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May 13
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Chris
gave
to:
The Day of the Triffids (Essential.penguin)
by John Wyndham
bookshelves:
apocolypse,
science-fiction,
top-shelf
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in May, 2008
Chris said:
"I have a long fondness for Apocalyptic novels. The Stand was one of my early favorites from junior high school, and I really enjoyed its cousin by Robert McCammon, Swan Song. Ther...more
I have a long fondness for Apocalyptic novels. The Stand was one of my early favorites from junior high school, and I really enjoyed its cousin by Robert McCammon, Swan Song. There's something about the End Of The World that just grabs me and won't let go. Maybe it's the thought that, should the world end, I would be one of the survivors. The rule of law would break down, all shackles of modern life would be loosed, and I would finally be free to choose my own destiny. Which, knowing me, would probably be very short and end up with me getting shot by some kind of Mad Max pirate tribe.
I can say with some certainty, however, that in this book's scenario I would not be coming out on top. Because I love astronomy.
Let me explain. The end of the world came in two parts, one of which was definitely of our own doing.
It started with a comet. Or a meteor shower. Or something, but whatever it was, it lit up the sky. Green streaks of light brightened the night skies around the world, and everyone who could go and watch them did so. I'm a sucker for a natural light show, so I probably would have spent the night watching the skies and enjoying myself. And I would have woken up stone blind the next day.
That in itself - the vast, vast majority of the human population on Earth being blind - would have been a pretty good apocalypse. Wyndham describes rashes of suicides, accidental deaths and, of course, murder in just the first few days. Without vision, the carefully crafted world we've made kind of falls apart. But it would have been survivable. Co-operation groups spring up pretty quickly, both voluntary and otherwise, where sighted people assist the blind in surviving. It would have been tough, yes, but not impossible. If not for the Triffids.
While we don't know what caused the green comet, the Triffids were definitely our fault. Bioengineering gone haywire, the Triffids are ambulatory carnivorous plants with a poison sting that can kill a grown man from ten feet away. And while they're not intelligent, they are remarkably... aware. They follow sound, they learn and co-operate in hunting, and are very difficult to eradicate.
But by themselves, they're manageable. Their stingers can be removed, even though they grow back eventually, and they make interesting garden plants. And they're immensely profitable - the oil derived from a Triffid outdoes every other kind of vegetable oil available. In normal times, the Triffids are under human control.
Two problems, when put together, make for a truly terrifying end. And an exciting story. Wyndham has created a brave new world for us, with a wide variety of characters who all react to their new situation in different - and realistic - ways. From the girl who believes that the Americans will save her to the man who believes that polygamy is the way to a brighter future, everyone has an idea on how to survive.
But first they have to deal with the Triffids.......less
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Chris
gave
to:
The Godfather (Paperback)
by Mario Puzo
bookshelves:
top-shelf
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in May, 2008
Chris said:
"This is a book that you can't refuse....
Sorry, just had to get that in there.
This is truly a fantastic book, better than the movie, and the movie is really good. One thing that I marveled at is how closely the movie stuck to the book - word ...more
This is a book that you can't refuse....
Sorry, just had to get that in there.
This is truly a fantastic book, better than the movie, and the movie is really good. One thing that I marveled at is how closely the movie stuck to the book - word for word in places - and how well it treated the source material. Coppola gave the book the respect it deserved, and as Don Corleone would say, respect is the best thing there is.
We all know the story - it's the tale of a powerful mafia family, brought to the edge of destruction, only to rise up stronger than before. We know the characters - the brilliant patriarch, Vito, the hot-tempered Sonny, and Michael, whose destiny brought him to the heights of illicit power. We find out that Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes, Carlo Rizzi damned himself the first time he hit his wife, and there's no worse way to wake up than with a horse's head in your bed.
But what makes the story even more entertaining is that it's not really a story about the Mafia. It's the story about family, about standing by the people who stand by you and about the high standards a true man must live by. Yes, they make a living by doing things that in polite society might be "illegal," but they do so because the legitimate authorities do not provide them with the means to see that their families are safe and successful. It's all anybody wants, really, but for a young Vito Corleone, there was no way to do that within the bounds that the law provided.
