Book Blog
August 27, 2023
‘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
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
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
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
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 […]
July 2, 2023
kay, I’ve got to be careful here. Ever since coffeeshop Maddy got me into the first book of the Mistborn series, and railroad friend Ben loaned me the rest, I’ve been yacking this one up to any readers I can corner. As a result, I know at least two friends who are currently working through it. So I’ve got to be careful of spoilers in my review. What I can say is that The Well of Ascension is the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s wonderful series. In it, magic users (who have to be born into it, so no midi-chlorians […]
June 18, 2023
ell, things ended well in the first book for Lieutenant Commander Matt Reddy. Aboard the four-stacker destroyer Walker, he and his crew found themselves in an alternative timeline in the Western Pacific. Here, apparently the asteroid had not wiped out the dinosaurs, velociraptors had evolved, as had the man-sized lemurs from Madagascar. So Reddy has allied with the fuzzes to fight the scalies. And given that he has a couple of 4″ guns with modern munitions, those lizard sailing ships don’t stand a chance. However, in attempting to break a siege in what is modern day Surabaya, Java, he discovers […]
June 4, 2023
his book should count for two reviews. I checked it out of the local library for a recent road trip. Listened to it while the miles zipped past, smiling. Decided at the end that I liked it well enough to look into the series. Fifteen books. And Norfolk’s local bookstores could come up with ten of them. Bought those and ordered the rest. just re-read the first one. So, the Destroyermen series starts with Into the Storm in the opening days of the Pacific War in World War 2, with the Japanese Navy devouring anything in its path. The USS […]
May 28, 2023
his one was a recommendation by our favorite barista Maddy, a book of high fantasy in a world so bleak it is really not to be believed. The thing is, magic works, but only after a fashion. There are eleven metals that a misting (who can use one) or mistborn (who can use them all) employ for basic spells. But here is the interesting part – the metals are swallowed by these mages, and their bellies burn them, so that’s what fuels the magic. It’s really wild and craftily done, this set of magic rules that make this fantasy world […]
May 20, 2023
o this is book two of the Alien Chronicles, a short series Lucasfilms authorized (or whatever, I don’t know the arrangement) for a scifi story that could have been sometime in the StarWars universe but not directly in it. So what’s that mean – if you have a circular area that represents StarWars (with Jedis and Tie Fighters and Banthas) then this series is somewhere (or somewhen) outside it? Okay, we’ll go with that. So in the first section, reviewed HERE, we had feline Ampiris banished from the court and her mistress’s side (her mistress being the queen-in-waiting-for-dad-to-die). Right now, […]