Books Read 2010

[Isgrimnur]

Shanks for Nothing by Rick Reilly

Apparent;y the second in Rick Reilly's series about the worst golf course in the country, a pretty entertaining, but definitely adult read. Definitely not for the kiddies.

[Jeff V]

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

In which Stephen King writes a "Wonder Years" episode. Well, more like the whole series. Ugh.

Hearts in Atlantis is not a horror book at all. It's been out a while, and picked it up for cheap used, and didn't know this about it. It follows the life of an uninteresting kid from the Northeast leading an unremarkable life in the 50's, becoming a rather timid "radical" in the 60's, and an aging boomer father by the end. In the mean time, we meet the mundane people of his life, childhood bullies, bad influences in college (why study when there is money to be made playing Hearts?), friends who go to Viet Nam; some who suffer from debilitating illness. I didn't care about a single one -- for the first time, King's power of character creation was utterly lost on me.

Other King books have started out slow but managed to generate SOME interest by the end. This never did. I kept waiting for a justification that I did not waste 19 hours of my life listening to this, but it never came.

[Jeff V]

Heretic by Bernard Cornwell

The third and final volume of Cornwell's Grail Quest saga, our hero Thomas finds himself in southern France, near his ancestral home of Astarac. By happy coincidence, his nemesis, cousin Guy Vexile, arrives as well as some unexpected (and unwanted) guests: plague rats. A friend and companion turns on him (and is redeemed), an old friend dies, but the battles are won and the grail? Well, I won't spoil it.

The series is a great read for those looking for an adventure set in medieval times. The story takes place early in the Hundred Year's War between France and England, and does a good job illustrating how shifting loyalties meant it wasn't a simple war between two established nations. Cornwell's Agincourt, set later in the same war, is not part of the series but will be the next Cornwell book I read.

[WYBaugh]

I just finished Best Served Cold and while enjoying it, I think he reached a Robert Jordanesque plateau by using the term 'smiled sideways'.

Come on Joe, you're a writer and can't come up with another way to express this???

[lildrgn]

Just finished Elegy Beach by Steven R. Boyett. Onto Lehane's Prayers for Rain next.

[Scuzz]

Rome 1960 by David Marannis

This book is about the 1960 Summer Olympics held in Rome. It covers the people and events that surrounded the Olympics at that time. An interesting book but I would have liked a "little" more about the people....people like Wilma Rudolph, Rafer Johnson, Cassius Clay etc.

[Kasey Chang]

Finished quite a few of John Ringo's books lately...

Ghost
Kildar
Chooser of the Slaim
Unto the Breech

and also

The Last Centurion

The first four is a series, it reads like adult fiction at times. The first book is actually one short novel and 2 novellas, all involving Mark "Ghost" Harmon, ex-SEAL, who ended up rescuing a bunch of naked co-eds from the evil clutches of Arab sadists, and killed bin Laden, of all people as well. Later he happens upon a valley of peasants, bought the valley, and ended up as Kildar, only to find out he had resurrected the Varangian Guards, as he ended up battling Chechens, Albanian human traffikers, and others in the later books. In between, he inherited a harem, a castle, some secrets that will destroy governments, and get to satisfy his, uh... S/M indulgences on willing people. That's why I said he reads like adult fiction. But it's fun.

The Last Centurion is a bit different, and in a way it's a lot like another book, Ralph Peter's "War in 2020". Basically, a massive pandemic swept the world, and an ultra-liberal president turned the country upside down to deal with the emergency, and the narrator's unit is stuck in the Middle East guarding supplies nobody wants or will use, but cannot be left behind either. So he's pretty much left to his own devices... by rewriting all the rules. The whole thing is written first-person, blog-style, lots of digressions, and basically lambasts all things liberal.

[lildrgn]

Prayers for Rain is done. I think I'll finish off The Enemy by Lee Child next.

[Skinypupy]

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Finished this last night, and I'm still not sure what to think of it. I can't decide whether its brilliant or just strange, and it probably falls somewhere in the middle. I enjoyed it more once I connected all the dots, but the constant jumping around was a little off-putting. Probably give it a B grade.

Next up, The Odyssey by Homer. At the turtle's pace I read, I'll probably be finishing this one around August.

