This month all my reading time was stolen away, again for NaNoWriMo. I still managed to finish a couple of books, though one was a reread. I’ll have to really tear through some in December to hit my yearly goal of fifty. Right now I am six books short. I’ll need to read quickly to catch up.

Curse of Chalion

Lois McMaster Bujold

I read this yet again, this time for inspiration while writing my own stuff. It is still really great. My thoughts haven’t changed much from when I read it last year. It is maybe the best stand-alone fantasy novel ever.

Dead Man’s Folly

Agatha Christie

A Poirot mystery, and not the best one. There are a lot of points of interest in this story, but the mystery is not really one of them. One of the characters is a mystery writer, a sure stand in or reflection for the writer, at least in some capacity. If I had liked the rest of the story more, I might have been interested in tangling out just what Mrs. Oliver is about. There are also some repugnant racial sentiments expressed by characters, though whether those are simply the opinions of the characters or the author is a question. A character is mentally challenged and several characters suggest that it is due to her mixed race heritage. The book also uses the conceit of a “murder party” something that I guess happens, though I’ve only ever heard of it in mysteries and every time someone is actually killed. This time, it is the assigned victim of the murder scavenger hunt thing. Poirot eventually sorts it out, and it is a pretty awful, in that what happened was terrible not that is was no good. While not exactly obvious, the solution was also not particularly surprising either. It is just not Christie’s best work.

I did quite a bit reading in October, all of it in two series. I finished up my reread of the Outlander series, which was largely entertaining. I also got caught up with Jasper Fforde’s Last Dragonslayer series. I don’t expect to come close to matching this pace next month, since NaNoWriMo will be taking up a lot of my free time. It is also why I am kind of phoning in these reviews. Let’s get on with it.

The Song of the Quarkbeast

Jasper Fforde

I saw that a new Jasper Fforde book was coming out, which reminded me that I never read the one before it. So I bought both this book and its sequel. These are his Young Adult books, skewing a little younger than his other work, but they are still highly entertaining. Jennifer Strange is still leading the magic company of Kazam, with its founder, the Great Zambini, still missing. Now she is facing problems with the only other magical practitioners in the Ununited Kingdoms, meddling from the King, the reproduction habits of Quarkbeasts, and the mystery of what happened to The Once Magnificent Boo. She has to hold together Kazam in the face of a competition to determine who controls the future of magic itself.

Song of the Quarkbeast is another great Jasper Fforde book. It keeps the trademark humor and wit, but aims it at a younger set than something like the Thursday Next series. This book is funny. It also pulls the curtain back a little more on how the word of this series works. I liked this one more than the first one. It spends less time getting to know the characters; it just gets to the fun.

The Eye of Zoltar

Jasper Fforde

I followed up book two with book three immediately. It is a similar thing. This time, Jennifer goes to a foreign country where magic is outlawed to rescue the Once Magnificent Boo, as well as look for a magical macguffin that may or may not exist, the Eye of Zoltar from the title. It is not a quest, though, those require regulations that Jennifer doesn’t want to deal with.

On its own, this is a fine story, but it is kind of a digression from the characters and setting that the previous two books established. The Eye of Zoltar is an excuse to the a few characters out of the way in order to set up the next (final?) book in the series. That would be a problem if this book wasn’t still supremely entertaining. It introduces some interesting new characters and some entertaining concepts. Again, I don’t like this series quite as much as I do Fforde’s “adult” books, but there is still enough wit and humor to make it worthwhile.

A Breath of Snow and Ashes

Diana Gabaldon

It had been a long time since I had read this book. I remembered snatches of events, but not the sequence or the totality of them. Much like Dragonfly in Amber, this book is one to close up all the lingering plot threads from the previous books and clearing the way for the next one. The community of Fraser’s Ridge in the back country of North Carolina is firmly established by now, and thing are moving rapidly to the start of the Revolutionary War.

