October '11 Book List
October ended up having a larger than average number of books I just didn't care for. And for most it wasn't even that they were bad as that they didn't click with me. Like Colin Harvey's Winter Song about a barely habitable arctic colony world and it vaguely Norse-ish inhabitants. Or Kevin Anderson & Doug Benson's Ill Wind which looks at a bio-engineered plague that ends up eating everything made from fossil fuels. Or Anthony Neil Smith's Yellow Medicine, a pulpy book about a crooked cop who ends up the frozen backwoods of Minnesota after getting caught being a crooked cop in Missouri. Actually this one with its collection of psycho gangsters and possibly terrorists begins to edge into being a bad book more than a bad fit...
Also on the free classics front, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau just didn't do anything for me. I still like the concept of Dr. Moreau and his island of beast/men, but the book itself? Enh. And as for Robert Louis Stephenson's Kidnapped? All I can say is the young lead in this one is no Jim Hawkins...
And normally I like Tanya Huff, but her short story collection Nights of the Round Table just has two stories that left me totally cold. Both dealing with Evil Overlord/Queens who are hyper-competent and somehow unbeatable and thus really, really boring...
But really the only one for the month that I'd classify as genuinely bad was Duane Swierczynski's Fun and Games. Which has simply ludicrous premise. That the ruling elite of Hollywood has some kind of death squad made up of wannabe actors, directors and writes who can get to anybody and make it look like an accident. So stupid...
Anyway, over to the stuff I actually enjoyed for October. Starting with a Vorksogian novella by Lois M. Bujold, Winterfair Gifts. A story from the perspective of one of Miles' armsmen during his wedding, that takes place between A Civil Campaign and Diplomatic Immunity...
Then some Bernard Cornwell, with an American Revolution military history fiction, The Fort. And if Cornwell is at all accurate, then man Paul Revere was a giant tool...
October also saw me getting another of friend Joe Selby's books to beta read. This time a Young Adult book in a pseudo-Middle Eastern fantasy setting called Prince of Cats. Needed a little tweaking, but another one from him that I can hopefully one day pick up a published copy of...
From the borrowed from the roommate's shelf list we start with Mira Grant's Feed. Which is a near future zombie Earth book. With the title being a reference to the zombies and to the protagonist's jobs as bloggers who join the press corps of a presidential candidate. Grant really impresses, not just for her skills at dialogue and story. But in how well thought out her world building is, especially in the "science" of her setting's undead plague...
Then the new Lev Grossman, the Magician King, his follow up to the Magicians. This one actually manages to be even more bleak than the first, with its partial focus on the non-Wizard School magical community...
After that was the two latest Gaunt's Ghosts books by Dan Abnett, mostly because I got the roommate the most recent as a birthday gift. Blood Pact has Gaunt and his men slowly falling apart as they spend an extended period stationed way behind the lines. Until a potential turncoat and the Chaos forces sent to assassinate him prod them back into being bad-ass action soldiers again. Salvation's Reach. has the Ghosts taking part in a dangerous mission against a Chaos research station. Plus they're working with Space Marines. Warhammer 20K Imperial Space Marines a crazy hard-core...
Also got the newest Terry Pratchett, Snuff, last month. A new Sam Vimes sub-series book, with a focus on goblins, the Disc's lowest intelligent species. Some excellent scenes with Vimes and Willikins his butler and Vimes and the country gentry and Vimes and Young Sam learning about poop together. This one lacks a bit in the Big Bad department, but the always wonderful characters makes up for that small lack...
Reread the first two Beka Cooper books by Tamora Pierce, Terrier and Bloodhound again. In expectation of getting the final book in the trilogy towards the end of the month. And then my copy got delayed from Amazon, so I didn't get to it until November. Oh well, still some of my favorites...
I finished up the month starting on David Weber's "Honor Harrington" scifi space opera/military series. In part because Baen has the first two, On Basilisk Station and the Honor of the Queen available as free e-books, with the rest at $5 each. So after Honor's first two stories ended the month with A Short & Victorious War and Field of Dishonor. Good military space battle stuff, with technology premises that make them similar to wooden ship and cannon type stuff. And the politics of Kingdom of Manticore remind me a lot of Elizabeth Moon's "Familas Regnant" series. In a good way. The only slightly annoying quirk I found was Weber uses a lot of info-dump exposition to world build. Where a character will go to use something or think about something, which then turns into a big expository thing. Not the worst way to drop world build info, but it was noticeable...
