"The Rogue Republic"

The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History (William C. Davis)

Here's a book I wanted to like. I'm always interested in the parts of history that largely go un-examined - hence my excitement to get my hands on this book, a history of how Spanish Florida came to be part of the United States in between the end of the Revolutionary war and the War of 1812. Unfortunately, I didn't find the book itself that great. I don't know if it's because of the huge cast of characters, or the author being a better historian than he is a writer, but I had a lot of trouble keeping everything straight at some points. The biggest five or six characters are fine, and the first half of the book, focusing on the guerilla war of one family versus the nervous, tottering Spanish colonial administration, is great. However, once the Spanish are overthrown and the second half of the book starts with the West Florida Republic's entire government being introduced, I had a hard time keeping who was what with the things and oh boy. This isn't helped by the second half of the book's mostly being a bureaucratic history of the republic's short-lived existence. Overall, I don't regret buying or reading this book, but it's hard to really recommend unless you're a huge nerd. Cough.

Grade: C+

Journey to the West

Journey to the West

One of the Four Classics of Chinese Literature. I've now read half!

Journey to the West has inspired anime, video games, and movies. The story is about, I feel, Monkey. He grows powerful, disrupts heaven, and must redeem himself by protecting a monk on a long journey to worship Buddha and receive holy scrolls. Along the way, Monkey, Pig, Friar Sand and the monk are beset by demons who want to eat the monk and they must overcome all.

Like Three Kingdoms, there are four volumes and this is a long read. I highly recommend it though if you liked Three Kingdoms or if hero journeys appeal to you. I have nothing else to say other than read it!

"The Horus Heresy: Collected Visions"

The Horus Heresy: Collected Visions (Alan Merrett)

Well, I didn't think I was going to read this whole thing, but here we are. This is a nice big hefty coffee table book about the Horus Heresy, mostly art comissioned for some collectible card game that's too nerdy even for me. The art makes up probably 80% of the pages and is the real star, although the text isn't bad, describing the entire Heresy from start to finish. Fellow W40K nerds should beware that the text contains a few passages that may charitably be described as perhaps inaccurate and maybe more accurately described as heretical; This includes the Emperor directing Russ and the Space Wolves to flat out destroy the Thousand Sons instead of just ferrying Magnus back to earth (and the text later contradicts itself on this point anyway), and weirdest of all, having the Emperor and Horus have a big dumb hollywood fight at the end where Horus pulls one of the Emperor's arms off and stuff. (I was under the impression that the Emperor could have defeated Horus any time he wanted; It was only his love for his son and his humanity that was staying his hand, not that Horus was able to beat him up as depicted here.) (Also, if you understood any of what I just said, you are a giant nerd.)

Highlights:
Page 200, which features what appears to be a demonically laughing woman zooming across the page powered by what can only be described as a massive jet fart
Pages 362 & 363, a full page spread of probably the greatest piece of W40K art of all time featuring the Emperor confronting Horus on the bridge of his ship

Grade: B

The Alienist

N.Ham and I read this book out loud to each other, each of us trying to do voices and accents for the characters. I enjoyed the first 75% of the book but once our heroes had an idea who the murderer is...I just wanted them to catch the killer already.

The novel is set in the late 1800s in New York City during Theodore Roosevelt's time as police commissioner. A journalist (who is a complete moron but is supposed to be the audience stand-in), a lady (omg, she might show her ankle off), an alienist (psychologist), and two detectives set out to invent modern crime solving and catch a killer of young boy-prostitutes. The detail in the setting of the novel as well as the nascent crime fighting techniques are interesting. I did think it was odd how enlightened all the 'good guys' were for the late 1800s. I suppose we wouldn't root for racist, sexist homophobes though.

Read if you like old timey crime solvin'.

"The Chronicles of Harris Burdick"

The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell The Tales (Various authors)

One of the neater Chris Van Allsburg books is "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick", a collection of 14 images with cryptic captions (my favorite being the last one, a house blasting off with the title "It was a perfect lift off"). The idea is that you use the little cyptic caption and the picture and write a short story, or just let your imagination go wild. In this collection, fourteen authors are rounded up to write their own take on an image.
This book lives or dies on the writing quality (well, I guess every book does, but even more so). Some of the shorts - "A Strange Day in July" and "Uninvited Guests" - are great. Some of them, like "Missing in Venice" and "Under the Rug" are enjoyable larfs. Unfortunatly, there's a lot of stinkers. "Another Time, Another Place" and "The Seven Chairs" are both really bad, not just badly written, but squandering some great concepts. ("The Seven Chairs" is the worst offender here; The image is a nun flying 100 feet up in a chair and the title "The fifth chair ended up in France," and the story is, there's this woman who can fly in chairs, and the fifth chair she can fly in goes to France, and she becomes a nun. Oh, you wanted to know if the story had a point? No; At least, not one besides the author getting paid.)
All in all, this is an interesting book, but there are more bad stories than good - I want to say it's about a 2:1 ratio - and the one-two punch of the book ending with Chris van Allsberg's own completely boring and pointless contribution and Stephen King's awful story about an abusive history professor dad (who drives a Porsche?) based on my favorite picture of the house lifting off kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.  I found it enjoyable when I viewed each take not as the final word on these images, but just as each author's take. That being said, I feel like you'll have more fun with the original book making up your own stories.

Grade: C-

"The Christmas Lamp"

The Christmas Lamp: A Novella (Lori Copeland)

You're probably already familiar with the idea, if not the formal definition, of the idiot plot - the plot that would be solved in five minutes if everyone wasn't a dumbass. I admit that I have real problems with these. You can ask K. Ham - I'll often end up yelling angry advice and orders at the TV ("Just shoot him!!!"). Unfortuenatly, The Christmas Lamp has one of the worst idiot plots I've seen in a while. As the book opens, the town of Nativity has set up a town christmas tree in an intersection. A car intersection, that you drive through, with your car, is where the town christmas tree is. Now wait, I hear you asking, don't people hit the christmas tree in the middle of an intersection with their cars? Yes they do. In fact, that's how the book starts. The male lead, who may as well be named Grinchy Lesson Learner, shows up and, surprise, hits the town christmas tree, which is in the intersection, with his car. Later, he proposes that, if the tree gets hit by another car, they not bother putting it back up. This is supposted to show us how much he hates Christmas, and Jesus, and mom and apple pie. He then gets into a fight with the moronically named "Roni", the book's female lead, about wether or not they should put the tree back up if it gets hit by another car.

At this point I had an idea. How about you move the tree? Maybe - I don't know - cars wouldn't hit the tree if it wasn't in a fucking intersection? However, this never occurs to our happy little band of morons. No, instead there's geninue tears and hurt feelings over not keeping up a tree, in a intersection, where it's hit by cars several times each year.

At this point I have to confess I put the book down. I could already tell what was going to happen - the male lead, who at this point is Evil(TM), and is described as such ("He detested Christmas and all its phony sentiments"), is going to learn that Christmas means putting up a tree on the fucking street where it gets hit by cars all the time, and he'll marry "Roni", even though she's at the age of 29, which makes her an old bag who needs to get married and start popping out kids right this second.

