"The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" (Second Look)

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England (Ian Mortimer)

Like our other look at this book, I enjoyed this. A comprehensive tour of 1300s England covers topics from what food you'll be able to find to what kind of furniture you'll be sitting on to  how to stay out of trouble with the law. A few aspects I found tiresome - nobody has toilets; I get it - but on the whole this was extremely interesting. I did skip a few parts (the author's enthusiasm for fashion is commendable, but after a few pages of seeing how the doublet went under the superdoublet I checked out) but the material is almost always interesting and skillfully presented. May make you want to watch "Braveheart" again.

History Nerd Grade: A-
Normal Citizen Grade: B+

"Legion"

Legion (Dan Abnett)

"Legion", like "Fulgrim", is a frustrating book. The Alpha Legion, who the book is about, tend to lurk in the shadows and only appear for extended periods as the book goes on. The problem with this is that the author focuses his attention on something called the "Geno Five-Two Chiliad", which has a trillion new, confusing words, names, and concepts. I knew just flipping through the Dramatis Personae section at the front of the book this was going to be trouble. What do you do with names like:

Sri Vedt - Uxor Primus of the Geno Five-Two
Honen Mu - Uxor
Rukhsana Saiid - Uxor
Hurtado Bronzi - Hetman
Dimiter Shiban - Hetman
Franco Boone - Genewhip

And, oh boy, the book doesn't do any favors keeping all this straight, either. The Uxors are female officers who command the troops, which is easy to grasp. It gets annoyingly hard to keep track of when the author's laying down that the Uxors are female officers who have little retinues who use something called "'cept" (always with that distracting ') to order troops around, so you'll have Honen, or Mu, or Uxor, 'cepting her ass off with Hurt, or Hurtado, or Bronzi, or Hetman, or Het.
I never really got used to this. People, please, if you have confusing names, just pick a name and run with it. I realize that you may want to have Uxor Mu call Hetman Bronzi "Hurt" instead of "Hurtado" to show how close they are, but when I can't keep the fucking charecters straight because they have six ways they're referred to you're just defeating yourself.
So that's issue one. Now things get even goofier when we meet John Grammaticus, agent of THE CABAL, a group of anicent, smug Xeno scum. Now this introduces a big problem, because the Cabal meeting with the Primarch of the Alpha Legion is such an important event that it natrually suggests itself as the climax of the book, and the events immediately following it are so momentus that it pretty much has to be the climax. The problem this creates is that since this meeting happens at the end of the book, quite a lot of it is Grammaticus trying to get the Cabal in touch with the Alpha Legion, and this part isn't exactly thrilling. In "Fulgrim", a craftworld just shows up, hails the Space Marines, and a meeting is arranged, and while I understand that if that happened here this book would be about 75 pages long, it does get mighty tiresome as roadblocks are constantly thrown up to make sure the Legion and Cabal don't meet until the end of the book.
All that being said, when the Cabal and the Primarch do finally meet the book picks up, and the end comes with a bang. As with "Fulgrim", however, the last 8th of the book being great isn't really enough to save it. I don't want to imply this book is as bad as "Fulgrim"; The parts with the army are interesting, if hampered by the names, and Grammaticus' sneaking around isn't that great but does have one spectacular fight scene, if nothing else. I can't really recommend this book to the general population, but if you love the Alpha Legion - does anybody? - then you can't go wrong. You goof.

Grade: C

"The Great Shark Hunt" (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1)

The Great Shark Hunt (Gonzo Papers, Volume 1) (Hunter S Thompson)

What the sub-title means by the "Gonzo Papers" is that this book is a Thompson sampler; It collects dozens and dozens of articles and book exceprts on subjects from covering the Kentucky Derby to race tension in LA following the slaying of a prominent Latino TV reporter to Muhammed Ali's loss to Leon Spinks to Nixon's impeachment and resulting fallout. I really liked this book - I was never bored, which is no easy feat considering the wide breadth of material covered and the sheer length (almost 600 huge pages). In the voice of a less talented author, Thompson's schtick could become tiresome very quickly, but he is so engaging that this never happens. A heist late in the book where he skips out on his massive hotel bill in Mexico and flees back to the US with a drug stache that he and his lawyer decided to consume all of on the plane into Texas is just as frightening and hilarious as anything early in the book where he holes up in a hotel room shooting heroin while he's supposted to be covering the Super Bowl. If you have the slightest interest in Thompson's work, I can't think of a better starting place than this. (I've also read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72", which I'll see if I can remember enough of to cough up a bite-sized book review.)

