A perfect Sunday with... John Scalzi
Coffee cake, naps and Why I Hate Saturn!
Every week, a top writer, artist or creator reveals how they’d fill their perfect Sunday, sharing their favourite comfort reads, movies, food… anything that would make their weekend great.
Today, it’s the turn of Starter Villain author, John Scalzi.
John’s perfect Sunday… brunch
I don’t typically eat brunch on Sunday because that would mean waking up before noon, and why would you do that to yourself on a Sunday? That said, a nice coffee cake on a Sunday is pretty great.
John’s perfect Sunday… read
I’ve been catching up on the Hugo finalists this year and can recommend Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man as a fabulous light but excellent weekend read.
John’s perfect Sunday… comic
I just purchased a 30th-anniversary combo edition of Kyle Baker’s Why I Hate Saturn and The Cowboy Wally Show, and both of them are delightfully funny reads.
John’s perfect Sunday… movie
I could probably watch The Philadelphia Story on an endless loop.
John’s perfect Sunday… TV binge
The Science Channel series How It’s Made is what I put on when I want to look at moving pictures and yet not think.
John’s perfect Sunday… podcast
I rarely listen to podcasts. I do, however, watch a lot of cooking videos on YouTube over the weekend. I will never make any of those things -- too lazy -- but I enjoy watching other people make them.
John’s perfect Sunday… album
There’s a particular song which I think is the perfect Sunday tune, and it’s hopelessly obscure, but try it on anyway: Sunday’s Coming On by Marc Teamaker, and aside from that I just put on the LoFi Girl channel on YouTube.
John’s perfect Sunday… treat
Naps!
Starter Villain by John Scalzi is out now from Pan MacMillian.
Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.
Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.
Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.
But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.
It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.
In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.
JOHN SCALZI is one of the most popular SF authors of his generation. His debut, Old Man's War, won him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (which won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel), The Last Emperox, and 2022's The Kaiju Preservation Society. Material from his blog, Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com), has earned him two other Hugo Awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.
