• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 30th, 2023
  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are you looking forward to in 2025?
    4·
    16 hours ago

    You joke, but here’s the thing… neither of the two heart attacks I had felt like heart attacks.

    Thought the first one was just bad heartburn. Fought it for FIVE DAYS. In my defense, it started 3 days after Thanksgiving and I DID have that extra plate of sweet potatoes.

    2nd one, I was just having a hard time breathing. No pain. At all. Doc had changed up my meds, sent me to the ER to get checked, had the heart attack IN the ER.

    Feel something weird? Ask your doctor. Goes on for more than 24 hours? Get help ASAP. Don’t do what I did.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    41·
    19 hours ago

    Oh, boy, you have to understand… I have my own library… separated into two rooms. A proper “library” library and a separate room for comic books and graphic novels.

    It’s really impossible to pick a single favorite. Best I can do is make suggestions by genre:

    Travel:

    Redmond O’Hanlon, “Into the Heart of Borneo” and “In Trouble Again”. A natural history book REVIEWER is packed up and sent to first Borneo and then the Amazon. They are bright, funny, and immensely readable. He followed them up with “No Mercy” which is about the Congo and it is dark, depressing and heartbreaking. I’m glad I read it, but it’s a bit of a record scratch after the first two.

    Tim Cahill, “Road Fever”. He has multiple travel books, “A Wolverine is Eating My Leg”, “Jaguars Ripped My Flesh” and “Pecked to Death By Ducks”, but Road Fever is my favorite. He was hired by GM as a promotional stunt to drive their new truck from the tip of Argentina to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska as fast as he could.

    Dark Fantasy:

    The Night Watch books (6 of them) by Sergei Lukyanenko. This is a hard one to suggest, because after writing the very good books, he took this J.K. Rowling style turn and went off the deep end on the Ukraine/Russia issue. Lukyanenko is a Russian of Ukrainian heritage and has gone full Putin. :(

    The books themselves were all written before the Crimean invasion and are separate from real world politics. The premise is there have been two warring factions, the Night Watch, a group of magicians, shapeshifters, and other magical entities who serve as a bureacratic stop against the Day Watch, your vampires, witches, and werewolves who have their own bureaucratic structure holding the Night Watch accountable.

    There was a film called “Night Watch” which is quite good, it adapts about 1/3rd of the first book. The sequel “Day Watch” isn’t as good, and veered from the book so hard, it painted them into a corner to a point where no 3rd film was possible. :(

    Fiction:

    Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Cemetery of Forgotten Books (5 books). Not technically a “series”, but all set in post Franco Spain. The first book, Shadow of the Wind introduces the Cemetery of Forgotten books, where a young boy is given custody of a book from a mysterious library of lost, out of print, and mysterious editions.

    He finds that someone is going through Europe, collecting all books by that author, and burning them.

    The translator here does a STUNNING job, there are lyrical turns of phrase that border on poetry. A beautiful read.

    Romance:

    Nick Bantock - Griffin and Sabine books (7 books). These you really want to buy NEW and not used. It’s the story of a romance between Griffin and Sabine, but it’s done through a collection of reproduced letters, envelopes, and postcards. You’ll turn a page, find an envelope glued to the next page, open it, find a letter inside, unfold it and read it.

    Like kids pop-up books, used copies run the risk of damaged and missing bits.

    Superhero Comics:

    James Robinson, Starman. 81 issues, related crossovers and mini-series. Jack Knight is one of the sons of the 1940s hero Starman. He wants no part of his father’s legacy, that’s his brother’s deal, but when an old villain comes back, Jack picks up the mantle to defend himself. It’s a touching story of fathers, sons, brothers, and legacy.

    Allan Moore, Tom Strong. Ridiculously fun. Makes you happy to read comics again. A Doc Savage pastiche, Strong is a science hero. Experimented on by his parents, he has enhanced strength, speed and lifespan. Dedicating his life to solving science problems. At the end, dovetails into Moore’s treatise on magic, Promethea, which is a bit of a tougher read. A Wonder Woman variation with Moore’s notes on magic and the end of the world. So it ends with the juxtaposition of science vs. magic.