Pointless Babblings

Jan

2025

Books Read in 2024

A massive stack of generic books, no titles or covers visible.

This may come as a shock, but I quite like to read. Here’s what I read in 2024, and a little bit about what I thought of each book.

About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, Expanded 2nd Edition – 1975-1977, Seasons 12-14 by Tat Wood. I am a nerrrrrrrd. But if you’re an obsessive Doctor Who fan like me, I can’t recommend this series enough.
My Side of the Mountain by Jean George. A boy’s-own survivalist story from the ’50s that I loved as a kid and thought I’d revisit. It holds up!
Infinity Son by Adam Silvera. I love super-heroes and I love novels, but I don’t love super-hero novels. This was fun, but I haven’t picked up the next book in the series yet.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Have you heard of this? Kind of obscure. Great little book, though.
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, Expanded 2nd Edition – 1977-1980, Seasons 15-17 by Tat Wood. Shut up.
Eternity Weeps (Doctor Who: The New Adventures) by Jim Mortimore. I’ve very slowly getting around to some Doctor Who novels I missed in the 90s.
Unsouled (Cradle 1) by Will Wight. I’ve really gotten to love progression fantasy and I devour whole series like candy. The Cradle series is terrific. The next bunch of entries are going to be a little repetitive.
Soulsmith (Cradle 2) by Will Wight.
Blackflame (Cradle 3) by Will Wight.
Skysworn (Cradle 4) by Will Wight.
Ghostwater (Cradle 5) by Will Wight.
Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City by Elyssa Maxx Goodman. I’m usually reading two books at once, one fluffy, one more substantive. This book is a must if you’re a drag fan, especially if you want to learn how much more there is to the art form than what you’ll see on Drag Race.
Underlord (Cradle 6) by Will Wight. Back on my bullshit.
Uncrowned (Cradle 7) by Will Wight.
Wintersteel (Cradle 8) by Will Wight.
This Must Be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City by Jesse Rifkin. Looks at the development of multiple music scenes in NYC by focusing on the venues where they originated and grew. It’s fantastic. Brought back a lot of memories of my clubbing days.
Bloodline (Cradle 9) by Will Wight.
Reaper (Cradle 10) by Will Wight.
Dreadgod (Cradle 11) by Will Wight.
Waybound (Cradle 12) by Will Wight.
Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira. The story of the disciple Christ loved. It’s gorgeous. You must read this.
The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway. I was headed to Key West so I thought I’d bone up on my Hemingway. This one was a bit confusing until I learned it’s a parody of a once-popular, now-mostly-forgotten novel.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Here we go! That’s the Hemingway I remember.
Life in the North (System Apocalypse 1) by Tao Wong. Yeah, another progression fantasy series I devoured. This one was also great, and it had a queer lead – always a plus.
Redeemer of the Dead (System Apocalypse 2) by Tao Wong.
The Cost of Survival (System Apocalypse 3) by Tao Wong.
Cities in Chains (System Apocalypse 4) by Tao Wong.
Coast on Fire (System Apocalypse 5) by Tao Wong.
World Unbound (System Apocalypse 6) by Tao Wong.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Sometimes the classics are classics for a reason, you know?
Stars Awoken (System Apocalypse 7) by Tao Wong.
Rebel Star (System Apocalypse 8) by Tao Wong.
Stars Asunder (System Apocalypse 9) by Tao Wong.
Broken Council (System Apocalypse 10) by Tao Wong.
Forbidden Zone (System Apocalypse 11) by Tao Wong.
System Finale (System Apocalypse 12) by Tao Wong.
Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin. This book fucking broke me, in the best possible way. Queer horror at its best.
Wool (Silo 1) by Hugh Howey. A landmark series in the self-publishing world, I thought I’d finally get around to it before I watched the TV adaptation. It’s really good!
Shift (Silo 2) by Hugh Howey.
Dust (Silo 3) by Hugh Howey.
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin. Not quite what I thought it’d be – I was expecting a broad history of gay bars, but it’s more of a memoir of the author’s personal experiences with them. Excellent nevertheless.
Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World by Brandon Kiem. Leave the coyotes alone! A fascinating look at wild animals living in human-dominated habitats.
Eskau (Millennial Mage 7) by J.L. Mullins. Playing catch-up on yet another progression fantasy series I love.
Ironbound (Millennial Mage 8) by J.L. Mullins.
Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy. I dig the author’s progressive politics; she focuses on a lot on how game theory has been used to enable capitalism’s ruination of the world.
Gay Key West: A History by Richard McGarry and Greg Madsen. I picked this up on my vacation – a small-press book with biographies of notable gay Key West residents over the years.
When Wizards Follow Fools (Arcane Ascension 5) by Andrew Rowe. Yes, more progression fantasy. Didn’t I say they were like candy?
In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life by Amy Schneider. Finished off the year with a memoir by my favorite Jeopardy! champ. I met her at Comic-Con and got it signed!

