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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 28, 2020 10:53:19 GMT -5
Web Site Story by Robert RankinLegend has it that this is Rankin's least favorite of his books. If that's true, it's probably understandable. This is very weak Rankin. It's still readable and it occasionally has that Rankin feel, but it's just not up to snuff and even the running gags feel like they've run on too long. Maybe I'm just missing Pooley & O'Malley & company. None of the characters in this work, or the last couple by Rankin, seem to be particularly interesting to me. This is set in a future where the debugging of the Y2K bug was a ruse that allowed the insertion of computer chips that have now gained sentience and are playing with humans. And now strange things are afoot in Brentford as people are disappearing, Brentford is in danger of being turned into a large tourist attraction, and the teachings of Hugo Rune are in danger. All in all it's okay. But it's weak enough that I'm going to take a break from Rankin again for a while and see if I can recharge my batteries.
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Post by berkley on Sept 28, 2020 12:59:37 GMT -5
Bit of a weak pun, too - it would be witty and funny as an off the cuff remark in conversation or even on a message board like this, but not strong enough to be used as a book title, IMO.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 28, 2020 20:39:51 GMT -5
Hidden Depths by Anne Cleeves
Not too long ago our library purchased the first several books of this series, and as she's a fan of the show, I grabbed the 1st one for my wife to check out, with the intention of perhaps also reading it if she liked it.
It took until book 3 for the motivation to kick in... I think perhaps this was not the best one for me to read first... not because it's not the first book, but because it happens to be an episode of the show, one which I remembered very well (though, funnily enough, not the murderer). As such, it was hard to say if I really enjoyed the writing, as I was picturing it as it was filmed.
The story definitely moved along nicely, and even though the detectives 'failed' at first, things really picked up in the 2nd half and ended up being a page turner. I definitely like Vera's character alot better on the TV show then here... I think I it's really just a matter of which I see first at this point. She's super unlikeable in the books, where she gives off a much better vibe in the TV series.
I think I'd be inclined to read a book by the author in another series before another of these, just to give her a fair shake as a writer.
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Post by Rob Allen on Sept 29, 2020 0:42:08 GMT -5
So we're at the Oregon Coast for some R&R. The other day we went to our favorite place for smoked fish, Barnacle Bill's in Lincoln City, and then to the hippie health food store and then to Goodwill. My wife was browsing in the linens and I headed to the book section. I saw a book titled Theseus with a beautiful painting on the dust jacket. The back cover said it was volume three of a four volume series. I looked around, and there's volume one, and volumes two and four. A few minutes later I walked out with all four volumes of the Heroes series from the book division of Cricket magazine. These are prose versions of the legends, designed for younger readers. But look at these dust jackets! The paintings are by Tom Kidd, an artist I'm not familiar with, and the author, Geraldine McCaughrean, seems to have made a career of retelling ancient stories.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Sept 29, 2020 3:46:20 GMT -5
So we're at the Oregon Coast for some R&R. The other day we went to our favorite place for smoked fish, Barnacle Bill's in Lincoln City, and then to the hippie health food store and then to Goodwill. My wife was browsing in the linens and I headed to the book section. I saw a book titled Theseus with a beautiful painting on the dust jacket. The back cover said it was volume three of a four volume series. I looked around, and there's volume one, and volumes two and four. A few minutes later I walked out with all four volumes of the Heroes series from the book division of Cricket magazine. These are prose versions of the legends, designed for younger readers. But look at these dust jackets! (...) The paintings are by Tom Kidd, an artist I'm not familiar with, and the author, Geraldine McCaughrean, seems to have made a career of retelling ancient stories. Ah, Lincoln City. Sometimes I miss the Oregon coast (and it's cool bookstores) so much. That's really cool that you found a whole set in a Goodwill - and you probably only paid $4 for the lot. Great find.
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Post by Rob Allen on Sept 29, 2020 10:04:40 GMT -5
Ah, Lincoln City. Sometimes I miss the Oregon coast (and it's cool bookstores) so much. That's really cool that you found a whole set in a Goodwill - and you probably only paid $4 for the lot. Great find.
