"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):

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

"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+

"Tampa"

Tampa (Alissa Nutting)

I have to give this book a lot of credit; it's the most gross, inappropriate, squicky, skin-crawling novel I've ever read, starting with the unpleasant furry black dust jacket.
The main character, Celeste (I almost absentmindedly typed "our heroine"; never has that been more inappropriate) is the book's strongest element, a genuinely scary psychopathic predator with a taste for young teenage boys who sums herself up in one sentence on page 41: ""Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?"
As unsettling and cringe-inducing as the book can be (and the author does not shy away from showing in graphic detail what Celeste is doing to her victims), it's quite gripping, and - I admit this doesn't sound right - entertaining. As horrible as the main character is, the book is capably leavened by a considerable amount of very dark humor, ably assisted by the book's other unforgettable character, Janet Feinlog, a trainwreck of a fellow teacher that Celeste has as much disdain for as I had for the main character herself. It's weird to find myself recommending a novel that's full of graphic sexual abuse, but what can I say? This is a weird book, and unless you're completely disgusted from just reading about it, I'd suggest at least getting it out of your local library.

Grade: A

"The Pillars of the Earth"

The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

This is a massive novel set in England in the 1100s. I wouldn't describe this necessarily as a historical novel - there's none of the obsessive accuracy of, say, the Masters of Rome series. I'd describe this as more maybe historically-flavored. In either case, I believe it can also be described as a real page-turner; Follett juggles multiple story arcs and sets of characters in the 40+ years the novel covers, mostly centered around the town of Kingsbridge and its attempts to build a cathedral. It's all very entertaining, and Follett is great at juggling a big tale with multiple story threads. At first, even the small-scale ones are quite gripping - very early on in the book we're following a family that's cold and hungry in the woods who gets their pig stolen, and it was very difficult not to flip pages because I was so worried about them getting that pig back so they don't starve to death.
It'd be easy to slap an A+ on this book if it was all this good, but unfortunately the second half begins to drag and at times become quite tedious; at one point the focus leaves the more interesting storylines to focus on two young lovers, and I had to stifle some annoyed yawns after one of them was like "I love you so much that I'm never going to speak to you again," which kicks off a truly irritating batch of pages that doesn't really go anywhere or tie in to the rest of the story. The book does pick up again after that (although at this point Follett starts recapping earlier developments for some reason), before coming to a somewhat abrupt and bizzare conclusion, so you're probably looking at about 800 great pages and maybe 200 that you should feel free to skip. I'm looking forward to reading some more Follett books; even with the occasional stumble in this novel, I devoured over a thousand pages of it in five days because I didn't want to put it down.

Grade: A- 

"John Dies at the End"

John Dies at the End (David Wong)

I didn't know what to feel when reading this book, which is not a good sign. Honestly I'm not really sure what the book is going for; am I supposed to feel scared, amused, grossed-out, suspenseful, excited? The only one of those I really felt was grossed-out, which is not a terribly difficult feat. I guess that there's also supposed to be horror and humor in here, but none of this ever really landed. Mostly, I felt confused; why does throwing coffee on a demon made out of meat hurt it? Why does playing music from a boom box hurt it? (There's some guff in here about how a boom box is a modern "David's harp," and I guess I need to go back and brush up on my Bible, because I don't remember David fighting any demons, let alone destroying them with harp music.) The best books can draw a wondrous range of emotions from a reader, but this one just conjured up a slightly confused, annoyed yawn.

Grade: D-

"The Emperor's Gift"

The Emperor's Gift (Aaron Dembski-Bowden)

Halfway through this book, I thought I had it all figured out. All the ADB books I've read up till this point were about Chaos space marines - read irredeemable scum – who have been humanized, given real personalities and back stories to the point where I found myself often rooting for them even as they continued doing horrible things that marked them irremediably as Bad Guys. Here, ADB's writing instead about the Grey Knights, basically as good a group of guys as you'll find in the WH40k universe. And sure enough, about halfway through the book, they end up behaving less than heroically - not of their own free will, but still. 

