Category: Book Report

You know, I haven’t read a bit of pulp fantasy in a while (the previous Salvatore I read was five years ago, and that review was fun to re-read because it touched on my old gaming memories). I read The Lord of the Rings last year, I know, but this book is pulp fantasy regardless of its hard cover and dust jacket.

Within it, the son of a duke chafes under his father’s accommodation of a wizard who rules the land through his Cyclops army and subwizard governors. After he slays one of the one-eyed centurions, he flees his home and his birthright and takes up with a halfling thief. They meet a good, or at least not as bad as the baddest, wizard who tricks them into invading a dragon’s lair but gives them magic items for their trouble, including a cloak of invisibility. The duo move onto a town and live the lives of successful thieves until the cloak of invisibility reanimates the legend of its previous owner, the Crimson Shadow, and reanimates the town residents’ hopes for freedom.

As always, this is but one book in a trilogy, so it sets some things in motion that I won’t see conclude. It’s a decent enough read, but the climax and the denouement, such as they are, come rather suddenly. So, like I said in 2006, I won’t shy away from Salvatore’s other works, but I’m not running out to get them right now.

I had another thought while reading it: In modern suspense and thriller pulp, it’s pretty common to knock authors who make mistakes with guns. Is it only our lack of true familiarity as a culture with ancient weapons–aside from some real hardcore SCA geeks and the like–that keeps us from nitpicking the use of a sword? As I read this book, I noticed that the army of the Cyclopses used a variety of weapons straight out of the Dungeons and Dragons equipment charts. Thrown spears and bows for missile weapons, and then swords, battle axes, and polearms for bladed weapons. Wouldn’t you expect an army, especially an invading/occupying sort of army to have more standard equipment? Nah, I’m just trying to nitpick where none is warranted.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book back in November, and I’ve already read it. I do sort of have a last-in-first-out method. The fresher the purchase, the closer I am to the eagerness to read the book that drove me to buy the book.

I’m not sure if this is the first Stark book I’ve read; I don’t have any other book reports on them on the blog here, so I haven’t read one in the last ten years. If I did, it probably came during my high school years, but I don’t remember it. So it’s like going into a series fresh except for knowing what the series character is and seeing a portrayal of it on the big screen (Payback, donchaknow?).

So Parker is an amoral, immoral bad guy who does heists for the Outfit. One or two a year, not enough to get greedy. This time, the Outfit wants him to hit an offshore casino run by a former German officer on an island claimed by Cuba. When the Feds get wind of the operation, they want Parker to grab the man himself and bring him in. So Parker cases the island, builds a team, and executes the plan–which goes awry when a rejected team member tips the casino that the heist is coming.

It’s a quick, pulp read. It’s just a little off in that some of the detail and description in the beginning is, I don’t know, a little overdone, a little out of the pace of a proper pulp novel. From the front matter of this book, I see that Stark is a pen name of Donald Westlake. You know, Westlake is an author of whom I’ve read a couple of books, but not someone I’ve rushed out to read all. I wonder if the poor pacing in the beginnings is what does it. I don’t know.

This volume is a LARGE PRINT EDITION from 1988, which is 22 years after the initial publication date. Man, those pulp books could stay in print, couldn’t they? Aside from some of the huge bestsellers today, what do you think will still be in print in 2034? Not a whole lot, probably, with the industry changing as it is. I mean, if you look at the sales stats today, the more modern edition I’ve linked to is still in the top 100,000 books sold on Amazon. So it’s got longevity that even my torpid review won’t dent.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you probably don’t know, I like Alan Ayckbourn ever since I saw his plays The Norman Conquests when the Rep in Milwaukee was putting all three of the plays on, rotating which play was showing nightly, so that viewers could see all three. Even though I was a hardscrabble working college senior, I managed to see all three–and with three different women (and Table Manners twice due to a scheduling error). Norman would have approved.

This book is a single full evening play. Within it, a woman who is hit on the head gets some attention from a doctor as she comes around. As he goes to get some tea for her, her loving family, clad in tennis apparel, checks on her. She’s a successful historical novelist with a doting husband, an attentive daughter, and a protective brother. But as the doctor returns, they fade away, and her family is really an uncommunicative and distant son and a parson who’s estranged from his wife. As the play goes on, the family visits intersperse, and her doctor tells her she’s suffering from hallucinations related to the head injury.