Actually they were $4 each. Still a bargain! Lincoln City lost a bookstore a few years ago - Pacific Coast Books closed down. But Robert's and its offshoot Bob's Beach Books are still going strong.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 30, 2020 10:54:19 GMT -5
Headed For a Hearse by Jonathan LatimerBill Crane is back with another case. Robert Westland, wealthy broker, has six days to live before he's executed for the murder of his estranged wife. Crane, and fellow PI Doc Williams have been hired to find the real killer, because that's the only thing that can save Westland at this late date. What results is a interesting mash-up of hardboiled detective and locked-room mystery, complete with all the suspects gathered at the end for the reveal. This one didn't work for me quite as well as Murder in the Madhouse. Crane still drinks to the point that he's occasionally not effective. He still quips, though they don't land as often as in Madhouse. The casual racism (and I recognize when this was written) has been turned up a couple of notches. The mystery itself is okay and the solution makes sense. The addition of Williams really didn't help the story. Crane is the more interesting of the two and having Williams to play off doesn't add much. Worth a read but definitely a let-down.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Oct 2, 2020 21:56:02 GMT -5
The Immortal Unknown (Perry Rhodan #13) by KH Scheer My favorite cover so far... nothing to do with the story, but man, do I want to read the story it goes to. The actual story is quite good... thanks to the Pucky delay, Perry and crew find their quest now has a time limit, as Vega's sun is rapidly going nova. Some excellent contrasts between both the humans and the Arkonides, which was quite interesting. I'm happy the quest is over and we can move on to other things... it had a good conclusion...definitely some shades of 'Q' at the end, which of course makes me happy. I was a bit surprised about the ending, be interesting to see how the particular box the writer put himself in plays itself out, if I ever get that far. I definitely think this story could have been longer... maybe a two-parter (I know, that's contrary to wanting the quest to be over), but there was a bunch at the end that was glossed over quickly that could have used more explaning... maybe that'll happen in the next one. According to the letters in the back, apparently they're going to start skipping the 'boring' chapters, which I don't love, but I knew it was coming, and obviously this translation only goes a very small way into the series, so I'm not going to worry about it too much.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 4, 2020 3:27:51 GMT -5
Finally got to sit down and experience the new Frazetta art book I picked up last month... This is what I said o GoodReads... I will emphasize the size of this book. It's 14.5 by 10.6ish inches in size, so it provides the large canvas for the art to really shine and have a presence. It's a good representative sample of work, but by no means comprehensive, but Spurlock does mention it is the first in a series, and his intent was to make it a modernization of the classic Ballantine Frazetta art books from the 70s, and used the first such book as his inspiration in curating the choices to include in this volumes. Most of what was new to me was either earlier versions of works I had seen, or later revisions to stuff Frazetta had done after the work saw print. One piece that was all new to me was Deina... which was an interior piece published in Dow Elements magazine. I look forward to future entries in this series, especially if they are in this over-sized format. -M
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 4, 2020 11:45:05 GMT -5
The AlgebraistIain M. Banks, 2004 One of Banks' non-Culture SF novels. This one is pretty hard to summarize, given how dense the story is, but I'll give it a shot: it's set about 2000 years in the future, when humanity has reached the stars - but just one of many species in an immense galactic community and not considered anything special. Humans and others mainly live in a loosely-connected civilization called the Mercatoria, which has a complex, rather feudal hierarchy. FTL travel doesn't exist, rather everyone travels to different systems via a series of wormhole gates. If one of those gets taken out, i.e., due to warfare or by a class of outlaw marauders called the Beyonders, a given star system or section of the galaxy gets cut off from the mainstream and has to wait for the Mercatoria's engineering department to fly out and re-install the gate. This can takes decades or centuries. Also, the Mercatoria considers AI an abomination and destroys any hint of it - that comes into play as the story progresses. Otherwise, the oldest known sentient species in the galaxy, who've been around for billions of years, are these large creatures called Dwellers, who live in gas giants pretty much everywhere. According to legend, the Dwellers have a secret network of their own wormholes which they use to get around. But they're casually indifferent to pretty much all forms of other intelligent life (they're not part of the Mercatoria or any other grouping), although they do interact with them. And there is a special class of people, called Seers, in a few systems in the galaxy who are allowed to visit their planets and communicate with them. The main character is a one such Seer, a human named Fassin Taak, who lives on a moon orbiting a gas giant, Nasqueron, in a rather peripheral star system, Ulubis - which is only notable precisely due to the fact that it's one of the few places where there is significant communication with the Dwellers. When the ruler of a renegade empire decides he wants to invade Ulubis to find the secret to the Dwellers' supposed wormhole network, Fassin is basically conscripted into the Mercatoria military and sent on a mission to find the secret. He ends up having quite a time of it. This is a really grand space opera, filled with tons of ideas, action, great characterization and even humor (pretty much all of the latter provided by the Dwellers).