Regrettably, The Christmas Lamp is another in the depressingly quickly growing collection of free Kindle books that are so bad I still feel ripped off.

Grade: F

"The Epcot Explorer's Encyclopedia"

The Epcot Explorer's Encyclopedia: A guide to the flora, fauna, and fun of the world's greatest theme park! (R. A. Pederson)

Not really an encyclopedia - The author, I assume, avowedly avoided appliciable advice to always abstain from alliteration - this is really a history and rundown of Epcot, from the pavilions to the rides. Most of the book - about 80% - is about the front half of Epcot, Futureland (understandable, since the back half, the World Showcase, is mostly un-changing shops). The star attraction is the detailed rundowns of the rides, and as far as I've seen, this is the best place to get information about what the rides used to be like - the written information in this book is much more comprehensive and understandable than shaky YouTube footage, and the behind the scenes information sprinkled in is a nice touch. (It seems like this is a great resource if your husband never went on, say, Horizens, or the original Journey Into Imagination, and you're going crazy attempting to explain it to him.) About the only bad things I can say is that, being what looks like a self-published labor of love, there are a few goofy grammar and spelling errors, and that obviously if you don't give a fuck about Disney you'll be bored out of your skull. You grinch you.

Grade: B

"Lesbian Pulp Fiction"

Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965 (Katherine V. Forrest, editor)

This is an interesting book, but I'm not really the target audience. The editor describes finding one of these novels in 1957 as "as nessessary to me as air"; Since that doesn't apply to me I found it to be more of an interesting collection of curios. For being pulp paperbacks from the 50's and early 60's I was surprised at how good most of the writing is, and Forrest's careful selection runs the gamut - although most books at the time had to have downer endings where the heroines either were locked up or were "cured" and happily settled down with Good Men (TM), Forrest has managed to either pick books without this mandated theme or excerpted the parts without it, so you get all kinds of different flavors. As a result the book's always interesting, and if you find a selection you don't like (and I'm not sure I ever did), it's just a few page flips before you're in a totally different world. I'm not really sure who to recommend this to, but I guess if you've read this far you'll be able to figure out if this is the kind of book you'd be interested in.

Grade: Uh, good?

"Pompeii"

Pompeii: A Novel (Robert Harris)

Here's a interesting idea: A historicial fiction novel about Pompeii where the hero is a Roman aquaduct engineer, with the events leading up to the apocalyptic explosion explored as a series of phenominia that disrupt the water supply of towns around the bay.
That may sound boring - and for our non-nerd readers out there, it probably is - but I found this to be a very fresh and interesting approach. Combine the unconventional presmise with with the ever-present sense of doom hanging over the hero (he may not know what's going to happen, but you do, and the author starts each chapter with a snippet from a science tome about the fearsome power behind volcanos), and then pile on the fact that there's a mini-murder mystery (the hero is investigating the mysterious disappearence of his predecessor) and the fact that there's a corrupt plutocrat who is even more dangerous to our hero in the short term than the volcano.
If that sounds like a lot, it is, and it's packed into a slight book, but Harris has a very deft touch, and the result is the most suspensefull thrill-ride about Roman aquaducts you're likely to read.

Grade: A

"Regrety's Big Book of Fabricated Folktales from Finland"

Regrety's Big Book of Fabricated Folktales from Finland (April Winchell)

Just exactly what it sounds like (well, aside from "Big"): A book full of made up folktales and invented facts and statistics about Finland, usually about how Finland smells like pee and everyone who lives there is a depressed drunk who takes turns beating each other with sticks to pass the time while the moonshine ferments. It has nothing in common with the author's other book except the quality of writing, which is still excellent. This is a good bathroom book, as it is a little short (like this review).

Grade: B+

"Game Change"

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (John Heilemann and Mark Halperin)

It's no secret that I love gossipy political trash, and here's a great example. This book covers the 2008 campaign, with about 50% of the book being Obama facing off with Hillary for the Democratic nomination, a small interlude where McCain brushes aside the joke campaigns of Guliani and Fred Thompson to lock up his own nomination, and then maybe the last third being the general election. This is well-written, entertaining trash - the charecters are outsized and there's never a dull moment. My one and only complaint is that I think a little too much time is given to the Democratic primary; I don't know if that's because the reporters had the best sources on this or they found it the most interesting, but I would have liked the ratios switched so the first third was the Democratic nomination fight, then the second half was the general election. That's really my only complaint - I re-read this recently, and even with the material now being rather dated (perhaps a concern for the new reader) and having read it before, I still had trouble putting it down.
Bonus! New words I learned from this book: "Ripshit" - this is a great word; Try using it at least once a day - and the cryptic terms "political big feet" and "thumbsuckers", applied to important members of the national press and government, I think (???)

Grade: A-

"Bloody Mohawk"

Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York's Frontier (Richard Berleth)

I really enjoyed this book. Berleth's sweeping history of the Mohawk river valley is engrossing - the story picks up where the English have already come and taken over from the Dutch, who are snooty old money at this point, and the people of the long house have an uneasy co-existance with the white settlers, supplying them with pelts in return for manufactured goods. The book follows the sweep of events until at the end, the confederation of the native peoples is ripped apart in the extremely bloody and personal conflict of the Revolutionary War (spoiler alert).
My only word of warning here is that "Bloody Mohawk" really isn't kidding. During the first half of the book it's not too bad, but by the time the Revolutionary War starts, it's a mercy when people are just getting shot point-blank in the face with muskets and not getting scalped while still alive or hung with their own entrails.
If you can deal with the depressing and frankly astonishing amount of blood shed in the second half, you won't want to miss this.

Grade: A

"Inside Scientology"

Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (Janet Reitman)

This is the perfect starter's guide if you're interested in Scientology; Reitman has put together a comprehensive history of the church running from L Ron Hubbard's Dianetics phase up to today's staffer-abusin', Xenu-fearin', money-takin' church. Reitman navigates Scientology's often confusing maze of concepts, organizations, shell corporations, and lingo expertly. The only part of the book that drags a little is when she follows three girls born in the church and where they end up - I found myself flipping pages here as the one who's still in Scientology attempts to justify the church, and comes off like a typical 17 year old who, like, whatever, because right?
Otherwise this is a great read, if depressing, and if you keep your eyes peeled you'll see cameos from Nancy Many, Amy Scobee, and Marc Headly among other tell-all authors. Start with this book and you'll never be lost or confused while reading the others.

