The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990 - 1990 (Miriam & Ezra Elia)
I guess I didn't get this book; it's about a sad hamster who (spoiler alert? I can't even tell, it's in the title) dies at the end. It's not funny or entertaining; it's puzzling and depressing. The whole book I was like "Is this supposed to be funny?" and then I got to the end and went "What?" and then "Was this supposed to be funny?"
Don't even bother getting this one of the library.
Grade: F
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
"You're Only as Good as Your Next One"
You're Only as Good as Your Next One: 100 Great Films, 100 Good Films, and 100 for Which I Should Be Shot (Mike Medavoy)
A pretty interesting look at Hollywood from the agent's and producer's side (Medavoy being an agent and then a producer). If you're hoping for juicy Hollywood gossip or dirt, this is a book to skip; Medavoy sticks to his own career and the changing nature of the movie buisness. I learned a lot, and I was entertained the whole time. There's better (and meaner) books about Hollywood out there, but this is worth picking up if you see at the used bookstore.
One caveat is that I'd advise keeping your bullshit detector on high alert; Medavoy claims that "The 6th Day" is a very intelligent movie, which I guess reasonable people can disagree about, but when he ventures into taking credit for the Adams Family movie because it spawned a trend of successes like the Beverly Hillbillies movie, well, that's the kind of thing I wouldn't want to unquestionably read and then start repeating in public.
Grade: B
A pretty interesting look at Hollywood from the agent's and producer's side (Medavoy being an agent and then a producer). If you're hoping for juicy Hollywood gossip or dirt, this is a book to skip; Medavoy sticks to his own career and the changing nature of the movie buisness. I learned a lot, and I was entertained the whole time. There's better (and meaner) books about Hollywood out there, but this is worth picking up if you see at the used bookstore.
One caveat is that I'd advise keeping your bullshit detector on high alert; Medavoy claims that "The 6th Day" is a very intelligent movie, which I guess reasonable people can disagree about, but when he ventures into taking credit for the Adams Family movie because it spawned a trend of successes like the Beverly Hillbillies movie, well, that's the kind of thing I wouldn't want to unquestionably read and then start repeating in public.
Grade: B
Thursday, March 20, 2014
"Architect of Fate"
Architect of Fate (Edited by Christian Dunn)
Remember when I said after the last W40K book that I was "almost out"? Well, after this one, I'm out, I promise. This is another book in the SPACE MARINES BATTLES series, and it's a short story collection. I'm just gonna run them down real fast:
Accursed Eternity: This is pretty good; it details a group of Space Marines having a Battle wherein they board a ghost ship that appears and disappears, attempting to destroy the demon within (the giant blue bird pictured on the front cover). I liked the approach the author took to the demon ship, where it starts out as a pristine, if empty, starship and only morphs into a rusted metallic blood-oozing hellscape because that's what our heroes start imagining. Very entertaining, if slightly confusing.
Sanctus: I'm not too crazy about this one, which is about a bunch of relic-hunting space marines battling Chaos space marines and cultists and a weird prophet dude who is trying to set up a stable time loop by turning the Chaos space marines into statues using a dust storm made up of loyalist prayers and meanwhile up on a ship there's an Inquisitor guy and a demon gets lose after a navigator baron's son blows up a bomb in his boot while they're trying to torture him and then the Grey Knights have to fight the demon so that the inquisitor has enough time to start bombing the planet. (deep breath) I think the author tried to pack a little too much in this one.
Endeavor of Will: I liked this one. A Iron Warriors bad guy attacks two star forts guarding the Eye of Terror, and who shows up but the main charecter from Maldorax? I didn't realize that the giant hammer he uses called the "Fist of Dorn" has the part you hit someone with actually shaped like a fist, which I guess makes sense since he's a member of the Imperial Fists, but all I could think of was a gag weapon you'd use in a jrpg.
Fateweaver: This one was better than Sanctus, but I wasn't really a big fan of it. I will give it credit for wrapping up all the loose plot threads (no easy task!) and nailing the ending, a distressingly rare feat in W40k.
I guess that was "real fast" after all. Well, let me sum up quickly: It's a little confusing, but there's a lot of good action in here, hung on a frame that all comes together in a pleasing way at the end. It's stuck firmly in good-not-great territory, but it's easily worth the $9.
