I hate that comic, but I love that line...

Just finished Under a Flaming Sky, about the Hinckley Firestorm of 1894 (a forest fire that consumed four Minnesota towns and killed almost 500 people). A harrowing tale, leavened with the badassery of several train engineers who risked their lives and their livelihoods to rescue people from the firestorm.

Still working my way through Catch-22. I might actually finish it this time.

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (got the name right, finally) - I don't think I liked this one as much as the first book in the series, but it was fairly entertaining. The book doesn't waste time getting into the action, but there is far, far more exposition, rule establishing, and whatnot than the last story, which probably slowed down the pace a lot more.

Replay by Ken Grimwood. Here is the definitive what not to do book. Wow this thing shoots itself in the foot. It introduces great ideas…and drops them. It implies rules…and then flagrantly violates the hell out of them. It suggests answers…but we don't get them! The main character is an fuzzyduckling. The ending stinks. It just sucks. I realize this is a richly admired novel but I have zero idea why. It stinks. How bad is it? I jumped to chicklit afterwards and I infinitely prefer it!

It's a midlife crisis novel -- maybe it doesn't speak to young'uns.

Not that it's so great for those of us who are packed with the wisdom of maturity either, but I managed to semi-enjoy it once. Tried to reread it a while later... couldn't maintain interest.

See, it's weird. I can say yeah, I don't get it. But then I look at dvd shelves lined with films like it. I get the general idea, but it's the execution I guess.

One of my favourite series as a kid. It gets even more awesome as it goes on.

War and Peace update - I don't think I have reached the mid-point yet, but it has established character well enough now to start really delving deeper into the quality of their characters and into self-examination. I am really enjoying the way Tolstoy rips into Pierre Bezukhov, a stupid buffoon in existential crisis who stumbles into a huge inheritance and, like Voltaire's Candide, manages to inflict pain and suffering on poor people all in the name of doing good, yet insists he is climbing toward some ideal of virtue. I was a bit concerned getting into this, even in audiobook form, but it really is highly entertaining.

The Slate Hill Covenant on the other hand is a self-published novel I picked up at the annual Horror movie convention that comes into Lexington every Fall. In theory, I wholeheartedly support the idea that there are great books out there that simply have not been published. But the existence of this piece of crap reminds me that there is an awful lot of dreck that has gone commercially unpublished for a very good reason. There have only been a few times when a book's utter lack of any redeeming quality whatsoever defeats my resolve to finish any book I have started. I am a mere 58 pages into The Slate Hill Covenant and already I am asking myself why I should expend any more of my life on this book. I know its early, but there is so far no evidence that the author has a whit of an idea at all about the fundamental concept of writing to be read. The only reason I am going on at this point is that there is a whisper of hope that the children, who are supposed to be the novel's main characters, might finally provide me with a straw of interest. I will let you know at which point I decide to go on or finally elect to chuck this into the nearest Goodwill and move on to the next book in my stack of "To Be Read."

I just started Pandora, by Pamela Kaufman. It's too early yet to say much about this book, but so far it seems to be a sort of mad gothic for the mystical, drug-addled 70's, like Rebecca by way of Exorcist II.

I'm reading a P.D. James mystery, The Murder Room. She's supposed to be on a higher literary plane than other whodunitists, but so far I ain't seeing it. She's an inheritor of the old English between-the-wars style of "cozy" murder mystery, but she lacks their sense of fun. And the pacing is an issue: it took her a hundred and ten pages to have something happen. That pre-anything-happening part was mostly devoted to in-depth exposition and character development, apparently just to make sure that the mystery solver has their scorecard thoroughly filled in. And her detective is so stuffy that I'd much rather have him turn out to be the bumbling police officer in someone else's detective story.


[update] It didn't improve. The crucial clue that in theory would have made the mystery solvable to the reader was communicated so unclearly that when she pointed back to it at the end of the story, I had no idea what she was talking about.

Then it ends with a personal scene in which the detective achieves a crowning moment of stuffiness.


Also, the book has sloppy typography mistakes, like words hyphenated as if they were at the end of a line, when they're in the middle.

Finished Catch-22. Wow, that book gets dark near the end. I wonder if the film is worth looking for.

As I remember it, it's okay, but doesn't really hit the right note of jet-black humor to succeed as an adaptation.

I just finished Snow Crash. What an odd book. Fun as hell, but odd. Now I'm taking a shot at reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan. We'll see how that goes.

I loved the book. Loved it. So I hated the movie. The non-linear plotline worked great on paper but was a confusing mess on film, most of the characters were wrong (for instance, the two Colonels' physical characteristics are switched for no reason), and as Santo said it didn't seem to understand which parts of the book were serious and which were supposed to be darkly funny. Yossarian getting arrested for not having his pass while the police apologize for the intrusion to the guy who just raped and murdered the maid is played as a big dramatic event instead of a horrible cosmic joke.

Frankly, the whole tone is wrong. The book was often manic and farcical, the movie is lethargic and takes itself far too seriously.

Fall of Colossus - Even ickier sexual politics than jColossus. Writers of sci fi movies in the 50's would read these things and say, "Seriously, dude, that's really sexist. I'm offended". The odd thing about these books is the juxtaposition of the utter brilliance of the computer stuff, with the utterly clueless pulpy exploitation handling of all the human stuff. This has led me to the theory that D.F. Jones is in fact a robot from the future, who is every bit as clueless about human interaction as he claims Colossus to be in the books.

Blood Worm - It's about giant worms and killer beetles eating people, so you can't go too wrong, but it's not Shaun Hutson-ey enough. I bet that's the first and last time anyone will ever say that. It just needs to be ickier to really work.

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper - I found this one to be far more enjoyable than the last book. The return of Simon, Jane, and Barney helped ground this story a little more and Cornwall seems to be the place for cool adolescent adventures. Also, at 165 pages, the story moved along at a very fast clip.

Next up: The Left Hand of Darkness