So he made his own law. He did it, though, with respect and friendship first, acting on the basic principle of the Golden Rule - if I act as a friend to you, you will act as a friend to me. Is that not how reasonable men behave? Should that friendship be betrayed, however, the consequences could be dire....
It does rather glamorize the mafia culture, turning the Corleone family into a kind of benevolent lordship. The reality of the mafia and organized crime is, I'm sure, much less noble than as portrayed here. But I'm not reading this for research material - I want a good story and characters I can really get behind. This book has them in spades....less
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May 04
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Chris
gave
to:
Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files, Book 8)
by Jim Butcher
bookshelves:
fantasy,
wizardry
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in May, 2008
Chris said:
""Hell's Bells" count - 16, with 7 instances of "Stars and Stones." I think it's clear which one is Butcher's favorite....
It's one year later....
Many things have changed for Harry Dresden. He has family now, and a giant dog. ...more
"Hell's Bells" count - 16, with 7 instances of "Stars and Stones." I think it's clear which one is Butcher's favorite....
It's one year later....
Many things have changed for Harry Dresden. He has family now, and a giant dog. He has a job - a real one, as a Warden - and all the responsibility that goes with it. He also has the shadow of a fallen angel in his head and a war with the vampiric Red Court to contend with. And in the midst of all this, he's given two small, seemingly unconnected jobs to do: find who's been dabbling in black magic in Chicago and find out why the Red Court vampires have been allowed to use the lands of the Faerie to attack the White Council of Wizardry.
They should be simple, or reasonably so. But they're not. They never are.
Whoever's been using black magic has caused a whole world of hurt, bringing forth creatures that feed on fear and take the forms of some of the most terrible movie monsters we know (all of whom are, of course, based upon real characters, with only the names changed to protect Butcher from Lawyers). These creatures have already killed, attacking at a crowded horror movie convention, and Harry is determined to see that the person who called them forth pays for doing so. With blood and pain, if possible.
Unfortunately, when he finds out just who it is that's been calling up these things, Harry finds himself and his friends in a situation that no mortal should be in - an attack against the Winter Queen of Faerie herself, Queen Mab.
When all is said and done, we get another glimmer of insight into how Dresden's world works. His relationship with the non-Wizarding people he cares about, the laws and strictures that bind the wizard community together, all are tested and pushed to their limits in this book. It's compelling and very, very hard to put down. As with all the Dresden books, I can't recommend it enough.......less
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Chris
gave
to:
Dead Beat (The Dresden Files, Book 7)
by Jim Butcher
bookshelves:
fantasy,
wizardry
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in May, 2008
Chris said:
""Hell's Bells" count - 12. Under average, although Harry's newest expletive, "Stars and stones," brings up the rear with 7 instances.
Me? Obsessive? Never....
Anyway, many thanks to Jenn for supplying me with <s>crack&l...more
"Hell's Bells" count - 12. Under average, although Harry's newest expletive, "Stars and stones," brings up the rear with 7 instances.
Me? Obsessive? Never....
Anyway, many thanks to Jenn for supplying me with <s>crack</s> more books. I received this one and Proven Guilty yesterday afternoon, along with the "Hell's Bells!" pin. Also, The Boyfriend may have found a hidden message in the cover art - if you look at Harry's staff on the front cover, the glowing letters read "Matrix" in katakana. why this should be so, only the artist knows, but The Boyfriend saw it immediately....
Anyway, I mentioned in the review to the last book that it appeared Butcher had decided to really stir things up, and I was right. Aside from the physical injuries done to Harry, there was a lot of spiritual wounding going on as well. While I was on the train, I wondered what the Harry Dresden from Storm Front would have made of the Harry Dresden from this book. He probably would have been scared. For good reason...
There's necromancy afoot in Chicago, and as much as he doesn't want to be, Harry is in the middle of all of it. He's been charged by one of the most dangerous vampires in the Black Court to find the missing volume of a series written by one of the most notorious necromancers in human history. It's a mission he can't refuse, which is too bad - there are other powerful people who are also hunting for the book, and they're bringing all their Evil Dead powers to bear on it.