Grade: A-
Scientology Jargon-O-Meter reading: 0 (If you can remember what the RPF is, you won't have any trouble; Excellent primer for other books)

"Treason"

Treason [Navy Justice, Book 1] (Don Brown)

Yes, that's DON Brown, not DAN Brown. And man, this is a bad book. I got this for free on the Kindle store and I still feel ripped off. This is probably one of the most amateurish books I've ever read - everyone is flat and smotheringly one-dimensional. The bad guys - stock Evil Muslim Terrorists (TM) straight from central casting - all have horribly stilted "My brother, let us destroy this cute kitten in the name of our evil god, Allah" type dialog. They go around doing typical Evil Muslim Terrorist things, such as throwing hand grenades in churches, and assassinating Israeli ambassadors, and, um, serving for years in the United States Navy? Hey, I didn't say it made sense.
Meanwhile, that's just half the book. The other half is a military trial where a SEAL is accused of raping an officer. (What do these plotlines have to do with each other? Nothing! Ha ha!) This part of the book actually has our "hero" in it, a military prosecutor. And what does our hero do? Well, he, uh, prosecutes a rape case and starts dating the victim about two days after the incident took place. This part of the book gets twice as much ink as the other part, and it sure makes a Evil Muslim Terrorist named "John Neptune" throwing a grenade into a church look tightly written when the author takes twice as long to describe a boring dinner date in which nothing interesting happens. Kind of like how getting kicked in the butt is better than getting punched in the face - the Evil Muslim Terrorist sections may be incredibly dumb, clumsily written, offensive, and obvious, but at least something happens, which beats the part of the book that's dumb, clumsily written, offensive, and obvious, and nothing happens.
Overall, I'd give this a B- and a Shows Promise! from a 16 year old in a high school English class. As a finished novel, the only grade it deserves is the dreaded

Grade: F-

"Scientology - Abuse At the Top"

Scientology - Abuse at the Top (Amy Scobee)

This is kinda the anti-My Billion Year Contract. Scobee's not fucking around here; I finished the whole book in a few hours in the airport terminal and my hotel room. Scobee is amazingly blase about the whole thing. The book basically starts with her getting sexually assaulted at 14 by a Scientologist, and it doesn't get any more cheerful from there. Scobee bounces around the RPF (at one point being assigned there for two years), getting weird punishments like having to eat nothing but rice and beans for months and months, and getting verbally and emotionally abused by David Miscavige, the head of Scientology (and witinesses him physically abusing other staff members first hand). Scobee must be one tough cookie, because none of this seems to do more than make her mad, and the typical Scientologist cult techniques (bad and not enough food, not enough sleep, disconnecting people from friends and family) don't have the desired effect. At the end of the book she blows and there's as happy an ending as you can get when the cult you escaped after 20 years blackmails your mother into never talking to you again unless you give them $250,000 and dumps you on the street in your mid 40's with $100 in your pocket. I'd recommend reading the book, but maybe not as your first Scientologist memior; Scobee doesn't go into the kind of context you'd get from a "Blown for Good", and you might want to read one of those first.

Grade: B
Scientology Jargon-O-Meter reading: 7 (Scobee uses extensive acronyms and jargon like "being in a treason condition" or "up-stat"; These are explained in the end-notes, but unless you're already familiar with these concepts, you will need to attempt a guess at her meaning from context or flip to the endnotes every other page.)

"The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb"

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb (Text by, I guess, God; Illustrated by, yes, R. Crumb)

 Just like the title says: Here's all 50 chapters of the Book of Genesis in graphic novel format. The cover promises that nothing will be left out, and it isn't; You get everything from God creating the heaven and the earth in chapter 1 to Joseph dying in chapter 50 (spoiler alert). In between, you have the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah getting destroyed (with awesome pictures), and people begatting each other. Really, the only downside of the book is that whoever wrote Genesis is obsessed with this, so you have a bunch of material that's just people begatting the shit out of each other. This means Genesis is full of lists of who begat who, and even R. Crumb can only do so much with pages of this, although he does make it easy to skip with postage stamp-sized pictures of all the people who were begatted. Otherwise, this is a great book, and Crumb's art style fits the material much better than I anticipated (after all, I guess this was before the bra was invented). Absolutely not for kids, but - and I'm going to give this book points just for letting me write this sentence - not to be missed by Bible fans and R. Crumb enthusiasts.

Grade: A

"Job: A Comedy of Justice"

Job: A Comedy of Justice (Robert Heinlein)

Here's another book I feel like I might be missing the boat on. I tried, but this book is just a little too slow-moving for me. It starts out with a interesting premise - the hero, on a Carribean cruise, is egged on to walk on hot coals, and he takes a snootful of smoke and passes out at the end. When he wakes up, he's in another dimension; Although he is himself, everything else has changed, from his name to the political and societal context of western civilization.
The problem is that then nothing happens for fifty pages. The world that the author has left has a fundamentalist North America, and the one that he has come into more resembles our own, and the hero's fish out of water routine gets old fast - I get it, he drinks a lot and people don't wear as much clothing. By the time I was on page 60, having read 50 straight pages of the author experiencing this wonder you humans call al-co-hol, I came to another interesting situation: The hero had a million dollars in his shipboard safe deposit box, apparently meant for a transaction on one of the islands. However, this is resolved rather anti-climactically, and then the author's back to leering at women and drinking. At this point I put the book down and moved on to something else.

Grade: Not Applicable, since since I didn't finish the book.

"Fairy dust and the Quest for the Egg"

Fairy dust and the Quest for the Egg (Gail Levine)

Man, this is a grim book. I'm not sure who this book is for; By the time a child would be reading this book where Mother Dove is getting her wings broken and attacked by foxes and fairies are getting iced left and right, I'm not sure they'd still be interested in Disney Fairies. As an adult, uh, the watercolors are very nice, and it is pretty entertaining reading a Disney Fairies book where Tink is getting her leg broken in a hurricane.

Grade: Weird

"The Great Game"

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Peter Hopkirk)

This is an easy book to figure out if you're going to like. If the prospect of an in-depth history of the "Great Game," Imperial England and Tsarist Russia's brokering for territory, market share, and prestige in Central Asia in the 19th century sounds interesting to you, I can't recommend a better book on the subject (with the caveat that this is the only book I've read about it). Likewise, if you fell asleep halfway through the last sentence, first, wake up, and second, well, I'm sure you already know not to read this book.
I think you'll be missing out, though; This is a well-written book, ably dodging the pitfalls of being too dry or too partisan (although it does tend to skew to the British point of view given the wealth of primary sources available and the dearth of Russian ones). The only complaint I have is that the ending is a little anti-climactic, but such is the peril of working with history instead of fiction.

History Nerd Grade: A-
Uninterested in History Philistine Grade: C-


** Update **


Why did I only give this a B? The grade has been adjusted. I fear that I may be trying to avoid handing out too many A grades to history books, but I feel this book does deserve better than a straight B.

"Persian Fire"

Persian Fire: The first World Empire and the Battle for the West (Tom Holland)

A look at the famous clash between the Persian empire and the Greek city-states, running up through the Persians ultimate defeat at Platea. This is a famous story, one I'm sure you already know the broad strokes of, either from school or 300. Even being familiar with the story, I really enjoyed this book. Holland is a great storyteller, and instead of jumping right into the fighting, he instead carefully sets the scene, delving into the history of the Persian empire and to a slightly lesser extent the Greek states, so that by the time the clash actually comes, both combatants are familiar, and it's understandable how the badly outnumbered Greeks routed the Persians with almost no casualties. Perhaps the highest tribute I can offer the book is that even knowing the events it was covering and how each battle was going to turn out, I never found my attention or interest wandering. Recommended.

History Nerd Grade: A
Normal Person Grade: B

"Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer"

Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History (Greg Wyshynski)

Just what it sounds like: A list of 101 horrible sports ideas. Wyshynski is a snappy writer and this book moves right along. Even if you, like me, know nothing about hoops or soccer, it isn't difficult to follow. Good bathroom book. That's all I have to say.

