More like game 3, less like game 4 please.
I'm nervous about this one.
All posts by Daneekas Ghost
Game Log: St. Louis Blues @ Minnesota Wild, Game 4
Game 3 was great, but apparently St. Louis isn't going to just give up.
The Wild have never had a two game lead in a playoff series. They are 0-3 when given the opportunity (all 3 games on the road).
Game Log: St. Louis Blues @ Minnesota Wild, Game 3
I thought the Wild played well in both games in St. Louis, minus a few hiccups that didn't hurt them in game 1, but did in game 2. The series is shaping up to be the close battle that everyone predicted it to be.
So now the series is in Minnesota and it's on the Wild to hold onto home-ice advantage. Generally the Wild have been good at home under Mike Yeo in the playoffs (6-2 record in the last two playoff years), but the home record hasn't been exactly spectacular as the season finished.
The historical pessimism corner:
- The Wild have never finished a home game with a series lead in franchise history.
- The Wild are 9-15 in games following a playoff loss in their history.
- The Wild are 10-17 in playoff games played in arenas where I have attended a hockey game.
Game Log: Minnesota Wild @ St. Louis Blues, Game 2
Historical pessimism worked so well last time, so here's a few more nuggets.
- The Minnesota Wild have only ever held a lead in a playoff series twice.
- Once in 2003 when they won game 1 to lead 1-0 against the Avalanche. They lost the next three games.
- Once in 2008 when they won game 3 to lead 2-1 against the Avalanche. They lost the next three games.
- The Minnesota Wild have never played a home playoff game where they entered the game with a series lead. (In actuality, they've never finished a home playoff game with a series lead, but that's a nugget for later in the series, I think)
Game 1 was a good game for the Wild, they just need to do that again.
Game Log: Minnesota Wild @ St. Louis Blues, GAME 1
How about some history?
- The Minnesota Wild are 1-7 in games 1 of playoff series in franchise history (they've lost 7 in a row).
- The Minnesota Wild are 8-18 in road playoff games in franchise history (they've lost 11 of their last 12).
- The Minnesota Wild have never beat the St. Louis Blues in a playoff game in franchise history.
- The Minnesota Wild are 7-18 in playoff games on days where the Twins won a baseball game (they are 11-11 if the Twins don't win or don't play)
OK, enough history.
I don't know what I think about this series, to be honest with you. The Wild are certainly capable of beating the Blues, but I would say that it wouldn't take much for the Blues to beat the Wild as well.
Looking around I see a lot of people saying this series is too close to call and then picking the Blues. The Wild have the advantage in goaltending and the penalty kill, but their power play just doesn't contribute and I can see that being a potential huge problem if the Blues find a way to get their own special teams rolling.
Still, if the goal totals stay low, I like the Wild's chances.
Either way, it's playoff hockey and therefore awesome. Here we go!
First Monday Book Day
A few thoughts.
Nebula Award nominees are out. One pet peeve I have with SF/F awards is that so much is series-oriented. This year 5 of the 6 nominees in the novel category are part of a series and one of them is book 7 in its series. (To be fair, 2 of the nominees are the first book in the series) and so require an awful lot of someone who uses these awards as reading list fodder. All that aside, I'm excited that The Three Body Problem was nominated. I definitely plan to pick that one up at some point in the future, and I was always going to read Ancillary Sword given how much I liked the first book.
I read Player Piano as part of my ongoing passage through Kurt Vonnegut's novels. It was pretty much as I remembered, not exactly what you think of when you think of Vonnegut, but so many of his consistent themes are right there from the very beginning.
I read some other stuff, but I'll save that for the comments.
Some good things that I found on the internet this month:
"Some Desperado" by Joe Abercrombie. A short story title that should be read sarcastically. It's a Western setting with a young woman trying to get away with the spoils of a robbery.
"Weary" by P.E. Garcia. A quiet, but strong short story. I'm not sure I can put my finger on why I liked this. But I did.
"Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov. The short story that became the first chapter of the novel by the same name. I actually read this a few years ago and loved it. But then I came across this reading of it by Alexsander Hemon and I got to listen to it again. I love the initial description of the title character and his situation.
First Monday Book Day: Biography x3
This year, I decided I was going to re-read (or read for the first time) all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. With that in mind, I looked around for some books that get into the background of both the books and the author. This month I read three biographies of various types. I'll admit that by the end of the third, I was feeling a little like I was going over the same material, but each was different enough. Listed below are the books that I read all or part of this month.
THE MAN:
And So it Goes - Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields
The word that comes to mind is "workman-like". It's about as straightforward as a biography can be. Point to point without much editorializing or analysis in between. Still, this filled in a lot of details about Vonnegut's life that I was not familiar with (the kids, the wives, the agents, etc.) and gave me a pretty good framework for the other biographical books that I read.
Letters by Kurt Vonnegut (edited by Dan Wakefield)
Reading this directly after the Shields biography was about perfect. A lot of the details that were only mentioned in passing in this book I was already familiar with from my previous reading. I enjoyed Vonnegut's writing even in this non-narrative format.
Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut
One of many "autobiographical collages" that Vonnegut published that collects some of his lectures and writings and attempts to connect them together. This is perhaps a little redundant with respect to the collection of letters above, but it was interesting to see how Vonnegut connects things as opposed to an editor or biographer. This added some depth to some life events, but as noted in the intro, I did start to feel like I was reading some of the same material.