[Isgrimnur]

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

A very good read that goes through the different levels of society present in the 1300s in England. The book is divided into 11 chapters (listed below) and covers all levels of society for each, even going so far as to cover the differences between rural and urban living. You get information on the plagues, the hierarchy and high costs of falconry, the varieties of food including fish given as gifts between nobility, a look at fashion down to the undergarments, law and order in action, etc. The book is well done, well researched and footnoted like you wouldn't believe. I got the Kindle version for my iPhone, which made it easier, but I can easily see the need for a dead tree version needing a second bookmark for the footnotes. I'd say about 60% of them are simple reference bibliography lines, but some do have some excellent information.

1. The Landscape
2. The People
3. The Medieval Character
4. Basic Essentials
5. What to Wear
6. Traveling
7. Where to Stay
8. What to Eat and Drink
9. Health and Hygeine
10. The Law
11. What to Do

Next up: World War Z.

[lildrgn]

Prayers for Rain is done. I think I'll finish off The Enemy by Lee Child next.

Nope. Couldn't finish The Enemy. I think I'm tired of the Lee Child formula...

I read a book called The Pawn by Steven James. It was free on Kindle. As I read, I realized about 2/3rds of the way that there was no cussing. There were a few mentions in hospital scenes of God, etc. Then I looked online and found that I'd been duped! Someone slipped religion into my thriller!

Finished it anyway.

Next up, The 25th Hour by David Benioff.

[Kasey Chang]

Actually, I rather like "the Enemy". It was far more straightforward as a mystery, instead of "stranger walks into town, unravels bad things". With no spoilers...

The Enemy is a prequel, dealing with Reacher's days in the MP. He was assigned to take over a backwater MP base in the US just before the invasion of Panama (hunting Noriega). Not longer after, he was called out to a problem... Apparently, a General was found dead in a motel room, heart attack, except there's no record of the trip and no reason for the General to be there. Later, a special forces soldier was found dead and mutilated in a corner of the base, as if he was gay and killed for it. Are the crimes related? Was there foul play? Are there higher forces at work? And what does it all have to do with Reacher, if anything?

[GreenGoo]

Finished Briar King today at lunch. Enjoyed it a lot. Thought the writer did a good job with regional speech. General politics and geography of kingdoms and their relationships to each other.

Betrayal was well done. Magic was well done with just enough of a different take to make it new rather than old hat. Author didn't shy away from sex while at the same time didn't write porn for 12 year olds. Really enjoyed his take on monks and the church. There was enough "neato fantasy" that I enjoyed it right to the end.

Now, while I go over it in my mind, I can't help but think a lot of the intrigue, character drama and politics are all pale imitations of the much better written/told Game of Thrones etc. I'm not saying the stories have much in common besides court intrigue, just that....GRRM may have ruined me for other authors. Everything in the Briar King seemed so...straightforward as compared to Game of Thrones etc. I didn't even consciously compare them. It's just that the bar has been set very high for political intrigue, and the Briar King fell well short. Which is not to say it wasn't good. But once you drive a Ferrari, all the fun kind of drains out of driving your BMW.

Book was really quite good overall though, and brought me back into the genre, which I haven't touched in a long while. The reader is left hanging leaving room for a sequel, but I'm not chomping at the bit for the next. It does fairly well as a one off (if it is, I'm unsure of the situation).

I saw that Black Company is in transit to my local branch of the library, so I guess I will be reading that shortly. In the meantime I picked up Frederick Pohl's Outnumbering the Dead. A short novella about an utopian or near utopian society who's people are immortal due to surgery before birth.

Still reading The Terror at a leisurely pace. It's a full sized hard cover so I don't read it during my commute. Have about 150 pages left. Not much of a "horror" story, which is the thread where it was recommended. I mean, yeah, made into a movie it would fall in the horror genre, but for horror novel, I haven't even been made uncomfortable, let alone scared.

[YellowKing]

Still reading The Terror at a leisurely pace. It's a full sized hard cover so I don't read it during my commute. Have about 150 pages left. Not much of a "horror" story, which is the thread where it was recommended. I mean, yeah, made into a movie it would fall in the horror genre, but for horror novel, I haven't even been made uncomfortable, let alone scared.

I think it hearkens back to earlier horror like Lovecraft and Poe (who, after all, is directly referenced). The other point to make is that Dan Simmons is a very wide-ranging author who not only writes horror but fantasy, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction. So it's really hard to pigeon-hole his work to one genre.

[Jeff V]

Hidden Empire by Kevin J. Anderson

Book one of the Saga of the Seven Suns. In this book, the Saga is characterized as a tome so vast that no one could possibly assimilate it in a single life time. With I think 7 books in the series, this could actually be true.