Grade: B

"My Billion Year Contract" ( & new genre introduction)

One genre of books I enjoy is that of people who have escaped the Church of Scientology, a cult designed to drain money and free labor from its victims via a gradual process of brainwashing and cutting off all ties to non-Scientologists. There's a peril to reading these, which is that Scientology uses a huge amount of jargon, to the point where even people who have escaped from the Church and have been living outside for years will pepper a sentence with enough mysterious words and phrases to make it unintelligible. For that reason, this - and future - reviews of such books will contain a Scientology Jargon-O-Meter, a simple way to gauge how readable the book is without keeping a pocket dictionary of what the hell getting RPF'd for sec checking a SP squirrel means. The book will be graded on a 1 to 10 scale, 1 containing no or always well explained jargon, and 10 being a Palin-esque word salad of puzzling acronyms and phrases.
And now our feature presesntation...

My Billion Year Contract: Memoir of a Former Scientologist (Nancy Many)

Nancy Many's story is not dissimilar to may Scientology survivors: As a curious young college student she was sucked in with the organization's sales pitch, not realizing what was happening as she was fleeced of her money and freedom until she found herself working feverishly for pennies hard-selling the organization's products. One of the lowest points actually comes very early on in the book as she is assigned the dreaded RPF, or Rehabilitation Task Force, a kind of hard-labor prison program where she has to sleep in a hastily constructed shed in a parking garage and is only allowed to eat leftovers. This occurs while she is five months pregnant.
Not surprisingly, she decides to get out, or "blow", and escapes not only the RPF but Scientology completely. Imagine my surprise to note that all of this occurs about a third of the way through the book. So what's the rest, you ask? Kind of a confused mess, I hate to say. Nancy escapes actually having to live in the Scientology centers, but she stays affiliated with Scientology, even doing undercover spy work for the OSA (Office of Special Affairs, basically the dirty tricks division). The first third of the book is tightly written and easy to understand, but the last two thirds is kind of a mess; I went from thinking she'd just escaped Scientology entirely to her working as a sales rep and spying for the OSA. Eventually during a "Security check", what sounds like basically going into a small room and having someone yell at you for hours on end, she has a complete mental break. This is harrowingly written and genuinely scary. After this she kind of just rambles for a while until the book ends.
This isn't a bad book, but I feel like the author got more from writing it than you may from reading it, if you get my drift. I don't know if it was really that disjoined and muddled or if it seemed that way because I was reading it on my ipod. Either way, I don't feel like reading the book was a waste of time, but unless you're really interested in the genre you may want to take a pass on this one.

Grade: C
Scientology Jargon-O-Meter reading: 2 (occasional phrases without explanation; Vast majority of terms explained when they first appear)

"Team of Rivals"

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin)

I'm not really sure what I expected from this book; The first part of it promises to be nothing less than quintuple biography, covering Lincoln and then his three closest advisors (the "Team of Rivals") in the run-up to the 1860 election and through Lincoln's assassination at the end of the civil war.What I got instead was a mess. The author inexplicably has decided to include reams of pointless details, so the book develops an identity crisis. What is this book about? Is it a Lincoln & family biography and history? Then why do we spend page after page on the personal lives of his cabinent members? Is it a history of Lincoln and the federal government's handling of the Civil War? Then why do we spend page after page on Mary Lincoln going camping and shopping? Is it an examination of Lincoln's governing style and how that effected the war and the aftermath? Then why do we spend page after page on Kate Chase and her husband? The ultimate problem is that the book has no message, no thrust, nothing driving the narritive forward, and any time it begins to pick up momentum, the author will jump away from the military developments to Mary Lincoln's camping trips or jump away from Lincoln's navigating of the rocky political waters to Kate Chase's marrige. There's a good book in here, but it has at least 250 needless pages inserted into it. Cut out the parts of Lincoln's personal life that don't effect his governing of the country (the vast majority), cut out the personal lives of his cabinent members, and you have a very interesting examination of Lincoln's political and military philosophies. Leave it all in, and you have this book, which I can't recommend.

Grade: D+

"Odd and the Frost Giants"

"Odd and the Frost Giants" (Neil Gaiman)


 The back of this book says that this is a "Inventive, short, yet perfectly-formed novel",       and, well, it's short, let me give it that. This isn't bad at all, but it's a kid's book, and  frankly I felt a little underwhelmed by this after seeing the movie "Thor"; This is like Baby's First Aesir book, and while it's probably perfect for kids, I'm not sure how much adults are going to get out of it.

 Grade:
 10 and Under: A
 18+: C+

"First Man"

First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (James Hansen)

The imaginitively named authorized biography of Neil Armstrong (not to be confused with the Albert Camus book of the same name). I feel for the author; Armstrong is apparently legendarilly taciturn, which makes for a lot of sentances like "Neil doesn't remember..." or "Neil couldn't confirm that..." This may sound annoying, but I found it kind of charming; Armstrong's quiet, reserved self-confidence seems very commendable to me (and familiar; Armstrong reminds me of a certain someone's older sister, actually). What does get annoying is how technical the book can be. I understand - in fact, I applaud - the level of care and detail that goes into the moon landing (and the preparation and immediate aftermath). What I don't understand is why this level of detail is gone into for the entire part of the book leading up to the moon landing. Do we really need to be given a rundown on the difference between the average height and weight of the first versus the second group of astronauts (to provide one example)? The amazon review points out that the author actually counts up how many shells, bombs, and rockets were fired per month when Neil is a fighter pilot in the Korean war, and this is exactly as boring and as tedious as you think it is - any interesting events are rendered lifeless by an endless parade of dry technical details and meaningless figures. The author even starts early, giving us 10 generations of the Armstrong clan before Neil is even born. Bizarrely, the opposite occurs at the end of the book -after the moon landing, it's like a switch has been flipped; The remainder of the book - and there isn't much - is basically "Uh, then he never gave any interviews, the end."

My recommendation: The moon landing and the parts immediately surrounding it are about a third of the book, and they're a great third of a book. This is where the author's endless attention to detail is a powerful positive instead of a deadly dull negative, and what could in the wrong hands be boring (since you know the outcome already presumably) or tedious (given the amount of technical detail) is where the book shines and almost makes plodding through the rest of it bearable. The thing is, you don't really need to plod through the rest of the book. Skip until when Neil starts working as a test pilot, and close the book after he returns home from the "Giant Step" tour coming off the moon landing. You'll have a well-written, gripping account. Read the whole thing, like I did, and you'll have a slog with a cracking middle. (Admittedly, the author remains humorless, managing to turn Buzz Aldrin's amusing anecdote about being the first man to pee his pants on the moon into a paragraph-long investigation of who truly peed in his pants on the moon first, but this somehow feels fitting given Armstrong's character and desire to get it right, no matter what makes the best story.)

Grade:
If you just read the part I recommend: A-
Entire book: C-

Mass Effect Volume 1: Redemption

If you have not played, or have no interest in, the Mass Effect series...get out of this review. Really. Run. Go outside and do whatever it is people do when they don't play video games.