THE NOVELS: (Analysis - I've only started these two, so any thoughts are preliminary)
The Vonnegut Effect by Jerome Klinkowitz
Klinkowitz has written a lot of analysis of Vonnegut's work. This book breaks things down by novel. Depending on how much I like this book, I might seek out some other Klinkowitz offerings (there are quite a few, here's his author's page on Goodreads, see if you can spot the theme).
Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels by Gregory D. Sumner
Lest you think that I am some kind of truly original visionary with the re-reading Vonnegut idea, here's someone who already thought of it and wrote a book about it. This might be the book I'm most excited to read in this post. I've only gotten through the prologue (an abbreviated biography - Argh!) and the section on Player Piano so far.
So, fair citizens. What are you reading?
First Monday Book Day: New Year
The last book I read in 2014 was The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis.
It's a horror novel (because what better time than Christmas for a little horror?) that loves what horror can be. The structure of the book is very aware of itself. A manuscript that describes something supernatural is found in the apartment of a recently disappeared author. But before you know even that, the first words of the book are an excerpt from that author's story:
"What is it?"
"An old manuscript. Much of it is hard to make out, but..."
Mr. Leatherbotham cut in.
"What? That worn-out old Gothic trope?"
He rolled his eyes.
The whole book careens along through the various stories (a demonic puppet show, a variation on Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and an homage to Lovecraft, among others) that come from chance meetings with strangers (another self-aware nod to "weird tales" and horror stories) while updating the main plot. It only perhaps loses steam once or twice but quickly finds its footing. The Wanderer is a book where a word like ichor feels right at home. The vocabulary is extensive and the description is remarkable. The prose is described as poetic in more that one place, and it's easy to see where that comes from. The description is concerned with things often visceral, often gory, often downright repulsive. Horrible things are happening in The Wanderer. And they keep happening.
I loved it, the main plot of an immortal man fleeing an immortal pursuer while all the stories spin out around him worked really well and put this right up there among my favorite reads of the year.
First Monday Book Day: Goals
December is here. The final month of the year, where everyone starts publishing their "best books of the year" lists and I start to compile my reading list for 2015. More on that next month probably. This month is our last chance to meet our reading goals for 2014 (if we set any - I did, of course, and I tracked the whole thing on a spreadsheet, because that's who I am).
I had two goals for 2014.
1) Read 60 books (I usually set my goal somewhere around 50, then adjust as life happens). I'm about 50 pages from finishing my 58th book of the year right now, so things are looking good for that.
2) Read about one "big" book per month that I have wanted to read before, but never found the time. An attempt to clear away some of my backlog that really worked out well, I think. Read some really interesting books and checked off a few bucket-list books.
Here's my final list of "big" books for 2014 in general order of how much I enjoyed them (I'm going to start Midnight's Children next week and finish before the end of the month).
| Author | Title |
| Laszlo Krasznahorkai | Seiobo There Below |
| David Markson | This is Not a Novel |
| Georges Perec | Life A User's Manual |
| Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives |
| Bruno Schulz | The Street of Crocodiles + Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | The Idiot |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Labyrinths |
| Neal Stephenson | Cryptonomicon |
| John LeCarre | The Spy Who Came in From the Cold + The Looking Glass War |
| Italo Calvino | Invisible Cities |
| Haruki Murakami | 1Q84 |
| Kobo Abe | The Woman in the Dunes |
| Vladimir Nabokov | Pale Fire |
| Thomas Pynchon | Gravity's Rainbow |
| J.G. Ballard | Concrete Island |
So, what do you have left to read in 2014? What are you reading right now?
First Monday Book Day: Series
This month I finished Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy (pictured above if I figured out the header thing correctly). He released all 3 books this year, and it was kind of nice to be able to finish one and know that the next was coming out in a month or two (eat your heart out GRRM fans!).
The series itself was interesting and at times really good. A portion of the coastline has been cordoned off and designated as "Area X" after an incident. Several expeditions have been sent in, but none have been successful in determining exactly what is going on.
Annihilation follows the twelfth expedition into Area X,
Authority follows what happens at The Southern Reach, the organization sending in the expeditions, in the aftermath of book 1.
Acceptance sends some characters back into Area X and investigates the incident that started the whole thing.
The setting in all of these books is awesomely weird. In Area X, in the Southern Reach, the feeling of isolation, paranoia, and alienation comes through in a very real way. The plot tended to lose itself occasionally. In book 1, you spend the entire book inside the head of the narrator, and she doesn't know what's going on any more than you do. As I said above, that's great for an atmosphere of paranoia and isolation, but not so great for figuring out what is going on. Books 2 and 3 deliver a bit more in the plot department, making book 1 almost the foreword to the rest of the trilogy.
I enjoyed the series. It didn't blow me away, but I liked the weirdness enough that I was glad to have read it.
On the subject of series, I was looking through my "recently read" list and I have started a bunch of different series that I just haven't got around to finishing. Maybe next year that will be a good reading goal. How about the Citizens of the WGOM? What series have you finished recently? What series have you started recently? What series has you patiently awaiting the next volume?
Put all that, or any other book stuff below.