Now one caveat: I read this over a long period of time - I left it in the car and read it when we went out to eat, which means the book was devoured in 50-page chunks. Your milage may vary, but I probably don't recommend sitting down and knocking the whole thing out in one day - like most writers with a very distinctive voice, it's probably better to savor rather than gorge. (Gonzo Papers, Vol 2, is apparently a collection of newspaper columns, which I anticipate will make an excellent bathroom book.)

Grade: A

"Witch & Wizard"

"Witch & Wizard" (James "I want money" Patterson & Gabrielle "My name appears on the cover 1/100th of the size of James Patterson's" Charbonnet)

When we got stuck in Detroit because Delta decided to cancel our flight because they couldn't find any pilots because they're a terrible airline, my wife brought me two books to read in the airport: This book, and "A Dark Matter". I read this whole book in a few hours, and as I read it two things dawned on me: First, this is a young adult book, and by "young adult" the authors seem to mean five year olds; And two, this book is pretty bad. Now, I was a young adult once, and I recall reading some pretty good young adult books that respect the intellegence of thier readers. This is not one of those books. This is a book where the villian might as well be twirling his mustache the whole time he's on screen in between sticking cute puppies in hot dog buns and eating them with disgusting sound effects.
So this book is poorly written. This part leapt out at me enough that I went and found my copy of the book to quote it for you. From page 21:

"Make me," Byron said to Whit, then he gave a smarmy, oily smile, vividly bringing to life all the times I'd seen him in school and thought, What a total butt.

What a total butt. I mean, okay, this is a young adult book, so I'm not expecting a life-changing masterpiece, but you know, young adult books can be good. They can feature real, interesting charecters, not lame one-dimensional heroes whose primary heroic virtue seems to be A.) Being a football player and B.) Being the narrator. They don't have to feature horrible lines like "What a total butt".
So okay, the book is not well written. It is poorly plotted (there's literally a new chapter every two pages for no particular reason I could figure out) and has a terrible ending, which I'm about to spoil:

Our heroes meet the villian, and he basically says "Bwa ha ha, the ANCIENT PROPHECY of squeezing more money out of my publisher decrees that we will have an awesome battle......... after you visit the next five novels coming to bookstores near YOU and collect the Magical McGuffins of Needless Plot Extending! Please buy the next volume, everybody! Poorly-written fake Snape out!"
Needless to say, I don't like this book.

Grade: F-

PS: I almost forgot the book's post-script, which contains a painfully unfunny list of acts banned by the evil N.O. organization; Look, it's They Might be Giants, but now the name is We Shall Be Titans! GET IT???????????????????????????? If we gave out anything lower than an F-, this book would get it.

"A Dark Matter"

A Dark Matter (Peter Straub)

First off, an admission: I did not finish this book. I got halfway through it and realize that if nothing was going to happen by the time I was half done with it, nothing is probably going to happen in the second half either.
It's a shame, too, because if you just read the back of the book, it sounds like a good premise: You have a group of high school and college students who unleashed some kind of eldrich horror 30 years ago (don't worry, it apparently just popped in for tea and it's long gone). The protagonist is trying to get to the bottom of these mysterious events by interviewing the survivors. Unfortunately, once you start reading the book, the inherent weakness of the premise becomes apparent: Since these events all happened 30 years ago, there's no imminent danger, no looming threat, and the only thing driving the narrative forward is that the protagonist is curious what happened. (Really, I found myself asking, he didn't wonder what happened until just now? Considering that his wife was one of the students involved in this?)
This is exacerbated with the fact that the book just isn't very interesting. Our hero wasn't at the event, but he goes around interviewing all the people who were, and hearing the same boring events re-told five times is just as exciting as it sounds. The hero's wife is nicknamed "the Eel", and my mind kept wandering to how I'd like to read this guy's adventures where his wife is a 6-foot tall talking eel and maybe then something, you know, interesting might happen. I admit I'm mildly curious about the ending, but since we already know that one person was killed and everyone else lived to tell about it boringly 30 years later, perhaps even mild is an overstatement.

Grade: D

"Fulgrim"

Fulgrim (Graham McNeill)

In retrospect, the warning signs should have been obvious about this book:
- The back declares that it follows the Emperor's Children in the buildup to the bombing of Isstvan III, events that have already been covered twice in five books - once in the initial trilogy and one book ago in Flight of the Eisenstein. (Although this book does go a little further into the following events of Isstvan V.)
- The book starts out not with a bang, but with a Remembrancer giving a concert that goes on for pages.
- Someone whose opinion I respect told me the book wasn't very good.