So as I’m reading, I’m interested to see how this will resolve and somehow hope that she’s really suffering from hallucinations of the bad family and root for a twist where she’s really the successful woman hallucinating a poor existence, but we end with a penultimate scene where the faux daughter is at her wedding, but it’s really a horse race where she’s a horse, and it gets surreal (obviously) and the play resolves where the woman with the head trauma has imagined all of it and is in an ambulance right after the head trauma.

So it disappointed me, ultimately, because I like my plays to veer a little less into the surreal. I mean, I can read a surreal play and know what I’m getting into (The Balcony) and even enjoy it (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). But when a play leads me to believe some surreality is going to resolve but ends up more surreal and unresolved, well, meh.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is not one of the strongest in the Executioner series. In it, Mack Bolan travels to the Mexican resort to keep the Mafia from getting a stronger grip on the criminal warlord currently running the rackets there. After he kills a frontman and contact point for the bad guys, Bolan takes in the man’s secretary and traveling companion who claims to be innocent. He gets on-the-scene help from a washed-up actor that had been a front man for prostitution and white slavery as Bolan tries to find a solution that will keep the Mafia out of Acapulco.

Sadly, although its plot like the others differs from boilerplate, this book ends rather abruptly with a twist for a twists’ sake.

Not one of the better ones in the series, but still a quick and interesting enough read.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a sixty-year-old collection of Ladies Home Journal stories about old houses. You know, you hear the word McMansions to refer to large homes in the suburbs, but there’s a vast difference between large homes in the suburbs and most of these mansions.

One element of this book raises it above other volumes of its ilk that I’ve seen: this book was previously owned by someone related to one of the homes within’s original owners. Check out the handwritten notes:

Fascinating and poignant.

A good browser, for certain.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read this book as a break in more serious books. It is the sixth book in the series, so it’s the one right after Gulag War, which was the first of the series that I read in 2009. It deals with the aftermath of that book: After a successful mission to Siberia that embarrassed the Soviets, the SOBs scatter and hide out, only to find Spetsnaz kill teams on their trail. The SOBs discover that a fallen team member isn’t dead and is bait for a Russian trap on Majorca. But if you’re trying to trap the SOBs, you might find that the metal clamps shut around you.

The book is 218 pages, and about 120 of those pages are the climactic battle on Majorca. The preceding 90 are also action-packed and move along very rapidly indeed. There’s less exposition and setup even than the Executioner novels. Although, ultimately, this means they’re not as deep nor character-rich, but as an ensemble cast of sometimes expendable characters, you should expect some of that.

I’m surprised that the SOBs didn’t get some sort of movie treatment in the 1980s, frankly, and I look forward to stumbling across more of these books in the future.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a short little self-help program designed to cheerlead you through getting some sort of creative endeavor completed (the author tries to extend it to anything, but basically, it’s about writing a book or something). My wife borrowed it from the library and told me to read it. So I did.

The main schtick is that Resistance is the enemy (well, the main one) when you’re out to accomplish something, and during any project you’re likely to encounter resistance in a number of forms. The book rah-rahs you through those moments and then tells you not to overthink something, since overthinking it might just keep you from doing it. The book explains that you should just rush in, fool, and get it done and then correct it later.

This doesn’t account for the fact that revising and rewriting itself can be a great obstacle, and creating the first draft of a masterwork is not the end in itself.

So I wasn’t that impressed with it. But I’m not the target audience.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is the best Prey book in a long time. Partly that’s because half occurs in the late 1980s, whose memories are warm, fuzzy, and indistinct enough that there’s no sudden eruptions of “Reagan sucks, huh?” or “The tired old man we elected king is going to start a nuclear war while calling for his nurse!” Well, nothing along those lines in the olden times. When we get to the modern day, Sandford gets to put in a character who is a gun nut (and Davenport doesn’t care for gun nuts), but this particular “gun nut” is an archetypical “gun nut” put into little social lesson for readers. But this gun nut is not anything like the gun nuts I know. Sandford manages to get him shot to prove that having a gun for self-defense doesn’t help in books.

But aside from that.

