"The Swerve"

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Stephen Greenblatt)

I learned a lot from this book and was also quite entertained by it, which I guess is all you need to know; maybe I should have put that sentence last. Let's try this again:

I was worried when I started reading this book - the first page has our hero riding into town and notes that "any raw-boned yokel" could kill him by hitting him over the head with a club. Luckily, Greenblatt's overheated style calms down quickly as we start following our main character around as he hunts for lost ancient works in the libraries of Europe's monasteries. Eventually, this winding path takes the reader through a tour containing a look at bookworms (the book-eating "teeth of time"), the recovery of ancient books from Pompeii, a tremendously entertaining polemic against the Catholic church, and a through examination of Epicureanism. This could be a mess, but Greenblatt's able to work all of these elements into a cohesive whole that I both (checks first sentence) learned a lot from and was quite entertained by. Easily recommended for book nerds (cough), history nerds (cough, hack) and really anybody with even a passing interest in the material.

Grade: A-

"Ruled Britannia"

Ruled Britannia (Harry Turtledove)

This is an alternate history novel where the Spanish Armada succeeded, picking up ten years after England's defeat with Elizabeth imprisoned in the Tower of London and Phillip II on his deathbed. Don't let all those links scare you off - you don't need to know much beyond the very basic jist of what the Spanish Armada was to enjoy this book, although I don't think it's a surprise to say that history nerds will get much more out of it. The other audience I'd recommend the book for is Shakespeare fans, as the man himself is the book's main character, and in fact the entire book is written in his style. This may sound annoying, but Turtledove is able to pull it off for the most part, and surprisingly I never did get tired of people taking ten words what they could say in two (a random dialouge sample from page 130 about a guy excited to have a new play to read: "Dear Geoff's prompter and book-keeper. He hath before him a new play - so new, belike the ink's still damp. What'll he do? Plunge his beak into its liver, like the vulture with Prometheus. A cannon could sound beside him without his hearing't").
As it turns out, the book's real problem is its sheer length, coming in at a bloated 450 pages, at least 150 of which it could really stand to lose. To be fair, the book's setting does suggest itself as worthy of lengthy exploration, and I would be a little bit more forgiving if these pages were all just detailing the alternate history flavor of the book, but a fair chunk of these pages are eaten up by a pointless character and two particularly dumb plot twists late in the book. (Happily for the story, they basically cancel each other out, but a barrel of ink is spent on them needlessly.) In the end, this isn't an easy book to recommend to anybody but history buffs and Shakespeare fans, but speaking as a member of one of those demographics, I enjoyed it enough to earn a solid

Grade: B

"The Founding"

The Founding (Dan Abnett)

This is a omnibus containing three Gaunt's Ghosts novels, Gaunt himself being a Commissar in the 40k universe. Collected here are First and Only, Ghostmaker, and Necropolis. Since it took me so long to read, I don't feel bad reviewing each novel one by one. Suck on it, libs!

First and Only: According to the introduction, at one point this was the best-selling book published by Black Library. I get the sense this book came out quite early in the Black Library's run. It's entertaining enough, but it's marred by some weird issues - The Guard is all male, Chaos Space Marines are killed with single shots from a Guardsman's laser rifle (!!), and there's a deformed psyker commissar (!!!!) who "atomizes" an entire city when he dies (?!)
There's also just weird careless details: Gaunt's bolt pistol becomes a laspistol becomes a lasgun becomes a boltgun. On top of that, some of the writing is, put charitably, clumsy (a character's reaction when he realizes he's just been decapitated: "Only when his headless body fell onto the deck next to him he realized that... his head... cut... bastard... no.")
So with all that, is this book worth reading? Well, it's not bad, but the above mentioned issues make it rather difficult to recommend. I'd probably only suggest this book if you either love military-style novels (which this is at heart), or are looking for a friendly introduction to the 40k universe. Otherwise, it's perfectly serviceable, but I can't really recommend going too far out of your way to track it down.

Grade: B-

Ghostmaker: This is a short story collection that meanders around giving different Ghosts some time in the spotlight. I applaud the idea - up until now they've basically been cardboard cut-outs whose personality is no more fleshed out than "medic", "scout", "heavy weapons guy". In fact, the Ghosts themselves have less personality than the Team Fortress 2 characters who are literally named Medic, Scout, and Heavy Weapons Guy. So giving them some personality is a very welcome idea, but the actual execution unfortunately sinks the entire enterprise. What do we learn from a spotlight on Mkoll, the silently-moving scout? Turns out he's a scout, and that he can move silently. The author seems either unwilling or unable to flesh out characters  If they're good, they're tough, blue-collar, gritty heroes, and if they're bad, they're either deformed chaos monsters or blue-blooded elitists sipping coffee while our heroic, blue-collar, gritty heroes get the job done. Maybe I've been spoiled by other w40k novels. I'm bumping the grade up because I appreciate Abnett's efforts to imbue the Ghosts with a personality, but it's a cringing failure, and I only got like an eighth of the way through it.

