audiobooks

Geek Punditry #200: 30 Books, One Purpose

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , ,

A few months ago, my friend Adam Santino suggested that I try building a presence on Substack, a suggestion for which I have largely forgiven him. Although it didn’t exactly begin that way, Substack has grown nicely into a social media platform that is tailor made for authors, journalists, essayists, writers, and readers of all kinds. People post articles on the most niche topics you can imagine. Others serialize their fiction. There’s one guy on there whose entire presence seems to be dissecting every possible nuance and detail of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, and that ain’t even CLOSE to the nerdiest person I follow. There’s an awful lot going on there, is what I’m saying.

It’s like Facebook, except it has smart people.

But even the most wholesome social media platforms (which, at present, this seems to be) will occasionally erupt into controversy. The current one is surrounding – and I apologize to anybody whose political sensibilities may be offended by this at this difficult, divisive time in our country – how many books it’s possible to read in a year. There is a strict divide forming among people who claim to have read large quantities of books over the first 10 months of 2026, and other people who claim that the first people, to put it colloquially, are liar liars with their pants on fire.

For some reason, the number that seems to have stuck as the tipping point is 30. Some claim that reading 30 books in 10 months is absolutely impossible. Others claim that it’s a breezy Sunday afternoon. So just out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at the list of books I’ve read so far this year (of COURSE I have a list of the books I’ve read) to see what number I, personally, am up to. And to my surprise I realized that the book I finished most recently, Cold Storage by David Koepp, turned out to be – drumroll please – number 30.

Liam Neeson was in the movie, but I think Koepp considers his mention in this article a higher accomplishment.

This number, I should mention, does not include comic books or graphic novels, nor does it include audiobooks (I have no objection to including audiobooks towards your count, but the only ones I’ve listened to this year are the audiobooks of some of the Dungeon Crawler Carl novels, which I didn’t start listening to until after I read the books and I didn’t want to count the same book twice). That number, for what it’s worth, includes 24 novels, three anthologies, two nonfiction books, and one memoir.

Now, why does any of this matter, you may ask? If you’re a sane person, it doesn’t. But according to the internet (an organization that has been semifunctional for at least six weeks, according to various credible sources), reading so many books in such a period is virtually impossible. Three books in a month? A book roughly every ten days? What kind of psychopath is capable of such a feat?

And the answer to that question is: pretty much anybody who actually wants to do it.

I make it a point to read every day. That doesn’t mean I read the same amount every day. Sometimes I get in a good 20 to 30 minutes before bed. Sometimes I’m utterly exhausted and I give in after two or three pages. Sometimes – most often when I’m approaching the end of a really ripping story – I’ll try to stay up late and finish the book on my kindle app, and sometimes that effort is derailed when my wife tells me to go to sleep because I’m losing consciousness and the sound of my phone hitting the floor has woken her up three times now.

“That’s fine for YOU, Blake,” you say, “but I just don’t have the TIME to read.”

Yes you do.

“I’ve got kids!”

I have a nine-year-old.

“I’ve got a job!”

I’m a high school teacher.

“I have other responsibilities!”

I’m currently writing a novel. (More information about that on my aforementioned Substack, by the way.)

If you don’t want to read, go ahead and own it. Lots of people – particularly celebrities, for some reason – are pretty vocal about the fact that the last book they read cover to cover featured both a cat and a hat, and therefore it should count for two. But if you’re claiming that there simply isn’t any TIME to read, I’m calling shenanigans.

I know exactly two things about Alix Earle: she says she’s never read a book, and something something makeup.

Besides reading before I go to bed, which of course is the natural habitat of any great reader, I steal time at assorted other points during the day. While I’m waiting in the parent pick-up line to get my son from school. While I’m sitting in the stands during my son’s basketball practice. While I’m in the waiting room while my son does his speech therapy. Have you noticed a theme here? Waiting. I don’t care who you are or how important you think your schedule is, to all of us there come moments in our lives where there is nothing to do except…wait. And it is in those moments that cracking open the latest LitRPG, an old familiar friend by Stephen King, or a classic by Mary Shelley is the absolute best way to pass the time.

In fact, for those of you who poo-poo audiobooks (you should really reconsider your diet if that’s happening by the way), those are PERFECT for people who are busy all the time. Listen to them while you’re driving, while you’re washing dishes, while you’re mowing the laundry, while you’re folding the grass. There are few positions I find stupider than people who say “audiobooks aren’t reading.” It’s true, listening engages the brain in different ways than reading words on a page, but you’re still taking in and processing information. And some people simply are better auditory learners than visual learners. If it works for you, it works.

Just maybe have a different book to switch to once you pick up the kids from school.

I know it sounds like I’m telling you that you should be reading all the time, but that’s only because I am. Reading is a skill and your brain is a muscle, and exercising both of those things is the only way to keep them sharp. Now if you’re even reading this column in the first place, odds are you’re not in the category of people who have to be convinced that reading has value, but you may have fallen off. It’s okay. It happens to all of us. I had some fallow years a while back where I was lucky to make it through one or two books in a year, because I simply didn’t have the motivation. Eventually I found it again.