Now that the boring people are gone (just kidding, favorite reader of ours who just got a new kitten)...I can continue. Mass Effect: Redemption falls...Oh! SPOILERS FOR THE BEGINNING OF MASS EFFECT 2 AND SOME OF THE GAME ITSELF. There. Now I cannot be sued or flamed by the internet.

Ahem. This graphic novel continues from where we left off after Shepard dies, but before she is resurrected by Cereberus. I chose to romance Liara in all of my Mass Effect games so I found the story of how Kate Shepard's girlfriend goes to such lengths to rescue her body from the Collectors touching. If you didn't romance Liara, I guess you can be touched by how your BFF Liara saves you?

Liara tells you in ME2 the overview of how she came to rescue your body and bring you to Cereberus so if reading video game graphic novels or books is not your thing, you can probably skip this. If, however, you enjoy the universes Bioware creates...pick this up. It'll be good to see our girl, Liara, kicking some ass on her own.

Post script to the review: On my first playthrough, I was quite mad at Liara for not coming with me after my Shepard met her on Ilium. I mean, we really had something...you know? The Liar of the Shadow Broker helped a little, I'll admit. This graphic novel, though, really makes you appreciate what Liara did for you...and maybe why she's too hurt and set on revenging Feron to come with you at first on Ilium. Read this if you want to not be mad at your best girl.

The Magicians

The Magicians is, obviously, about magic. Magic done realistically, if there is such a thing. I hate to use the 'blank meets blank' cliche to describe it BUT it reminds me of Harry Potter and Narnia written for adults in an upstate New York setting (at one point the characters even reference a trip to Albany! Cheap pops for my hometown!).

Just as not all animated works are made for children, not all books about magic are for children. The characters drink, swear, and have sex. Just like real teenagers! And that's what I enjoyed about this book. I didn't have to roll my eyes at Boy character and Girl character (or boy character and boy character, this book portrays a gay relationship--bonus points for making the gay character one of the coolest in the book) chastely holding hands and even kissing once at the finale. The book also doesn't portray marriage as the most perfect thing two people can do...marriages can be messed up and children can be pissed about it.

"Coutdown to Lockdown"

Countdown to Lockdown: A Hardcore Journal (Mick Foley)

I am apparently one of the few people who enjoyed Foley's previous book, "Hardcore Diaries", so I was happy to read in the introduction that this book follows the same format - that is to say the birth, life, and hopefully successful climax of a single wrestling angle. In "Hardcore Diaries", it was a fairly horrible journey, with our author at the end wishing he'd just stayed at home, but happily at the end of "Countdown to Lockdown" everything goes about as well as it can when you have a 300 pound, 45-year old retired wrestler lacing up the boots one last time. Um, spoiler alert.
As always, Foley is a wonderful author with a gift for perfect understatment and setting up horrible, obvious jokes that make you laugh anyway after they land. On the downside, he also continues his bad habit of rambling about how much he loves a random celebrity (having now moved from Katie Couric to Tori Amos, who he won't stop talking about). For this book he introduces the "Wrestlemeter", a device that is supposted to let you know how much he's going to be talking about Tori Amos or his charitable work in Sierra Leone as opposted to the main thrust of the book, which is dissecting in fascinating detail what goes into a modern wrestling angle. To be honest, I don't think the Wrestlemeter works. It's not specifically that I only want to read about wrestling, it's more that I just don't want to hear him going on about how much he loves Tori Amos for pages. In fact one of my favorite parts of the entire book has nothing to do with wrestling, it's Foley admitting to and then describing in amusing detail his watching and then re-watching in slow motion a scene from Mad Men trying to see if the actress is using a body double when he's supposted to be working out.
In that respect, the Wrestlemeter is actually unnessessary; All you need to do is start flipping pages when you see "Tori Amos" or "Sierra Leone" and you'll be fine. I don't think I really skipped that many pages - maybe 10 or 15 out of a 314-page book -  and the rest is just as good as anything he's ever written. Recommended for wrestling fans and non-wrestling fans alike, or, I guess, Tori Amos fans.

Grade: A-

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms

Town of Evening Calm is a moving story of survivor's guilt. Country of Cherry Blossoms tells of the child of a survivor and of the survivor's attempts to remain connected as those who lived through the bombing, or touched the lives of those who did, simply die of old age.

I finished the graphic novel about two minutes ago. I'm sad and touched. This is the kind of book I end feeling like I want to hug everyone I know and tell them beautifully profound things.

Life with Mr. Dangerous

Gosh. How should I describe this without giving anything away? The main character is a mid-twenties woman who is obsessed with a cartoon show, has a jerk boyfriend, and works at a department store (or maybe just a clothes store?). She has no whacky adventures. She just lives her life. Some stuff happens but I can't tell you. Just read it, okay?

Walt Disney's Imagineering Legends and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Park

Ever wonder just how Disneyland and Disney World got so magical? This book will tell you. It focuses on the original Imagineers who helped Walt Disney create Disneyland (btw if you don't know that Disneyland is the one in California, you should just stop reading my review right now. You are a terrible, terrible Disney grinch, and you are banned).

For me, this book did nothing to take away from the magic I enjoy at Disney World as an adult. When you're a kid, you only see the 'real' Mickey. When you're an adult, you appreciate all the work it took to put him there.

"Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin"

Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: Our Tumultuous Years (Frank Bailey, Ken Morris & Jeanne Devon)

Reading though this book, I found myself amazed at two things:

1.) How incredibly vain and paranoid Sarah Palin really is.

2.) The fact that it took three people to write this book.

Let's deal with point two first. Frank Bailey is many things, but unfortuneatly he is not exactly a master wordsmith, and this book at times suffers. (I hesitate to think what the manuscript would look like without his two co-authors). This is kind of a minor point, which is why I want to get it out of the way now. Mostly all you need to know is that some lines hit ("Making me long for a chance to back in time to the Governor's Picnic and say to Sarah, 'Thanks, but no thanks, on that job to nowhere'") and more often miss (A realtively unimportant part of the book - Palin's vetting by the McCain campaign: - is described "As political perfect storms go, this resembled two Category 5s meeting head-on") and some really just sum up the whole book ("Punishing enemies and wealth accumulation became a full-time job").

Back to the first issue, this is an inside look at Sarah Palin before and after her veep run in 2008. (Bailey was out in the cold during the actual veep run, which I think ends up being a net positive; Her behaviour during the election itself has been covered exhaustively and I don't really think it needs to be gone over again here.) Bailey, describing himself as the original Palin-bot, gets in on the ground floor of the Palin campaign for Gov, showing up the first day to pry gum off the floors of her new campaign headquarters. What follows is his rise to becoming Sarah's right hand, kind of, and his subsiquent ups and downs as the Palin inner circle, which sounds like nothing so much as a horrible high school clique on steroids, raises some high and brings others down low.

Though it all, what astonished me the most was how vindictive and petty Palin appears; Even after she's elected Governor, she seems to spend more time reading blogs about herself and emitting steam from her ears when commenters say mean things about her than she does governing. For me, the low point came after she returns from the lower 48 to resume governing Alaska (before becoming the Alaskan Quitbull and resigning), when a neighbor complains about the air and noise pollution coming from tour busses going past her house. Palin sets out to destroy him, sending her daughter Willow out to set up a lemonade stand, then calling reporters to tell them that, gosh, this mean ol' grinch just hates little girls, lemonade, Sarah Palin, America, and probably the Baby Jesus, isn't that a shame?