As a prequel of sorts, the book deals more with Lucas Davenport investigating rather than project managing an investigation. Which is cool. The plot deals with the first case Davenport handled when he was temporarily made a detective out of necessity. Two young girls disappear, and Davenport investigates. The police find a suspect, a homeless man with mental issues, but Davenport is not entirely convinced. However, he cannot pursue his alternate suspect because the brass decide the case is closed and Davenport becomes busy with other investigations.

25 years later, roughly, the girls are unearthed in a suburban neighborhood far from where they went missing and far from the homeless man’s territory. Davenport has to deal with the guilt he feels once he realizes he let a killer continue killing, and one of the recently slain is a longtime friend and series recurring character.

It’s a particularly good book because the political stuff (both fictional and social messaging) is left behind. Mr. Sandford, (or his proxy who Googles him regularly, tell him that) you could probably write more early Davenport books set in the past without losing your readers. Let’s face it, your books aren’t being bought by millenials who need Davenport to have a cell phone and Internet connection. Your books are getting bought by old timers like myself who remember pay phones and dial-up connections.

I didn’t like Odd Hours when I read it last year, so you might have believed, as I did, that I would not rush right out to get one of the Odd Thomas graphic novels. Well, we were both right: I only bought this on a trip to Hooked on Books because I’d already picked up something else that was not quite ten dollars, and I still like to push my credit card purchases over that threshold whenever possible.

In Odd We Trust is a graphic novel prequel to Odd Thomas, so Thomas is still in Pico Mundo, bein’ a fry cook. A child is murdered, and Thomas uses some of his skills to find out whether there’s a child killer lurking in the town or if the killer had something else in mind.

As a graphic novel, the interior voice of Oddie is muted, which is double-edged. As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews of the series, sometimes that interior voice is engaging, sometimes it’s padding. With a graphic novel, you don’t need padding. The book also make allusions to a darker, greater evil game afoot, which fits the Odd Thomas mythos.

So it’s a graphic novel and won’t take too long to read. Basically, a short story with pictures. I’m almost seriously reduced to reading coloring books to fill my annual reading total. But I’ve hit my mark already, and this is book 105 for the year as I prepare to turn the spreadsheet and start listing for 2012.

Books mentioned in this review:

Sadly, it’s not uncommon for me to accidentally re-read a book I’ve already read if I buy it again, but this book presents a special case. I did not even choose to read it. Well, not exactly.

As is my wont, I keep a book of short pieces, columns, and whatnot at the bed side so I can read in 600- or 1000-word increments until I am ready to sleep. It’s also not uncommon for me to bring a book up, brush my teeth, and determine that I am too tired to read after all, so a book will sit on the headboard until the next such time I want to read in bed, which can be a week or two later.

So, anyway, one night, the book was there, I was there, so I started reading it. Little did I know that it was my beautiful wife who brought it up so she could read it, but in the time between when she brought it up and I discovered it, the headboard book shuffling that occurs during dusting had put it onto my stack of books. So this might be the very first time that I’ve re-read a book accidentally in this fashion, although now that my wife knows I can fall for this sort of trickery, I might start finding other books she wants me to read on the headboard.

So my reflections on the book closely mirror what I said in 2004: the book is bifurcated into a part about adolescent love, which is spot-on and amusing, and the second part is about being married to his wife which focuses on the nitpicky little ways they get on each other’s nerves. Maybe those moments make for the best comic recounting, but as for a book that celebrates marriage, they really give short shrift to the basic daily comfort of having a life partner and the joys that surpass the general contentment of a good marriage. That’s, again, probably just because the comedian has to focus on the disparaties, but it doesn’t serve as encouragment to wed.

Not the best Cosby book, but I still love the man and his work.

This book is the 25th in The Executioner series. Within it, Mack Bolan finds himself drawn into a net in Colorado, a trap designed to kill him but also to do something else, something bigger. Bolan finds himself encircled by a paramilitary force that has all the earmarks of the United States Army, cut off from support at a ski resort during a blizzard, and the only way to save the President is to attack. Of course.

Hey, it’s a pulp Bolan book. It’s a fun little read. I still like them, which is good, since I still have 20 or so on my bookshelves to read.