I say this to my students a lot, especially when ACT season rolls around and they want to know how to get better at the reading portion of the test. They hate when I say it, but the test measures reading skill and comprehension, and the only way to get better at that is to practice. To read. Preferably every day. And I don’t care WHAT you read – a book, a magazine, a newspaper, a comic book – as long as you read it with focus and without distraction. Even 15 minutes a day will help, and you’ll start to see improvement.

True, most of you reading this are probably past the stage in your lives where college admission essays are a significant concern. But that doesn’t mean that reading has ceased being worthwhile. In fact, without the impetus of school pushing it on you, it’s probably more important than ever. You’ve reached the point where you can read what you want instead of what your teachers told you to read, after all. That means you can choose your own material. It also means that there’s no one making you do it now, so just like any other form of exercise, you’ve got to convince yourself to do it on your own.

By the way, I know that a lot of those books you read in school seemed boring at the time, but may I suggest that you go back and give some of them another chance now that you’re a little older and wiser? Most of those books were required reading for a reason, after all.

The Penguin worked really hard to write this, the least you can do is read it.

Anyway, the points that I’m trying to get here are, as in descending order of importance:

  • Reading is important, and everybody should do it.
  • You may not think that you have time to read, but trust me, you’re wrong.
  • All reading is valid – fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, and yeah, even audiobooks. Everything except AI “summaries.” That’s bullshit.
  • You should totally subscribe to my free Substack, and I promise, that’s the last time I’ll mention it until you get to that italicized portion down there at the end.

Reading is education. It’s entertainment. It’s exercise. It matters. And if it’s been a while, consider this your invitation to start again. Okay, maybe you’ll never hit 30 books a year. But if you’re not reading already, ANYTHING is better than the nothing you’re reading right now.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Geek Punditry #36: On a Gridiron Far, Far Away

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , ,

I haven’t listened to the radio in years. I know this is no longer a novel position. Most people in this digital age ignore the radio in favor of populating their own playlists on Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Heimdall’s Jockstrap, or whatever app is en vogue at the moment. But even before the rise of such services, podcasts had long since become my entertainment of choice while driving. One such podcast I discovered years ago helped turn me on to “podiobooks” (audiobooks delivered in podcast form, in case you couldn’t decode the term), and that in turn directed me to the new pantheon of writers that were riding the wave that came at the time that medium was burgeoning: people like Mur Lafferty and J.C. Hutchins and, most pertinent to our discussion today, the Future Dark Overlord himself, Scott Sigler.

Clearly the creation of an evil genius.

So as not to bury the lede, the reason I’m writing about Sigler this week is because a new podcast series is launching that presents his most popular series of stories starting over from the beginning. So right now I want you to open your chosen podcasting app (yes, that includes Spotify) and subscribe to “Scott Sigler’s Galactic Football League Series.” Then, while the first three episodes are downloading, I’m going to tell you why this series is awesome and you should be giving Sigler your attention.

Sigler, as you could probably guess from the inclusion of the word “Galactic,” is a science fiction writer. He has developed a complex and fascinating universe with intriguing characters, wild and bizarre alien species, and a degree of worldbuilding that could make Tolkien and Rowling take notice. Sigler has laid out thousands of years of history (both before and after the present day) that he feeds his audience a little bit at a time. The individual novels or series stand on their own, but when read together you get a rich and textured science fiction tapestry that plays out over 2000 years.

Let’s start with the Galactic Football League stories, since that’s what the podcast is going to cover. The stories in the GFL era take place about 700 years in the future, in a universe where humanity has spread out to the stars, encountered several sentient species of alien, and bifurcated into many different worlds and governments. Football – American-style football, also known as “Gridiron” – has been adopted as a sort of de facto peacekeeping event in a galaxy in turmoil. Football, you see, is no longer played only by humans, but by the massive and powerful Ki, the swift and agile Sklorno, and the brutal Quyth, among others. By forcing these different races to work together on the field, conflicts between them have been mitigated, even as most of them are under the rule of an alien empire of small, batlike creatures that rule through sheer force of numbers. The story focuses on Quentin Barnes, a young quarterback raised in the xenophobic Purist Nation, who has to learn how to cooperate with these bizarre alien species if he wants to achieve his goal of winning a Galaxy Bowl. 

So right off the bat, the GFL series has aliens and sports, which are both a lot of fun. But that’s not all. In the time of the GFL, Gridiron Football has largely come under the control of massive organized crime syndicates, with teams owned by actual criminals, illegal substances smuggled on the team transport ships, and players doubling as strongarm enforcers for their leaders. That’s right: it’s also a gangster series. (In fact, that’s the title of the sixth book: The Gangster.) And as the story goes on, although football never leaves, it becomes increasingly clear that the story is about more than just football, that Quentin is more than just a quarterback, and that the stakes they’re really playing for are much, much higher than a championship ring. Sigler has developed an intricate and fully fleshed-out universe that is completely engrossing on multiple levels. 