"Oh," I thought smugly to myself. I see what he's doing here; instead of taking bad guys and humanizing them so they're real characters, he's taking good guys and making them do bad things, so they're more like real characters too. And had that been the case, this would have gone down as a good but not great book - nothing to complain about, but a step down from ADB's previous work.

As it turns out, that's not the case. ADB pulls it off, and although I can't really say what "it" is without getting into spoilers, suffice to say I was shown who is the boss (Ed. note: the boss is your wife). ADB is even nice enough to have the book's “villain” come out and sum everything up: 

"Some stories have no villain... Merely a mix of souls, each seeking to find where the answers lie." 

Grade: A

"Promethea" (Book 3)

Promethea: Book 3 (Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III & Mick Gray)

It's been a while since books one and two (the perils of poaching books off your wife's shelf). Luckily I didn't feel too lost picking up here, although it took me a minute to remember what happened at the end of Book 2 - someone was killed, if that's the right word, and this book picks up with Promethea going after her. To do this she journies into the Sephirot (the Tree of Life, not the bad guy from Final Fantasy 7), which makes up basically all of this book.
And how is it? Pretty good. The writing's what you would expect from Alan Moore, and while apparently some reviewers didn't enjoy the mysticism, I'm not sure why you'd still be reading this series if that was a turn off. (I mean, this is a series where our heroine gets her powers by writing poems about imagination.) The art is also quite nice, although there are a few hiccups (one section done entirely in black and red that I think is supposted to be scary comes off more as eye-punching). I don't really have anything negative to say about this book; if you've already started reading the series, there's no reason not to get it, but I guess you don't really need me to tell you that.

Grade: A

"Dragon Keeper"

Dragon Keeper (Robin Hobb)

I tried with this book, I really did. This is another free Kindle e-book, a genre which I have not exactly enjoyed in the past. In this case, I tried to make it 50 pages (this is not easy to measure with the Kindle's "location" system), and after three and a half chapters I just couldn't stand it anymore. Reading this book is like wading through hip-deep mud: It's slow, heavy, turgid, and your mind constantly wanders to something more interesting. The book opens badly, starting with a bunch of dragons cocooning themselves, but they're all weak and dazed and half of them die, and it's so ham-handedly GUYS THIS IS SAD that it becomes silly; I couldn't help but imagine these dragons drunkenly bumbling around to comical music.
Then we switch to focus on a deformed harpy girl and her dad, and nothing happens, and while reading this part I was missing the dragons stumbling around. After a bunch of pages of nothing of interest happening we switch to focus on Alise, our mary sue who LOVES DRAGONS GUYS, and while reading this I was somehow missing the earlier parts about nothing happening to a deformed harpy girl. At this point (I was reading the book in the bathroom) I would have rather just listened to the various gross sounds coming from the next stall than continue reading this book, which I guess is very mean to say, but there you have it.

Grade: F

"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+

"Soul Hunter"

Soul Hunter (Aaron Dembski-Bowden)

There's a bunch of Space Marine legions that don't get much attention in W40K; The Ultramarines show up everywhere, but the likes of the Salamanders, Iron Warriors, and White Scars never get any ink. This book is about the Night Lords, one of these neglected groups, and it may be understandable why they've been ignored up until now - the concept behind them is Batman, if he went around murdering criminals to keep everybody in line. This is an interesting concept, but in the world of 40k where you can be an intolerant, murderous, paranoid bunch of religious fanatics and you're still as close as the setting comes to being the good guys, "killing criminals" isn't really that evil.
Luckily, they've been placed into the hands of an author who's already worked miracles with one chapter. The result isn't quite the masterpiece of The First Heretic, but it's quite good. The Night Lords are admirably fleshed out so that their underlying concept kind of makes sense. I only have two issues with this, and in fact these are my two issues with the book itself. One is that the Night Lord's leader, Konrad Curze, let himself be killed by an Imperial assassin; the book kind of lays some groundwork for why he let himself be killed, but never comes out and says his reason (or if it did, I didn't understand it). To be fair, there's an earlier novel about the Night Lords that probably covered this ground. The second issue is that the titular Soul Hunter of the novel's title has a long flashback towards the end of the book that explains his name and fleshes him out as a character, but coming where it does also drains a bit of the tension out of the climax.
Both of these are minor issues, though. The rest of the book is great, and the author is able to pull off one of the most difficult literary tricks out there - mixing humor and drama and pulling it off well. He's also able to repeat an effective technique from The First Heretic where you come to root for our anti-heroes even as they go around murdering innocent people and generally acting like, well, Chaos Space Marines.
So, to sum all that up: Book good; you should read.

