Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
Bacon Fest – Easton’s biggest festival (73,700 attendees in 2023) is coming Nov. 2-3, 2024. To promote, the city has Bacon Fest t-shirt wearing scarecrows sitting on benches around downtown. Chip met his first scarecrow today … and he didn’t like it. Chip is an 11-month-old Seeing Eye puppy my family is raising (our 7th) … Read more
Many years ago, at the dawn of the podcasting era, my friend Mur Laffery and I were podcasters. We were also writers, me mostly non-fiction, Mur fiction (well, actually, we both wrote non-fiction, but Mur wrote – and podcast – a lot more fiction than I did). She’s written a lot of fiction since then, and I’m … Read more
Our Seeing Eye Puppy Raising Club held its annual puppy night at the IronPigs in tonight. A small host of puppies (and their human friends) saw our local AAA minor league team take on the Rochester Redwings. The ‘Pigs won, 4-2, thanks to a walk off home run in the bottom of the 10th.
Dragons of Deceit sees legendary Dragonlance authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman return to their creation. This time, the story focuses on Destina, a young noble woman whose father died in the War of the Lance. Not one to let a little thing like death stop her, Destina seeks to travel back in time to prevent her … Read more
The latest book in the Revelation Space series finds humanity’s galactic civilization all but wiped out by the life-destroying (and alien) wolves.
I enjoyed the world building – and world destroying – in Brian Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, in which alien gods walk the earth, an Empire struggles to survive against an ancient conspiracy, and the Kettral – elite, giant-bird riding warriors – try to stay alive through it all. This book picks up five … Read more
I first read “Manage Your Day-to-Day” after attending David Cameron’s presentation “Human at Work or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get Better at My Job” at HighEdWeb 2014. The presentation had a big impact on me and inspired me to look at things like: Blocking out creative/project time on my calendar Knowing when my most … Read more
I first read Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber novels in college, after being introduced to them by my roommate. I’ve revisited them several times over the years. They revolve around the city of Amber, which is the archetypal city and the nexus of all Order in the universe. Everything else is shades of Chaos; any worlds you … Read more
The Rhythm of War is the fourth book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. It’s epic fantasy in the vein of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, and at 1,232 pages (57 hours, 26 minutes in audiobook form) it is a hefty tome. I’m planning on alternating between the print and audio versions … if I can … Read more