3 Movies

Jan. 24th, 2014 05:06 pm
lurkerwithout: (eastman)
Zero Dark Thirty: Killing Osama Bin Laden, good.  Finding him by torturing people, probably bad?  Maybe?  I don't know this movie is like 8 million hours long and none of it really dwells on the ethics of torturing prisoners for intel...

Here Comes the Boom: If you cut out the half-dozen sub-plots (or at least pare them way the fuck down) then you've got a decent half-hour of movie here.  Plus the climatic fight is pretty good and Kevin James I think actually pulls it off.  But there is a fuck-ton of filler to get to that climax...

Jack Reacher: Tom "Jack Reacher" Cruise is the total bad ass one-man army investigator that America needs.  Or needed in the 80s maybe.  Really its a very 80s action hero kind of bad-ass lone wolf who gets things done that the system can't get done.  Because of rules and corruption and stuff.  Really, the movie is ok even if I didn't really buy into the deadly threat of the final boss, Old Russian Dude With No Fingers...
lurkerwithout: (Book on bed)
Starting with the Free Range short stories for May.  We've got Christopher Rowe's "Jack of Coins" about rebellion and magic and guys in funny looking suits.  Cecil Castellucci's "We Have Always Lived on Mars" is an abandoned Martian colony story with zee twist.  Garth Nix's "Fire Above, Fire Below" gives us OMG Dragons are real and misunderstood.  "Shall We Gather" by Alex Bledsoe is a niftly little bit of hillbilly urban fantasy.  Cherie Priest's "the Button Man & the Murder Tree" is a crime noir piece and a prequel to the most recent Wild Cards book.  Also from that series is "the Elephant in the Room" by Paul Cornell with Elephant Girl and Croyd Crenson and the duplicating powers girl, now naming herself Understudy.  And lastly we've got Wen Spencer's Pittsburgh stuck in Elfland series and "Pittsburgh Backyard & Garden"...

I ended up rereading a bunch of Ring of Fire books in May, I think because I noticed the roommate doing it first.  All seven of the print Grantville Gazettes edited by Flint and Goodlett and all three Ring of Fire anthologies edited again by Eric Flint.  Plus rereading 1635: the Eastern Front, 1636: the Saxony Uprising by Flint alone.  And 1635: the Papal Stakes by Flint and Andrew Dennis, as well as 1636: the Kremlin Games by Flint, Paula Goodlett and Gorg Huff...

Clifford Simak's the Fellowship of the Talisman is an early example of One Quest add miscellaneous band of heroes.  Set in an England where mankind is stuck in the Middle Ages because of rampaging demon hordes.  Or maybe its just one horde...

Wicked Business has Janet Evanovich dipping into the Paranormal Romance setting with a baker\/magic seeker with Sexy Bad Boy partner.  As well as the normal cast of colorful supporting characters...

I have to say I really enjoyed Weston Ochse's Seal Team 666.  Its right behind Larry Correia's Monster Hunter books in the field of gun porn and monster fighting.  And Ochse's band of badasses have a dog.  Correia's just have a werewolf...

Way back whenever it was I read Joe Hill's first novel I didn't care for it.  Thought it was well written and everything but it didn't click.  Horns, with its broken protagonist and murder mystery and interesting supernatural twist definitely grabbed hold of me...

I'm pretty sure I read Jack McDevitt's Eternity Road back in high school or college, but I'm not positive.  I did have a post-apocalyptic civilization slowing rebuilding phase.  And this book, with its archeological expedition to search for a pre-destruction haven, is right in that wheelhouse...

My only real beef with Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations (edited by Paula Guran) is that I had several of the short stories in other collections.  Including the Butcher, P.N. Elrod and Charlaine Harris stories.  Still, plenty of other good, and new, pieces in this collection...

And finishing up with John Scalzi's the Human Division, another entry in his Old Man's War series.  It reads a bit differently, since it was originally published serially, but a fun read nonetheless...

Total Books: 21
lurkerwithout: (Book on bed)
I always expect to read a lot more on my birthday vacation, and yet I don't.  *shrug*

Started out the month with another of Mike Shephard's "Kris Longknife" books, Intrepid.  Later on I finished the remaining three, Undaunted, Redoubtable and Daring.  Sadly by book nine I had grown weary of Kris, her band of snarky sidekicks and the yo-yoing level of "science" available...

Got the latest "Liaden" book from Sharon Lee and Steven Miller, Necessity's Child.  This entry mostly pushes the regular character's into the background while focusing on one of the younger House Korval members.  As well as a far future version of what seems to be Roma...

During the vacation I did get to the stack of "Walt Longmire" by Craig Johnson books the roommate got me at Christmas.  I read the 1st one a  while back after getting an e-version on sale, so this was the next three.  The books, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man's Moccasins, and Death Without Company, are a step above the tv adaptation (which isn't too shabby on its own) though Henry Standing Bear's voice is very much that of Lou Diamond Phillips during the reading...

I'd had Isaac Marion's zomromcom Warm Bodies for awhile, but I didn't really get inspired to finish it off until catching the movie version.  The zombies in the book have more of a weird culture than the movies.  With the skeletal skinless zombies being a kind of priest/teacher caste.  Plus the zombies eat people a bit longer than they do in the movie...

