Book Blog
January 15, 2023
here is a bit of irony here. I’d picked up Mark Bauerlein’s bestseller at a neighborhood used bookshop. It had gone into the to-read pile. Then something triggered it to be read, namely a train-club get-together at a local restaurant. There , one of the young members (seventeen years old or so) told me in blunt who-cares fashion, “I don’t read. Haven’t read a single book other than one’s I’ve been made to read. And those I skimmed.” Which depressed me – we talked a little about it, with him questioning the total value of it. And even though he […]
January 1, 2023
ook Three of the Nine Princes in Amber was a pretty interesting continuation. Corwin, now holding the throne of Amber, tries to figure out where this shadow road leads to that is dumping all sorts of dark creatures into his realm. Another one of his brothers is killed and if it isn’t apparent that we are heading towards a whodunit, it becomes clear when the entire group (brothers and sisters, both) stage a rescue to get another brother back from a shadow-world prison. While they do get him and pull him back into Amber, someone slips a knife into his […]
December 25, 2022
ell, Scalzi wrapped up the Old Man’s War series with a satisfying conclusion. What more can I say? We went into this with the the alien confederation, the Conclave, and the humans represented by the Colonial Union (the Earth, pissed off at being a sole supplier of soldiers and colonists, forms a weak yet dangerous third party to this anger-triangle). The universe is now soaked in gasoline and the mysterious group, the Equilibrium, is trying to light it on fire and bring everyone down. Sorta sounds like the world today. So we start on a disturbing note – we know […]
December 18, 2022
‘ll admit that I was sorta meh about the first book of the second series of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. After all, Zoe’s Tale told things from a slightly different perspective, true, but it really didn’t add that much to the storyline. in this, I went off and read other things so that I’d get back into that Scalzi-mood. So when I picked up Book Two, The Human Division, I wasn’t sure what I’d get. First off, the title is cute. I thought it would be about some sort of military formation of humans, right? Well, it wasn’t, […]
December 11, 2022
ook two from the 1970’s classic series, the Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon. As I mentioned in the first review, nine princes scrabble for the throne of the primary realm in a sea of shadow possibilities after the king goes missing. Our protagonist, Corwin, just made an attempt to seize the throne from his brother Eric, leading a massive army in a truly epic series of battles that I remembered some forty years later. Corwin loses and is thrown into a dungeon with his eyes burned out of his skull. But the princes of Amber are of strong […]
December 4, 2022
think I always say this, but “Another book of the Ark Royal series…” Yes, this is the fourteenth of the series that started for me in a used bookstore in Norfolk, Va and ended up on my straining bookshelf. For those of you who don’t religiously (because I post these every Sunday?) reviews, the Ark Royal series follows a cast of evolving (and perishing) characters through a near space-n-time setting, that being the English Navy two or so centuries hence. We’ve fought several alien races so far, and nearly gotten squashed, but this time we are facing Earth’s biggest threat – a […]
November 27, 2022
icked this one from the best stocked used bookstore I know, my favorites shelf in my Florida Room. This was one of Roger Zelazny’s best, written all the way back in 1970 (while I was a tiny creature). I picked it up sometime in the early eighties, reading it in college and loving every page. So it’s been forty years and there I am looking for a book and there is my five volume set. And the book series, it really holds up. Written in that era when Fantasy was in the wake of the Lord of the Rings, when […]
November 20, 2022
o this one is a steampunk western. With magic. It’s even got an airship in there. Did we leave any genres out? And I love the tag line on the book “America was built on blood, sweet, and gears.” Very cute. So our hero protagonist in this thing is a loner-drifter guy up in the NorthWest in the 1870s or so with a bit of a backstory. You see, Cedar Hunt is a werewolf. And it’s that high-moon-riding time of the month. A boy has gone missing and Cedar wants to find him. The problem is, he’s got to find […]
November 13, 2022
od, I wish I’d had this book before programming TUSK tower, my computer-driven interlocking tower on my Tuscarora Branch Line railroad. More on that in a bit. So, Interlocking Towers are those control-tower-looking-structures you used to see along railroad lines. They came about because sending crews scrambling about in the middle of the night, in the rain, to align a route for the express sometimes ended up with hard feelings and smoldering causalities. Interlocking Towers were the computers of their era (from the 1880s to the 1960s). The operator, standing in his high perch, would use long levers to set […]
November 6, 2022
have to say this, but if you are an Ark Royal series fan and have not read this book yet (the 13th in the series), well, SPOILERS AHEAD. So we discovered in the last book that a virus has corrupted at least three races and is eager to add more to its fold. That generation ship that came into human space and was allowed to land on a colony world was lousy with viruses.Yes, we think it was contained but there are some freighters that called on the world are missing. And now HMS Invincible has been assigned a small […]