In the midst of all this, Harry discovers that past actions still have present consequences, and that the choices he has to make are not always good ones. While Harry does save the day, he does so at a cost.
Aside from its general awesomeness, this book introduces a few really good new characters, including Butters, the Medical Examiner (and no matter how hard I try, I can't help but make him sound a little like Butters from South Park). And there was at least one "Holy SHIT" moment, which is big points in my book. It's at the end of chapter 38, you can't miss it.
I think that from here on out, this is going to be a very different series. Bigger, darker, as if that were possible, building on the foundation of the previous books to make something far more elaborate and interesting. I can't wait to see what it is....less
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Chris
gave
to:
Blood Rites (The Dresden Files, Book 6)
by Jim Butcher
bookshelves:
fantasy,
wizardry
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in April, 2008
Chris said:
""Hell's Bells" count: 16
Although he has added a new expletive, "Stars and stones," and the two were brilliantly combined to great effect in the phrase, "Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit balls" on page 346. I...more
"Hell's Bells" count: 16
Although he has added a new expletive, "Stars and stones," and the two were brilliantly combined to great effect in the phrase, "Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit balls" on page 346. I have got to commit that one to memory.
This is book six of the series, and it's about time that things took a bit of a turn. As far as I know, The Dresden Files is an open-ended series that Butcher will continue to write until he decides to end it, which is fine with me. One of the dangers of such a plan, however, is stagnation - you end up rehashing similar plot points, perhaps throwing in a few twists and turns, but never really advancing the plot because, well, you don't know where the plot is going.
While I don't know if Butcher knows (or knew at the time he wrote this book, since the series is up to book ten now, I think) where the series will finally end, he does manage to avoid stagnation very nicely. This book really stirs things up for the world of Harry Dresden and lets the readers know that there is far, far more in store for us than we knew. So bravo to you, Jim.
In this volume, Dresden is asked by his kind-of-sort-of friend Thomas to do a favor for him. Despite being a vampire of the White Court and a soul-sucker, Thomas is an okay kind of guy and has helped Harry out of a few tight spots in their time. He can't say he trusts Thomas, but he likes him. The job sounds simple: a movie producer has been having weird accidents happen to people linked with his movie, and two women have already died mysterious deaths. Harry's job would be to figure out who's putting the mojo on the movie studio and stop it.
The fact that it's an adult movie studio is not brought up until later.
In the process of trying to help out with an astoundingly powerful (and regular) Evil Eye curse, Harry runs afoul of the Black Court vampires, nearly falls into the bad books of an assassin who is much, much more dangerous than he appears to be, almost gets murdered by a lord of the White Court and sees one of his greatest nightmares brought to life.
All of this, though is incidental to the things he learns in this book, both about himself and the people he trusts. Those are the things that truly shake up his world and which will shape the books that are to follow.
As with the other books in The Dresden Files series, this is great fun to read. Which makes it no surprise that it's had some measure of success outside its original format - a TV series and a comic, at last count. I look forward to reading the rest of the series and pestering my local bookseller to keep me up to date as the new books come out....
...less
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April 19
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Chris
gave
to:
The Mother Tongue (Paperback)
by Bill Bryson
bookshelves:
history,
language,
top-shelf
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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recommended for: English teachers, English speakers
read in April, 2008
Chris said:
"This is my second Bryson book for the year (the first being A Short History of Nearly Everything), but this is probably the fourth time I've read this book. I'm an English te...more
This is my second Bryson book for the year (the first being A Short History of Nearly Everything), but this is probably the fourth time I've read this book. I'm an English teacher, so my desire to know more about the language I'm teaching is, well, pretty high. One does not necessarily lead to the other, of course - I've met plenty of English teachers who couldn't care less about the history of the language, just how to teach it. Not that there's anything wrong with that....