Dec

2023

Who doesn’t love a good end-of-the-year list? I actually don’t particularly care for them, but here’s mine anyway! I don’t think I’ll finish my two current reads in the two days remaining, so here’s every book I finished in 2023.

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Trans dystopia. Loved it. Perfect if you’re an angry queer like me.
Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right by Elizabeth Sandifer. It’s worth brushing up on your scholarly jargon to dive into these essays – the book’s a couple years old now, but some of the figures examined are (sadly) relevant at the moment.
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee. So gay. So historical. I fell in love.
The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky by Mackenzi Lee. A follow-up novella. Still so gay.
Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer. A book on creativity and world-building. Beautiful.
The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee. Not quite as gay but still pretty queer.
The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks by Mackenzi Lee. The least queer of the series, but I forgive it. Did I mention I fell in love?
Answers in the Form of Questions by Claire McNear. A history of Jeopardy!. Fascinating if you’re a fan.
Pilgrim in the Palace of Words by Glenn Dixon. A study of the evolution of languages in the form of a travelogue. Took me a bit to get into it, but I enjoyed it by the end.
Bad Therapy by Matthew Jones. One of the later books in the Doctor Who New Adventures series from the 90s. Working my way through (slowly).
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. A reread to refresh my memory before reading the new one.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. Okay, I loved it.
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. I love Mary Roach. Essays on science and culture that are both silly and serious.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I had ready and loved Seveneves so I thought I should try his classic. I thought it was decent, but I found it a bit of a slog to get through, if I’m being honest.
Mageling by J.L. Mullins. I was looking for something in the genre of progressive fantasy, which is what I’m currently writing, and tried this. As you’ll see from the next couple of entries, I quite liked it.
Mage by J.L. Mullins.
Binding by J.L. Mullins.
Bound by J.L. Mullins.
Fusing by J.L. Mullins. And then I was all caught up.
Hi Honey, I’m Homo! by Matt Beaume. A history of queerness on television told through essays focusing on individual sit-coms. I tore through this.
Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom by Brian Olsen. Okay, look. I’ve never reread any of my books, and after an extended writing break I’m gearing up for the release of a new one. I thought I should take another look at my first two series and see if they held up before I started the marketing machine again. And you know what? They do! And they take just as long to read as books I didn’t write, so I’m including them in this list. So there.
Caitlin Ross and the Commute from Hell by Brian Olsen.
Mark Park and the Flume of Destiny by Brian Olsen.
Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time by Brian Olsen.
The Dystopia Spell by Brian Olsen.
Night of the Living Date by Brian Olsen.
The Case of the Empty Throne by Brian Olsen.
How to Kill a Vampire in Outer Space by Brian Olsen.
Karma & the Seven Cups by Timothy James Ryan. Middle-grade fiction by my college roommate. It’s fantastic!
Fused by J.L. Mullins. Next book when?
The Reality Frame by Brian Clegg. Building a universe from scratch as a thought experiment. Fun, amateur-friendly science.
The Guncle by Steven Rowley. Recommended by my niece and nephew. I am nowhere near as fun a guncle as the title character but my jealousy didn’t ruin my enjoyment.
Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa by Zine Magubane. I read a speech she gave to my high school in the alumni newsletter and was interested enough to pick up her book. Quite scholarly, but if that’s your thing it’s a really fascinating look at… well, at exactly what the subtitle says.
Edge of the Woods by Andrew Rowe. More progression fantasy from one of my favorite progression fantasy authors. I do sometimes wish he’d finish one series before starting another, though…
The Heisenberg Corollary by C. H. Duryea. Fun hard science/fantasy mash-up from another old friend of mine!
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. End of the world and coming of age, can’t beat that combo!

Jan

2023

My Dad, the Doctor, and Me

“I’ve been watching since I was seven,” is what I always say when my love for Doctor Who comes up in conversation. “My dad got me into it.”

It’s possible I wasn’t seven. I didn’t make a note of it or anything. But that’s the age that’s stuck in my memory, and I’ve said it aloud enough times that it may as well be true. Seven years old, so it could have been late 1979, but I’m pretty sure it was 1980.

My father had been trying to get me to watch for ages, insisting I’d love it, but on WGBH, Boston’s public television station, Doctor Who aired weekdays at 7pm, and that was prime playing-outside time.