Grade: D+

Necropolis: I was hoping that these novels would improve with time as Abnett became more familiar and comfortable with the setting he's working in, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. Although the writing isn't as clumsy in this book, it's still full of distracting, careless errors. On page 669, a character is Trygg in the first paragraph and Trugg in the second. A character is hit by a lasrifle shot and bleeds out in a matter of minutes, even though the author has pointed out numerous times that lasrifle wounds are self-cauterized because of the weapon's heat. At the book's climax, Gaunt himself is shot by a bolt in the heart, but lives because he's wearing a steel rose on his shirt. This is dumb and cheesy enough as it is, but is nonsensical because a "bolt" is basically a rocket-propelled explosive. This is like surviving a hit from a RPG because you have a steel plate in your chest pocket; Gaunt would either be a mess on the floor or have had his steel rose punched straight through his body, but then I guess there couldn't be any sequels. Oh, and people also use "gak" as a swear word, and all I could think of was Nickelodeon Gak.
In short, this is not a good book. Some of the military action is exciting, but combined with Abnett's carelessness, lame characters  and annoying habit of cutting away from the actual important parts of the book to follow needless sideplots that don't go anywhere, this is a slog far more often than it is an engaging story.

Grade: C-

So in sum, I can't really recommend this at all. Even if you're looking to dip your toe in 40k, I'd suggest the much better Caiphas Cain omnibuses, which not only actually get the details right, but are actually, you know, enjoyable to read.

Grade: D-

"STFU Parents"

STFU, Parents: The Jaw-Dropping, Self-Indulgent, and Occasionally Rage-Inducing World of Parent Overshare (Blair Koenig)

Time for me to engage in some hypocrisy! I've given more than one book a hard time for being nothing but the content of a website in book form, and here comes the content of a website in book form I quite enjoyed. In my own defense, there's a considerable bit of original writing in the introductions of each chapter, and the book has a further advantage over the website of not having any pictures (as much as I enjoy the website, it's a real appetite-destroyer). Even better, since the book is organized by theme, you can just skip the gross chapters (which I highly recommend as there's some real gut-churning nastiness contained within), which isn't always possible on the website. Plus, it was only ten bucks, and I'm going to tell myself that's a fair price for a book based on a website I've been enjoying for free for years. Oh, and, uh, the book's very entertaining, too.

Grade: A-

"Void Stalker"

Void Stalker (Aaron Dembski-Bowden)

I often have trouble reviewing the third part in a trilogy  I feel like I've already said everything I have to say in the reviews for books one and two. So what can I add here? This book is just like the other two novels, which is to say masterfully written, packed with expertly crafted characters and tense, explosive action scenes. In fact, this entire novel is tense; It opens with our hero foreseeing his own death, and I am still amazed at how the author manages to portray monstrous murderers who are running around literally eating babies as sympathetic enough that you're rooting for them by the end. At this point ADB needs to write a bad novel so I have something new to say about his books besides "they are great" and "you should read them".

Grade: A

"The Joy Luck Club"

The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)

My wife told me I wasn't going to like this book. I hoped she was wrong - hey, I loved Spring Moon! - but is as usually the case, she turned out to be right. My big problem with this book is that everything interesting happened to the narrator's mother. Out of the 20 pages that I read, 2 pages were interesting stuff happening to the main character's mom, and the rest was the main character farting around playing mah-johngg, watching people cook, and reflecting on her own, comparatively boring life. What separates this book and Spring Moon is that in the latter we're seeing directly the interesting parts, and in the former we're just hearing little bits of the interesting part told to someone else. Unfortunately, this also separates a book I couldn't put down to one I couldn't stop myself from flipping through.

Grade: C+

"Blood Reaver"

Blood Reaver (Aaron Dembski-Bowden)

Part 2 of a trilogy kicked off by Soul Hunter. I'm going to pay this book an unusual compliment in that I enjoyed its aimlessness. Our heroes (I'm sure that's not the right word) are a hunted group of desperate murderers, and after being on the run for thousands of years, they're running low on beans and bullets (well, bolter rounds and kids to gene-hance into Space Marines, but you know what I mean). They put into port and spot a ship from their legion that's been stolen and re-painted, and the rest of the book is them scheming to get it back. There's no big evil villian - there are people who stand in opposition to the group of characters who get the most ink, but really, there's no good guys here. This feels nice and refreshing, and surprisingly realistic for a setting where nine foot tall supermen eunuchs in power armor hit giant bugs and space elves with chainsaw swords. As with the previous book, what started as a joke of a Space Marine Legion (the assassin who kills their Primarch is named after Martin Sheen, for chrissakes) is given a thorough rehabilitation and turned into a very nuanced set of characters (again, surprising for a setting where "He shoots guys" is a perfectly acceptable personality type). I'm trying not to just heap praise on this author and his books, but the sheer quality isn't making this task any easier.

Grade: A

"The Catiline Conspiracy"

The Catiline Conspiracy [SPQR II] (John Roberts)

I liked the previous book in this series well enough, but this one kind of fell flat; I think the problem is that this book has even less of a climax than the previous one. (I don't want to spoil it, but you might want to skip past this sentence if you're worried: The ending is basically "I informed the guys in charge and they took care of it" which is very realistic but not very exciting.)
To be fair, this book is very realistic and accurate, and while I enjoyed all the meticulous attention to detail in the setting and knowing what was going to happen from reading Roman history, for some reason this time to lack of a climax really bugged me. Maybe it's the fact that our main character never really felt that important to what was happening, or the way that his love interest has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, but whatever the reason, this is tough to recommend unless the rich, detailed setting is enough to make you happy. As for me, I'm going to try one more book in this series and see if it feels a little narratively tighter.

Grade: B-