"Habibi"

Habibi (Craig Thompson)

This book really frustrated me. Thompson's art is gorgeous, and the story and setting contained within is absolutely top-notch, but the first half the book drove me bonkers with the way that Thompson kept cutting back between three different periods in the heroine's life from page to page. One page she's a teenager living in a boat in the desert, two pages after that she's a grown pregnant woman in a harem, and two pages after that she's a child at a slave market. Not only did this prevent the story from building any kind of momentum, but it also serves to drain any tension from the two chronologically earlier story segments. You'll have a visually exciting, kinetic chase scene with guards yelling "Kill her!", but you already know what's going to happen, because a page ago you were reading about her in ten years.
Luckily, this is only the first half, and once the book switches its focus to the titular Habibi, it also proceeds in chronological order, and - what a shock! - not knowing what's going to happen actually allows for some, you know, shocking and surprising moments. Overall, the story and art are good enough to make this easy to recommend; Just don't let the irritating first half's mish-mash put you off.

Grade: B+

"The Mead-Hall"

The Mead-Hall: The Feasting Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England (Stephen Pollington)

Nerd alert. This book is exactly what it sounds like, a big scholarly investigation of mead halls, including where they were located, how they were built, what people ate inside, the feasting equipment they used, and what entertainment they had. It's pretty interesting stuff, if not exactly gripping, and if nothing else it makes you look smart when you can point out how Eric's club on True Blood is set up like a traditional mead hall. I don't know that I can really recommend this for most people, but I liked it.

Grade: B

"Queer Pulp"

Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions form the Golden Age of the Paperback (Susan Stryker)

I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately, it has one fatal drawback that keeps it from being a great read like Lesbian Pulp Fiction - there's no samples. Stryker describes what's in the book and you see the cover, but that's all, and it can get really aggravating when she'll say something like "The book's contents don't match the lurid cover". Great - let me see some of the contents! Maybe it's a copyright thing, I don't know, but it really hurts the book. It's still entertaining to read, but I started just flipping through and looking at the covers after a while. For die hards only.

Grade: C-

"Bound for Canaan"

Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (Fergus Bordewich)

Hey, I know this guy! And unlike "America's Great Debate", I don't have to knock off half a point for a goofy rhyming title this time! I liked Bordewich's previous book well enough, and I liked this one even more. I put this down to the fact that this is, as far as I know, the first and only exhaustive history of the underground railroad, and let's be honest, it's probably inherently more exciting reading about slaves escaping bondage than a bunch of rich white guys arguing about how far slavery should extend. Also, it's nice reading a book like this that's more uplifting than depressing - Tom Benton from the previous book might be a Profile in Courage, but even he wasn't down south risking his life leading people to freedom. Highly recommended.

Grade: A

"The Nth Doctor"

The Nth Doctor (Jean-Marc Lofficier)

Nerd alert. The original Dr Who TV show was canceled in 1989 and got a not terribly successful made for TV movie in 1996. This book covers the various written and discarded screenplays prepared for the movie, and while I found it quite interesting, it's probably only for Dr Who supernerds. I could have done without the "Script Review" section of the book as each script is praised highly, even the one I had trouble keeping awake though (I was more of a fan of the insane script where the Doctor goes around throwing people into vats of acid and killing them with karate chops). Also, I'm still not sure how a human and a Gallifreyan can have a kid given all the regeneration energy in a Time Lord.

Grade:
If you understood the last sentence: A-
The other 98% of the population: Skip

"Our Friends Beneath the Sands"

Our Friends Beneath the Sands: The French Foreign Legion in France's Colonial Conquests 1870-1935 (Martin Windrow)

I got pretty much what I expected with this book - like Windrow's The Last Valley, this is a massive brick of a book overflowing with information. I liked this book pretty well, but it shares the previous book's flaws, namely that the endless details of which military organization each battalion, squad, etc. belongs to can get a little tiring. The book also suffers from a common historical pitfall the other book didn't in that it just reaches a stop line and ends without a climax, and honestly I felt like the end of the book was more interesting as the legion beings experimenting with cars and trucks instead of camels. These are mostly minor issues, though, and the Legion's history in Indochina and Morocco is quite interesting, even if the book never quite raises to the level of excellence from the author's previous work.

Grade: B+