One of the most impressive things about it, for me, is the degree of work he has put into crafting his various alien species. There are none of the “rubber forehead” aliens that we see in Star Trek or most TV and movie sci-fi franchises, a fact that’s made easier because these are novels and Sigler doesn’t have to worry about budgetary concerns. Every alien species in Sigler’s universe is imagined from the ground-up with their biology, life cycle, and culture carefully crafted, many of them in ways very unlike what we’re used to. The species that is most like humans, the Quyth, are really only like us in that they are bipedal and experience a similar emotional range. Unlike humans, the Quyth have a biological caste system that divides the species, which is covered in either fur or chitin depending on which caste they belong to. They also have a pair of dexterous pedipalp arms protruding under their head and their one massive eye, which changes color to indicate their mood. Quyth leaders gain their dominance by castrating their siblings while still in the womb. Quyth females are never seen by outsiders at all. This is the CLOSEST alien species to humanity in this universe, and it’s a species that in real life would be virtually unthinkable, except perhaps in southern California.  

See? Just like us.

But I digress – the GFL is probably Sigler’s most popular work amongst his fans. It’s certainly the era that is discussed the most and for which we are most eager to see new installments. But it’s not the ONLY era. 200 years before the GFL comes The Crypt, a military drama about a crew assigned to a ship with the reputation of being a deathtrap for anybody who is put on the duty roster – usually as a sentence for some crime. Then there are the modern stories, such as Ancestor, Earthcore, and the Infected trilogy. While the GFL stories are suitable for young readers, these other books are (even) more violent and brutal, and definitely not intended for kids. They are, however, part of the same universe, something that becomes clear in the second Infected book when the characters are given a glimpse of an alien race that is terrifying to them, but that readers of Sigler’s other work will quickly recognize as a familiar species in the GFL era. And then he does it again with the Generations trilogy, a series set a millennia after the GFL about a group of teenagers who wake up on a distant spacecraft with no memories of their past. I don’t want to get too spoilery, but I will reveal that eventually the series, again, starts to share familiar species with the reader.

Rated TV-KSD: Not approved for people with Kitchen Scissors or the city of Detroit.

The point I’m getting at is that Sigler has a universe that is complete, complex, intricate, and really entertaining, and is so in various time periods, which is a trick that very few writers have managed to pull off. So I respect and admire Sigler for that as much as I am a fan of the writing itself.

But that’s not all. There are lots of writers whose work I admire and respect. What sets Sigler apart, why I’m writing about him today, is the way he has masterfully crafted a community around himself. From the early days when he branded himself the Future Dark Overlord of the world to the way he has cultivated relationships with the many “Sigler Junkies” that populate the internet, I am in awe of the way he’s built out his fan base. Sure, there are highly devoted fans of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and plenty of other book series, but most of those have been built over many years or were done with the help of a major publishing empire or movie studio to enhance the brand. Sigler has done it without those things. Oh, he’s had some mainstream success: he’s published books through Crown, hit the New York Times list, and he’s even contributed licensed novels and short stories to the Alien and Predator franchises…but for the most part, his community and his fervent, devoted fanbase was cultivated by himself and his small support staff. 

You know you’ve arrived when there’s a Geiger monster holding a bloody helmet on your resume.

When I look at what he’s done and how effectively he’s done it, I know that Scott Sigler is who I want to be when I grow up. He’s the reason I did audiobook versions of Other People’s Heroes and A Long November back in the day when podcasting was still young and easy to get into if you didn’t have any resources. (Most people don’t know this, but the name “Blake” is actually from an obscure Peloponisian dialect and translates roughly to “lacks both resources and the wisdom to use them correctly.”) While the new media landscape has changed dramatically since the days when he was starting, and I don’t know if his techniques could work today, that doesn’t matter. It already worked for him, and he’s allowed to enjoy the fruits of his incredible amount of hard work and talent.

Plus, in every interaction I’ve had with the guy online, he’s seemed to be a really cool and stand-up dude. 

So I’m saying all this to give back to him just a little bit for the hours of audio entertainment he’s provided me over the years. If anything I’ve said sounds interesting to you – if you’re into sci-fi or sports, if you’re looking for your next audiobook, if you’ve got a middle-grade kid in your life that you’re trying to get into reading, check out the GFL saga. The first three episodes dropped this week, and there literally years worth of content coming down the line. Hopefully enough that the podcast won’t wrap up before the FDO finishes writing the series.

Don’t worry. I’ve got faith that he’s not going to George R.R. Martin us. If there’s one thing that I believe is true about Scott Sigler, it’s that he doesn’t know how to stop working.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Hopefully, before you get too far into the GFL series, you’ll understand why Blake is constantly looking at some fool doing something foolish and muttering, “This kid needs a Ma Tweedy in his life.”