Book Blog
January 19, 2025
‘ll admit to not having a solid grasp of European history from the time before, during and after the voyage of Columbus. There was a lot going on in history including the various wars, Spain’s growing domination, the pressure from the Barbary raiders and the eastern frontiers, even Martin Luther hammering his demands to his door. Let’s face it, there is so much history and it is difficult to review (and remember) it all. But I’ll admit to liking Laurent Binet’s Civilizations. Actually, this one always followed a line of pondering of mine – what if the sweeping infestations of […]
December 29, 2024
hree aliens walk into a bar. Well, rather, a B&B rest stop. The last (so far) of Becky Chambers’ award-winning series about distant and dissimilar characters. For this one, we have Pei (who was referenced in one of the other books or two as the first book’s captain’s lover). So the story here is that there is a jump point in the literal middle of nowhere (and in space, there is a lot of nowhere). Alien ships from every race pass through this location and on a dead planet in the center of this space roundabout, there are domes and […]
December 23, 2024
eorge MacDonald Fraser wrote many great books across his long literary life including the Flashman Series. I’ve been reading him since my teens. And I can’t explain it but I had a recent dream were I remembered (in disjointed parts) the story The General Danced at Dawn. Decided to reread it so I carried it with me to the local botanical gardens and bought a coffee and sat down and read it again. So Fraser’s McAuslan series deals with “the dirtiest soldier in the world”. He is based (along with the narrator) in a fictional Scottish unit in the North […]
December 15, 2024
n popular culture, aliens are presented as either destructive pricks or bulb-headed benefactors. But what if they were fun-loving little creatures who love our greasy food, our discarded plastic, and above and beyond, our wasteland of television. This novel, written by Emily Jane, is a delightful story of aliens nosing around Earth, placing agents among us, controlling our cats, and generally being goofy and funny. Told from humans (who might be humans, but maybe not) the story starts with a dis-unified collective of characters and slowly works out their bonds and origins, explaining the oddball situations in ways that delight. […]
December 8, 2024
his is an interesting work on Alexander the Great. His adventures, driving across the known world and beyond, are the things that (used to) thrill the imaginations of schoolboys (back when they had imaginations). But the interesting aspect of this work is that it doesn’t do his entire life, not his youth, his father’s assassination (mentioned as an afterthought). And not (as I would have loved) the siege of Tyre. No, this is about his later campaign. It starts with him in Persepolis, with Darius III on the run and his primary objective (stated as revenge against the Persians, but […]
December 1, 2024
n interesting little time war story. It starts off with an operative from a future world who is trying to shape the destiny of the universe to suit her masters. She is pacing through the ruins of a titanic battlefield, scattered with space ships, tanks and corpses, surveying the carnage and pretty proud of herself. And then she finds an envelope labeled, curiously, Burn Before Reading. Inside, she finds a short letter from a counterpart of this time war, a playfully sneering letter from her nemesis. Of course, the two are heavily monitored and watched by their respective commands so […]
November 24, 2024
o what can I tell you about this series I haven’t yet? The way keeps expanding. We learn more about the League of Tripoli (the alternate fascists in the Mediterranean). And more about that maniac Kurokawa (the Japanese cruiser captain that chased USS Walker through the portal and into this crazy world). And all the crazy crap that’s been going on. The Japanese are playing for time. The Grik are expanding towards another mega invasion fleet. The League is up to no good. The Republic of Free People in South Africa finally got their thumbs out of their asses and got […]
November 17, 2024
o the creators of The Expanse series have closed it out and moved on to a new series. Or did they? The Expanse ended with (spoiler) the ring gates closing and hundreds of colony worlds cut off. Most of them were not established and probably died off. So in The Mercy of Gods, it’s loosely hinted that the humans on this world can find records of their DNA existence, including themselves, animals and plants (alongside more indigenous animals and plants with their own form of DNA). Records were, of course, lost. Nobody knows how they got there but it hints […]
November 10, 2024
kay, so back in the seventies, I really loved Alan Dean Foster’s stories. They were funny and exciting and great reads. And now I picked up one that’s a half century old, Icerigger. Of course, the question is, how does it keep up with modern scifi? Not StarWars either, but adult series like The Expanse. So in Icerigger, a passenger liner is making a stop at a colony world, one totally covered in a sea of ice. During ship’s night (as they orbit in) the main character, a merchant named Ethan Fortune, comes across a kidnapping in progress. The inept […]
November 3, 2024
companion book to a wild breakout novel, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, this book picks up a couple of months after the completion of the first one. Of course, you might have thought that the siege was broken in the first book, but no, that’s never mentioned and the barbarian leader Ogus, outside the battered walls, still wants everyone in the city dead (gruesomely). So this time, our story comes from an actor of plays and a playwright (he publishes them like he’s grinding sausages) named Notker. His other skills include witty impersonations of political figures. So he’s […]