I finished four books in October, and made some good progress on another pair.  I also read about a half dozen comic collections, enough that I’ve decided to do them as their own post this month.  I really wasn’t a fan of most of the books I read this month.  One was just not my thing, another kind of annoyed me and the last was simply not very good. Luckily, I had a new Mistborn book to make sure I was satisfied with at least one of them.

Shadows of Self
Brandon Sanderson

This is the second Mistborn book set after the initial trilogy, starring the Wax and Wayne, who are essentially cowboys and Marasi as they try to stop a madman from throwing the city into chaos. The first book with these characters, The Alloy of Law, felt like a stand-alone tale just to see if this setting was viable.  This one feels like the start of a trilogy.  While there were certainly a few loose ends leftover in the first book, but this seems to put a lot of balls in the air.

This one has a really strong mystery angle, and spends a lot more time exploring elements of the Mistborn world that were left out of the last volume.  The three central characters are more strongly developed as well. Marasi feels like a character with a greater purpose and Wayne actually gets some development outside of being Wax’s sidekick.  Wax, though, grows more conflicted as the novel goes on. He deals directly with the world’s deity and faces a crisis that will make how he reacts in the next book very interesting.  While the methods of the book’s villain are monstrous, the longer the book goes on the better the motive’s for those actions seem.  It seems more and more that Wax and crew are fighting for a status quo that doesn’t really deserve defending.  Marasi seems like one of the few people to realize how messed up things are and have some ideas on how to effect change.

Shadows of Self ends up feeling kind of rushed compared to Sanderson’s more sprawling works, but it is still a wholly satisfying read that will be followed up on in just a few months.

Death on the Nile
Agatha Christie

Another Hercule Poirot mystery.  For the first half of this book it was one of my favorite of Christie’s, just short of And Then There Were None.  Unfortunately, the further it goes along the less enjoyable it becomes.  It starts with a mostly sympathetic victim.  She had done something bad, but she is still appealing enough that her inevitable murder is tragic.  Set up on the same Nile tour as the victim are a handful of characters that are interesting in their own right and all have possible motives for murder.  When the veil is finally pulled away at the end, it is more disappointing than anything I can remember.  

It is just so obvious.  The only reason the reader might not guess the conclusion is that so much of the middle portion is deliberately misleading on the writer’s part.  There are parts that read like one continuous scene where later it is revealed that there are cuts.  As the book goes on the culprit seems clear, other than the fact that the person is on the list of people for whom committing the murder would be impossible.  As enjoyable as the rest of the book is how this book ends just wasn’t enjoyable.  

At the Mountains of Madness
HP Lovecraft

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a horror guy. The closest I get to engaging with anything related to horror is playing the occasional video game or watching Ghostbusters or The Addams Family.  With those games, even something as tame as Resident Evil 4 has been known to force me to put down the controller and leave the room for a few minutes.  Despite this, when a book club I’m in decided to read some Lovecraft for our October book, I joined in.

It’s not scary.  There are some horrifying things happening in this book, but the view point is so remote that it has little effect.  His descriptions of the ancient cities with non-Euclidian architecture and unknown horrors create a sense of wonder, not dread.  There are plenty of terrible things that happen, but they mostly happen off the page.  The reader only really sees the results.  The reader is held as such a distance that the big events don’t have as big of an impact as they could.

The Paper Magician
Charlie N Holmberg

The Paper Magician is a good set up in search of a story to make use of it.  It starts very strong, with young Ceony graduating from magic school and being forced into a field of magic in which she has no interest.  It does okay work setting up who Ceony is and starting to fill in how magic works in this series.  Her teacher, Emery Thane, is likewise an interesting guy.  Before the book can start doing developing anything other than Ceony starting to learn paper magic, a woman bursts into the house and rips Thane’s heart out of his chest.  

The bulk of the rest of the book has Ceony trying to retrieve his heart, having fashioned as short term replacement out of paper.  It ends up in an interesting section with her stuck in his real heart, trying to get out and having showdowns with an evil magician.  Her competence, though, comes almost out of nowhere.  She had just started training, how is she able to evade this very dangerous person.  She also decides she loves, which comes out of nowhere and raises a few alarms since he is supposed to be teaching her and is roughly twice her age.  It isn’t a bad book; I would consider picking up the rest of the series for the right price.  It just needs something more to the plot, developments that actually develop and don’t just happen out of nowhere.