I have this book in the Walter J. Black edition, which is part of the Zane Grey series you find often in book fairs. It’s the second Western I’ve read this year (The Virginian being the first), and I can see the debt that Zane Grey owed to Wilson and to Frederic Remington, the artist. Grey writes a standard western plot and then fills the book with lush, at times too-lush, description of the landscape. It actually detracts from the pacing of the book, but it’s an eighty-year-old narrative, so it has that going against the pacing for a modern reader, too.

Within it, a horse wrangler named Chane meets some horse thieves and whips one of them before being driven from his camp by the gang. The one he whooped shows up at a large, Eastern-based wrangling operation and assumes a position of power, but not before drawing the ire of Chane’s young brother Chess who caught on with the same outfit. The daughter of one of the financial backers is along, and when Chess can’t win her heart, he promises that Chane will.

So you’ve got some romance, some Western violence, and whatnot. It’s not a bad read, but not something I’m going to make a habit of reading. I’ll have to try something from Louis L’Amour to see if that suits me better. As L’Amour wrote his work a little later than Grey and he has a pulp background, I’ll bet it’s more punchy.

And if you want to know what I was talking about when I mentioned reading a book about horse wrangling while watching Krull, there you go.

You would think that since I have chased poor Rob Prather around the Internet for a decade, from his old blog Insults Unpunished to his guest time on Outside the Beltway to social media outlets telling him “I love your Shell Scott novels!” that I would have read more than two in that time period. You would be mistaken. I’ve read Kill Him Twice in 2008 and this book in 2011. I have read more than that, anyway, since I have at least one other paperback on my read shelves and might have gotten some from the Community Library back in the day.

Shell Scott goes to an Arizona resort to rest up and recouperate after being shot in a disagreement with some mob types, but shortly into his stay, movie star and Sophie Loren proxy Lucrezia Brizante seeks his help. Her father is in some kind of trouble, so Scott goes down to the Arizona retirement community to find out if the old man is really in danger. And he finds the mafia moving in, looking for some government money that’s coming to the retirement community.

The style of the book blends some lighthearted, irreverant humor with complicate plots endemic of Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler. It’s not quite as campy as the Dean Martin Matt Helm films, but Scott doesn’t take himself seriously, and one expects that Prather doesn’t take him entirely seriously either as some realism is sacrificed for spectacle. I think I was a little more down on it in 2008, as the review isn’t without reservations, but I guess if you’re in the mood for this particular style of book, it’s better than if you’re not.

So it’s worth a look if you’re in that mood.

I have an advanced reader’s edition of this book, and, blimey, I wouldn’t send this out for review. It contains misspellings and improperly formated sections. As some of you know, I’m working over another book presently, and I’m gnashing my teeth about every last missing comma and whatnot. But the difference between me and a professional is that this ARC contains those errors, but the pros will weed them out by the time the book has gone to press, whereas I’ll publish something with typos in it. And it drives me crazy.

Oh, right, we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about Ghost Radio.

This is a story about a young man with a radio program about the paranormal who has to deal with a ghostly sound pattern communicating with him. He suspects it’s the ghost of his friend Gabriel, who like Joaquin (the narrator) survived an automobile accident that orphaned them both (maybe). Gabriel died during an electrical storm as the duo, rockers and sound engineers, commandeered an abandoned radio station for an impromptu performance.

You know, I can’t really some up the plot for you because it bends and twists reality a bit, and you can’t be sure how sane Joaquin is and what’s going on. The book moves among flashbacks and the present as well as shifting from the first person narrators of Joaquin and his girlfriend/radio partner Alondra. So it moves along, keeps you guessing, and, if you’re like me, you eventually worry that the thing is going to go all Lost and end up sucking. Well, it’s not that bad, although I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. The book’s ending reminded me a lot of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (which I must have read before I was blogging since I can’t find a book review for it–did I read before I blogged? What was that world like?).

Still, it’s a pretty good book. And Gout has not published anything since. I hope he’s working on something.

As advertised, this is a book of questions and answers about various things, such as why the sky is blue except at sunset, why the ocean is blue, who Dr. Pepper was, why the mile is 5,280 feet, and whatnot. It runs about 128 pages and is probably geared to a younger audience, so don’t expect that it’s a science textbook. The questions are not so esoteric that Cecil Adams would cover them in The Straight Dope columns nor Slate in The Explainer columns.

But if you’re a bit rusty or if you want to bone up for obvious questions from your children, it’s probably not a bad idea.