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Post by Duragizer on Oct 4, 2020 15:38:14 GMT -5
1984 (George Orwell) Abhorrent; amazing. I'm glad I read it; I'm glad I'll never have to read it again. 9/10
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 4, 2020 15:45:14 GMT -5
1984 (George Orwell) Abhorrent; amazing. I'm glad I read it; I'm glad I'll never have to read it again.9/10 Nope. Cause we're living it.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 4, 2020 15:52:44 GMT -5
Nope. Cause we're living it. Yeah maybe, but with lots of Huxley's Brave New World mixed in...
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Post by wildfire2099 on Oct 7, 2020 19:00:42 GMT -5
Kenobi by John Jackson Miller Grabbed this from the library (so happy I can actually go to the library and look at books again!) TO get in the mood for the upcoming Mandalorian Season 2... I know this is a 'legends' book, but it's not like there's anything in it that can't still fit into the current canon. The author says he set out to write a Western in the Star Wars universe, which he thinks is unique. You could really say the original is very Western like, but this one is REALLY right out of the 60s Spaghetti Western playbook.. if you change 'Tattooine' to 'Arizona' and "Vaporators' to 'cattle' and you're pretty much all set, as long as you can picture the Tuskens as the 'indians'. That's not to say there no place for Ben Kenobi, as he gets some great moments of characterization as he meditates and attempts to commune with the spirit of his mentor. There was also some fun continuity nods... they went a bit overboard with the blue milk, but making sense of Jabba's first comic book appearance was really fun. And hey, the author also used his entry in 'A certain point of View' for his Tusken character, so it's kinda sorta still official. Definitely just what I was looking for to get in the mood
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 8, 2020 11:15:43 GMT -5
Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 by Willie Drye
I don't know from hurricanes. Blizzards...sure. Earthquakes...yeah, we get the odd one. Volcanoes...well I live in a lava field, not that we've had one recently. But hurricanes are something that happen on the other side of the continent. But I was intrigued by this book and I wasn't disappointed. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 (this was before they were named) was probably the strongest hurricane to hit the U.S. It's the one that they mention in the movie Key Largo. It had maximum sustained winds at landfall of 185 mph and barometric pressure of 26.34 inches of mercury. I didn't know what that last one meant until I read the book, but apparently that's lower pressure than most barometers at the time were able to measure. It was, by any measure, a monster storm. But beyond its severity, it hit the Florida Keys at a politically sensitive time. The 1936 political campaign was in the offing. And on Labor Day of 1935 there were hundreds of World War I veterans in the Keys that had been sent there by the Roosevelt administration to work on the Overseas Highway under the direction of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. 695 veterans, most of whom had been members of the Bonus Army, were in three work-camps in the lowlands of the Florida Keys. The camps were not well constructed, were not well placed and while there was somewhat of a plan for evacuation in case of a hurricane, it was not well thought out and it was, ultimately, not implemented...or at least not on time. Drye does a good job of giving us the background leading up to the hurricane, both the political situation with the Bonus Army and the new Administration and the background on the Keys and hurricanes there. The story of the hurricane itself is well told and it's told in a manner that allows for someone with very little knowledge of these types of weather patterns to understand what was going down. It would be easy for Drye to point fingers at the FERA officials for the scope of the disaster that lead to the death of 251 of the veteran workers and to an extent he does. But he also makes it clear that there were several breakdowns in the management of the veterans and the camps and that there were certainly people within the FERA and associated agencies who had been urging better planning and a much earlier evacuation than was attempted. Drye also does a good job of showing that even the Conchs (natives of the Keys) were taken surprise by the intensity and power of the storm and there were significant civilian I think that if there's one knock on the book it's that there's a large cast of characters and they tend to run together. I'm not entirely sure what Drye could have done to differentiate them, but at the very least a list of the "cast of characters" with a describer of who they are would have been helpful. But that's really the only nit I have to pick in a very enjoyable book.
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