Bailey has saved all of his emails, which he uses liberally to show the incredible amount of minute, petty matters Palin not only seems to enjoy wasting her time with, but can't seem to ignore to save her life, and the picture they paint is very difficult to refute. (One more piece of dirt: Sarah has had Lasik eye surgery, and only wears her glasses to look smart.) The book can occasionally be a slog, but as far as I've read it's the definitive Palin book out there, and in a sane country would probably be the nail in her political coffin, you betcha.

Grade: A

"Byzantium: The Decline and Fall"

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (John Julius Norwich)


Volume III of the history of Byzantium. Whereas Volume I has Justinian crafted out of mosiacs and Volume II has a gold and gem-covered Bible on the cover, Volume III has the none-too-pleased looking Mehmet II, conquerer of Byzantium. Volume II leaves off at Manzikert, so Volume III picks up at the greatest military disaster in Byzantine history and ends with the city being conquered and the resulting fallout as the coffin lid closes on the empire. Uplifting stuff, basically. To be fair, it's not all gloom and doom; There are several compitent if not great rulers in between Manzikert and 1453, and the author deals buisnesslike with the fall of the city and the aftermath.
What else can I say? The writing is as excellent as Volumes I and II, and I'm sad to be finished with the series. My only complaint is that the footnotes start to become slightly annoying at this point - over half of them are now "See (earlier volume and page number)", which, having read the earlier books, I don't particuarly feel a need to do. This is truly the smallest of nits to pick, however, and like the previous two volumes you really can't go wrong.

Grade: A

"Nazi Propoganda for the Arab World"

Nazi Propoganda for the Arab World (Jeffrey Herf)

Boy, this is a hard book to read. If you want to be bummed out for a while, here's one for you. I mean, what do you make of a book that has "Chapter 5: 'Kill The Jews Before They Kill You'?" The reason I got this book is because Nazi propoganda for the Arab world is such a bizzare idea to me; How do you reconcile the most racist political philosophy of all time with trying to appeal to arabs and muslims? As it turns out - and here I may be saving you $16.80, without shipping - the Nazis basically implimented a region-wide "No, we don't mean YOU" program, supplemented by a finger-pointing program accusing the Jews of, well, basically everything. The book is very well researched with endless quotes from primary sources and the author certainly knows how to write, but because of the subject matter it just becomes grinding after a while; The Nazis were very one-note, and reading about how "The Jew Roosevelt" is conspiring with the Zionists, the Bolsheviks, the British, the lizard men from Neptune, the UN, the New World Order, and Rainbow Brite just gets wearying after a while. The book is educational and sobering, but by the end I was counting the pages until it was over.

Grade: :(

"Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days"

Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days (Neil Gaiman - who else were you expecting?)

A collection of short stories. Two of these tie in with Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" run, which I admit I've never read and know nothing about; I guess Swamp Thing is a good guy, but I keep thinking he's going to go Creature from the Black Lagoon and start killing teenagers.

Anyway! The first story, "Jack-InThe-Green" has Swamp Thing tending to one of his dying friends, and then burying him. Not very exciting. Neither is the second short, "Shaggy God Stories", where a sentient tree wanders around talking to a houseplant. Not off to a good start here. The book gets more interesting if not nessessarily much better in "Brothers", where Gaiman takes a looks at "Brother Power, The Geek", a legendary, horrible-looking comic from the 60's about a doll that gets dressed up in water and blood-soaked clothes, then he gets hit by lightening and comes to life with a million swinging volts. This story is a hot mess, and I guess I applaud Gaiman for trying to do something interesting with such a ridiculous charecter, but some ephemera really are better left forgotten. (See also his attempt to rehabilitate "Prez" - the teen-age president!!!!! - in the Sandman books.)

Next up is "Hold Me", a John Constantine story where John Constantine meets a ghost who wants to hug people, and hugs him, and the ghost vanishes. It sounds about as exciting as it is. Gaiman says in his introduction that it has some of his favorite comic book art and all I can say is that it may not be faithfully reproduced here, because unless you're looking at it under a powerful light it looks horribly dark and skritchy.

The last story and as far as I'm concerned the best is "Sandman Midnight Theatre", featuring the pulpy 30's noir Sandman - a guy with a gas mask, big trench coat, fedora, and gas gun - meeting the other Sandman, the Gaiman-created embodiment of mortal dreams. Now don't get too excited - the actual meeting takes place in a two-page spread and is more of an interesting pit stop, since the Gaiman-created Sandman is currently enclosed in a glass prison that he will not escape until his own series starts proper; He actually plays no part in the story and is just a neat little cameo. With that being said the actual story itself is very interesting, and the artwork - although at times almost becoming as dark as "Hug Me" up above - is very evocative and sets the mood very well.
So "Sandman Midnight Theatre" is very good, but is it worth buying the whole book for? Probably not. Even if you're a Sandman completest, he's in the book for two pages and doesn't do anything. Interesting read for Gaiman or, I guess, Swamp Thing completionists, but otherwise you're probably safe taking a pass.

Grade: C+

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Phew! I finally finished this book. I've been reading it for months now. Although, I was reading it on my iPod Touch the majority of the time.

Nicholas Ostler starts at the first known languages and ends with English, along with speculation about the future of languages. Some of the history is familiar--Norman French's near extinction of English--the history of Arabic and Chinese less so.

While the book is very well researched and informative, I found myself skipping ahead every so often. A good book but be careful and intersperse it with lighter fair.This book is not for recommended for anyone not really interested in diphthongs and glottal stops as Ostler goes into great detail about such details.

"Watchmen"

Watchmen (Alan Moore)

Well, what can I really add to this? If you've heard that Watchmen is a modern classic and a must-read for any comics fan, you've heard right. Even if you've seen the movie, I'd recommend reading through the book, which has a significant difference in the ending. Now I feel bad taking a great book like this and making most of the review two issues that bugged me about it, so bear in mind that the two issues I'm about to list are both minor and should in no way dissaude you from reading, but only points to be aware of as you do so.

The first issue is that you can safely skip the Black Freighter parts; This is a comic within the comic that frankly isn't very good and has no bearing on the story I could see. Honestly it reads like an eight year old trying to top himself as he rambles on for why his homework didn't get done: Then a storm hit and then zombies attacked and then I had to ummm I had to make a raft out of um dead zombies to get home and then the dog ate my homework. Just skip it, you won't miss anything.
The second issue is that the artist eschews primary colors to give the book a distinctive look. This succeeds as the book does look very distinctive indeed, but after a while I almost became nautious under the noxious assualt of pinks, greens, and browns. If you read the book in one go - as I did since it becomes engrossing very quickly - you may never want to see off-pink and lime-green again by the time you're done.

Oh, and also, Doctor Manhatten wears less and less clothes as the book goes on, with the artist apparently "selecting carefully when full frontal shots would occur", which may not be the best note to end this review on, but I don't really know how to top it.

