If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’ll notice I publish a lot of book reviews. Frankly, these are Goodreads reviews I cross post to my blog, but I get a lot of traffic here when I publish book reviews. So you might have noticed I haven’t written any in awhile. I wanted to address that.

I’m actually in the middle of a number of books right now, which is how I tend to read — I can’t read just one book at a time. Among the books I’m reading are Camus, A Romance by Hawes, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haldeman’s Forever Peace, Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer by Huffington, and a couple of books by Frederik Pohl. That’s a lot, I know, and that’s one reason I haven’t written any book reviews. I read 20 or 30 pages in one book and then move on to another. The one I’m closest to finishing right now is the Camus book. I’ll probably be writing a review on it sometime soon. The Malcolm X book is interesting. It’s a required book in many high school and college classes, but I can’t figure out why. He’s just an immature narcissistic jerk, as far as I can tell. I’m only a third of the way through it, but he spends all of his time bragging about just what an asshole he was. I’d quit reading it, but I want to find out how he made his conversion to Islam and became the leader the country knew him as. So I guess I’ll continue. It’s irritating me though.

Another reason I haven’t written a review is there just aren’t any page turners in this group of books. The Hillary Clinton book was huge, but I couldn’t put it down. It was fascinating. I normally can’t put Phillip K. Dick books down. Some books you just have to read, you know? None of these books are doing it for me. They’re more of a chore, especially the Picasso one, which I had looked forward to. (It’s disappointing to read what an asshole he was….)

Yet another reason I’ve not written any reviews is I’ve gotten back into computer gaming. I used to be an avid gamer, particularly back in the 1990s. My favorite games remain Master of Orion 2, Civilization, and X-COM. They still make the Civilization series and I’ve recently started playing Civilization 5 and it’s been a whole lot of fun. I really haven’t played it for a couple of years. In fact, after playing this darn game for 20 years, last month I finally won for the first time! I won again last week. It’s been very cool. I’ve also found a game I had been into two years ago with an old work friend. It’s a game based on the classic X-COM called UFO: Alien Invasion and it’s near dead on, even an improvement on the original. It’s a free GNU game (like Linux — open source) which you can download from the Net. The last version I had broke on my Mac. Simply didn’t work. With my health problems last year, I just forgot about it, but remembered it a couple of weeks ago and downloaded a new version which works beautifully and I’m really enjoying it. The thing about these two games is they’re turn based strategy games that can take days and weeks to complete, so you can’t just sit down for 20 minutes and win a game. It takes awhile. So my reading time has really been diminished over the past couple of weeks. Some other games I’ve been playing include Air Attack, Hockey Nations 2011, Ships N’Battles, and Blackjack World Pro. I’ve recently gotten a golf game and a Star Wars game that look cool. I frankly don’t know when I’m going to find the time to play all of these games. There aren’t enough hours in the day!

Well, I guess that about covers it. I’m sorry if you’ve missed my book reviews. I have about 40 books I’m sitting on waiting to read, so more will be forthcoming, I promise. I just have to make the time and it would be helpful if some of them were real page turners. I’m actually holding a couple of Phillip K. Dick books back because I want to look forward to reading them later. I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season, and happy reading!