Grade: A

"A History of the Roman World"

A History of the Roman World: 753 to 146 BC (H.H. Scullard)

What do you say about a book that devotes as many pages to neolithic and pre-historic Italy as it does to Rome under its seven kings? Well, in my case, I say that I didn't finish it, and that I didn't like it very much, and that everything in the book I either knew already or had a hard time caring about. The consensus seems to be that this is an old but good book, whereas I just found it unreadable - not only because of the author's weird choice of what to cover, but also because it's devided up by theme instead of chronologically. Sometimes this works, but here it doesn't. I guess all you need to know was that I was already skimming within the first ten pages of how the old stone age turned into the bronze age. Skip.

Grade: D-

"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+

"In the Garden of Beasts"

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (Erik Larson)

This book is the anti-Agent Zigzag; Where there I had no expectations and loved the book, here I heard this book getting praise up and down and, well. I guess my first clue should have been the fact that all of two weeks after the book came out my wife found a free copy sitting out on the curb. As it turns out, this book ended up in my own donation pile after blazing through it, and I feel bad for anyone who spent $10 on this thing. I don't get what all the hype was about, as I found this book to be boring, plodding, and - worst of all - pointless. If you have even a cursory knowledge of the subject matter, you already know everything in this book, and you've probably read it in a more entertaining form. Even if the material in this book is a surprise, the author's tedious framing device does it no favors - the American ambassador is, like almost everyone in the book, a flat character  and his daughter sleeping around seems completely disconnected from the rest of the book. Bizarrely, the book is about the ambassador, but only covers the brief period of time that is his tenure up through the Night of the Long Knives, then hits the fast-forward button on the long rest of his term before coming to a baffling ending. In short, stay away.

Grade: F

"Lord of Light"

Lord of Light (Roger Zelazny)

I thought this book was great - imaginative, overflowing with ideas, and reading as strikingly modern for a book that came out in 1967. The basic plot is... you know, this is one of those books you might want to just read; Zelazny introduces a lush setting that sounds kind of silly compressed to a paragraph, but here goes:
The book's story is a conflict between a group of colonists from Earth who have anointed themselves gods and rule over a planet with advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, and our hero Sam, who struggles against them in the guise of the Buddha. I can't really say more except that this is a wonderful read. My only caveat is that the book's structure is a little strange - the book kicks off with Sam being summoned down from a radiation belt, which is actually almost the endpoint of the story told in the book. After one flashback it goes into a linear narrative that barely goes past this beginning point before the story is over, which did leave me a little confused (although I more chalk that up to reading this while being sick and in a daze). All in all, this book is a gem, and you shouldn't miss it.

Grade: A

"The Currents of Space"

The Currents of Space (Isaac Asimov)

I think I'm giving up on early period Asimov; It's a mess. This book is better than Pebble in the Sky, but that's not saying a whole lot. Reading it nowadays, it's serviceable, but the story is clunky and takes forever to get going (I bailed on page 75, at which point exposition was still getting dumped on me). Oh, and the main character having amnesia does the book no favors. (And! There's also there's some very clumsy parts that come off as racist to the modern reader where a black guy in space reflects on how people of different colors ended up settling on different planets). This may be a case of Seinfeld is Unfunny, and obviously Asimov got a lot better, but I really can't recommend these early novels.

