My favorite writer
A new feature; book of the week!
For years I’ve tried to tell people about what I’m reading, and I always trip up over it.
As a New Year’s resolution I would boldly start some Goodreads blog, pledging to write a one- or two-sentence description of every book I read.
And I always stopped a few days into the project, because I was scared of stepping on toes.
I’d read a book I didn’t like as much as I thought I would. Hey, it happens. But I’d vowed to review every book I read And rather than not post a review, or post a negative review, or an honest one, I’d lie. On like Day 6 of this year-long project I’d recommend a book I actually quite disliked.
And what would a hypothetical writer who obsessively stalked every traceable utterance about him or her do if they found my praise? They’d see right through it as the pap it was. And I’d have an enemy for life. Worse, I’d have crushed them with this review, just devastated them, in that way where if you overhear someone talking about you it’s worse than if they say it to your face.
I would be a sucker for any elephant repellent spray, I know.
But I’ve been on the other end of this! Someone asked for a review copy of one of my books. They promised they’d post a good review, except for if they just hated and despised the book. Then they’d just not post anything, because they didn’t want to be mean.
I sent the review copy out.
No review was ever posted.
(Hey, maybe they forgot.)
(They didn’t forget.)
Anyway, all of this is to say in addition to Leia, Spidey, Mario, and Mickey, I’m going to briefly talk about a book I read and loved over the last week. If you bumped into me and asked what I read and liked recently, this will be that book.
I will specify that maybe it’s not a book I read over the last seven days. There are some weeks where what I read isn’t stuff I deeply and truly love. I finish almost every book I start, and my thumbs-up ratio is decently high, but it’s not 100%.
So, starting off: the first ever BOOK OF THE WEEK, by my favorite writer.
TRIASSIC TANGO, by SEAN RYAN
Sean’s my brother, and my favorite writer. This is his first book.
Wait, how can he be your favorite writer if this is his first book?
Well, I don’t keep a journal. Neither does Sean. What we do is email each other about our days.
Sometimes we’ll write back and respond to what the other person wrote, but usually we don’t. It’s enough for us to know that our thoughts have been digested and formatted enough to cohere into paragraphs. And that someone else, one reader, has read them, and is up to date with our life.
Much of what we write is similar day to day: commuting times, getting kids ready for bed, what we’re eating, if we need to fill up the tank. This sort of stuff wouldn’t ever graduate to the level of small talk. (If someone cracked our email password and started snooping through the correspondence, pity on them: it’s like 200,000 words a month on what we’re probably going to have for lunch that day before it spoils.)
We both get to find new ways of expressing basically the same ideas over and over. On that level it’s a challenge of expression. A day doesn’t have to be thrilling for it to still be memorable, full of small moments you can box up and cherish.
That’s why Sean’s my favorite writer: I’ve read more of him than of anyone else.
And Triassic Tango is his first novel. It’s about a middle-aged English professor in upstate New York who’s bored with his curriculum, no one cares about the poetry monograph he’s been writing for two decades, and then one snowy day –
No, I’m kidding. Triassic Tango is about time-travelling dinosaurs.
They don’t mean to time travel, it just happens. Boop: dino in the present, just hanging out.
Sean’s cast of characters are a team of young adventurers whose job is to find out about these dino incursions, and save them from the world, and the world from them. The regular world be understandably concerned if they knew a T Rex could apparate on your town’s main street at any time.
Most adventure books like this have some sort of benevolent billionaire dropping stacks of cash on everyone so they can afford all their wrangling gear and travel and whatnot. Sean’s read more than his fair share of those books, and the Bruce Wayne deus ex machina always got to him. Isn’t there a cost-conscious way of doing this?
The crew of Triassic Tango are dirt cheap: they are the sort of people who use the breakfast buffet to make a peanut butter sandwich so they don’t have to pay for lunch. Sean really enjoyed figured out incredibly cheap ways to stretch dollars.
This is the Amazon link to the page: it’s absurdly cheap, either free or 99 cents or $2.99, depending upon if you’re already a Kindle user. A soda is costlier. If you amortize it by the number of dinosaurs in the book, it’s maybe two or three cents per dino. (Even less if you count dimetrodons, which as this book reminded me are ancient lizards that predate dinosaurs, but not dinosaurs proper.)
There’s a real story behind it: you’ll grow to like Ethan and Viv (the main characters) quite a lot as they try to deal with their missions, and deal with their developing feelings for each other. And loads of cinematic moments of wonder. More fun stuff that will play out in the sequel, which Sean is writing right now.
Give it a whirl, would you? And if you like it, I’ll pass on the nice words to Sean.
And now I’ve passed the worrying-about-reviews curse onto YOU! Now YOU will be improbably haunted over committing the most minor of online faux pas! You thought I was exaggerating over its agita levels, right!
PRINCESS LEIA OF THE WEEK
Dinosaur week!
(Hey, 65 million years ago is a long time ago, right?)
SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK
(That is one put-upon Yoshi right there.)
SPIDER-MAN OF THE WEEK
(A toy that’s definitely, absolutely not aimed at me, no, I have no idea how it accidentally appeared on my Amazon wish list.)
MICKEY MOUSE OF THE WEEK
(I was suprised how many times Mickey Mouse has canonically run into dinosaurs. Maybe HE is the rodent that survived the comet that killed the dinosaurs!)
UPCOMING APPEARANCES
MAY 3-5: FAN EXPO PHILLY — Philadelphia, PA
MAY 24-26: THY GEEKDOM COME — Oaks, PA
JUNE 15-16: RHODE ISLAND ANIME CON — Providence, RI
JULY 13-14: CONTROPOLIS NJ — Secaucus, NJ
JULY 18-21: CONNECTICON — Hartford, CT
AUGUST 16-18: TERRIFICON — Uncasville, CT (This one may not happen since I trying to figure out a way to get there by Friday morning and right now the best I can do is Saturday afternoon)
AUGUST 23-25: RETROWORLD EXPO — Hartford, CT
SEPTEMBER 20-22: BALTIMORE COMIC-CON — Baltimore, MD
NOVEMBER 1-3 RHODE ISLAND COMIC-CON — Providence, RI