But one night, for whatever reason – maybe it was raining, maybe none of the other kids on the street were around, or maybe my dad was just particularly insistent – I sat down in the back room of our house, a small room at the end of the hall that served as my dad’s TV room (mom’s was the living room). The back room had a couch and a chair, both of which he ignored, preferring to sit on the floor, eye level with the television, which was housed in a low cabinet. And sitting on the floor together, my father and I watched the third episode of “The Hand of Fear,” a Tom Baker story, the last to feature Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith.

I thought it was fine, I guess?

It probably didn’t help that I had no idea what was going on. I’m not sure I came back for the fourth and final episode.

A little detective work now. The website broadwcast.org features an encyclopedic listing of international air dates for Doctor Who. A quick perusing of the page for WGBH gives a couple of possible days on which this underwhelming start to my journeys with the Doctor might have begun.

The only possible air date where I’m 7 is Tuesday, September 16, 1980, but that doesn’t seem quite right to me. The next story they showed was an out-of-sequence “The Robots of Death,” and I’m sure that “The Deadly Assassin” was shown in its rightful place after “The Hand of Fear” when I watched. I know because I remember thinking I was just intrigued enough by what I had seen, and, probably subconsciously, enjoying the idea of a show my father and I could watch together, that I gave it another try, and was even more baffled by the cryptic political nightmarescapes of “Assassin.” It’s a great story, but perhaps not the best introduction to the show for a 7-year-old.

December 19 is the next possible date. But that doesn’t sound right, either, and not just because I’d have turned 8 by then. I remember being torn between watching and playing because it was nice outside. Not that I didn’t play outside in winter, but my memory tells me it was sunny when the show aired. My memory lies to me constantly, but it’s all I have to go on.

That brings me to the following spring – Monday, May 11. So it was 1981, not 1980, and I was 8, not 7.

I don’t know why that makes me a little sad. It doesn’t change anything, except one small detail about the story I tell whenever I have reason to talk about how long I’ve been a fan.

Anyway, this date feels right because “The Deadly Assassin” aired next, followed by “The Face of Evil.” Despite “Assassin” failing to catch my interest, I gave the show a third and final chance by watching the first episode of “Face,” and that’s where it got me. I came in at the start of a new story, a story introducing a new character who had as much to learn about the Doctor as I did, and the show no longer felt confusing or unwelcoming.

If Tom Baker was my Doctor, Louise Jameson as Leela was my companion. My father was a Leela fan too, and watching her run of stories with him fixed my attachment to the show. He had seen them all before and was eager for me to appreciate them, and happy that his certainty that I’d love them was proving correct. We watched “The Talons of Weng-Chiang,” a favorite of my father’s due to the similarities to his greater love, Sherlock Holmes. I remember sitting at his side transfixed by the creepiness of “Horror of Fang Rock.” He knew I’d love K-9, the robot dog introduced in “The Invisible Enemy” (and what 8-year-old wouldn’t?). Dad explained Gallifrey, the Doctor’s home planet, to me when we got there in “The Invasion of Time,” Leela’s final story.

The next episode to air was the first part of “Robot,” Tom Baker’s debut story, as WGBH had run out of new episodes. I got to meet Sarah Jane properly this time. Watching “The Hand of Fear” from the beginning, with the approaching-encyclopedic knowledge of any child with a new obsession, I couldn’t believe I’d been so dismissive of it the first time around. As for “The Deadly Assassin” – well, it would take a couple more years to really get that one. (Honestly, I’m still not sure I do.) And then Leela was back, and I watched her stories the second time as eagerly as I’d watched them the first.

My father, however, slowly lost interest as the limited episodes available for the US to license got repeated, and repeated, and repeated again. Whenever the opening titles revealed that we had once again looped back to the first episode of “Robot” he would express his disappointment, and before long I was watching without him, on one of the other TVs in the house. I’m not sure exactly when that happened. I know we were still watching together when WGBH finally moved past Leela in October of 1982. I think we finished out that first airing of Tom Baker’s final seasons, his departure happening in January of 1983. But after the last episode of “Logopolis” it was back to the first episode of “Robot,” and I can almost hear my father crying out in annoyance at yet another rerun. So that was probably it. Maybe we watched another story or two here or there after that but certainly by July of 1984, when the popularity of the show in the US had grown enough that PBS began showing the newest episodes, starring Peter Davison, Dad was done.

Which was fine, really. My brother and my cousin had long since joined me in my fandom, so I still had someone to talk to about it, to pick up issues of Doctor Who Magazine for me, to introduce me to the burgeoning Doctor Who convention scene. (I met Tom Baker in person! I was too stunned to speak but he grinned at me and said something nice I can no longer remember.)