Another not quite banner month for me. The quality of the titles I read made up for how few of them there were. I can guarantee that I will have read more books next month, if only because I am already at three right now. Also, starting next month I am going to include comic collections I read in this write up. This likely means that these posts will be lengthened by one or two entries every month, since I tend to go through at least that many every month. Often I nab them on sale on Amazon for a 3 or 4 dollars and watch them crash my Kindle.

Pysch’s Guide to Crime Fighting for the Completely Unqualified
Shawn Spencer and Burton Guster

Chad Gervich

This is a fine companion piece to the series.  It is written in character by Shawn, with both willing and unwilling help from the rest of the cast, as the series goes along. Each chapter seems to be written a little past when the previous ones were.  If the show works for you, then the book will as well. This book is pointless, but it perfectly captures the tone and feel of the show.  If Shawn were to have written a book, this is what it would be.  Part self-aggrandizement, part nonsense and wholly unable to stay on track. It is just a ton of fun.

Summerland

Michael Chabon

Reading a new Chabon is always a delight.  Even going in expecting something a little watered down, thanks to Summerland being a YA book, I was still excited to get to it.  In some ways, it is a little watered down.  This is a book intended for a younger audience and its subjects are aimed at them, but that does not stop it from also being rich and fulfilling.

Summerland takes a kind of hero’s journey and filters it through several kinds of myths and the great American pastime, baseball.  It works better than it should.  Ethan Feld is terrible at baseball, but he is scouted by a “hero recruiter” anyway.  When the mischievous and downright villainous Coyote tries to destroy the lodgepole, the great ash tree that ties all the worlds together, he joins up with his friends Jennifer T Rideout and Thor Wingnutt to stop him.

It eases the reader into it fairly complex and somewhat whimsical fantasy world easily and effectively sets the heroes on their path, but the back end rushes through their adventures so fast that it feels like it is falling apart.  It reads like a book that was originally going to be a trilogy, but the writer decided last minute to do it in one volume and jammed two books worth of plot into the back half.  The events and developments still feel right, but they don’t get enough time to settle.  

Despite the rushed ending, Summerland is still an excellent novel.  The writing is better than the typical YA book, and the margin between it and the median is significant.  

The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde

It hadn’t read any Fforde all year, and a book club I’m in decided to read this, so I thought it was worth another run through.  Thursday Next remains one of my absolutely favorite characters and this book remains a perfect mashup of classic literature, mystery and weird alternate reality scifi.  The plot stays fairly simple if only to allow the readers to absorb the strangeness of this world as they go and still follow along.  That doesn’t mean it is an easy book the read, you will be absolutely lost if you don’t have at least a passing knowledge of classic lit, specifically and obviously Jane Eyre, and British history.  As much as I think Fforde has improved as a writer since this book’s publication, it is hard to match the sheer originality of this first entry to this series.

I didn’t get a lot of reading done last month. Again, I was working too much too much to get a lot of reading done. I did finish the last of the Star Wars books I was reading and I devoured the Harper Lee’s new book, despite having some serious misgivings about how it came to be published. Honestly, I had read into that situation more closely before the book was released I likely would not have bought it. In the end, as distasteful as its release may be, it is being released and it does no one any good for me not to read it. Next month I hope to get back on track with my reading.

X-Wing: Isard’s Revenge

Michael Stackpole

I had never read this book before. I wasn’t aware of its existence for the longest time.  Despite only coming out and being set 2 years after The Bacta War, Isard’s Revenge feels like a much later edition. It feels like Stackpole taking one last trip with the characters he created.  Despite being fairly action packed, it never feels that high stakes. This is a villain the team has not only already beaten; they completely dismantled her from a seat of power.  The specter of her that returns here doesn’t feel all that threatening.  Still, it is a fun romp with these characters.  Nearly every dangling plot thread from the first four books is dealt with in largely satisfying ways.  One in particular, though, feels like it is forced to set up some that is coming later. That is Asyr letting everyone else think she is dead to get her out of the life of hero that she is being forced into by eternal pain in the ass Borsk Fey’lya feels forced. It isn’t completely out of character, but it really feels like a choice made because her relationship with Gavin was going to be allowed to continue.  That is the one discordant note in an otherwise enjoyable but lightweight affair.

Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee

(I am not going into the rancid background for how this book came to be published.  The story is out there, if you want to look it up.  It is gross, but it doesn’t really factor into the book itself.) This is a complex, conflicted work.  It certainly feels like the unedited draft that it is, muddled and formless. That’s what happens when you dig up a half century draft that became another novel completely and publish it with minimal editing. It also has a close, but unclear, relationship to To Kill a Mockingbird. It takes place later than that book, and features many of the same characters, but they aren’t quite the same characters. The differences between those versions of the characters have been the source of much consternation among readers. A lot of that comes from Go Set a Watchman being in many ways a more complex work.

To Kill a Mockingbird has Scout regard her father, Atticus, as almost superhuman. He is the epitome of good in her mind.  At no point in the book is that belief questioned. He is all that in To Kill a Mockingbird.  In Go Set a Watchman, the adult Scout must grapple with the fact that her father is not perfect, but a flawed and fallible person like everyone else.  Not only must she confront this, but so must readers who grew up reading Mockingbird also have to face it.  It is a hard truth to face, but it is also a more mature situation than the childish take in the previous book.  If only the rest of Go Set a Watchman was as mature and well-realized.  It is largely a collection of anecdotes that doesn’t really build to anything.  They are just there.  It is not unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, but everything comes together more satisfactorily there than it does here, where things happen and the book ends. There is no arc or conclusion, just a collection of loosely connected events. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it is well worth reading.

I didn’t do quite as much branching out as I had hoped to do in June.  Instead, the only books I finished were a collection of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries.  They were good, but it wasn’t exactly a wide variety.  I did read on some other books, but I didn’t finish either of them. Hopefully by the end of next month I’ll have finished a couple of those.

The Mirror Crack’d

Agatha Christie

This is a straightforward mystery for Ms Marple.  Here is at her oldest and frailest, yet also at her most engaged.  For once she is a genuine part of the story, investigating and not just coming in having solved the mystery off page.  The mystery here deals with a subject that is still very much in a big deal: celebrity.  Ire is directed not so much at the famous actress at the center of this story and her unusual life, but on the people obsessed with her fame.  A woman falls dead at a party thrown by an aging star and people assume that the star was the target, with the hardest scrutiny falling on the members of her household.  The subject matter feels fairly fresh for being more than fifty years old.  Obsession with celebrity is still a cancer that affects our society.

A Pocketful of Rye

Agatha Christie

This was easily my least favorite of the bunch.  It is another straightforward mystery, but this one doesn’t really play fair.  There are no actual cheats, but it is misleading in a way that doesn’t just feel like a mystery story.  That would not be such a problem if the eventual outcome was satisfactory.  That is not the case here.  The victim is an older man and the suspects are his spouse and children, with some suspicion falling on the household staff.  The murder, eventually murders, is done to match an old nursery rhyme, which is also the source of the title, but there is no good connection to that nursery rhyme in the story. It’s use is arbitrary and doesn’t really seem to fit.  Arbitrary seems to be the mode of the this whole outing. Surrounded by better or at least more interesting stories in this collection, the feebleness of this story stands out.

At Bertram’s Hotel

Agatha Christie

This is an odd one, a mystery with no crime to investigate for the first three quarters of the book.  Marple is actually around the whole time, but while there are various mysteries around, other than some vague talk of robberies nothing is presented as anything worthy of investigation.  The one small crime is some shoplifting by a teenage girl, and she returns the stolen property soon enough.  Marple is on vacation at the hotel, and there is some connection to the hotel and a series of daring robberies. The mystery unfolds about a young girl looking to possibly arrange a marriage with her paramour.  It turns out the girl’s mother, who abandoned her for what she thought was the girl’s own good years ago, is also staying at the hotel and possibly involved in the shady goings on.  When the murder does occur near the end, it is solved almost immediately, though not strictly satisfactorily. The inversion of the usual formula works to excellent effect here.  At Bertram’s Hotel keeps readers on their toes waiting to see exactly what the mystery is.