So why did I get this book? Well, I trusted Graham McNeill, who had yet to let me down with "A Thousand Sons", "False Gods" and "Mechanicum". Alas, this is his worst book, and if I may be allowed to judge having read a whole four, the least Graham McNeill-esque. Where he handles Rememberancers skillfully in his other novels, here they're at their most obnoxious, breaking up the action with long, pointless, boring, pointless, momentum-killing, and pointless stretches of pages in which not only does nothing happen, but nothing happens very, very slowly.
More troublingly, the rest of the book isn't very good either. Fulgrim's desent into Chaos is, and I hate to say this, boring. The series has followed other Primarchs as they turn away from the Emperor, and ultimately each one has a humanizing weakness that leads them down the dark path: Magnus, with his love of knoweldge and inablity to stop searching for it; Lorgar and his need for faith, taking the wrong lesson from the Emperor's dictate not to be worshipped; Horus and his pride, and his trust in councilors unworthy of it. So what is Fulgrim's story? Well, he goes to a planet with a temple that has weird shreiking music inside, and he pulls out a silver sword from a stone at the center, and then he starts hearing weird voices in his head. Zuh?

What else can I say about this book? For a novel about a chapter of genetically enhanced super-soldiers who end up worshipping the soul-eating god of pleasure, it's awfully boring (third time I've called the book that in a bite-sized review - not good). Even the pacing is bizzare, as I found myself finishing a chapter and flipping back a page to make sure that was really the end-point; The transitions feel like a bad movie where the director's just had enough of a scene and hacks it off. Even the names are unoriginal. Fulgrim's golden, flaming blade is named... Fireblade. Wow. Maybe McNeill just doesn't like the Emperor's Children; The (sadly brief) time spent with the Iron Hands legion I found much more interesting. Now it's not all bad; The Dropsite Massacre of Isstvan V is depicted here, and by the time the end of the book rolls around, it actually does get better (I credit the disapperance of the Rememberancers partially with this). The last 1/8th of the book is actually quite interesting, but unfortuneatly not enough to make up for the first 7/8ths. Given that the drop site massacre is also depicted in the far superior "First Heretic", I have to say that this is, sadly, the first Horus Heresey novel I recommend just taking a pass on. "Mechanicum" and "Nemesis" are, if failures, at least weird and entertaining, like your kid sister growing a third eye. Fulgrim is just a mess, like my living room.

Grade: D+

"The First Heretic"

"The First Heretic" (Aaron Dembski-Bowden)

Now this is more like it. After Mechanicum and Nemesis wandered off in interesting if sometimes slightly questionable directions, this book takes a long look at the Word Bearers legion, actually the first legion to turn away from the Emperor and begin worshipping Chaos (thus the novel name). The book begins with a bang as as the Ultramarines, led in person by Papa Smurf himself, land on a planet brought to compliance by the Word Bearers and find the population worshipping the Emperor; The population is foricbly evacuated and all the cities are destroyed by orbital bombardment as a lesson for Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers, not to worship the Emperor like a god.
Well, this works too well, as Lorgar begins his long, gradual, and tragically understandable journey down the dark and crooked road to embracing the ruinous powers of Chaos. This is the real beginning of the heresy, with events 40 years before Horus' betrayal setting the stage in grand fashion. I'm kind of perplexed as to why it took 15 novels before this vital backstory was filled in, but I can't complain about how it's done; The author is skillful enough that at times I found myself rooting against what any sane observer would class as the good guys, and instead hoping the chaos-mutated, demon-possessed abominations that the Word Bearers let themselves become will come out on top. It may sound weird, but I think this is actually the most emotional of the Horus Heresey novels so far, and I mean that in the best possible way. The positives keep on coming: Rowboat Girlyman, Primarch of the Ultrasmurfs, gets knocked right on his ass in the first few chapters; The pivotal and much referred-to but never before seen (that I've read) Drop Site Massacre is finally detailed; Primarchs like Corax and Cruze who have yet to see the spotlight are given some screentime.
My one and only complaint about this book is that this probably should have been the fifth in the series after Flight of the Eisenstein; I'd recommend reading the original trilogy, Flight of the Eisenstein, and then this book - just make sure you have enough time set aside because you won't want to put any of them down.

Grade: A+