I've always like Keven Anderson's work on the post-Frank Dune books. This book appears to be his attempt at an epic story along the lines of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series. For a number of reasons, though, it just didn't click with me. For starters, he introduced way too many characters, which in of itself wouldn't have been so bad if most of them didn't die before the end of this book. Setting up the story took an excruciatingly long time -- I listened to the audio book version and actually had to restart it because I was so lost. Most of the action happened near the end, at which point the few characters I cam to care about were eliminated. The overall main plot involving the prime antagonist is familiar to anyone who played the original Starflight computer game. One of the things I found bizarre is that for a tale set in the future, so many elements of the past were employed: the human empire was ruled by a monarchy, and trade was handled by the Hanseatic League. Why we would devolve into 15-16th century institutions is beyond me.

When I next have need for an audio book, I might get the next one in the series, just to see if it grows on me. It did start getting better at the end.

[lildrgn]

Finished The 25th Hour by Benioff. Not sure what's next.

[Chaosraven]

Reading Cards 'Ender' series... Halfway thru 3rd of 4. Has anyone read the alternates? Shadow etc...

[Chaosraven]

Reading Cards 'Ender' series... Halfway thru 3rd of 4. Has anyone read the alternates? Shadow etc...

[stessier]

Reading Cards 'Ender' series... Halfway thru 3rd of 4. Has anyone read the alternates? Shadow etc...

Yes - I enjoyed them all. I am easily entertained, however.

[Chaosraven]

I picked up Ender in Exile, noted as the direct sequel to Enders Game and read it before Speaker of the Dead, but all the stuff relating to the Shadow series was lost on me... Guess I will grab those

[stessier]

Hmmm, may have fallen behind. I read Shadows and Puppets. Didn't know there was an Ender in Exile book. I'll have to add it to the list!

[GreenGoo]

Library says my hold on "The Black Company" is in. Should probably see how long a wait it is for the 2nd in the series and get a reserve in on it ahead of time.

[Kasey Chang]

Finished Next 100 Years, a prediction of what will happen in the next 100 years. The guy works for a big think-tank and explained how the geopolitical forces are pretty much constant, and how some surprising historical trends will recur in the next 100 years, among them...

* defeat of Islamic extremism, how it can never survive in the face of technology and spreading knowledge
* disintegration of China, how fundamentally Chinese economy creates a split between the coasties and the interiors, and that fosters periodic revolution
* resurgence of Russia, how Russia will attempt to reintegrate countries and recreate the Soviet Union
* surprise entries into world power: Poland and Turkey
* total shift of the immigration policy, due to the aging population and dropping birth rates
* a major crisis and fundamental change of American political direction and attitude, based on historical trends
* what a war in 2050 would probably look like, with armored combat suits, hypersonic unmanned aircraft, and space-based warfare

and many other very interesting observations, extrapolations, and predictions. You may not agree, but it should at least make sense to you.

[Jeff V]

Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan

In Cro-Magnon, Brian Fagan delivers the current state-of-knowledge regarding our stone-age selves and summarizes archeological evidence to date. As someone with a casual interest the subject, I might read up on it every 10 years or so; watching a handful of documentaries in the meantime. Fagan collects the various wealth of scientific knowledge, and distills it for mass consumption.

So what's new with the old? For starters, better dating techniques and mitochondrial DNA analysis has improved our understanding of the timeline. The Cro-Magnon (and focus of this book) are the ancestors of modern Europeans, and the book begins with their co-habitation with the neanderthal before moving into a series of eras defining differences in Cro-Magnon cultures. Fagan intersperses analysis of the current evidence with tales describing what he imagines daily life to be in a certain place and time. Much of this is speculation, and on problem with the book is that historic record is very fragmented and only very durable (ie, stone) artifacts remain. Make no mistake, the author does make some very good educated guesses that fit with the evidence at hand, but still, there is an awful lot of conjecture, and parts of the story are bound to change over time. In the end, I was less interested in the speculation and more interested in the significance of actual evidence.

There were a few editorial problems with the book worthy of note -- most having to do with captions of illustrations and references to them in the text. Some compound illustrations, for example, were lettered but the caption neither explained all of the letters, nor were always in sync with what the letter actually represented.

[Isgrimnur]

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

An excellent read overall. I know I'm late to the party on this one, but it was a great book, well and truly a good follow-on to the survival guide.