The Moving Finger

Agatha Christie

This is another one of those Marple mysteries where the detective herself is little more than a deus ex machina that shows up at the end of the story to wrap things up.  The Moving Finger is as much of a pastoral romance as it is a mystery.   Siblings Jerry and Joanna Burton move out to a small village in the country while he recovers from injuries sustained in an airplane crash.  While there they encounter a rash of “poison pen” letters, detailing supposed sins of the residents, though all of the letters are clearly false, before one of the recipients apparently commits suicide.  From there, Jerry helps some of the townsfolk figure out exactly who is responsible, while growing closer to the strange daughter of the dead woman.  Interesting characters parade themselves in front of Jerry until Marple shows up to explain what has been going on.  It is reasonably enjoyable, but nothing too exciting.

May was another eight book month for me, propped up by a quick run through of the rest of the good Star Wars books. I might read some more next month, I have never read Zahn’s later Star Wars books, but I think I am about done with those for now. I really don’t have a lot to say about them, they are largely simple books. I also finished with Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series and with Edding’s Mallorean, which frees me up next month to move on to some different authors.

Timeless

Gail Carriger

This is the last of the Parasol Protectorate series, and it does a great job of trying everything up. It doesn’t do anything to move beyond the designation of “bon bon book”, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining. This time Alexia and her compatriots make a trip to Egypt to meet an ancient vampire that lives there, as well as to get to the bottom of the so-called God Breaker Plague. It doesn’t quite add mummies to the combination of vampires and werewolves, but it does enough with that third of the monster triumvirate. Without spoiling the twist, there are varying motives for the call to have Lady Maccon and her unique family visit this vampire hive. And for once, things don’t appear certain to work out perfectly happily.

I greatly enjoyed this series. They aren’t the deepest books, but they are charmingly written and plotted. They are just pure fun. I look forward to picking up the books in the sequel series, as well as the forthcoming conclusion to her Finishing School books.

The Krytos Trap

Michael Stackpole

The third X-Wing book is my least favorite of the series. This one gets even further away from pilots flying X-Wings than Wedge’s Gamble did. Protagonist Corran Horn is captured by Isard and held in her inescapable prison, while his completely innocent wingman Tycho is on trial for his apparent murder. Meanwhile, Isard has released a plague on the newly freed Coruscant that is bankrupting the alliance in their attempts to cure it. The Krytos Trap is still an enjoyable book, but it gets kind of ridiculous as it goes on, with copious deceptions and bluffs and double bluffs and misdirections all over the place. It isn’t truly hard to follow, everything is laid out rather clearly, but many of the plans are needlessly complex. Corran, stuck in prison, isn’t able to do anything and what the rest of the team spends most of their time doing, defending Tycho, turns out to be useless as well. Still, it does set the stage for Stackpole’s excellent final book, at least for a while.

The Bacta War

Michael Stackpole

This one gets back to the good stuff. Rogue Squadron goes rogue, leaving the Alliance to chase down Isard to where she fled to at the end of the last book. Of course, one squadron of X-Wings is no match for a Super Star Destroyer, so they must find help. This book closes up most of the plot threads that Stackpole has been working with since the first book and it provides some of the best action in the series so far. The team wages a guerrilla war on Isard, systematically dismantling her small fleet that holds her monopoly on bacta, the Star Wars miracle dug. The only real problem I have with this book is that by this point Stackpole has established most of the squadron with fully realized characters and does little to make them seem in danger. And that is held true with how few casualties they have. I really do like the conclusion of Corran and Mirax’s romance, which is one of the most fun parts of this series.

Heir to the Empire

Timothy Zahn

Zahn’s Star Wars books, though they are contradicted in many ways by the wholly inferior prequel movies, are the best that the Star Wars EU has to offer. With this first book, he does a great job of nailing the voices of the main trio, Luke, Leia and Han, and adds in a handful of compelling new characters. The most compelling of those is the new villain, Grand Admiral Thrawn. He has a great visual, with the blue skin and glowing red eyes, as well a more considered approach than Vader’s murderous one, though he is no less dangerous. Like any great start to any multi part saga, Heir to the Empire tells a great small story while also setting up the conflicts that will come up in the later books. This book has the remnant of the Empire, now under the control of Thrawn, starting some kind of big new plan. The heroes are beset by alien assassins trying to kill the pregnant Leia while they turn to Lando and new character Talon Karrde to help them with secure some former smugglers to help with shipping.