Jasper Fforde starts up yet another series with the Last Dragonslayer.  Though this modern fantasy is aimed at a YA audience.  And could work as a one-off.  But I wouldn't seeing more of his wizardry run by bureaucracy again...

Also finally got to the next two books of Alan Dean Foster's "Tipping Point" cyberpunk trilogy.  While the final bad reveal was a bit of a let-down, it was more than made up for by watching the super-assassin chasing the heroes get an ass-kicking from a giant ground sloth in the second book, Body, Inc.  And the deadly engineered family of meerkats in the Sum of Her Parts...

Peter Brett's latest "Demon Cycle" book, the Daylight War, dropped in February as well.  Which in addition large sections devoted to one character's back-story (which served to make them a great deal more sympathetic) has the confrontation between the Warded Man and the Spear of the Desert...

After sitting thru much of the recent movie version, decided to get around to Jules Verne's Mysterious Island.  Which needed more giant animals.  And I kind of felt the survivor group went from almost zero resources to being able to make flintlock weapons a bit too easily...

I mostly picked up the Myth Interpretations collection by the late Robert Asprin to get a copy of his "Cold Cash War".  Though it also has some amusing Skeeve and company stories...

And finally was a new-ish Steve Hamiltion "Alex McKnight" book, Misery Bay.  With Alex agreeing to look into the suicide of U.S. Marshall's son.  Which leads to a revenge-based cinema verte killer...

Total Books: 16
lurkerwithout: (Book on bed)
October is somewhat unusual in that I don't see a single reread on the relatively short list. Even Harry Harrison's The Works of Harry Harrison didn't include anything I'd already read. Not even the Stainless Steel Rat story which serves to introduce Jim deGriz' nemesis and future wife. Of the remainder, really only "Deathworld" truly stands out for me still...

Four new supers stories for October. Though Marion G. Harmon's Bite Me: Big Easy Nights is more an urban fantasy about a vampire character who previously appeared in a regular supers setting. Though I think any supers New Orleans ends up being the urban fantasy corner of that world. Also I'm not sure which I have more of, vampire-themed fiction titled "Bite Me" or "Life Sucks"...

Of the other three, Adam Christopher's 7 Wonders was a bit a dissapointing mess, though I did like some of the background character concepts that show up late in the book. Blake M. Petit's Other People's Heroes has the whole hero vs. villain thing having evolved into something faker than pro-wrestling, but it still manages to build a big heroic climax. And Mathew Hughes' the Damned Busters is worth a read if only for the lead. Who seems to be autisic, though somewhere on the high-function end. And it seems to help in his using an "accidental" demonic summoning to become a super-hero...

Two new "Honor-verse" books from Weber in October. First Shadow of Freedom was an eArc and part of the Talbott Cluster side-series. Enjoyable, but it feels like it cuts off nearer the middle of the story then the climax. Second, is the next YA "Stephanie Harrington" prequel Fire Season, co-written with Jane Lindskold. Manages to create a sense of danger using secondary characters, since fans of the setting already know its too soon for the leads to be under a real threat of dying...

With Downpour, I'm almost caught up with Kat Richardson's "Greywalker" series. I was happy that this one stepped away from the vampire related stuff to concentrate back on a more ghost/spirit-centric story...

Got to the newest of Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" books, the Woman Who Died a Lot. Very little BookWorld this go, with the story being centered around Thursday getting a new job, the consequences of time travel no longer being possible, an escaped memory-altering psycopath, illegal cloning and plotting by the Goliath Corp. Oh and the threat of God smiting the entire town...

I'd picked up the 2nd and 3rd "Nikki Heat" books, Naked Heat and Heat Rising on the cheap for my Kindle and finally got around to them. And then went and grabbed Frozen Heat. Enjoyable, if light-weight, mystery/police procedural stories. Much like the tv series they're sort of inspired by. I do still wonder who they tapped to ghost them...

Patrick Weekes' the Palace Job is a wonderfully fun "Ocean's 11" style caper story. With sword fighting and martial art masters and ancient artifacts and virgin-obsessed unicorns and more. All part of an attempt to break into an unbreakable vault on a floating island city...

I'm not even sure how I even found Rebecca Gable's Settlers of Catan novelization. But curiousty over the concept led to me getting a pretty darn good historical fiction story with a large group of Viking's working to colonize an out of the way and mostly undiscovered island...

And finished out October with a pair of David Drake's "Lt. Leary" books, Some Golden Harbor and When the Tide Rises. The first has newly made Commander Leary and Warrant Officer Adele Mundy tasked with stopping a planetary invasion with only the most limited of resources. The second has Leary, Mundy and their shipmates sent stiffen a rebellion of a group of worlds against their Alliance enemies. But the rebel leaders seem to be even more half-hearted in their drive to secede then was initially believed...

Total books: 16
lurkerwithout: (Default)
Ok so like the Army and Marines are looking at big shortages on their recruiting. And the Navy and Air Force are turning people away. So I've come up with a plan to balance that out some.

Have Marine's in their non-formal khakis waiting outside the Navy and/or Airforce places to pick up "recruits". Anyone who gets on the bus gets shipped off to Boot Camp. Because if they're too dumb to recognize that they're being stolen by the wrong branch they were probably to stupid to be a fighter pilot or submariner anyway...

Multiple problems solved! Patriotic people get to serve their country. Marines and/or Army make up for low recruitment. And morons are off the street where they might bother me!

Everyone wins!

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