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Book Blog

October 8, 2023

Destroyermen 5 : Rising Tides (Review)

o now I’m into the fifth of the Destroyermen series – only about ten more to go. And it’s been a long haul. As I mentioned elsewhere, Taylor Anderson’s unique series involves a four-stacker destroyer, plucked from early World War Two and placed in a world where humans occasionally fall into (where maybe the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs didn’t). Everyone thinks Final Countdown when they hear me speak of it. Anyway, the book continues to expand. It’s funny, but looking back to the first book, we only had a puny little map of the sea around Java. As Captain […]
October 1, 2023

Bull, the Pulp Issue (Review)

his unlikely softcover was sitting in the “Buy one get one free” stack. Since I’d bought one and everything else in that stack was YA or woman-heartthrob stuff, I picked up this one. Inside the cover, the publisher (Bull) notes: “Bull is dedicated to examining & discussing modern masculinity: what works, what doesn’t, what needs to stay and what needs to go.” I’m not sure what that all means; I’m just in it for a good story. And The Pulp Issue is packed with those. It’s a crazy mix of Noir and Pulp tales, most of them placed in our […]
September 24, 2023

The MurderBot Diaries (Guest Review)

new series for me— the MurderBot Diaries by Martha Wells. In the first installment of the series “All Systems Red”, a half organic half robot security bot (who goes by his title ‘SecBot’) wishes to put in a minimal effort ‘half -assed job’ (by his own admission) at security, and be left alone by his human survey team protection charges so he can view his trove of downloaded soap operas. SecBot finds himself saving his humans and figuring out the complex plot to exterminate them all.  Great interstellar adventure ensues as the bot gains both human attachments and grows in […]
September 17, 2023

On a Pale Horse (Review)

remember becoming aware of this book when my date was reading it on a cloudy day on a Chesapeake beach some forty years ago. I remember saying I’d read it soon. Well, the date turned into a relationship that turned into a bad joke. But yes, four decades later, I finally picked this book up. One reservation (not about the girlfriend (which I should have had)) on the book; it is part one of something called The Incarnations of Immortality. And since I got this in a used book store, it’s like a four leaf clover – just because you […]
September 10, 2023

Destroyermen 4 : Distant Thunders (Review)

hese aren’t really spoilers, what I’m about to say. Sure, if you are midway through book 3 (Maelstrom), it may spoil the final battle. But as I will review here, this should help you become more interested in this wonderful storyline. So USS Walker’s big battle in Baalkpan Bay does come at a cost. After all that murderous shot and shell, the proud WW2 destroyer (who has come to this strange world through a dimensional rift) wins the day, limps back to the repair dock yet settles on the bottom just short of the pier. Add to the fact that […]
August 27, 2023

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Review)

‘m a pretty good writer. I can lighten the mood of terrible things. And I can chastise people yet leave them smiling. But I don’t think I can write an adequate review for Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr. All I can say is, well, I know what one of my best-of-year selections will be. This wonderful book reminds me, in a lot of ways, of Cloud Atlas. Again, you have different characters in different times, all just getting through their lives yet all interrelated in some ways. It was there in Atlas, but it’s the driving force behind this novel. […]
August 13, 2023

Norse Mythology (Review)

he missus and I have been watching a NetFlix series, Ragnarok – It’s a series about a high school kid in Norway who has come to realize that he is a reborn Thor, that there are ice giants living in his town, and that Ragnarok, the final battle between gods and giants, is coming. Great little series which I highly recommend. Which is why, when nosing around my local bookstore, I found Norse Mythology, which might sound stuffy until you realize that writer and humorist Neil Gaiman wrote it. Thought about it – for about a second – and picked […]
August 6, 2023

The Golden Ocean (Review)

atrick O’Brian was a big deal back in the nineties with his Aubrey/Maturin books. Anyway, he was so hot that they scraped the bottom of the barrel for anything else he’d produced. It’s not to say that The Golden Ocean was bad – it was just forty years old at that point. And really, it’s pretty good. The novel follows a young Irish lad, Peter Palafox, who has gotten himself a berth on Commodore Anson’s flagship of his risky round-the-world, loot-everything-Spanish expedition (which I read about in The Wager, which reminded me I had these somewhere at stack-bottom). It’s a […]
July 23, 2023

The Wager (Review)

o this is a first – my wife pushed an age-of-sail book on me for once. And it was very, very good. So the HMS Wager was one the ships in Commodore Anson’s floating boat-wreck of a mission, to round Cape Horn (at the tip of South America) and get into the Spanish Pacific, to loot, burn and steal (i.e. open piracy and murder with the hint of legitimacy that war brings). Easy plan – they’d round the world and be back by tea, right? Well, first, they are hounded by Spanish warships since even Irish children knew this mission […]
July 16, 2023

Destroyermen 3: Maelstrom (Review)

he third book in The Destroyermen series did not disappoint. Whereas the first two books of the string only had the Americans (and one Japanese guy) in USS Walker, the Mahan, the Amagi (with the rest of the Japanese guys), the Lemurs and the nasty, toothy Grik, now we’ve added a couple of more power factions to this world. Since the Great Swarm didn’t work out so well for the Grik last book, they might as well try it again, this time fully backed by the big old Amagi, helmed by its frothing Japanese captain (who was perfectly fine with […]