08:18 – Barbara is off with our friend Bonnie Richardson to the craft show in Greensboro.
I finally got around to reading One Second After, the 2009 TEOTWAWKI novel that put EMP on most preppers’ radar. It’s basically a mediocre writer’s attempt to rewrite Pournelle’s and Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer, relocating it from the California mountains to the North Carolina mountains and recasting the threat to an EMP attack from an asteroid impact. The book could have used a decent editor. Or perhaps I should say “could of used”. By about the 20th time the author used “of” rather than “have” I was ready to scream; by the 100th time I was ready to track down and strangle the author. Despite nearly 3,900 Amazon reviews averaging 4.4 stars and despite being on the NYT bestseller list for three months and despite the foreward by Newt Gingrich, this is a bad book. Bad science, bad plotting, bad dialog, and to say the characters are cardboard is an insult to cardboard. Apparently there is a sequel in the works. I won’t bother to read it.