Bryson excels in many things, and one of his best talents is taking something horribly complex, like the rise of English as a dominant world language, and making it not only understandable, but entertaining. He takes us through, of course, where languages come from and how they've evolved over the last umpteen thousand years. With special emphasis on the evolution of English, of course, from a commoners' tongue composed of a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon and Norman, with regular infusions from the Romance languages and Scandinavia to the language of an Empire, spanning the globe and finding niches in the most unexpected of places. He talks about the origins of words pronunciation and how it's changed, and the multiplicity of English dialects. He covers the split of American and British English, and how half the time when the Brits get all snobby about an "Americanism," it's actually a word that was coined in Britain but fell out of favor. He covers the attempts to catalog English and standardize it, to simplify it and study it.
He even has a whole chapter on profanity.
So yeah, if you've every wondered where the language you're speaking comes from, check it out. It's rather unashamedly pro-English in terms of its comparison with other languages, as you might expect, but Bryson does his best to point out the occasions where other languages accomplish things that English cannot. You can't help but notice, however, that Bryson is an English speaker who loves the English language, so expect a bit of bias to seep in there.
Nonetheless, it's very entertaining and informative. Enjoy....less
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April 14
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Chris
gave
to:
Cat's Cradle (Paperback)
by Kurt Vonnegut
bookshelves:
science-fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in April, 2008
Chris said:
"Nothing in this review is true.
As much as I enjoy reading Vonnegut, one of the nagging little doubts I always have is that I'm missing something. That there's a hidden message in there that I'm not picking up on. Or, on the other hand, that I am...more
Nothing in this review is true.
As much as I enjoy reading Vonnegut, one of the nagging little doubts I always have is that I'm missing something. That there's a hidden message in there that I'm not picking up on. Or, on the other hand, that I am picking up messages that just aren't there.
Which is, perhaps, the point of the whole book.
The world is full of lies. Good lies, bad lies and indifferent lies, but lies nonetheless, and we pick and choose the lies that make our lives happiest. The lie that we know more than other people, or that we are chosen by one deity or another. They're all lies, and the acknowledgment of that is.... depressing.
So, rather than just write about that, Vonnegut wrapped it in a "religion" known as Bokononism - the indigenous and completely artificial "faith" of the island of San Lorenzo. And in order to tell us about Bokononism, we need a narrator - and a disaster. Which brings us to Ice-Nine.
A variant of water ice which is the final creation of the father of the atom bomb - Dr. Felix Hoenikker - Ice-Nine is solid at temperatures up to 45.8°C (114.4°F). A single crystal of Ice-Nine can convert any liquid water it touches, which will in turn convert any other water in contact with that. If Ice-Nine were to come into contact with a natural body of water, the chain reaction would lead to the total freezing of the planet Earth.
The narrator's journey to the end of the world is an interesting one, started by a search for the truth and ended with the death of humanity. As, perhaps, all searches for truth must....less
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April 12
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Chris
gave
to:
Un Lun Dun (Hardcover)
by China Miéville
bookshelves:
fantasy
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in April, 2008
Chris said:
"A young girl in London is visited by strange people who seem to know her. They call her the Schwazzy and mysterious graffiti seems to imply that young Zannah is a mysterious savior-in-waiting. There's a mysterious world, unknown to most peop...more
A young girl in London is visited by strange people who seem to know her. They call her the Schwazzy and mysterious graffiti seems to imply that young Zannah is a mysterious savior-in-waiting. There's a mysterious world, unknown to most people, and only she can save them!
This is pretty much how the book begins. At this point, I found myself thinking, "How long will it be before people can read something like this without thinking of Harry Potter?" I mean, the whole displaced child-messiah thing is fun, but Potter was a really big example of it and it'll take a long time before authors are able to overcome that. So, it was at this point that I settled in and got ready to read a nice boilerplate novel.
Mister Miéville, if you're reading this: I'm very, very sorry for not trusting you. It won't happen again.
Miéville has taken the child savior idea and pulled the rug out from under it in this book. While Zannah is the Chosen One of UnLondon, the one foretold about in the greatest prophecies of that abcity. It was said that she, with her friends, would defeat UnLondon's most horrible foe.... And if Miéville had stuck with that, he still would have had a very entertaining book. With UnLondon, a kind of funhouse-mirror version of London, he's created a rich and vibrant city that can support tales of great complexity. That great city wants Zannah to save it.