[silverjon]

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

An excellent read overall. I know I'm late to the party on this one, but it was a great book, well and truly a good follow-on to the survival guide.

I'm reading it now (about halfway done) and it's really not working for me. Since the book is meant to be reflecting on past events, the element of suspense is minimized. Every speaker survived, obviously. Most of the speakers aren't especially distinct from each other. At best, a few of them are individualized due to being archetypes... or plain old stereotypes. This is a failing of both the vignette style and of Brooks as a writer, though more the latter, as someone with more skill at character development would be able to create individual personae in these brief narratives. As a whole, the book's "voice" is very flat and mechanical.

There's just enough plot to keep it from being a total drag. Each narrator builds a little on the previous revelations. I guess if you're already a fan of military history, maybe the style is more accessible, but it's not a great way to tell a story, or not in these hands. As for the satirical elements, I think they're too overt, so the reader is just being beaten over the head with them. Governments screw up! Humans cause catastrophic environmental damage! The privileged are soft and weak!

If I spent more than two days with this thing, I'd be annoyed.

[GreenGoo]

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

An excellent read overall. I know I'm late to the party on this one, but it was a great book, well and truly a good follow-on to the survival guide.

So this is a sequel to another book? What's the name of the other book so I can add it to the list?

[Isgrimnur]

It is and it isn't. The first book is The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. This one is written exactly like the title suggests: a survival guide. There are no characters, there is no plot. It's a survival guide that will cover weapon selection aimed specifically at zombie killing, how to make your chosen location defensible, how to move through different types of zombie-infested terrain, and how to survive if the outbreak goes global, followed by "historic" reports of previous zombie outbreaks.

Those last two sections have basically been expanded out into a book of interviews with survivors of a global zombie pandemic that documents the early days through the end of the war. There are a couple of places in WWZ that call back to the existence of the civilian survival guide to tie back into the first book.

[GreenGoo]

Thanks.

[Isgrimnur]

Missing Links

I went back for the first of Rick Reilly's golf books since I had enjoyed Shanks for Nothing, the second in the series. I enjoyred this one as well, a nice read about the protagonist's struggle with the game of gold, his father issues, and life in general.

[Jeff V]

Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card

An interesting book that is part historical novel, part science-fiction novel. Pastwatch partially tells the story of Christopher Columbus' expedition to the the new world and begins with a scenario taking place as the fleet is gathering. But then the story switches to the future. The humans race, mired in a bleak future develops a technology called Pastwatch that allows historians and scientists to observe history. Further development led to Pastwatch 2, an advanced version that allows them to impact the past. So people of the future tweaked things here and there, changing the past and improving the future. One of the first things a Pastwatcher typically does is investigate their own family history. One such researcher traced her roots back to a village that was enslaved. Further investigation reveals that the root of all human exploitation in the New World was Christopher Columbus. Not through direct action, but through an unproven (but soon to be proven by others) conviction that vast wealth lie in the New World. The Pastwatchers decide they can change the history of the human race for the better if they alter Columbus' Caribbean experience. As such a profound change could have a drastic effect on the future, including the very existence of their own lives, a debate ensures when evidence is discovered their history (which at this point is our history) was already modified by Pastwatchers in another timeline, and they botched it.

Three people were sent back to different points of time to intercept Columbus and prepare the native tribes. They did have a profound effect on Columbus' expedition, and while we never hear from the future Pastwatchers, those in the past complete their missions and the epilogue mentions an unusual discovery in 1955 of a skull containing information describing the timeline that never was. Whether or not the over-reaching goals of the project were realized -- if human sacrifice was not replaced by human bondage, is left for the reader to speculate.

[Kasey Chang]

Finished this book a while back, actually: "Kill Bin Laden" by Dalton Fury, who's the Delta Force onscene commander in Afghanistan hunting bin Laden. It's almost like Vietnam: reliance on locals and ROE with one hand tied behind one's back. Argh!

[Bad Demographic]

Haven't posted here in a while - and I haven't read a lot lately. I've been trying to get some knitting projects done.

I re-read Terry Pratchett's "Soul Music" because I finally got my Sony Reader back (they made me send it in for a firmware upgrade then they basically lost it). Actually, it's a replacement - not an old one like mine, but the "touch" version. I re-read "Soul Music" so I could try out the Reader and see how I liked it compared to the old one. It's nice, a tad more glare-y, but the "turn the page with a swipe of your finger" is a nice feature, as is the ability to take notes on it.

