Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 23
February 10, 2014
Review: Flesh & Bone
Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Benny, Benny, Benny. How many times will you find yourself facing impossible odds only to be miraculously rescued by some stranger who steps out of nowhere?
How many times will you or Nix mention jets and make me mentally sing, “B-B-Benny and the Jets”?
I’d say about one more book. This series is really just good enough to let my literary OCD tell me to keep reading, but the plot twists are increasingly frustrating. For instance, in this...
January 30, 2014
Review: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition
The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m really torn on this one. On the one hand, the writing is absolutely amazing for a 13 to 15-year-old girl. Her vocabulary, syntax, and insight is incredible. Most modern American teenagers would be put to shame by Anne’s ability.
On the other hand, as a 47-year-old male reader, most of Anne’s diary is pretty boring. She spends a good deal of words whining about her mother, then mooning over Peter, the o...
January 23, 2014
Stone Thread to Publish Inheritance
I have reached an agreement that allows Stone Thread Publishing to release the electronic version of my novellaInheritance. The release date is April 1, 2014. Here’s what I’ve submitted for the synopsis of the book:
Lynette Cook knows about abuse. She learned it from her father and, later, had the lessons reinforced by the boyfriend she thought was her savior. Free at last from her own tormentors, Lynette now lives with her teenage daughter Kari in a small town in Oklahoma. Then one day she co...
January 21, 2014
Review: Dust and Decay
Dust and Decay by Jonathan Maberry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I didn’t love Rot & Ruin, but I liked it well enough to find out what happened next. I don’t regret continuing with the series. I went through this one pretty quick, so obviously it was a decent read.
My issues with this second book are the same as with the first. The plot is pretty predictable and Benny is a tool. Is any teenager really that awkward and socially dumb? I dunno. Also, the bounty-hunter surfers were pretty annoying with...
January 19, 2014
Review: In Dubious Battle
In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While the story of In Dubious Battle is pretty good, I found the book most interesting as a reflection of where Steinbeck was in his career when he wrote this novel. He seemed to have found a niche as an author of populist social protest and was lengthening his stride in preparation for his magnum opus, The Grapes of Wrath.
This one is similar to Grapes in that it deals with the mistreatment of migratory agricultural workers, though...
January 12, 2014
Books of 2013
It’s become something of a tradition for me to wrap up a year writing about the books I read during the past 12 months. So, here’s the best and worst of the 30 titles I read in 2013*.
Let’s start with the worst. The good news is there was nothing so bad that I gave it only one star. (These are Goodreads.com stars, by the way; five is the top ranking.) At the bottom are William Faulkner’sLight in August, which had some nice lines but really seemed to go nowhere, Amanda Coplin’sThe Orchardist, w...
January 11, 2014
To Teenage Daughters, from Fathers
When you bother to speak to us these days, one of your favorite expressions is, “You don’t understand me.” You’re right about that. Fathers don’t understand teenage girls. We were never teenage girls ourselves, but that’s only part of the problem. You see, fathers are men, and while it’s usually bad to make generalizations about a large group of people, I’m going to do it, anyway.
Men, especially men old enough to have teenage daughters, are reluctant to see certain kinds of change. Our own yo...
January 10, 2014
Review: Rot & Ruin
Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This has been a pretty popular book amongst my male students at the high school, and Jonathan Maberry is an acquaintance, so I figured it was time I give it a read. It’s a very enjoyable horror/adventure book with a good message about family, the value of life, and having empathy toward others.
I’m not much for plot summary, and there’s plenty of other reviews of this book where you can get that. What I most liked about this book was that...
December 30, 2013
Review: Dan Frontier
Dan Frontier by William Hurley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I decided to end 2013 by re-reading one of the first books I ever read on my own. (And because I was one book short of meeting my 2013 Reading Challenge, a children’s book was a sure way to get there.)
I’m not sure which came first, my love for the American colonial period, or my love of Dan Frontier books, but the two go way, way back. The Dan Frontier series of books were the first books I remember checking out from the school library a...
2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,300 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
Click here to see the complete report.
