A Descent into Dullness

Looking over my November list I'm only seeing four free-range short stories.  Andy Merino's grotesque transformation story of a pioneer journey in the Oregon Trail Diary of Willa Porter.  Then Benjamin Rosenbaum's bureaucracy and social media during the zombie apocalypse in Feature Development for Social Networking.  Su Yee Lin has a dreamscape style quest in 13 Steps in the Underworld.  And finally Michael Swanwick has another of his "Mongolian Wizard" stories set in a fantasy alternate history World War with House of Dreams...

Actually started the month with Paolo Bacigalupi's YA zombies & the meat packing industry book, Zombie Baseball Beatdown.  Followed by volume 50 of the Grantville Gazette (edited by Paula Godlett) one of the less memorable and slight collections.  I honestly had to go back and look to remember any of the stories in it...

Veteran mystery writer Janet Evanovich teams with long time tv and novel mystery writer Lee Goldberg with the Heist.  The pair craft a competent and entertaing (if overused concept) cop and crook team up to take down a bigger Bad...

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett is creepy and gripping mix of small town Americana, Cthulhu-style alien entities and dysfunctional families...

Another entry in Baen's "Ring of Fire" e-books, 1635: Music & Murder by David Carrico collects the various Gazette stories that lead into 1636: the Devil's Opera.  I do like the "modern" music influencing the downtime art forms stories, so it was nice to have them collected in one spot...

Gail Carriger's "Finishing School" was a new one for me.  The two books in the series so far, Etiquette & Espionage and Courtesies & Conspiracies combine Victorian-era steampunk, vampires, werewolves, espionage and girl's finishing schools...

Finally got around to Suzanne Collin' 'pre-"Hunger Games" book Gregor the Overlander.  Turns out its the start of a kidlet series, of the hidden magical world stumbled into by a "normal" hero.  I will give Collins this, she had me crying over the heroic death of giant cockroach.  And roaches freak me the fuck out, so high bar there...

I was less than impressed with the pair of horror novels by Joey Compeau.  One Bloody Thing After Another feels unfinished, like it ends about 3/4 of the way thru the story.  And I could not bring myself to wade thru the wholesale slaughter and murder of kids with the Summer is Ended & We are Not Saved...

I was happily surprised by Drew Hayes' Super Powereds and Super Powereds 2.  He writes the books one chapter at a time and posts them on his site, then publishes the whole thing when they're done.  I've been avoiding checking the individual chapers for volume 3 as I want to read it as a whole.  But you can actually see his writing craft improve chapter by chapter.  I'll also admit I picked up the first one hoping it was by the still-missed late Drew Hayes of Poison Elves.  Sadly, no...

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's latest "Liaden" book, Trade Secret, took me a few chapters to get hooked into.  Mostly trying to recall which sub-story line and short fiction it was mainly connect into...

Sharpe's Prey by Bernard Cornwell takes place in 1807 and Denmark, in between the India and Spain campaigns for Wellington and Sharpe.  Not one of the most memorable in the series, but picking it up filled one of the holes in my collection of the series...

I've been mixing together reading the Frank L. Baum "Oz" series after getting a complete omnibus e-edition and picking up the recent Marvel comics' adaptations by Eric Shanowar and Skottie Young.  For November I read the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz.  The expanded Oz setting is a trip and a half...

The Way We Fall by Megan Crewe is another YA/End of Civilization book.  Its also a touching, melancholy and yet hopeful book.  Crewe's makes a great choice in focusing on a small isolated coastal island struggling with the civilization-breaking plague outbreak.  I need to get the sequel sometime soon...

Beta read another book for my friend Joe Selby.  Family Jewels is a future scifi/noir mash-up with detectives and teleportation and planets owned by decendents of todays mega-wealthy and a jewel heist.  I had a few quibbles with some parts of the set-up, but as always I wish Joe had a publisher so more people could get a chance to read his work...

You're Jonah Yu is a Choose Your Own Adventure book by Jeffrey C. Wells, that ties into his and Shaennon K. Garrity's webcomic Skin Horse...

And finally, ended the month with a reread of Lois McMaster Bujold's Captain Vorpatrill's Alliance.  I just really like this and a Civil Campaign and just can't get enough of either...

Total: 21

Been putting off trying to do last month's list. Mostly because of it being over fifty books. The majority of which is from rereading all thirty-five volumes of the Grantville Gazette anthologies at work. Plus the first two Ring of Fire anthologies after getting the 3rd's advanced reader copy as an e-book...

April also saw several instances where I declared myself done with a book series. All three books; Simon R. Green's the Good, the Bad and the Uncanny for the Nightside series and From Hell With Love for the Drood series and L.E. Modesitt Jr's Angels Fall for his Recluse series, because they were just blending together with every other book in the series...

I also reread Dean Koontz's Strangers after finding a copy left behind at work. And man is it even less subtle than I remember from high school or whenever I last read it...

Filled another hole in my Sharpe's collection with Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Havoc, which has Sharpe and his men trapped behind enemy lines in Portugal trying to rescue a young heiress...

Also from long-running, though still ongoing, series read the latest from Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson series River Marked and Stephen Brust's newest Vlad Taltos book Tiassa. In the first Mercy and her new husband get entangled with a rampaging Native American river monster on their honeymoon. And the latter has Vlad being saved by his ex-wife from a fairly byzantine scheme by House Jhereg to kill him. Oh and finished Dan Abnett's Thunder & Steel Warhammer fantasy anthology. Which was..decent. I'd say it was mostly lacking in having any real stand-out characters to hook into the way his Gaunt's Ghosts books do...

Got a new Alan Dean Foster book in the new cyberpunk style, Sagramanda. Which is set in the 100 million population Asian city of the same name. Following various characters and two major plot points. A stolen bit of revolutionary bio-engineering and a Kali obsessed serial killer. Oh and a man-eating tiger...

Sever new to me writers as well. Starting with Mark Hodder's the Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack a steampunk novel centered around Richard Burton and time travel. Then David Wong's John Dies at the End which is damn funny book that can be thought of as Call of Cthulu meets Clerks...

After that I checked out Brent Weeks' (if only because I keep getting his name mixed up in my mind with Peter V. Brett) the Way of Shadows. A well-done blood and mud fantasy series. Morally grey protagonists, crap sack setting, the whole nine yards. But really my only qualm is that it has another Total Monster bad guy. Who is partly sets things up for the series' Even More Total Monster baddie...

Finally got around to reading Brom's the Child Thief a fairly dark and cynical retelling of "Peter Pan". Which was..all right. It was well done and everything but just didn't catch a hold of me...

And dipped into the roommate's books again to try out Brandon Sanderson (the writer who is finishing out Jordan's Wheel of Time series) with his debut Elantris. A pretty good book and an interesting setting, but definitely feels like a rookie novel...

Ended the month with Janni Lee Simner's sequel to Bones of Faerie, Faerie Winter. Didn't like this one as much. Mostly because I'm so weary of the Total Monster Sociopath bad guy...


Total books: 53

Richard Sharpe is caught up in a game of spy and counterspy with a beautiful young nun caught in the middle. Can the legendary British sol...wait...is that Mark Antony? Holy crap! It is James Purefoy. And Sir Henry Simonson again? That slimy little weasel!