I re-read Charlaine Harris' "Dead Until Dark" because we started watching the "True Blood" series and I wanted to check some discrepancies. If you haven't read the books but saw the tv show, or you read the books but haven't seen the show, there's a lot of deviation. It's easier for me to think of the show as "loosely based" on the novels.

I never know how to describe the writing of Jasper Fforde. Or his plots, for that matter. The "Thursday Next" series and the "Nursery Crime" series are comedy mysteries I guess. "Shades of Gray", while written with his same odd style, is a dystopian future story. It took me a long time to figure that out, but once I did, I stopped wondering why I didn't find it anywhere nearly as funny as his other books. I'll have to try to get ChrisGwinn to read it - maybe he can give it a deserving write up.

[Pyperkub]

Books Read in 2010:

U is for Undertow - Sue Grafton (meh - she's writing out the string I think)
The Black Company - Glen Cook
Shadows Linger - Glen Cook
The White Rose - Glen Cook
Shadow Games - Glen Cook
Dreams of Steel - Glen Cook
The Silver Spike - Glen Cook
Nine Dragons - Michael Connelly
Up in the Air - Walter Kirn (very different from the movie)
Bleak Seasons - Glenn Cook
She is the Darkness - Glenn Cook
Water Sleeps - Glenn Cook
Soldiers Live - Glenn Cook

For the black company books, I was kept interested throughout, but I felt after the first 3 books, it fell off. I'm not sure if that's because Croaker/the Narrators became too involved in strategizing or what. Maybe I just liked the idea of them fighting for the wrong side and then making it right, with vast things unknown and only hinted at. I also think the whole Deceivers/Khadi plot took too long to resolve, maybe the latter books needed to be more concise.

The Burning City - Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

I remember some of the great books by Niven & Pournelle. This isn't one of them. They've dropped off since they had to write the sequel to A Mote in God's eye. Of course, I'm subjecting myself to the sequel since I got them both from the library. This one's set in the "The Magic Goes Away" universe, but didn't have much of the creativity of that book.

Burning Tower - Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

Better than the Burning City, with a decent story involving the Aztec gods in the Southwest. Ultimately, these two novels are more like a travelogue of Niven & Pournelle in the Magic Goes Away universe. Fun, but not really memorable. They did leave room for a third.

Songs for a Teenage Nomad - Kim Culbertson

A friend of mine's first published book. An interesting tale of a teen girl who's been moved from town to town and stepfather to stepfather who lands in a town in CA and finds out why. A 'young adult book' with many echoes of Catcher in the Rye, and it's won some Young Adult fiction awards.

[Jeff V]

The Dogs of Rome by Conor Fitzgerald

The Dogs of Rome debut novel for accomplished foreign affairs journalist Conor Fitzgerald. A current resident of Rome, Fitzgerald has also lived in the UK, Ireland, and the United States, and the characters of the book reflect his diverse background.

It would be easy to dismiss the book as just another mob/political corruption story taking place in a city renown for it, but Fitzgerald adds some subtle twists. Yes, there is mob involvement, but for most of the story, it is covert; watchful eyes spreading information where it needs to go. There is corruption too, although our hero, Commissario Alec Blume, endeavors to remain above it. But what I found most interesting was the interplay of otherwise mundane events and bureaucracy that created a psychopathic killer out of a gambling-addicted computer geek. In a story that tries to finger professional criminals, the evidence is so abundant that it did not fit the classic mob profile. Blume is thwarted by political interests stemming from the murder victim's widow, a Senator. He is distracted by the victim's mistress, the daughter of a mob boss. And his hands are tied by protocol, which prevents him from arresting the perp when all he had was a "gut feeling" and other possible evidence. Meanwhile, the body count rises and includes the innocent (and not so innocent). But Blume is responsible for his share of mistakes too, including his initial visit to the perp while he was in a hurry to meet up with his first date in 18 months. Fitzgerald does a good job pointing out that in spite of their tough outward appears, cops are people too.

[lildrgn]

The Dark Tide by Andrew Gross is done. Free on Kindle. Now it's onto Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.

