"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