping of his favorite sitcom, to help him stay calm in the midst of all that teeming humanity. I might have actually enjoyed that outing, except the sitcom was one of those “fat slovenly husband vs. shrill anorexic wife” crapfests. Freelance work could be kind of a gamble.

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When I finished Boundary Crossed and the sequels in 2017, I enjoyed them enough to put Melissa F. Olson’s other books on my ever expanding to-read list. Last year, I randomly choose Midnight Curse to read and finally got to it this year–not realizing that it’s actually the second Scarlett Bernard series. Dead Spots is the first (even before Boundary Crossed actually).

It doesn’t actually matter that much, at least so far, but there are a number of references to previous events that I expect I would already know about. So it goes. It’s actually kind of nice not to go through Scarlett first finding out about the Old World and getting acclimated and just start out in the middle of everything. Plus, having the protagonist that basically cleans up messes and neutralizes anyone else in the Old World is pretty cool. Also, she’s wonderfully snarky.

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Okay, Cussler really jumped the shark (over the moon?) in Cyclops . After the mind control plot of Deep Six , I figured things would stay a bit more grounded this time around.

Nah. Moon colonies. A plot to take over Cuba. El Dorado (or rather La Dorada!). Conversations with Fidel Casto. It’s all here. And it’s completely ridiculous. I wish there’d been a bit more focus on one or two of the plotlines (particular La Dorada, that’s the Pitt I prefer), but so it goes.

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Franny, you are the genuine article. You are solid. You are certain. You are like a refrigerator. You hum.

Francine Poulet is the greatest Animal Control Officer in Gizzford County and now she has to go up against her own worst enemy: self doubt, panic attacks, and facing your fears. Also a ghost racoon. But that’s not really what the story is about.

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