[Jeff V]

The Evolution of God by Robert Wright

Wright's The Evolution of God sets out to trace the academic concept of a supreme deity from its origination in Stone Age societies to modern implementation. Wright does not merely collect and present evidence in a clinical fashion, however -- in the course of the book, he expounds theoretical models on how and why religions developed as they did, and extrapolated this to the present and future. In this respect, he goes a little beyond what is normally expected from a history book. And while I generally agreed with his conclusion based on the evidence he provided, his own evangelizing near the end seemed a little outside of his authority. On the other hand, he said what needed to be said, and nobody is else is stepping to the plate to say it, so I'll give him a pass on this.

Wright's theory is that religion (and the nature of gods at a given moment) is an extension of "facts on the ground." Governments and peoples do not bow in the winds of unalterable religious doctrine, but instead conform their notions of the supernatural to fit the needs of the day. One such example is the development of monotheism. The notion of one and only one supreme being was not struck overnight and delivered with inexorable force in a pagan world. As peoples were conquered, astute leaders discovered that embracing their gods was a good way to maintain order in their new holdings. Sometimes they allowed the pantheons to co-exist, other times, priests allowed the form and function of foreign gods to combine with their own. Wright traces the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god to a very diverse polytheistic beginning in ancient Babylonia and before. Yahweh moves up the chain from a rather minor deity to big chief almost by accident -- it could have easily have been the god El (thought to be embodied in the name Israel). Two leaders cast their lots with a god and do battle. One wins, another loses. The winner goes on, lauded as the cause of victory. The loser is vanquished to the mists of history, discredited or its followers dead. Fitting the "facts on the ground," monotheism eventually coalesces to mirror the administrative needs of large, widespread empires with a centralized government. One all-powerful head of state, one all-powerful god.

Wright calls upon a number of translations of the Hebrew and Christian bibles and the Koran, as well as other historical evidence. I was a little disappointed that the book didn't focus on the evolution of all gods -- just the Abrahamic ones (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Sure, there was some Buddhist anecdotes, but it was mostly discussing how the phenomenon of Jesus had it's counterpart with the Indian Asoka. After discussing the rise of Islam, Wright shifts focus from the evolution of religion to focus on his thesis of interpretations fitting the "facts on the ground" and what it means in the modern world. Specifically, he discusses contradictory themes in all religion, and how they might support a wide range dogma ranging from the benign to the chaotic. He then speaks directly to a Judeo-Christian readership (freely admitting that he did not imagine too many readers in Indonesia or Saudi Arabia among his audience). Treating Islam like an unruly stepchild, he admits that the radicals are too far gone to be salvaged in a global community, but those of us in the Western world should endeavor to better integrate Islam into our culture if we wish to prevent to moderates from becoming extremists. He argues this is how the religions came to being in the first place, and that evolution has necessarily trended towards peaceful coexistence as populations increased. The penalty for bucking this trend could be something along the lines from the ancient influences that begot these religions -- the notion of a world-ending battle (Armageddon, if you will). It's not so much the ancient scripture writers were prophets in any sense of the word, those ancient religions that survived to this day did so by adapting to an often-hostile world around them, and their continued survival was a legacy of what works, what does not. Lessons learned in the demise of others illuminates paths that lead to danger.

[silverjon]

I thought the writing (specifically characterization) in World War Z improved a fair bit in some later sections. Not enough to redeem the entire book for me, but it became much less annoying.

The back blurb from the book Sharp Objects by Gilliam Flynn (which was ok but I though her second novel was better) referenced an older book called All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By by John Farris. It came out on Playboy Press in the 70s, and doesn't seem to be too hard to find secondhand online. I don't usually buy novels, so the interlibrary loan department tracked it down for me in the science fiction collection of the University of New Brunswick. Potent stuff, and well worth your time if you like a good creepy southern gothic.

The second volume of Joe Hill's Locke & Key series is excellent. If anything, his writing lends itself to comics better than it does regular fiction. With his novels, he strikes me as someone trying to create strong visuals using words, and he does so effectually, but it slows down the pacing. In an illustrated format, it's all meat.

[Kasey Chang]

The Dark Tide by Andrew Gross is done. Free on Kindle. Now it's onto Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.

Digital Fortress sucks. It's basically Langdon, in a different guise as computer geek.

[lildrgn]

The Dark Tide by Andrew Gross is done. Free on Kindle. Now it's onto Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.

Digital Fortress sucks. It's basically Langdon, in a different guise as computer geek.

Funny. It's my first Brown novel and so far, I'm enjoying it (just found out what "Digital Fortress" is wrt the book). I'll try the DaVinci books next.