The Bounty Hunter Code: From the Files of Boba Fett (Daniel Wallace, Ryder Windham & Jason Fry)
I feel silly saying that a book with a sticker price of $99.99 is only for fans of the series, but here we are; this book comes in a really cool case (you put in a fake ID card and the hard lid opens while lights go off), but the books inside are a little bit slim. The main attraction is the Bounty Hunter Code, and it's pretty entertaining, but unless you're interested in a social history of the Mandalorian clans, I don't know that there's really much here to entice you. There's also a 48 page autobiography by Cradossk, a guy so obscure I had to look him up on Wookiepedia. (Turns out he's Bossk's dad!!)
Overall, this is a fun little set of books with a cool case; but even at Amazon's half price of $50 - let alone the MSRP of $99 - this is pretty hard to recommend unless you're a Star Wars nut.
Grade: B
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Friday, June 20, 2014
"The Gildar Rift" (Space Marine Battles series)
The Gildar Rift (Sarah Cawkwell)
This is a SPACE MARINE BATTLES book, and at this point I feel like the series could honestly be renamed "Pretty Good 40K Novel Light On Plot" as most of the books fit into that category. This one does too; it's pretty good, mostly action, and a little light on plot and characterization (although the loyalist chapter the book is about, the Silver Skulls, are unique enough to set them apart from generic space marines). Honestly, I mostly got this book out of curiosity at seeing a female author handling the sausage-fest that is 40K. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but what I got is one of the better Space Marines Battles novel, and one that's easy to recommend with the above caveats in place.
Grade: B
This is a SPACE MARINE BATTLES book, and at this point I feel like the series could honestly be renamed "Pretty Good 40K Novel Light On Plot" as most of the books fit into that category. This one does too; it's pretty good, mostly action, and a little light on plot and characterization (although the loyalist chapter the book is about, the Silver Skulls, are unique enough to set them apart from generic space marines). Honestly, I mostly got this book out of curiosity at seeing a female author handling the sausage-fest that is 40K. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but what I got is one of the better Space Marines Battles novel, and one that's easy to recommend with the above caveats in place.
Grade: B
Sunday, June 15, 2014
"A Centaur's Life" Volume 1
A Centaur's Life Vol 1 (Kei Murayama)
A goofy slice-of-life manga about (checks title) a centaur and her two high school buddies, a tomboy "draconid" (nothing exciting, she just has pointed ears) and a kind of personalityless "goatkind" (who has big cat ears on top of her head for some reason). The art is really nice, it's pretty funny, and I learned a lot ("A centaur's undergarments" are "big"!) , but I do have kind of a hard time recommending you run out and spend $13 on a book that takes 45 minutes to read. See if you can borrow it from a friend.
Grade: B
A goofy slice-of-life manga about (checks title) a centaur and her two high school buddies, a tomboy "draconid" (nothing exciting, she just has pointed ears) and a kind of personalityless "goatkind" (who has big cat ears on top of her head for some reason). The art is really nice, it's pretty funny, and I learned a lot ("A centaur's undergarments" are "big"!) , but I do have kind of a hard time recommending you run out and spend $13 on a book that takes 45 minutes to read. See if you can borrow it from a friend.
Grade: B
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
"Lincoln at Gettysburg"
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (Garry Wills)
I'm surprised at how little I liked this book. Honestly, I don't know how this won the Pulitzer; it's about a fifth very technical dissection of the Gettysburg Address itself, and the rest is a wandering hodgepodge (I found myself flipping page after page of information about then-contemporary cemetery design philosophy). Some of this is interesting - the author's rundown of the two hour long preceding Gettysburg Oration went into a lot of detail about public speaking in the mid 1800s that was surprisingly interesting.
But this is the exception - most of the non-Address material is both boring and puzzling in that I'm not sure why it was included. I almost muddled through the whole book, but then I started running into this (from pages 116-117):
Grade: F
I'm surprised at how little I liked this book. Honestly, I don't know how this won the Pulitzer; it's about a fifth very technical dissection of the Gettysburg Address itself, and the rest is a wandering hodgepodge (I found myself flipping page after page of information about then-contemporary cemetery design philosophy). Some of this is interesting - the author's rundown of the two hour long preceding Gettysburg Oration went into a lot of detail about public speaking in the mid 1800s that was surprisingly interesting.
But this is the exception - most of the non-Address material is both boring and puzzling in that I'm not sure why it was included. I almost muddled through the whole book, but then I started running into this (from pages 116-117):
Psychobiographers, as we have seen, claim that this demonstrates Lincoln's oedipal compulsion to "kill" Douglas as a sibling rival.I don't really think I need to say any more than that. Don't bother with this book.
Grade: F
Thursday, June 5, 2014
"Path of the Eldar Omnibus"
Path of the Eldar Omnibus (Gav Thorpe)
Normally in an omnibus, I like to review each novel separately; I'm not going to be doing that in this case since the author has written three novels that all describe the same basic events from three point of views.
This is an interesting idea, but I unfortunately I don't think it quite works. The first book is pretty interesting, but the second and third suffer from already knowing what's going to happen. It doesn't help that the main characters of all three books are kind of obnoxious - the first book's hero is a self-obsessed creep, the second book's hero is a arrogant know it all, and the third book's hero is basically the villain of the piece, a truly loathsome dickbag I was hoping would get some kind of comeuppance for his frankly vile actions (admittedly, this reaction really kicked in once he started capturing ship crews to be used as slaves). The book isn't terrible; there is a lot of interesting Eldar background material, and for once they aren't being used as punching bags to show how cool and strong someone else is, but I can still only really recommend this to W40k nerds. (Or, if you're curious, I guess get it out of the library long enough to just read the first included novel; you won't miss much.)
Grade: C+
Normally in an omnibus, I like to review each novel separately; I'm not going to be doing that in this case since the author has written three novels that all describe the same basic events from three point of views.
This is an interesting idea, but I unfortunately I don't think it quite works. The first book is pretty interesting, but the second and third suffer from already knowing what's going to happen. It doesn't help that the main characters of all three books are kind of obnoxious - the first book's hero is a self-obsessed creep, the second book's hero is a arrogant know it all, and the third book's hero is basically the villain of the piece, a truly loathsome dickbag I was hoping would get some kind of comeuppance for his frankly vile actions (admittedly, this reaction really kicked in once he started capturing ship crews to be used as slaves). The book isn't terrible; there is a lot of interesting Eldar background material, and for once they aren't being used as punching bags to show how cool and strong someone else is, but I can still only really recommend this to W40k nerds. (Or, if you're curious, I guess get it out of the library long enough to just read the first included novel; you won't miss much.)
Grade: C+
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