Reading log, again
Dragon Precinct by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Summary: Okay, I was wrong. This is the one about a police department in a "high-fantasy" world, aka one with wizards and dwarves and such. (kradical has been talking a lot about his new book "Super City Police Department: The Case of the Claw" lately, which got me mixed up.)
Reaction: There are several sorts of detective stories where I don't solve the crime. The ones where the writer was cleverer than me, I like love to pieces. Agatha-Christie-style, where you can't figure out the solution by following the clues given, I don't like. (You can solve Agatha Christie mysteries, but you do it by subverting assumptions, which requires you to know the assumptions first. And she conceals vital clues from the reader.) And the sort where I came up with a better solution than the writer, I really don't like. This is one of those.
(I also don't like it because, while it's full of gods and religions, the one character in it who actively cares about his religion is also the one whose single dimension of personality is Insufferable Twit, whereas everyone else has at least two dimensions or maybe three - the ones with no religion usually three. This smells to me of a writer with his head up his posterior. Be an atheist if you want, but be even-handed with your characters ALWAYS.)
Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herbert Solow and Robert Justman (re-read)
Summary: In which an executive producer and assistant producer from "Star Trek: The Original Series" tell the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Star Trek.
Reaction: My favorite book about Star Trek, hands down. It's one of the spate of thirtieth-anniversary books, and its specific concern is to spread the love around - to give credit where it was due, to Gene Coon and Matt Jeffries and Fred Freiburger and Wah Chang and Janos Prohaska and all the other zillion and one people who aren't so famous as Gene Roddenberry and the seven main actors. Which it does very well. It's told mainly in first-person, interview-ish format by "Herb" and "Bob", and it's the book I recommend (together with Leonard Nimoy's "I Am Spock") to anyone who wants to know behind-the-scenes stuff about TOS.
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
Summary: Sequel to "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". Involves an exploding airline check-in counter, a mysterious Coke machine, and some other stuff.
Reaction: You're right, innocentsmith. It's better. :-)
And Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (unfinished): holy cat, what a trip. I'm only half an inch in and already running off at the brain. (I get "drunk on words" pretty easily, but it takes a rare book to get me this drunk on ideas. My little brother loves it; he asks leading questions like "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone in the world spoke the same language?" and then listens to me babble about LOLspeak, Entish, and Romance languages for the next hour or so. O_O) It's a crazy, cram-packed, mathematical romp with several timelines and a lot of bad language going on. I'm kind of dreading the point where the writer starts trying to pull all these disparate bits of nonsense together, because it's never as fun as just watching the piffle go on. ;P
Summary: Okay, I was wrong. This is the one about a police department in a "high-fantasy" world, aka one with wizards and dwarves and such. (kradical has been talking a lot about his new book "Super City Police Department: The Case of the Claw" lately, which got me mixed up.)
Reaction: There are several sorts of detective stories where I don't solve the crime. The ones where the writer was cleverer than me, I like love to pieces. Agatha-Christie-style, where you can't figure out the solution by following the clues given, I don't like. (You can solve Agatha Christie mysteries, but you do it by subverting assumptions, which requires you to know the assumptions first. And she conceals vital clues from the reader.) And the sort where I came up with a better solution than the writer, I really don't like. This is one of those.
(I also don't like it because, while it's full of gods and religions, the one character in it who actively cares about his religion is also the one whose single dimension of personality is Insufferable Twit, whereas everyone else has at least two dimensions or maybe three - the ones with no religion usually three. This smells to me of a writer with his head up his posterior. Be an atheist if you want, but be even-handed with your characters ALWAYS.)
Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herbert Solow and Robert Justman (re-read)
Summary: In which an executive producer and assistant producer from "Star Trek: The Original Series" tell the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Star Trek.
Reaction: My favorite book about Star Trek, hands down. It's one of the spate of thirtieth-anniversary books, and its specific concern is to spread the love around - to give credit where it was due, to Gene Coon and Matt Jeffries and Fred Freiburger and Wah Chang and Janos Prohaska and all the other zillion and one people who aren't so famous as Gene Roddenberry and the seven main actors. Which it does very well. It's told mainly in first-person, interview-ish format by "Herb" and "Bob", and it's the book I recommend (together with Leonard Nimoy's "I Am Spock") to anyone who wants to know behind-the-scenes stuff about TOS.
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
Summary: Sequel to "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". Involves an exploding airline check-in counter, a mysterious Coke machine, and some other stuff.
Reaction: You're right, innocentsmith. It's better. :-)
And Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (unfinished): holy cat, what a trip. I'm only half an inch in and already running off at the brain. (I get "drunk on words" pretty easily, but it takes a rare book to get me this drunk on ideas. My little brother loves it; he asks leading questions like "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone in the world spoke the same language?" and then listens to me babble about LOLspeak, Entish, and Romance languages for the next hour or so. O_O) It's a crazy, cram-packed, mathematical romp with several timelines and a lot of bad language going on. I'm kind of dreading the point where the writer starts trying to pull all these disparate bits of nonsense together, because it's never as fun as just watching the piffle go on. ;P