Playing Spider-Man
April '12 Book List
May. 23rd, 2012 09:12 pmI should really get these done sooner, I've been seriously slacking on them. And April was a pretty light month with the books read. Started with an urban fantasy series involving tooth fairies by Jennifer Safrey called Tooth & Nail. Don't remember a lot about this, beyond that the main character was an amateur female boxer, the fae were kinda callous jerks and the bad guy master plan involved mind altered kids. Also that I didn't care for it even a little...
After that I went with the second of Tobias Buckell's "Xenowealth" series, Ragamuffin. It takes awhile before the new characters meet up with the original cast, but it gives some excellent world building in its on-the-run tour of parts of the Benevolent Satrapy, where humanity are 3rd class citizens at best. Also some excellent zero-g gunfight sequences...
Next up is the second of Phil & Kaja Foglio's text versions of Girl Genius, Agatha & the Clockwork Princess. Like the previous novel, the Foglios do a great job of adapting formats, losing nothing from the original and adding just a small amount of extra info to increase the value of the book. The book covers volumes Four thru Six of the comic. And I'm hopeful that the next volume will be able to cover Agatha and Castle Hetrodyne in less time...
And then still another second volume, with Dan Well's Mr. Monster. I've been hesitant to finish up this trilogy, since much of whats going on the head of the budding sociopath teen protagonist disturbed me. Plus it involved violence against a cat which is just one of my buttons. The roommate assures me the mental state of John Cleaver improves a bit in the finale, so I'll probably get around to it fairly soon. After all I've still got some curiosity about how this whole Dexter + Buffy concept works out...
I then tried another book by Chris Roberson, End of the Century. It makes a somewhat novel take on the Arthurian mythos and has an interesting interconnected three-time period story. But something about how the ending shows that it was mostly a way to interlock several of Roberson's previous stories and characters that left me feeling fairly ambivalent about it...
Happily getting Jenny "the Bloggess" Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened was a much more positive reading experience. Lawson's website is often one of the funniest things I'll read and her first book collection didn't disappoint...
Read the first of Alan Dean Foster's "Tipping Point" cyberpunk books the Human Blend and enjoyed it quite a bit. I like the set-up where much of human society indulges in wildly varying body modifications...
The next two e-books are really more novellas or even short stories than full length books. But both are quite good. Stephen King's Mile 81 is creepy and weird and he manages to give real depth to characters you only get to spend a page or two with. And John Scalzi's Election about a human running for city council seat that hasn't had a human win it in decades is just funny and clever in all the best ways...
After that I finally got around to finishing up Sherwood Smith's "Wren" series with Wren's Quest, Wren's War and Wren Journymage, a YA fantasy series focused on a teen princess and her wizard in training best friend...
Blake Crouch's Run was a very nasty piece of survival horror. The set-up is that a large portion of America's population seemingly goes crazy overnight and becomes a merciless army dedicated to wiping out the rest of the population. Regardless of what their previous relationships might have been. The struggle by the point of view family to survive both the kill-crazy mobs and nature was pretty brutal...
Next was a reread of the George R.R. Martin edited Fort Freak. I'd already read the latest Wild Card anthology, but I ordered my own copy when it hit mass-market paperback. And after that was another anthology with the May 41st edition of the Grantville Gazette (edited still by Flint and Goodlet) coming out a couple days early...
And I finished out the month with Dead is the New Black by Marlene Perez. An ok teen girl urban fantasy and start to a series that I picked up as a Daily Deal at some point. The urban fantasy bits seemed a bit hastily added into the teen girl mystery base concept. Still, an ok read but not something where I see myself tracking down the further books in the series...
Total Books: 16
Yeah a very light month. And thats with almost too short to count Mile 81 and Election added in...
After that I went with the second of Tobias Buckell's "Xenowealth" series, Ragamuffin. It takes awhile before the new characters meet up with the original cast, but it gives some excellent world building in its on-the-run tour of parts of the Benevolent Satrapy, where humanity are 3rd class citizens at best. Also some excellent zero-g gunfight sequences...
Next up is the second of Phil & Kaja Foglio's text versions of Girl Genius, Agatha & the Clockwork Princess. Like the previous novel, the Foglios do a great job of adapting formats, losing nothing from the original and adding just a small amount of extra info to increase the value of the book. The book covers volumes Four thru Six of the comic. And I'm hopeful that the next volume will be able to cover Agatha and Castle Hetrodyne in less time...
And then still another second volume, with Dan Well's Mr. Monster. I've been hesitant to finish up this trilogy, since much of whats going on the head of the budding sociopath teen protagonist disturbed me. Plus it involved violence against a cat which is just one of my buttons. The roommate assures me the mental state of John Cleaver improves a bit in the finale, so I'll probably get around to it fairly soon. After all I've still got some curiosity about how this whole Dexter + Buffy concept works out...