But right around a hundred pages in, Miéville goes and switches protagonists on us. Just because a girl is the Chosen One doesn't mean that she has to end up being the one to save it. A good thwack on the head can make it so that the Funny Sidekick - Zannah's friend Deeba - is now the one who has to save UnLondon from The Smog.
While Miéville owes a great debt to Neil Gaiman for his writing of Neverwhere - which he acknowledges in the end of the book - he's taken the concept of the Other London (to say nothing of other abcities such as Lost Angeles or Baghdidn't) and extended it. He's created a potentially vast other world, a network of cities that reflect our world in weird and wonderful ways. Deeba and her companions - embodied slang, a half-ghost boy and an animate milk carton named Curdle, to name just a few - embark on a quest to save a world from itself. It's a great story, full of adventure and twists which takes the expected standards of the genre and stands them on their head. For that alone, he should be praised. That, and for writing an awesome book.......less
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April 07
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Chris
gave
to:
The Ghost Brigades (Mass Market Paperback)
by John Scalzi
bookshelves:
science-fiction,
top-shelf
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in April, 2008
Chris said:
"Back in aught-Six I read Scalzi's breakout book Old Man's War and loved it. It had everything - high-end science fiction, philosophy, cool battle scenes and a protagonist whose sense of humor remin...more
Back in aught-Six I read Scalzi's breakout book Old Man's War and loved it. It had everything - high-end science fiction, philosophy, cool battle scenes and a protagonist whose sense of humor reminded me a lot of my friend Jon. The book's premise was very simple - why do we use young people to fight in wars? Because they have the bodies that work best for the task. If that were not an issue, then who would we want? Why, old people, of course. They have the life experience, the patience and the perspective to be better soldiers.
In theory, of course. I don't think there's any sci-fi in the world that'd make Dick Cheney into a good soldier.
So, it's The Future. Mankind has spread out among the stars, and the Colonial Union is the political organization that keeps them together. Any government needs a military, so the Colonial forces make sure they have the best recruits, all brought from Earth. With some pretty high-tech jiggery-pokery, the senior citizens from Earth's richer nations are made into lean, green fighting machines, capable of performing in ways that make the Marines of our day look like palsey victims. Their minds are transferred from their old, decrepit bodies and put into new ones, grown from their own DNA, but altered to make them better soldiers. It's all very exciting and cool, but at some point, I suppose Scalzi asked himself a question: what happens when someone signs up at age 65, but doesn't make it to age 75 when they're supposed to start their service?
Well, we have all this DNA just sitting there, can't let it go to waste, can we?
That brings us to the Ghost Brigades, the rather morbid nickname for the Colonial Union's Special Forces. Their bodies are grown from DNA whose previous owners have expired, and modded in more extreme ways than the regular defense force soldiers. Then, when the body is ready, they're woken up. An amazing piece of biotechnology called, rather whimsically, a BrainPal prepares their brains for consciousness, acting as a kind of bootstrap for the emergent personality. It tells them what they're supposed to know, so they don't have to go through the tedious process of learning it all. And, of course, much more. They Special Forces do what the regular Defense Forces can't, and act in ways that their more "ordinary" soldiers couldn't understand. In Old Man's War the Special Forces only came in at the end. In this book, as you might have guessed, they play a much more central role.
Charles Boutin is a traitor to humanity. For reasons known only to him, he has sold out the Colonial Union to its enemies, a troika of alien species that would be more than willing to wipe us off the map. The Defense Forces would love to find him, of course, but he's hidden himself among the enemy. So they got the next best thing: a copy of his mind that Boutin had made while researching the BrainPal.
In theory, it should work: put this mental backup copy into a "clean slate," a body that has no mind of its own. A Special Forces body.