Remember when I said after the last W40K book that I was "almost out"? Well, after this one, I'm out, I promise. This is another book in the SPACE MARINES BATTLES series, and it's a short story collection. I'm just gonna run them down real fast:
Accursed Eternity: This is pretty good; it details a group of Space Marines having a Battle wherein they board a ghost ship that appears and disappears, attempting to destroy the demon within (the giant blue bird pictured on the front cover). I liked the approach the author took to the demon ship, where it starts out as a pristine, if empty, starship and only morphs into a rusted metallic blood-oozing hellscape because that's what our heroes start imagining. Very entertaining, if slightly confusing.
Sanctus: I'm not too crazy about this one, which is about a bunch of relic-hunting space marines battling Chaos space marines and cultists and a weird prophet dude who is trying to set up a stable time loop by turning the Chaos space marines into statues using a dust storm made up of loyalist prayers and meanwhile up on a ship there's an Inquisitor guy and a demon gets lose after a navigator baron's son blows up a bomb in his boot while they're trying to torture him and then the Grey Knights have to fight the demon so that the inquisitor has enough time to start bombing the planet. (deep breath) I think the author tried to pack a little too much in this one.
Endeavor of Will: I liked this one. A Iron Warriors bad guy attacks two star forts guarding the Eye of Terror, and who shows up but the main charecter from Maldorax? I didn't realize that the giant hammer he uses called the "Fist of Dorn" has the part you hit someone with actually shaped like a fist, which I guess makes sense since he's a member of the Imperial Fists, but all I could think of was a gag weapon you'd use in a jrpg.
Fateweaver: This one was better than Sanctus, but I wasn't really a big fan of it. I will give it credit for wrapping up all the loose plot threads (no easy task!) and nailing the ending, a distressingly rare feat in W40k.
I guess that was "real fast" after all. Well, let me sum up quickly: It's a little confusing, but there's a lot of good action in here, hung on a frame that all comes together in a pleasing way at the end. It's stuck firmly in good-not-great territory, but it's easily worth the $9.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
"One Hundred Days"
One Hundred Days: Napoleon's Road to Waterloo (Alan Schom)
This one you can judge by its cover. I guess I'm kind of starting at the end with Napoleon here; spoiler alert. What I liked about this book is that the author didn't just cover Waterloo - in fact, the entire military campaign makes up maybe a fifth of the book. This leaves the rest to what I really wanted to see, namely
Napoleon's governance of France and to a small extent planning for the future (it's to a small extent as he doesn't seem to have thought much past battling the rest of Europe, and of course he never got the chance after that).
That would make it an easy recommend (for history nerds), but there is one warning I'd issue: Schom stops to drop in biographies of all the major players as we run across them. This is puzzling for two reasons; one, I would assume that most readers had the sense (unlike me) to read other books about Napoleon first instead of starting at the end, and would already have this information. Two, the biographies are largely pointless as most of the characters get so little screen time that their introductory biographies are longer than all the rest of the text featuring them put together. I'd say just skip 'em.
Other than this issue, and probably recommending reading this as a endcap, the bulk of the text covers an area of study that's esoteric enough that this is the only book I've seen covering it, and that makes it pretty easy to recommend.
Grade: B+
This one you can judge by its cover. I guess I'm kind of starting at the end with Napoleon here; spoiler alert. What I liked about this book is that the author didn't just cover Waterloo - in fact, the entire military campaign makes up maybe a fifth of the book. This leaves the rest to what I really wanted to see, namely
Napoleon's governance of France and to a small extent planning for the future (it's to a small extent as he doesn't seem to have thought much past battling the rest of Europe, and of course he never got the chance after that).
That would make it an easy recommend (for history nerds), but there is one warning I'd issue: Schom stops to drop in biographies of all the major players as we run across them. This is puzzling for two reasons; one, I would assume that most readers had the sense (unlike me) to read other books about Napoleon first instead of starting at the end, and would already have this information. Two, the biographies are largely pointless as most of the characters get so little screen time that their introductory biographies are longer than all the rest of the text featuring them put together. I'd say just skip 'em.
Other than this issue, and probably recommending reading this as a endcap, the bulk of the text covers an area of study that's esoteric enough that this is the only book I've seen covering it, and that makes it pretty easy to recommend.
Grade: B+
Monday, March 10, 2014
"Maldorax"
Maldorax (Ben Counter)
Yes, I know I've been reading a lot of W40k lately; Don't worry, I'm almost out for the time being.
As for this particular book, it's part of the SPACE MARINES BATTLES series, which means you get a whole lot of bang pow boom splat aaagh. So far I'm kind of split on this series, and I wasn't really sure what to expect.