I then tried another book by Chris Roberson, End of the Century. It makes a somewhat novel take on the Arthurian mythos and has an interesting interconnected three-time period story. But something about how the ending shows that it was mostly a way to interlock several of Roberson's previous stories and characters that left me feeling fairly ambivalent about it...
Happily getting Jenny "the Bloggess" Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened was a much more positive reading experience. Lawson's website is often one of the funniest things I'll read and her first book collection didn't disappoint...
Read the first of Alan Dean Foster's "Tipping Point" cyberpunk books the Human Blend and enjoyed it quite a bit. I like the set-up where much of human society indulges in wildly varying body modifications...
The next two e-books are really more novellas or even short stories than full length books. But both are quite good. Stephen King's Mile 81 is creepy and weird and he manages to give real depth to characters you only get to spend a page or two with. And John Scalzi's Election about a human running for city council seat that hasn't had a human win it in decades is just funny and clever in all the best ways...
After that I finally got around to finishing up Sherwood Smith's "Wren" series with Wren's Quest, Wren's War and Wren Journymage, a YA fantasy series focused on a teen princess and her wizard in training best friend...
Blake Crouch's Run was a very nasty piece of survival horror. The set-up is that a large portion of America's population seemingly goes crazy overnight and becomes a merciless army dedicated to wiping out the rest of the population. Regardless of what their previous relationships might have been. The struggle by the point of view family to survive both the kill-crazy mobs and nature was pretty brutal...
Next was a reread of the George R.R. Martin edited Fort Freak. I'd already read the latest Wild Card anthology, but I ordered my own copy when it hit mass-market paperback. And after that was another anthology with the May 41st edition of the Grantville Gazette (edited still by Flint and Goodlet) coming out a couple days early...
And I finished out the month with Dead is the New Black by Marlene Perez. An ok teen girl urban fantasy and start to a series that I picked up as a Daily Deal at some point. The urban fantasy bits seemed a bit hastily added into the teen girl mystery base concept. Still, an ok read but not something where I see myself tracking down the further books in the series...
Total Books: 16
Yeah a very light month. And thats with almost too short to count Mile 81 and Election added in...
Ok. Point him out, Mittens.
Hang on, I just got an email.
Seriously, number numbers?
Dec. 10th, 2011 08:43 amThe alt text for today's Wonderella means me and Justin Pierce can't be friends. It really is like nails scraping down the chalkboard that is my soul...
"I see," said Reginald. "Right, then. Gather close." He picked up a muddy stick with one of his stubby little arms and found a big flat rock. Brian and me leaned in. Because I was not blowing hot air up Reginald's butt, or whatever alligators have instead of a butt, when I told him that I am an undistractable killing machine. I have great control of my attention. It's like that one time a few minutes ago when I was able to ignore all the unimportant talky crap and get right down to the important part of the situation at hand, which is to say, dude, bad guys get hovercrafts? Because that is, like, way on the unfair side of things. I am part of the government and that means that I am one of the good guys, and I don't get my own hovercraft. I guess what they always tell you is true: Evil guys get all the cool vehicles. Like with the G.I. Joes that Dr. Lee used to bring into the lab in some kind of weird attempt to teach me principles of human interaction and crap. You got the Joe guys driving around in, like, F-16s or something, but the Cobra dudes got these super-radical futuristic space tanks with laser cannons on them. You know who else was awesome? That bad guy who turned green when you put him in the sun. You know how many Joes turned green when you put them in the sun? Zilch. Oh, and there was Destro whose head was all shiny. Maybe because he dipped it in molten silver at some point. Or maybe it was a prosthetic head after his real head got cut off. There is not one single G.I. Joe guy who is that awesome, except maybe Snake Eyes, who is an official ninja for the U.S. Government, and that is the coolest job description in the entire world. Anyway, Snake Eyes is always fighting Storm Shadow, who is the official ninja for Cobra, and since they're each the most badass people on their respective sides, they should go off and continue their private war in some place far away, like on top of a snowy mountain or something. And then, after a long time of fighting each other, they would realize that they're more the same than they are different and then they would totally have hot sex. It would be boss, because what's better than ninjas? The answer: hot gay ninjas totally doing each other.
Because
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shaenon is the smart. Expecially the talking alligator...
Sunday Trade: Copper
Apr. 17th, 2011 09:19 pm
Copper by Kazu Kibuishi
Collecting the critically acclaimed webcomic in one handy volume. Copper is a young kid who goes around having adventures with his dog Fred. Or imagining they're on adventures. THe early strips seem to be intentionally unclear on that point. What isn't unclear is how gorgeous Kibuishi's art is or how clever his writing. Copper is a fun, somewhat nonsensical book that is a visual treat and a delight to allow oneself to be carried along by it. One that ends much too soon, leaving one wanting more of the pair's explorations...
