Aaaannnd it’s March 2022 already. Big day today – Kentucky basketball game, State of the Union address, beginning and end of month bills to pay (those are all automated, but still…).

The State of the Union should be interesting. Poor Joe Biden has had his hands full since getting the job he always wanted. A mutating virus pandemic, repairing a wrecked economy, dealing with an insurrection, selecting a new Supreme, ignoring idiotic approval polls, getting out of the Middle East Forever War, working with around an unhelpful and childish Congress, and now trying to help Ukraine but avoid head-to-head conflict with Russia. Joe has no time to play Wordle. It’s a tough job, and I wouldn’t want it. So it’ll be interesting how much of that ground he covers tonight. If asked, I think he and his team are doing a great job of navigating through the obstacle course of 2022.

Between my own habits/blinders of book buying and Amazon’s irritatingly unimaginative recommendation algorithms, I’ve been in a reading rut lately. Hard to discover new books that I like. So I’ve been perusing the reading lists of others SFF junkies and have come up with a few new ideas of what to buy and read. So far my get-out-of-the-rut purchases include:

• Look to Windward, by Ian M. Banks (buying the hardcover to go with my collection of the rest of his books.)
• The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi
• Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution, by P. W. Singer and August Cole
• The Cold Between, by Elizabeth Bonesteel
• Tropic of Kansas, by Christopher Brown

That’s a good start. By the way, I lumbered through the paperback version of John Grisham’s latest small town lawyer story, A Time for Mercy, last week. I was underwhelmed. In 630 slow pages it covered no new ground and it had an uninteresting ending. I had great hope for it, but it definitely didn’t recapture the lightning of his earlier books. Not recommended.