Luckily, this book is all right; we're dealing with solid, middle of the road W40K fare. The basic jist is that a SPACE MARINE has escaped the demon planet of Maldorax, and comes back with a bunch of his buddies to kill the Evil Bad Guy whose name I've already forgotten. There certainly are a lot of Space Marine Battles depicted within, and the author alternating chapters where our hero is back with his buddies flipped with ones where he's escaping the planet is a nice touch. If you need a 40k fix you might as well pick this up, as you could certainly do a lot worse; otherwise it's nothing special.
Grade: C+
Yes, I know I've been reading a lot of W40k lately; Don't worry, I'm almost out for the time being.
As for this particular book, it's part of the SPACE MARINES BATTLES series, which means you get a whole lot of bang pow boom splat aaagh. So far I'm kind of split on this series, and I wasn't really sure what to expect.
Luckily, this book is all right; we're dealing with solid, middle of the road W40K fare. The basic jist is that a SPACE MARINE has escaped the demon planet of Maldorax, and comes back with a bunch of his buddies to kill the Evil Bad Guy whose name I've already forgotten. There certainly are a lot of Space Marine Battles depicted within, and the author alternating chapters where our hero is back with his buddies flipped with ones where he's escaping the planet is a nice touch. If you need a 40k fix you might as well pick this up, as you could certainly do a lot worse; otherwise it's nothing special.
Grade: C+
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
"Dividing the Spoils"
Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (Robin Waterfield)
I'm torn on this book; it does a very nice job of summing up the fallout from Alexander the Great dying young, stopping to touch on Greek social and political ideas in addition to who fought whom. But I also struggled with it - there's a ton of new unusual Greek names, and I never got a really solid grip on who was who as the story played out. In the end, this is probably not for the casual reader; I think I'd recommend this as a quick endcap (it's barely 200 pages) after a nice meaty Alexander the Great biography. (Speaking of which, can anybody recommend a nice meaty Alexander the Great biography?)
Grade: B-
I'm torn on this book; it does a very nice job of summing up the fallout from Alexander the Great dying young, stopping to touch on Greek social and political ideas in addition to who fought whom. But I also struggled with it - there's a ton of new unusual Greek names, and I never got a really solid grip on who was who as the story played out. In the end, this is probably not for the casual reader; I think I'd recommend this as a quick endcap (it's barely 200 pages) after a nice meaty Alexander the Great biography. (Speaking of which, can anybody recommend a nice meaty Alexander the Great biography?)
Grade: B-
Saturday, March 1, 2014
"The Unremembered Empire"
The Unremembered Empire (Dan Abnett)
I was really worried about this book - it's currently sitting on two stars on Amazon, and reviewers were harsh on its inclusion of (ugh) THE PERPETUALS, which I have complained about before at length. In addition to that, it's a book about the Ultramarines and Rowboat Girlyman - not a good prognosis.
Maybe it was just because I was expecting a stinker, but I have to say this book wasn't that bad. In fact, if you cut out the Perpetual crap - and there's not really a whole ton of it - there's a really decent book in here somewhere. It follows up on both The Mark of Calth and (ugh) Vulkan Lives, even going so far to slightly fix some of Vulkan Lives' problems. (Don't get too excited; this basically raises it from a F- to an F.) All the non-Perpetual parts work because here the Ultramarines and Guilliman are fallible; it's amazing how readable a book about them can be when everyone isn't standing around talking about how cool, powerful, and attractive the designated Gary Stu is.
All that being said, if you haven't read at least Mark of Calth, you'll be pretty lost. If you're already reading this series, I'd say pick this one up and just skim past all the Perpetual stuff; otherwise, it's not really worth reading the previous books just to read this one.
Grade: C+
I was really worried about this book - it's currently sitting on two stars on Amazon, and reviewers were harsh on its inclusion of (ugh) THE PERPETUALS, which I have complained about before at length. In addition to that, it's a book about the Ultramarines and Rowboat Girlyman - not a good prognosis.
Maybe it was just because I was expecting a stinker, but I have to say this book wasn't that bad. In fact, if you cut out the Perpetual crap - and there's not really a whole ton of it - there's a really decent book in here somewhere. It follows up on both The Mark of Calth and (ugh) Vulkan Lives, even going so far to slightly fix some of Vulkan Lives' problems. (Don't get too excited; this basically raises it from a F- to an F.) All the non-Perpetual parts work because here the Ultramarines and Guilliman are fallible; it's amazing how readable a book about them can be when everyone isn't standing around talking about how cool, powerful, and attractive the designated Gary Stu is.
All that being said, if you haven't read at least Mark of Calth, you'll be pretty lost. If you're already reading this series, I'd say pick this one up and just skim past all the Perpetual stuff; otherwise, it's not really worth reading the previous books just to read this one.
Grade: C+
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