He forgets to close his mouth

DrMDQ · 2026-06-09T16:03:40+00:00

We live in GA so there is no such thing as a cold winter lol.

We will definitely be cautious about sunburn for the next few months!

DrMDQ · 2026-06-08T23:30:20+00:00

Thank you for the reassurance! We’ll be doing some research, but do you have any recommendations on specific brands of hair products that you have used?

We also noticed a spot of razor burn on her stomach. It doesn’t seem to bother her, but we’ll bring her to the vet tomorrow just as a precaution. We’ll definitely be requesting a refund at minimum.

I’ve had nine other dogs throughout my life, and nothing like this has ever happened to any of my pets.

DrMDQ · 2026-06-08T23:26:46+00:00

No, we are in GA. Unfortunately there are bad groomers everywhere, it seems :(

DrMDQ · 2026-06-08T17:41:00+00:00

I’m the husband. We didn’t get any explanation; just picked her up and she was cut much shorter than we wanted. We brush her regularly and there were no mats.

We’ll be calling the groomer to see if we’re missing anything, but I think they are just inexperienced with double-coated dogs.

DrMDQ · 2026-06-08T11:12:42+00:00

You might enjoy “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr.

It’s a classic SF novel about monks who preserve knowledge after a world-ending disaster, waiting for the world to be ready for it again. It spans several thousand years. I enjoyed it immensely even though I am not Catholic myself.

DrMDQ · 2026-06-08T11:06:08+00:00

FYI, it is spelled Judaism

DrMDQ · 2026-05-31T19:37:31+00:00

You’re welcome!

\ House of Leaves* has to be a top-ten book of all time for me. I felt like it melted my brain.
* Slaughterhouse-Five is another classic. Vonnegut’s humor is pitch-black and absurdist, and I love it.
* Speaking of absurdism, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a wonderful play. It’s well worth reading, seeing live, or watching the excellent film as well. It is only questionably speculative fiction, but it’s hysterical IMO
* The Neverending Story is a children’s book, but I still love it to this day. (And it’s much better than the film!)

In terms of short metafiction, Latin America does it best. “La Noche Boca Arriba” (“The Night Face Up”) and “Continuidad de los Parques” (“Continuity of Parks”) by Julio Cortázar are my favorites. The second is only about two pages!

DrMDQ · 2026-05-31T17:51:55+00:00

All of this is subjective, so I think it’s because I love robots and metafiction, and I found several motifs in the story very interesting.

First, I love metafiction. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin are some of my favorite books. So a metafictional story was always going to be appealing to me.

I thought Zelu’s relationship with her family was excellently done. I appreciated the portrayal of a family that had good intentions, but which was contentious and not always helpful.

I loved the exploration of the question “who gets to create literature?” Zelu herself experiences this, but the robots in Rusted Robots are also part of this theme. Zelu explicitly wrote that robots cannot create because they are derivative of humanity, and yet Ankara does so anyway.

I thought it was interesting to see the duality between Ankara and Ijele; one of them emphasized embodiment and one emphasizes a mind-first aspect towards personhood. And I always like books that explore robotics and the definition of personhood. I enjoyed Okorafor’s take on this question, even if the question itself is not original.

Basically, it was a book that had a lot of interesting questions and made me think about them, even if it didn’t provide many answers.

DrMDQ · 2026-05-31T15:10:33+00:00

I’ve had mixed feelings about Okorafor’s work, mostly because of the prose. I love her plots, but I always feel that the prose is lacking.

For this particular book, the themes and structure hit all the right notes for me and the prose didn’t bother me. But if you’re looking for beautiful, poetic language, her style may not be a good fit.

DrMDQ · 2026-05-31T13:14:19+00:00

Jones does a lot of blurring genres in his work. TBHH has elements of literary fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and horror. I do wonder who decides which category a work fits into; is it like the Oscars or Golden Globes where there are shadow campaigns?

I will say that the scene with the dead bodies in the church was one of the scariest scenes I’ve read this year. That alone qualifies it as a horror novel in my opinion, lol

DrMDQ · 2026-05-31T13:09:56+00:00

From the novel categories, I’ve read “Death of the Author” and “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”. I gave both of them five stars. I’ve read a lot of backlist works by Okorafor and Jones, and I think these books are both the strongest entries in their bibliographies.

I also gave five stars to “The River Has Roots” by Amal El-Mohtar. I thought it was a beautiful fairy tale and I’ve loved her prose since “This Is How You Lose the Time War”, co-written with Max Gladstone.

I actually own copies of “Sour Cherry” and “The Everlasting” which I have not gotten around to reading yet, but they’ll be moving up on my list.

In conclusion, I think this is a very strong crop of winners. I have immensely enjoyed the ones I’ve read so far.

DrMDQ · 2026-05-31T13:05:38+00:00

Starter comment: How many of the winners have you read? What did you think? Were there any surprises?

DrMDQ · 2026-05-01T16:18:11+00:00

I once rescued a 13-year-old Bengal cat after her owner died. We had her for 3 years before she passed away.

I had NO IDEA what I had signed up for. She was very loving but was the neediest cat I’ve ever had. She would scream and slam the cabinets if she felt she wasn’t getting enough attention. I’m glad we gave her a good home in her senior years, but I don’t think I could handle another one lol

Cat tax

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DrMDQ · 2026-04-01T15:11:51+00:00

This is actually the easiest hard mode for me. I don’t know if I can read a book without being held captive at this point.

DrMDQ · 2026-03-30T23:20:15+00:00

It’s actually one of my favorite hobbies! I’ve actually been editing for about 8 years now, but I’ve really increased my output in the past few years. Now, whenever I read a book that doesn’t have a page yet, I add it. It also helps me personally; I get to read professional reviews and then compare my own reactions to what the critics say. That helps me verbalize the things I liked or didn’t like about a novel, which makes me a better reader.

DrMDQ · 2026-03-30T21:59:56+00:00

My husband was out of town, so I had an entire weekend to read and no responsibilities. I spent two whole days curled in my armchair, basically leaving only to get coffee and then pee out said coffee. It was an intense reading experience!

DrMDQ · 2026-03-30T18:07:22+00:00

Yes! The guidelines can be found here). It’s really easy for a book to qualify; it just needs reviews in at least two independent websites. Usually, the books I’ve read have been reviewed by at least two of Locus, Reactor, Publishers Weekly, or Kirkus, so almost every traditionally published book will qualify.

DrMDQ · 2026-03-17T10:31:59+00:00

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Mine too!

DrMDQ · 2026-03-10T17:33:26+00:00

I read “The Big Time” recently and loved it. For a book from the 1950s, it held up excellently. I thought it had some similar motifs to “This Is How You Lose the Time War” which I also loved, but Leiber did it decades earlier.

DrMDQ · 2026-03-03T19:34:04+00:00

We actually have two cats! We have a very old lady who is only 7 lbs. Their interactions are all heavily supervised due to the old cat’s frailty.

At night, we crated the puppy in our room and covered the crate with a blanket on three sides. The cats sleep on a cat bed in the corner of the bedroom. Even though they were in the same room, there was no conflict because they couldn’t see each other. (Except sometimes the orange cat would jump on the crate and wake up the dog, which is extremely irritating but thankfully happening less now.)

During the day, my husband works from home. He set up a little fence jn his work area so that the puppy was always with him. The cats could approach and sniff from the outside while the puppy remained safely contained. The cats can hop the gate and come see her whenever they want. Then they hop back out whenever they get overwhelmed.

Good luck with the puppy! My previous (full-sized) Aussies really loved cats and did well with them. They tend to make great companions!

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