My love for the Doctor has only deepened over the years since my dad introduced us. I stayed with it through the final years of its original run, through the end of the 80s, when I had to watch on my sisters’ TV, for some reason the only set in the house that could pick up the New Hampshire PBS station showing Sylvester McCoy’s episodes. I stayed faithful through the wilderness years of the 90s, through the disappointment of the Fox TV-movie, through the show’s renewal and reemergence into the popular consciousness in 2005. And I’m still very much faithful to it today.

I’ve tried to get my father back into it, here and there. I gave him a bootleg VHS copy of “The Curse of Fatal Death,” a 1999 parody starring Rowan Atkinson, whom I knew he liked. He watched it once, politely, but the tape eventually made its way in with my own, and now sits in my closet. I thought the new show would interest him, but it wasn’t much to his taste. He watched an episode or two, but he doesn’t care for the ongoing arcs and deeper characterization of modern science fiction. Most recently, I tried to get him to watch “Legend of the Sea Devils” with me. It was the Easter 2022 special, and it sounded like it would be a fun one-off action piece. (And it was!) I was staying with him and my mom for a few weeks at the time. When I brought it up that morning he was interested, but by the time it aired that night, bed held more appeal. He’s over 90 now, I can hardly blame him.

So my dad’s relationship with the Doctor ended a long time ago, and that’s okay. Dad’s done a lot for me over the years, but making me sit down and watch Doctor Who with him all those decades ago is still the best gift he ever gave me. And even though we’ll probably never watch another episode together, it’ll always be something we share.

I’ve been watching Doctor Who since I was eight years old. My dad got me into it.

Nov

2022

Social Mediarama

As I write this, Twitter – my social media platform of choice – is being driven to ruin by an overmoneyed idiot. I’m sticking around, for the time being, but it’s unclear if those of us too smart/poor/uninterested to buy a blue check will actually be visible for much longer. In the meantime, you can always find the best ways to reach my on my contacts page, but here’s all my online presences as of November 11, 2022. (I’ve got a Linktree if you want ’em quick, but that doesn’t have my pithy, snarky comments.)

Obviously, there’s my blog, but you’re already here so it seems indulgently recursive to link to it. Leave me comments, if you like, and I’ll see them.

The absolute best way to keep up with what I’m doing is to sign up for one of my two newsletters. If you’re here for my books, sign up for my author newsletter – I don’t email that much, only when I’ve got something new coming out, but you get a free novella, exclusive to subscribers! And if you’re more interested in my acting or sketch/script writing, you can sign up for my performing newsletter. Or do both! Why not!

But if you want a form of communication that’s a little less one-way, I’m on Twitter, so long as it stands, as @brianolsenbooks. I post there the most out of all social media, and my DMs are open!

On Instagram, I’m also @brianolsenbooks. I’m on there quite a bit as well, and my DMs likewise beckon you. I post mostly when I’m doing something interesting, like going to a comic con or drinking too much.

Because I’m old, I still have Facebook, and my author page there is www.facebook.com/brianolsenbooks. I’m on there quite a bit, though all I really do is link back to this blog. You have to pay for anybody to actually see any of your posts, and why the hell would I do that?

I’ve been resurrecting my Tumblr account in the wake of Göttertwitterung – I am, surprise, also @brianolsenbooks there. So far also just links back to this blog, but I used to be pretty active there, back when you could post dicks. (I didn’t post dicks, but I found it comforting that they were there.)

Years ago I made a Mastodon account and never used. Still haven’t posted anything, but I want a Twitter exit strategy in case it’s where we all wind up. I’m at https://mastodon.social/@brianolsenbooks. I have no idea how it works yet.

I have a YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@brianolsenbooks. I haven’t done much with it – a couple of comedy videos, that’s about it. I’ll post more if I can get a little more than my current 11 subscribers (not that I don’t love them all). Honestly, you’ll see more of me at my sketch team’s channel, https://www.youtube.com/@15minutesaway. Lots of me acting and writing there! Why not subscribe to both?

And finally, I do have a TikTok, god of the elderly help me. I tried out making a few videos and decided it wasn’t for me, but I do follow other people on there, so follow me and maybe I’ll follow you back? If you must, I’m @brianolsenbooks.

That’s pretty much it, and isn’t it enough? I mean, I have a LinkedIn, but I don’t really use it, and I’m on Grindr but if you want to find me there you’ll have to come to the Bronx and try your luck. See you online!

Dec

2018

Back again

I’m resurrecting my long dormant blog…sort of. Recently a bunch of posts I wrote for another website were deleted, which saddened me, so I’m going to gradually repost them here. I don’t expect to post a lot of new material — I want to save my writing time for my books — but I’ve got a lot of fun stuff scattered across that site, Blogger, Tumblr, even my old Livejournal blog (remember Livejournal?) that I’d like to have gathered in one place, on my own site, under my own control. Watch this space!

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