Dark Force Rising

Timothy Zahn

Things continue here, with Luke meeting with supposed Jedi Master Joruus C’Baoth while Lando and Han look for the lost Katana fleet and Leia goes to the home of the Noghri to learn how Vader supposedly helped them. Meanwhile, there are power plays going on in the new Alliance Capitol that could disrupt the war effort. Aside from Thrawn, Zahn also introduced a few other highly memorable characters to Star Wars. Talon Karrde is the secretive leader of a smuggling ring. He is not Han Solo, the rogue with a heart of gold, he is a more pragmatic opportunist. Unfortunately, his attempts to stay neutral in the galactic Civil War and his access to some choice knowledge eventually force him onto the side of the angels. While he isn’t one to do the right thing because it is right, he does have a certain sense of honor, including repaying his debts. The other is the first in the fairly long line of women introduced to be Luke’s love interest. Luke’s love life is fertile ground that was largely left untouched in the movies, and Mara Jade is easily the best character introduced as a potential love interest. She is a sort of apprentice of the Emperor, trained with some rudimentary force knowledge to be his assassin. She doesn’t have any conscious use of the force, but enough of certain skills to be useful to the Emperor. Her connection to him allowed him to give her one last order before he died, to kill Luke. Her gradual shift from hating Luke to realizing his innate goodness is some great character development over the course of this series. Again, this book does a great job of maintaining the feel of Star Wars, giving all of the main characters plenty to do but never running short of new ideas and situations.

The Last Command

Timothy Zahn

The conclusion has everyone meeting up at a backwater planet that houses some preserved cloning facilities. This plot thread about the Clone Wars is where this book is completely different from what the prequels established, but I have to say that this series version of the Clone Wars far excels that of the movies. Thrawn made a deal with the devil to recruit the services of the mad Jedi clone Joruus C’Baoth and now the clone tries to take over. He used the clones Force powers to help control his troops, especially the mentally weak ones he is churning out of the cloning facilities. And while Thrawn has measures in place to deal with him, it is a distraction. Luke also battles C’Baoth, as well as a clone made from the hand he lost on Bespin. His only ally is Mara Jade, who is just as likely to want to kill him. Han and Lando are there, but they are distracted by trying to take out the cloning facility and Leia has to deal with problems on the effectively blockaded Capitol. This book is just as good as the previous two, though I don’t know how well the final showdown between Luke Luuke and C’Baoth works. It is also disappointing that Thrawn gets dispatched. His end is fitting and deserved, but it would have been nice to keep such an effective threat around for later books.

The Seeress of Kell

David Eddings

I never really warmed to this series. It ends just as strangely as it started. It is anticlimactic and sees the main character sidelined for a big part of its climax. The ever growing gang finally reaches their destination and they actually use their powers, some. I don’t really want to tear this series down, I didn’t like it but I don’t feel the need to hate it. It wasn’t awful or offensive, I just didn’t like it. I will not seek out other books by Eddings. I’m done.

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

Michael D Sellers

This is an interesting look at just what went wrong with Disney’s John Carter movie. While I would argue that the film itself is excellent, there is no denying that it was a significant flop for the company. It is written by a fan of Burroughs’ Sword and Planet series who not only watched as the film was left to die as it was released, but who actually cut some fan trailers and contacted Disney about helping with marketing. So he definitely has an agenda. This book is far from perfect, a lot of page space is spent expounding on numbers of social media posts instead of drawing conclusions about why the numbers were what they were and what those numbers meant. It does set a pretty clear series of events that led to Disney’s disinterested marketing of their very expensive movie.

It is really a stunning tale of incompetent and lack of interest. It was the last movie greenlit by a leaving studio head, working from a mandate that was no longer necessary, with marketing lead without any strategy by another employee that was leaving the company. When work on John Carter was starting, Disney was desperate to get into the teenage boy market, but the time it was to be released they had bought Marvel Comics (and were working on buying Star Wars), which pretty well secured that market, making John Carter redundant. Without anyone passionate for the project left at the Disney office, they simply left it to die, seemingly hoping that the name of the Pixar veteran director to sell the movie. Then they threw it under the buss as a massive flop just as it was released. It is a sad tale, since John Carter is a damn good movie based on some very entertaining books.