Reading Update

[zqadams]

     So in the last couple days I've polished off both A Deeper Blue  (and thus the Paladin of Shadows series as a whole) and Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games (I had been reading both simultaneously, bouncing back and forth as the mood struck me).  The former was exactly what I expected, and after the long and occasionally draggy Unto the Breach it was a nice little jog of a novel.  The latter was...problematic.  Donovan covered a lot of ground that other historians like Steven Kent have glossed over, and has the benefit of a decade's worth of stuff to write about since all the major texts on the subject.  He did a lot of research, secured a lot of interviews and put it together in an interesting, if disjointed, way; he starts off with the technological march from Spacewar! to the crash of 1983...but then, as home computers take hold he covers individual scenes, genres and makers through their entire history instead of scattering, say, the UK Spectrum scene in bits and pieces of the same chapter that covers Nintendo's war with Sega or Commodore's attempt to get people to do more with their C-64s than play pirated games.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.  Unfortunately, it's REALLY poorly edited.  There are enough dropped articles and other short words to choke a camel, and a few glaring if minor factual errors which make me wonder about any other stories I hadn't heard before, and which aren't confirmed by the person to whom they happened.  On top of that, fully 40 percent of the book's length (based on Kindle locs) is appendices; a listing of historical games by genre, then chronologically within that genre, and an alphabetical listing of major computers and gaming consoles dating back to the PDP-1.  If they had put in a hyperlinked table of contents for each appendix, to let you jump to a letter or genre (depending), it'd be awesome.  As it is, it feels like wasted space.  I can't really recommend it.

Now that I've finished both my most recent fiction and non-fiction endeavors, I think I'm not going to start a book until after I get through the fourth Invincible hardcover, which arrived today from Amazon.  After that, I've got the omnibus containing Peter David's first four Star Trek: New Frontier novels sitting on my Kindle; I've not read Trek books since I was in high school and Q Squared and Dark Mirror came out.  But I've always enjoyed and admired PAD's work, and my occasional dabblings in STO have revived my interest in the franchise even as I grumple about the things they get wrong.  (I find it hilarious that the four-book set weighs in at less than half the length of the recent Honor books, for some reason.)