And so, Jared Dirac was born. Decanted. Whatever. It was hoped that when he opened his eyes, he would be Charles Boutin in a new body, and could promptly be interrogated. But it isn't that easy. All Jared Dirac is is a normal Special Forces soldier, a blank slate who is ready to do the job he was, literally, born to do: keep humanity safe.
He's sent off to training, with the expectation that he would be just another Special Forces soldier. But he is, of course, much more than that, and the memories that begin to emerge could lead the Defense Forces to their goal, or to destruction....
It's a great book. Tons of fun, although the exposition is a bit heavy-handed in the beginning. There's a whole lot of reminding about what you learned in Old Man's War, and I didn't really need it. That's the thing about recap, though: if you avoid it altogether, you can confuse people who haven't picked up the previous book in a while. Slather it on and you bore the people who have good enough memories. It's a tiny thing, though, well balanced by the awesomeness and imagination of the book. I look forward to finding and reading the next book in the series, The Last Colony....less
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April 02
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Chris
gave
to:
Not Without Peril: 150 Years of Misadventure on the Presedential Range (Hardcover)
by Nicholas S. Howe
bookshelves:
history,
top-shelf
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in April, 2008
Chris said:
"When I left the US for Japan, I came with three books: The Neverending Story, Good Omens and this one. I had this book because it was a dep...more
When I left the US for Japan, I came with three books: The Neverending Story, Good Omens and this one. I had this book because it was a departure gift from Chris Soule who, with his folks, had come out to Logan airport to see me off at the gate. It was a more innocent time.... We had both hiked up Mount Washington and along some of the more beginner-friendly trails (for my benefit, not his) and had, in retrospect, enjoyed it immensely. I do believe that, during the actual hiking, I was in favor of flattening the entire range and enclosing the trail in a nice climate-controlled pathway.
I knew that the Presidentials were dangerous. While we were in college, Chris kept a map of them on his wall, and would add newspaper clippings every time someone died. A tad morbid, but you do get a certain satisfaction knowing that you went up there and, by dint of good preparation, sense and luck, made it down in one piece.
It's tempting to say something at this point like, "And we were the lucky ones." But in fact, thousands of people visit the Presidentials every year. They either hike or drive or take the Cog Railway (the last two types are, by the way, pussies) and the vast majority of them don't die. And the reason they don't die is, in some small part, because 135 people already have. And it is by their examples that hikers learn never, never to underestimate these mountains.
Nicholas Howe is a son of the mountains. His family and all their friends have intimate ties to the White Mountains and the Presidentials in particular, and he's grown up on their slopes. If anyone knows the mountains, their promises and threats, Howe does, and in this book he tells of a small sampling of lives that the mountains have claimed. Some of them were just bad luck, like 15 year-old Sewall Faunce, who had the misfortune to be standing beneath the Tuckerman Ravine ice arch when it collapsed. Others were done in by their own overconfidence, like Frederick Strickland who was the first to die on their slopes (and who, to be fair, had NO idea what he was getting himself into). Still others died trying to save their friends (Monroe Cooper and Erik Lattey) or died while their friends saved their own skins (Derek Tinkham). They died in water and ice, of cold and injury. Experts and amateurs, the mountain didn't discriminate.
The counterpoint to all this senseless death is a history of hiking on the mountains and its occupation by the AMC, the Appalachian Mountain Club. From the earliest days of New England mountaineering, the AMC has kept and maintained the trails and done everything in its power to make sure that hikers in the mountains are safe. Barring that, they do everything they can to make sure that they can be rescued. They do not always succeed, but they work by the motto, "Not dead until warm and dead." Howe has a great deal of love for the volunteers and state workers who risk their lives at the drop of a hat for hikers in danger, and as you read you can't help but share his enthusiasm. Without this dedicated corps of people, the deaths on the mountains would be of a staggering number instead of a simply unfortunate one.
This is a very enjoyable book, and a good history of the White Mountains for the last 150 years or so. Howe treats a delicate subject with compassion, but also is more than willing to point out when a death could have been prevented. Check it out.
Also, for even greater entertainment, here is my write-up of the trip from back in '99: The Mountain Doesn't Want Us Here....less
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