Book Blog – Page 40 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

September 22, 2019

Goshawk Squadron (Review)

nother review from way back, this from one of my favorite fictional World War One flying novels, Goshawk Squadron. This book is from Derek Robinson, who would go on to English infamy for a later book, Piece of Cake. And this is pretty much a proving ground for what he’d do in Piece, that being create a squadron of misfits and unassuming youth and then fling them into war. The book starts with Major Woolley sitting in a deck chair, watching his squadron float towards the frosted landing field. Uncouth, foul, always angry, as his adjutant announces each pilot’s name […]

October 6, 2019

Fighter Pilot (Review)

s mentioned in my Dog Ear piece, I needed a break from modern arty storytelling. I’ve had Fighter Pilot on my shelf for a decade and never read it (I don’t even know where it came from). Anyway, it’s the story of the first American ace in World War Two, William Dunn. All in all, it’s a roiling tale of a guy who joined the army to try to be a pilot in the thirties, and got put in the infantry. Then he joined the Canadians and still got put into the infantry. About all the air action he got […]

October 20, 2019

Infinite Jest (Review)

here is a scene in this monster of a book, in tiny print in a footnote that spans pages. A character is trying to plagiarize a flowery-penned writer and is furious he can’t do it verbatim (since the voice is so radical and baroque). He visualizes slapping the author: left, right, left. That’s kinda how I feel about this book. Infinite Jest is, as I’ve said elsewhere, a monster of a book. The primary story is 981 pages long. The footnotes (some of them as long as a chapter on their own) adds another 96 pages (in tiny print). It […]

October 27, 2019

Starrigger (Review)

o this was one from the recovered attic book boxes, a rollicking space opera in a strange universe. On Pluto (according to backstory), giant cylinders were discovered with a road leading into them. If you went fast enough and stayed right on the center line, you’d pop through to another planet. Eventually enough gates were mapped to establish the Terrain Maze, a collection of planets that we’ve colonized. But there are other gates, pot lock portals, that lead God knows where. And every so often, on these mega freeways, strange aliens in stranger cars can be seen. Our protagonist in […]

November 11, 2019

Nemesis Games (Review)

nother installment of the Expanse series (is that what it’s really called, or is that just the amazing scifi show it spawned?). Fake writer James S.A. Corey (he’s actually two guys) keeps this chapter in the big sprawling series back in our own solar system. The whole thousands-of-colonies-await-you bit is kept to a minimum – this books is about the four principles – Jim, Naomi, Alex and Amos, as they part ways for “small errands” that should have been corner-store-walks but don’t end that way, given the fact that the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance, i.e. the skinny low-grav belters) are […]

November 17, 2019

Red Limit Freeway (Review)

o Jake (and his sentient truck Sam) is back for the second book following StarRigger. Predestined by road lore to be the trucker who makes it to the end of the universe (via the skyway, a series of jumpgates built into a highway system) and back with a working road map, Jake continues his travels. Along the way, he continues to pick up more and more people in his quest, those voluntarily coming (or otherwise). And tagging in his wake, the evil forces of a rival trucker union and a tree-planet boss (whose huge hotel Jake burned down in the […]

November 24, 2019

The Man in the High Castle (Review)

o this isn’t the sixties you know, not your Summer of Love, no. In this version of reality, the Nazis and the Japanese (and sorta the Italians) won the Second World War. In this world, the western states are owned by Japan, the eastern by the Germans, with the central states as a sort of powerless buffer zone. The Russian steppes are a sort of Slavic reservation and Africa has been churned into lifeless ruin by the Reich. The story follows a number of characters – a Japanese business leader in San Francisco, and antiquities dealer, a guy trying to […]

December 1, 2019

Airborn (Review)

o I cracked this one open on a flight to San Diego (see my train blog for details) and found out, as the plane rolled to takeoff speed, that I’d accidently found myself reading Young Adult stuff. And then, fifty miles out and a chapter in, that I was really liking it. Airborn takes place in an alternate Earth, one where hydrium (lighter and better than both helium and hydrogen) exists. And so airships rule the skies. Certain things are the same, but many of the places (especially in America) are different. And in this odd steampunky world (after all, […]

December 8, 2019

Paradox Alley (Review)

nd so finally we get to the third (and final) book of the Starrigger trilogy, the Han Solo-ish book about big (really big) rigs, interplanetary gates, and the mystery at the end of the universe, where the road ends. Well, from the cover of the book, you’d think it was going to end violently – the truck going off a cliff (with cars skidding around it) while the driver launches clear with his ejection seat. All very exciting, but it doesn’t happen. Not even close. What does happen is a great deal of not much. Sure, we get to the […]

December 15, 2019

The San Diego and Arizona Railway (Review)

ou might have seen, HERE and HERE and HERE, all about my trip to La Mesa Club in San Diego to run operations circa 1951 on a huge HO scale railroad. While there, I often find myself with an hour or so of downtime before the next train. Often I’ll wander the other layouts of the museum (at night, it’s both quiet and spooky) and look around. Two of them (one HO, one N) have this crazy-high elbow trestle over a Mars-like gorge, with the tracks receding along ledges and pop-tunnels. Quite an amazing scene. It was only on my […]