Total books: 21
Also on the free classics front, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau just didn't do anything for me. I still like the concept of Dr. Moreau and his island of beast/men, but the book itself? Enh. And as for Robert Louis Stephenson's Kidnapped? All I can say is the young lead in this one is no Jim Hawkins...
And normally I like Tanya Huff, but her short story collection Nights of the Round Table just has two stories that left me totally cold. Both dealing with Evil Overlord/Queens who are hyper-competent and somehow unbeatable and thus really, really boring...
But really the only one for the month that I'd classify as genuinely bad was Duane Swierczynski's Fun and Games. Which has simply ludicrous premise. That the ruling elite of Hollywood has some kind of death squad made up of wannabe actors, directors and writes who can get to anybody and make it look like an accident. So stupid...
Anyway, over to the stuff I actually enjoyed for October. Starting with a Vorksogian novella by Lois M. Bujold, Winterfair Gifts. A story from the perspective of one of Miles' armsmen during his wedding, that takes place between A Civil Campaign and Diplomatic Immunity...
Then some Bernard Cornwell, with an American Revolution military history fiction, The Fort. And if Cornwell is at all accurate, then man Paul Revere was a giant tool...
October also saw me getting another of friend Joe Selby's books to beta read. This time a Young Adult book in a pseudo-Middle Eastern fantasy setting called Prince of Cats. Needed a little tweaking, but another one from him that I can hopefully one day pick up a published copy of...
From the borrowed from the roommate's shelf list we start with Mira Grant's Feed. Which is a near future zombie Earth book. With the title being a reference to the zombies and to the protagonist's jobs as bloggers who join the press corps of a presidential candidate. Grant really impresses, not just for her skills at dialogue and story. But in how well thought out her world building is, especially in the "science" of her setting's undead plague...
Then the new Lev Grossman, the Magician King, his follow up to the Magicians. This one actually manages to be even more bleak than the first, with its partial focus on the non-Wizard School magical community...
After that was the two latest Gaunt's Ghosts books by Dan Abnett, mostly because I got the roommate the most recent as a birthday gift. Blood Pact has Gaunt and his men slowly falling apart as they spend an extended period stationed way behind the lines. Until a potential turncoat and the Chaos forces sent to assassinate him prod them back into being bad-ass action soldiers again. Salvation's Reach. has the Ghosts taking part in a dangerous mission against a Chaos research station. Plus they're working with Space Marines. Warhammer 20K Imperial Space Marines a crazy hard-core...
Also got the newest Terry Pratchett, Snuff, last month. A new Sam Vimes sub-series book, with a focus on goblins, the Disc's lowest intelligent species. Some excellent scenes with Vimes and Willikins his butler and Vimes and the country gentry and Vimes and Young Sam learning about poop together. This one lacks a bit in the Big Bad department, but the always wonderful characters makes up for that small lack...
Reread the first two Beka Cooper books by Tamora Pierce, Terrier and Bloodhound again. In expectation of getting the final book in the trilogy towards the end of the month. And then my copy got delayed from Amazon, so I didn't get to it until November. Oh well, still some of my favorites...
I finished up the month starting on David Weber's "Honor Harrington" scifi space opera/military series. In part because Baen has the first two, On Basilisk Station and the Honor of the Queen available as free e-books, with the rest at $5 each. So after Honor's first two stories ended the month with A Short & Victorious War and Field of Dishonor. Good military space battle stuff, with technology premises that make them similar to wooden ship and cannon type stuff. And the politics of Kingdom of Manticore remind me a lot of Elizabeth Moon's "Familas Regnant" series. In a good way. The only slightly annoying quirk I found was Weber uses a lot of info-dump exposition to world build. Where a character will go to use something or think about something, which then turns into a big expository thing. Not the worst way to drop world build info, but it was noticeable...
Total books: 21