Grade: A

Batman: Night Cries

The episodes of SVU with children as the victims are the hardest to watch. Reading Batman: Night Cries is like one of those episodes. The victims in this book are children. It explores the terror of being a child currently in an abusive situation and the haunting memories of adults coping with an abusive childhood.

I felt a little better reading this book than watching SVU, knowing Batman was on the case. His justice goes beyond the technicalities or bungled testimony that lets monsters sometimes go free on SVU. We often see Batman tackling the more visible crimes of theft and murder, but rarely have I ever seen a superhero try to stop crimes like child abuse.

The story stars both Batman and Commissioner Gordon. I started to enjoy the interaction of the two characters with the recent Batman reboots and felt there was never the sense of partnership between them on the 90s animated series. Commissioner Gordon is a new commissioner in this book and must now juggle the political demands of the office along with his strong desire to continue being a cop. Someone also notices the aftereffects of a night as Batman on Bruce Wayne's body at a point in the story, which was a nice touch.

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it for Batman fans. But...go into it knowing it's about child abuse.

"Byzantium: The Apogee"

Byzantium: The Apogee (John Julius Norwich)

Volume II of the history of Byzantium, picking up at the year 800 and covering until the disaster at Manzikert (from which the empire apparently never recovers, thus promising a very uplifting Volume III). This volume goes on pretty much the same as Volume I, and is just as recommended; Really, I don't have much to add here, so I'll just direct you to the review for Volume I and all I can add is that this book is just as good.

"Byzantium: The Early Centuries"

Byzantium: The Early Centuries (John Julius Norwich)


Part 1 of a three-volume set covering the Byzantine empire, starting with Constantine and ending, with, um, I guess the fall of the city in 1453 (I haven't read the third volume yet). I was looking forward to this a lot as I enjoyed "Venice", the author's one volume history of - take a guess - Venice. My one complaint about that book was that it felt a little dense. By covering only the first 500 or so years of the Byzantine empire in this volume, the material is allowed to breathe, and the result is a intensely readable.This is a big hefty book, covering Constantine and ending at the crowning of Charlemange at Christmas, 800 AD (as the author notes, an absurdly convenient date). I couldn't put this book down, even when the various claimiants to the Imperial throne were blindling each other or cutting each other's tounges out. The writing, like "Venice", is excellent, and always clear and easy to follow, even when the author can't help but wade into the obscure ecumenical fights the Byzantines loved getting into. This is Byzantium for beginners, so you don't need to know much to enjoy this book, although a basic knowledge of the founding of Islam and the transformitive effect it had on the region may put some of the events in a more meaningful context for you. All that being said, if you have even a slight interest at all in this area and you're not already an expert on Byzantine history, you really can't go wrong - and even if you do already have knowledge of the material, this book is so well written I'd bet you'll enjoy going over it again with the author anyway.

Grade: A+

"Boring Postcards"

Boring Postcards (Martin Parr)

This book sat on my wishlist for ages until my wife finally got it for me. I can understand the reluctance to purchase this; Who wants to watch someone open a present and then proudly declare, "Yes, it was me who got you boring postcards!" Likewise, if you were flipping through this book at a bookstore, you probably wouldn't be surprised to find out that this book is exactly what it says it is: A book full of boring postcards, mostly from 50's and 60's England. This sure sounds tedious, but I found myself amused, even charmed - who in thier right mind decided people wanted postcards of hospital cafeterias, rooms at motor lodges, and most mind-boggingly, airport parking lots? Did anybody buy these? Non-ironically? I can't imagine sending one of these - Dear wife, really enjoying this parking lot, wish you were here.
Reading through the Amazon reviews, apparently some British readers were struck with nostalgia for a time when England was rebuilding itself after World War 2 and had bright hopes for the future; I don't have any of that, so I was just trying to come to grips with who in their right mind would make a postcard out of the living room at an invalid home.

Grade: A

"The Secret History of MI6"

The Secret History of MI6 (Keith Jeffery)

Here's an odd bird: An offical history of a secret intellegence organization. Bear in mind this is the real history of MI6 (nee SIS), so instead of James Bond parachuting away from an exploding blimp and snowboarding down the mountain he lands on while outrunning the fireball, you're going to be reading about people trying to get jobs in shipyards and stealing documents from the garbage.
Now that's all well and good and I wish I could recommend this book, but I can't. The book is weirdly dry and bloodless. A lot of the book - feels like 90% at times - is wasted detailing SIS' endless reorganizations, which is just as exciting as it sounds. My eyes started glazing over and then I started skipping pages as SIS got reorganized again and again, with the nadir coming as the section on SIS activites in World War 2 threatens to get exciting and is hit like a car on the train tracks by another fucking reorganization.
With that out of the way, the remaining material is pretty interesting - my favorite parts actually come almost at the end of the book when Q branch starts up and begins wrestling with stuff like a safe that can destroy everything in it in the time it takes a man to run up the stairs. But the "remaining material" is very sparse; Most of the book is a bureaucrat's view of SIS, where everyone is minuting thier asses off about how the organization should be set up. Not terribly thrilling, in other words, and tough to recommend unless you're adept at skipping large chunks, or really, really interested in the permanent under-secretary minuting about the report prepared by Sir Biffy Tushsniffington about which Section of SIS should report to which branch controlled by which assistant director. A sad missed opprotunity.

Grade: D+

"Prospero Burns" & Genre Update

First, a genre advisory: We have now reached the end of the Horus Hersey novel series published so far, putting aside short-story compliations and books with horrid Amazon reviews. Further reviews will have to wait for more books to be published (check my wishlist). I do have "Collected Visions", but this is a 800 page coffee table book that I'll mostly be flipping through. I hope you've enjoyed our trip through the Horus Hersey, and now we can move off incredibly nerdy books about the far future back to incredibly nerdy history books. But first, let's examine the last novel from the series I read...

Prospero Burns (Dan Abnett)

This book is titled "Prospero Burns" with the subtitle "The Wolves unleashed," but a more accurate title would be "A bunch of boring rememberancer crap" with the subtitle "ZZzzzzz".
Okay, maybe I'm being mean, but this book is frustrating. How do you take eight-foot tall genetically engineered space vikings and make them boring? The answer, as you may have already guessed, is making half the book a pointless slog of a flashback. Oh, how I wanted to start skipping pages as the flashbacks droned on and on, serving no purpose and boring the shit out of me. Oh, how I wanted to get back to the present, to see the Space Wolves - who the book is supposted to, you know, actually be about - fucking do something. It would almost be better if I could just dismiss the book totally and say skip it, but the parts of the book actually about the Space Wolves are excellent - action-packed, filled to the brim with interesting charecters and situations.
And then you cut away from this to see a rememberancer bumblefucking around in the library for ten pages. Who cares? Having finished the book, I can tell you that the flashbacks are totally pointless - they end up having an impact on the story, but this could have been filled in with ten or fifteen pages, or even just totally axed by keeping the (not very interesting) events they lead up to off-camera. In fact I'll say right now you can safely skip these scenes, which is what I would recommend. You'll need to have read "A Thousand Sons" for the end to make sense even then, and if you have, I'd just leave it at that.