Grade: C-

"The Mists of Avalon"

The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

Let's take a nice break from massive, nerdy history books to read a massive, nerdy women's studies retelling of the Arthurian legend. (I'm not kidding about how massive it is - the parts just dealing with Arthur's mother is enough text to have been a full-sized novel by itself.)
Where viewing the story through the eyes of the female characters didn't really work for The Penelopiad, it works wonderfully here, breathing new life into the old, tired story. The male characters stay offscreen unless what they're doing effects the women, so the book's real hero is Morgaine, with the villian being played by Geunievere. Gwen here seems to have severe agroaphobia along with the intellect and emotional maturity of a five year old - in other words, she comes off as a perpetually terrified, charmless, child-like, dumb weirdo. Arthur doesn't come off that much better, and neither does Lancelot, come to think of it. I think part of the problem - and this is so wide-spread that it even effects Morgaine - is that the main cast at times acts forehead-slappingly out of character. This seems to be a result of the story having to hew more or less to the original myth. It's annoying, but I suppose in the end a good tradeoff for how well the end result turns out. Even though the book runs over 800 pages, it really only drags when we're following Gwen around being dumb and scared, and these stretches are a drop in the ocean (albeit parts I recommend skipping anyway). Highly recommended.

Grade: A

"World's Fair"

World's Fair: A Novel (E.L. Doctrow)

After throwing City of God spitefully into the donation pile, I realized I have another Doctrow novel on one of my to-read shelves. And it's..... okay? Unlike City of God, this time we only have two narrators, and you can actually, you know, tell what's happening. Except that what's happening isn't really that interesting. A kid is born, and he grows up (the book ends when he's just about in the fifth grade). And.... that's it. It's not really that gripping or interesting, unless you really NEED to read, for example, three pages about the protagonist buying and eating a baked potato. I liked the parts written by the main character's mother, which are written in second person, but they're just trimming on the main, bland course. Maybe I'm missing something; People apparently love this novel, while I basically dozed off reading it. Shucks.

Grade: D+

"V."

V. (Thomas Pynchon)

This is a tough book to review. This isn't just a novel, it's Literature, and Pynchon isn't interested in telling an interesting story so much as showing off how well he can write. And he can write very well - to be fair, although nothing much happens in this book, nothing much does happen interestingly, which was enough to keep me happy for a while. After enough pages, though, I just got tired of our heroes wandering around sleeping on the subway and trying to score and found myself getting bored. It never really gets bad, but when the novelty wears off, there just isn't enough to hold my interest, no matter how good a writer Pynchon is.

Grade: Weird

A Clash of Kings

A Clash of Kings (book 2 of A Song of Ubiquity and 25% off at Target)
George R. R. Martin

As I had said in the previous review, this book was better in hindsight having made it through the second book, which I found to be a vast improvement.  Which was true.  And now, having finished the third one, I can say, jeez, I dunno.

In any event, it's a great improvement over Game of Thrones, in that the intrigue is more interesting, and there's a hell of a lot more action, which certainly helps make this one the best I've read in the series so far.

Good:

ACTION.  Jeez, and how.  Yes, this book is talky, but you can't say that shit doesn't happen in it.

Different characters.  Davos Seaworth's chapters especially are interesting reads, bringing new perspective to the story, especially as one of the few people in the book not constantly under oligarchic pressure from their noble blood and kin.  It's also nice to see some characters formerly sitting out the story in the background get the spotlight for once as well.

Better characterization.  Catelyn Stark actually gets some dimensions, and this book is all the better for it.  Her sorrow and frustrations were one of the most well written parts of the book I thought, even if they were a bit un-subtle.  Arya Stark's chapters got a lot more interesting as well, and it was nice to see her given more to do other than mope about not wanting to act like a lady.

Bad:

Drags at points.  This is an improvement over Game of Thrones, but, honestly, starts to get worse again in the next book in the series (review forthcoming.)  Again, I often would sigh to myself that another Sansa chapter was coming up, or the real offender this time, Danerys Targaryen, whose story really has yet to interest me very much even three books into the story.  Obviously it's a slow build with her, but jeez, this is pushing it for me.  The most improved award goes to the aforementioned Arya, whose chapters got pretty compelling.  Sadly, Jon Snow's chapters, which, after his initial "okay, sigh, he's getting into trouble again" phase, got quite interesting, seemed to slow back down into literal slow, plodding marches through the snow.

The dialogue isn't great.  Tyrion Lannister seemed wittier in the first book, to me.  At least no one was given the wind again.  But, geez, Danerys has some hokey lines.

Grade:  A- (this will drop back to reality for the next book.)