The Levee by Malcolm Shuman. Though occasionally dotting to present day with the protagonist Colin as an old man haunted by nightmares of his youth, most of the book takes place during his youth as he and childhood friends get wrapped up in a murder mystery... Except it seems really to be about how a gossipy college town can destroy people's lives because everyone who lives there can't stop running their friggin' mouths. The plot feels like it has safety brakes on, where it repetitively stops so the main character can hear sagely advice from his father, or tangentially link somewhere he's visiting in the present to some mostly unrelated event in the past. The book's not boring despite this, but it never really feels like the story gets going once it's begun, and I say that being less than 40 pages from the end of an about 200 page book.

While Bloodworm is strangely demure about the sleaze, skating up to nastiness and then shying away for the most part instead of revelling in the lurid filth that makes most of these books so much fun, it has picked up considerably in the second half. There are even little flashes of, if not brilliance, at least very well thought out consideration of the havoc the monsters wreak. The titular worms are the larvae of extremely agressive carnivorious beetles that lay eggs in wood like real-life timber pests, only the larvae also eat people as well as wood.
In an exposition paragraph telling how the spread of the insects is shutting down life and business in London, there's a throwaway line about how trials were being cancelled because jurors refused to show up for duty in courtrooms that are constructed almost entirely of wood, and newspapers were shutting down because press workers were being attacked by packs of worms coming out of the giant rolls of newsstock. I thought that was a nice touch.

Trying to finish A. Lee Martinez's The Automatic Detective before it goes back to the library on Tuesday. His previous book, Gil's All-Night Fright Diner, started out okay, but then spent far too much time in the viewpoint of an unbelieveably annoying teenage girl, to the point I had to abandon novel.

This one, thankfully, doesn't make that mistake. It's from the viewpoint of Max Megaton, a giant robot built as a weapon of war who glitched and developed sentience. On refusing to kill and turning against his creator, Max was given probationary citizenship in Empire City, basically the '50s "city of the future" with more pollution and mutants. When his neighbors are kidnapped, he sets out to find them, and things start going wrong.

The prose can be a bit clunky, and the characters are flat at points, but this is a book that manages to carry itself on concept and setting alone so far.

Jutland- An Eyewitness Account of a Great Battle
Compiled and edited by Stuart Legg- 1967

The guy takes several primary accoutns and strings them together to tell the story of the Battle of Jutland.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's about an astronaut who goes to a cold planet (not quite Dezo, but still pretty cold) in order to convince its inhabitants to join some interplanetary organization. The people who live on the planet are hermaphrodites of sorts: they're pretty androgynous until they "go into heat," at which point their male or female characteristics develop in detriment to the other. Anyways, a lot of politics get in the way of the guy's mission.

Despite the sci-fi setting, it seems to be more of a meditation on politics and people than anything else. That said, a good portion of the last act of the novel is dedicated to the two protagonists trekking across the planet, going through forests, volcanoes, and even journeying across a gigantic glacier, while braving rain and constant blizzards.

It's not a great book, but it's interesting for most of the way.

I started re-reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I love how John Carter doesn't consider himself a hero because, in his eyes, a hero is someone who is faced with the decision of "Fight" or "Run" and consciously chooses "Fight," whereas he fights out of instinct, only realizing after the fact that there had been an option to run.

Take note of every time John Carter "Weaves a fence of steel" when facing off against enemies. After reading the series I got the impression that the Mars landscape was now just littered with steel fences.

Reading Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom by A.C. Crispin who previously handled prequels for Han Solo and Ambassador Sarek. Now Jack Sparrow gets the treatment and like her other works, Crispin creates a solid, rich adventure story. Nails the voices. Good read.

I'm looking back at some nineties William Gibson. Of course it doesn't hold up well, but I knew it wouldn't, so I'm left with some appreciation for the parts of it that aren't bad.


[update] -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Some of you have complained about this book, but I found it a satisfying conclusion. For about half of the surprise plot twists, I was going "yeah, I knew it!" because she'd foreshadowed them so far back.

I actually would have kinda loved it if the prophecy had turned out to mean that it was Neville Longbottom instead of Harry who finally won the day, but I suppose most readers would have grabbed their pitchforks and torches.

Actually, given the vast number of people who would have preferred to see Neville and co.'s adventures in the book, they would likely have cheered.

Recently finished The Coming by Joe Haldemann. The concept is sound (about forty years from now, Earth receives a message from an unknown intelligence that just says "We're coming"), but the execution is badly flawed.

The book leaps from viewpoint to viewpoint. By itself, this isn't quite so bad, but several of those viewpoints are utterly superfluous. One of them, a college student who does VR porn films on the side, is a character who means absolutely nothing to the plot and is present clearly to shoehorn in a sex scene. Several others aren't quite as gratuitous, but they wouldn't be missed if cut.

The entire middle ("November") section of the book is connected only very, very tenuously to the main plot, and that only in a few paragraphs. It comes off as filler.

The book has this problem at many points, the needless characters in particular - the pacing is abysmal. The idea is that it will take three months from receipt of the message before the aliens arrive. Each of the three sections of the book (as well as the epilogue) cover one day, with three-page segments tacked on to cover the entire rest of the month.

At the end, the reveal of the message's source is outright ludicrous, and makes the entire book feel like a bad joke.

Potential squandered is the saddest thing to see.

Now that the children have become homicidal and killed all the reprehensible adults, The Slate Hill Covenant has gotten better. But there are massive gaping plotholes, especially considering the challenge of the three "relatively" able-bodied kids having to take care of three younger children, two who are described as so hideously deformed that their special needs would have exhausted the abilities of the older kids rather quickly in real life.
But the author has decided to shove the deformed kids into the background, asking the reader to take it on faith that they are fine and cared for, and brought the manageable characters to the front. It still stretches credibility beyond the breaking point - but it has a quickly rising body count that more than compensates.

I must say that Neville's growth as a character from the wimpy sort to the snake-slicing a**-kicker he was in the last book was probably the most compelling bit of character development in the series.

I'm trying to read Peter F. Hamilton's Fallen Dragon, but so far it's quite an unpleasant experience. This is a future where people invented a warp drive in 2070, and apparently made no further progress after that point, or even moved backwards. It's a mean nasty world -- an fuzzyduckling of a future -- and we've got ourselves a mean nasty fuzzyduckling for a protagonist.

I've been reading quite a bit of late, but nothing all that noteworthy. But just this weekend I finished The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I honestly can't recommend that book enough. I wish YA novels like that were around when I was in the target demographic.

I just started the second book of the trilogy, Catching Fire, and it's equally awesome so far.

Let no one say television doesn't have its good side. Catching bits of the HBO series has gotten me back to reading Game of Thrones.

I'm about three hundred pages in, and now I'm starting to understand what all the fuss is about.