"The Cuckoo's Egg"

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (Cliff Stoll)

This is a real-life detective story that I had a really hard time putting down. The book kicks off when the author notices a seventy-five cent billing discrepancy in his mainframe system (this is back in the 80's when people were paying for computer time), and a little digging ends up turning up, well, I'm not really sure I should say.
I can say that I really liked this book; it's mostly about computer crime, but I wouldn't worry about it being too esoteric (I mostly find it charming - the mainframes these guys are chasing each other through have a faction of the power of your phone.) I would recommend skipping the back cover, which gives away the mystery, but otherwise I have nothing but good things to say.

Grade: B+

"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 Book of Jean's Own!"

The Onion Presents A Book of Jean's Own!: All New Wit, Wisdom, and Wackiness from The Onion's Beloved Humor Columnist (Jean Teasdale)

This is a book pretend-written by the Onion's intentionally bad humor columnist Jean Teasdale, and it's pretty easy to figure out if it's for you: Just take a gander at her columns (and her website!) and see if you're amused. The book is basically Jean in concentrated form, and I liked it enough to polish it off in one sitting. My only suggestions would be to flip past the recipes (the joke appears to be the insane amount of butter that goes in), and don't listen to Jean's advice that you can skip around the book; there is a narrative thread running through the fake cat journals and Rick's lists of things that annoy the shit out of him that does come to a head at the end.
All in all I liked this book pretty well, and was surprised to see that the Amazon reviews are fairly mixed. I'm tempted to put this down to price; if I'd plunked down the MSRP of $18.99 I don't know that I'd be too pleased, but at $2.31 (with free shipping!) I'm pretty happy.

Grade: B

Spring Moon

I started and finished Spring Moon last night. That alone should give you insight into how much I enjoyed this book. Telling the tale of Spring Moon and her family on an epic scale, the book weaves the lives of the Chang clan with China's turblent early 20th century history.
Spring Moon grows and changes throughout the bittersweet story, beginning as a precocious girl and ending as a woman very much into her old age. She tells us of herself through her own eyes but we also see her through the eyes of her favored Grand Uncle, his wife, and Spring Moon's own child. A great read for history fans looking for the human side of the story and people who enjoy love stories that aren't ridiculous affairs.

"In The Shadow of the Moons"

In The Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family (Nansook Hong)

This book fits into the little subgenre of cult-escape books - most of the ones I've read have been about Scientology, but this one is about (checks title) the Moonie church, more specifically the man himself and his totally dysfunctional family. The author is married (at 15) to the eldest son of Sun Myung Moon, and escapes with her children after over a decade of abuse, verbal, mental, and physical. What really stuck with me is the author's strength; the abuse she undergoes is horrific, and I couldn't help but smile at the end of the book when she successful escapes and sets about building a real life for herself. She also seems more sad than angry about what she went through - and make no mistake, this is a downer. Even so, I recommend it. It's harrowing, but this is a story that deserves to be told.

Grade: :0

"Blankets"

Blankets (Craig Thompson)

I was a little tough on the first Thompson book I read, a graphic novel called Habibi that reached for greatness and couldn't quite grasp it. Weirdly enough, his previous work - this book -  is everything I could have asked for and more. I don't want to gush too much, but this book is beautifully written and drawn, at turns hilarious and heartbreaking (mostly heartbreaking) as it follows our hero Craig and his struggles growing up.
I guess if I'm looking for some criticism, the art in Blankets isn't as breathtaking as it is in Habibi, both because this is earlier in Thompson's career and because the setting is more stark and less fantastical - and come to think of it, that's more of an observation; the stark art in Blankets perfectly fits the tone of frozen Midwestern lost despair. Huh. Well, I guess for once I can't think of a single thing to complain about. Um, highly recommended.

Grade: A+

"Dragon Age: Asunder"

Dragon Age: Asunder (David Gaider)

This is one of the most dreaded works out there: A video game tie in (bum bum bummmm). The three Mass Effect novels were alright (I'm not sure in retrospect they quite reached that A- I gave out), but this novel is a cut above those, and the only thing that holds it back from being an easy recommend is that it's absolutely steeped in Dragon Age lore. If you haven't played both games you'll probably be pretty lost, and even someone like me who's not just played but also read most of the optional material in those games had no idea who someone from one of the previous Dragon Age novels was when she showed up.
If you can surmount that formidable barrier to entry, though, there's a great story in here packed full of the kind of interesting, fleshed-out characters that you probably wouldn't expect from a video game tie-in novel. My only nitpick is that the villain comes off as a bit of a mustache-twirling cartoon bad guy - the author does attempt to give him some depth and motivation for his actions, but this comes as too little, too late to make him into a believable person at cross-purposes with our hero instead of a naughty antagonist for our heroes to look good fighting. This is the only thing I can complain about, though, and if you know enough about the setting to consider buying this, I highly recommend it.

Grade: A-

"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