Whole Book Grade: C-
Part About the Space Wolves: A

"Regretsy"

"Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF" (April Winchell)

A quick look at the "website books" tag shows that I'm not usually a fan of books made out of websites. Happily, "Regretsy" is the exception to the rule. Whereas, say, "Stuff On My Cat: The Book" just throws a bunch of pictures in between two covers and calls it a day, this book actually has, you know, some new, original writing in it - imagine that. It's almost like someone put work into this book!
The title is based off a crafting site called "Etsy", which offers an incredible array of DIY crafts for sale, ranging from a $85 painting of a corndog inside the outline of a plane (with the explination "Reminds me of the time I flew to New York and had a corndog") to my personal favorite, "A Portrait of a Horse as a Young Man", a painting of a mad-looking horse with the word SHIT written over it in red text. These are roundly mocked by the author, which is no small feat; What do you even say to someone charging $50 for a print of a bowl of brussel sprouts and doll heads?
The crafts are organized into chapters - art, vulvacraft (K. Ham's personal favorite), christmas, and the all-inclusive WTF category. Before each chapter is a introduction that contains more text and amusement than I got from both "Stuff On My Cat: The Book" and "Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle", so take that for what it's worth.
With all that being said, the only caveat is that this is a short book. - I knocked it out in under an hour, but only because I couldn't put it down.

Grade: A-

"A Song of Ice and Fire"

A Song of Ice and Fire (George Martin)

God help me, I really tried with this one, but this is another book I never finished. When I got to page 300 and the author was still introducing whole new casts of charecters, I just couldn't stand it anymore. How about you go back to some of the 85+ charecters you've already introduced? Honestly, I'm not sure I'm missing much giving up at the 1/3rd point. Apparently I'm the only person who feels this way, but I didn't find the writing that great. About the time a lady given a horse is bellowing "Tell my husband he has given me the wind," and then repeating it for emphasis, I started to think this book wasn't everything all the hype said it was. I've heard defenders of this work say that, well, it's the first part of a seven-book epic, so you can't judge it in isolation, and I'm sorry, but that's nonsense; If you can't make the first book in a series any good, maybe you should re-think your series. I'll just ask: Was the first Harry Potter book bad? That was the first book in a seven-book series; Was he given the wind???????

Grade: F

"The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" (Second Look)

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England (Ian Mortimer)

Like our other look at this book, I enjoyed this. A comprehensive tour of 1300s England covers topics from what food you'll be able to find to what kind of furniture you'll be sitting on to  how to stay out of trouble with the law. A few aspects I found tiresome - nobody has toilets; I get it - but on the whole this was extremely interesting. I did skip a few parts (the author's enthusiasm for fashion is commendable, but after a few pages of seeing how the doublet went under the superdoublet I checked out) but the material is almost always interesting and skillfully presented. May make you want to watch "Braveheart" again.

History Nerd Grade: A-
Normal Citizen Grade: B+

"Legion"

Legion (Dan Abnett)

"Legion", like "Fulgrim", is a frustrating book. The Alpha Legion, who the book is about, tend to lurk in the shadows and only appear for extended periods as the book goes on. The problem with this is that the author focuses his attention on something called the "Geno Five-Two Chiliad", which has a trillion new, confusing words, names, and concepts. I knew just flipping through the Dramatis Personae section at the front of the book this was going to be trouble. What do you do with names like:

Sri Vedt - Uxor Primus of the Geno Five-Two
Honen Mu - Uxor
Rukhsana Saiid - Uxor
Hurtado Bronzi - Hetman
Dimiter Shiban - Hetman
Franco Boone - Genewhip

And, oh boy, the book doesn't do any favors keeping all this straight, either. The Uxors are female officers who command the troops, which is easy to grasp. It gets annoyingly hard to keep track of when the author's laying down that the Uxors are female officers who have little retinues who use something called "'cept" (always with that distracting ') to order troops around, so you'll have Honen, or Mu, or Uxor, 'cepting her ass off with Hurt, or Hurtado, or Bronzi, or Hetman, or Het.
I never really got used to this. People, please, if you have confusing names, just pick a name and run with it. I realize that you may want to have Uxor Mu call Hetman Bronzi "Hurt" instead of "Hurtado" to show how close they are, but when I can't keep the fucking charecters straight because they have six ways they're referred to you're just defeating yourself.
So that's issue one. Now things get even goofier when we meet John Grammaticus, agent of THE CABAL, a group of anicent, smug Xeno scum. Now this introduces a big problem, because the Cabal meeting with the Primarch of the Alpha Legion is such an important event that it natrually suggests itself as the climax of the book, and the events immediately following it are so momentus that it pretty much has to be the climax. The problem this creates is that since this meeting happens at the end of the book, quite a lot of it is Grammaticus trying to get the Cabal in touch with the Alpha Legion, and this part isn't exactly thrilling. In "Fulgrim", a craftworld just shows up, hails the Space Marines, and a meeting is arranged, and while I understand that if that happened here this book would be about 75 pages long, it does get mighty tiresome as roadblocks are constantly thrown up to make sure the Legion and Cabal don't meet until the end of the book.
All that being said, when the Cabal and the Primarch do finally meet the book picks up, and the end comes with a bang. As with "Fulgrim", however, the last 8th of the book being great isn't really enough to save it. I don't want to imply this book is as bad as "Fulgrim"; The parts with the army are interesting, if hampered by the names, and Grammaticus' sneaking around isn't that great but does have one spectacular fight scene, if nothing else. I can't really recommend this book to the general population, but if you love the Alpha Legion - does anybody? - then you can't go wrong. You goof.

Grade: C

"The Great Shark Hunt" (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1)

The Great Shark Hunt (Gonzo Papers, Volume 1) (Hunter S Thompson)

What the sub-title means by the "Gonzo Papers" is that this book is a Thompson sampler; It collects dozens and dozens of articles and book exceprts on subjects from covering the Kentucky Derby to race tension in LA following the slaying of a prominent Latino TV reporter to Muhammed Ali's loss to Leon Spinks to Nixon's impeachment and resulting fallout. I really liked this book - I was never bored, which is no easy feat considering the wide breadth of material covered and the sheer length (almost 600 huge pages). In the voice of a less talented author, Thompson's schtick could become tiresome very quickly, but he is so engaging that this never happens. A heist late in the book where he skips out on his massive hotel bill in Mexico and flees back to the US with a drug stache that he and his lawyer decided to consume all of on the plane into Texas is just as frightening and hilarious as anything early in the book where he holes up in a hotel room shooting heroin while he's supposted to be covering the Super Bowl. If you have the slightest interest in Thompson's work, I can't think of a better starting place than this. (I've also read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72", which I'll see if I can remember enough of to cough up a bite-sized book review.)

Now one caveat: I read this over a long period of time - I left it in the car and read it when we went out to eat, which means the book was devoured in 50-page chunks. Your milage may vary, but I probably don't recommend sitting down and knocking the whole thing out in one day - like most writers with a very distinctive voice, it's probably better to savor rather than gorge. (Gonzo Papers, Vol 2, is apparently a collection of newspaper columns, which I anticipate will make an excellent bathroom book.)

Grade: A