This is a sprawling book, with tons of small stories, but no strong central one. There is the growing unrest in the colony, with Jamie, knowing the outcome, trying to balance safety and his other obligations, with not allowing them to get caught on the wrong side of history again. They also have to deal with Ian’s return from living with Indians and some troubling new tenants, along with a host of other problems. It does let the stories take their time in the telling. The tale of the Christies’ is a sad, strange saga, with Claire’s protégé Malve doomed by the regressive gender notions of the time as well as her father’s harshness. It ended the only way it could. Her attempts to pin her out of wedlock child on Jamie is a strange soap opera-esque note, mostly because there is no chance that it is true. The fact that dealing with that accusation takes up a good portion of the back of the book is somewhat disappointing. The big deck clearing decision is Roger and Brianna taking their family back to the future. It was necessitated by the heart condition their baby had, but seemed to be mostly an effort to focus the narrative of the next few books.

A Breath of Snow and Ashes is a somewhat weak book on its own, but as a part of the ongoing Outlander Saga it is a fine entry in the series.

An Echo in the Bone

Diana Gabaldon

Another Outlander book. This one deals with start of the Revolutionary War and, despite their best efforts to the contrary, Jamie and Claire’s participation in it. At the start of the book, Jamie and Claire attempt to go back to Scotland, both to visit his sister and to get his printing press, which is how he plans to aid in the war effort. However, their attempts to secure a berth on a ship lead to a series of misadventures that bring them right to the heart of the fighting. It is a story scattered all over colonial America.

It is a little too scattered. The sheer number of POV characters has gotten out of hand, and Gabaldon doesn’t stick with any one of them long enough for the reader to get comfortable. Especially with the frequent trips to the ‘future’ with Brianna and Roger. It is not that their portion of the story isn’t interesting, but it is completely divorced from the rest of the book. It also brings in Jamie’s son William as a major player in the story. He is still unaware of his paternity, but he and Jamie keep crossing paths. Ian also begins a romance with a young Quaker girl. Other than its inability to keep focused on one story for any length of time, this is a fine entry in the series, though it is clearly a part one with a part two coming.

Written in my Own Hearts Blood

Diana Gabaldon

I did another quick read through of the most recent Outlander novel after I caught back up. It reads a lot better when you know what happened to lead to the situation where the book starts. It also is a lot more of a focused book than either of the last two. While there is just as much Roger and Brianna stuff, it is kept to its own section, letting it stand on its own better and not interfere with the other part of the story.

This one lets the Revolutionary War part play out, but with everything at the end seems to be setting up could be the end of this series. Roger and Brianna are back, William knows who his Daddy is and the Frenchman is not letting up in his search for Fergus, who may or may not be heir to a French Lord. I don’t profess to have any clue about how it will play out, but it seems like it is leading to a conclusion.

I did a lot of reading in August. Fresh off of reading the latest Outlander volume, I decided to go back and quickly read through the series. I was really lost for the first half of Written in My Own Heart’s Blood and I wanted to jog my memory. I also continued with reading Sayers’ Wimsey books, which I’ve just about run out of at now, as well as some nonfiction and knocked another tome off of my stack of unread fantasy novels. It was a good month.

The Office of Shadow

Matthew Sturges

I mostly liked Sturges’ Midwinter. Its good parts were really good, but it was all around sort of uneven. Office of Shadows is of similar quality, though it is steadier; it doesn’t have the highs and lows in quality of its predecessor, but I’m not sure I liked it as much. Instead of being a fantasy Dirty Dozen, this is more of a fantasy spy thriller. Except in Midwinter the supposed suicide mission got started pretty much immediately, where the thriller stuff here takes a long time to get moving. The cast is also less enjoyable. Returning character Silverdun is still an interesting character, a man of many talents but filled with self-loathing. His new allies feel like missed opportunities. Sela is a girl trained from birth to kill and Ironfoot is lowborn soldier turned scholar who is plucked from his studies to become a spy. They are at least theoretically interesting characters, but the book doesn’t explore them and their motivations as well as they could. Ironfoot is almost ignored at times and Sela spends her time dealing with a completely uninteresting romantic subplot.

The big danger the Seelie elves, the “good guys” country, face is a weapon being developed by the Unseelie that could tip the balance of their Cold War. The thriller part of book is just too abbreviated. Too much of the book is taken up with the training. It takes just way too long to get the three agents to be agents. Then their spy mission is somewhat short and conspiracies and plots that precipitate the coming conflict are dealt with almost perfunctorily. The biggest problem is that the political situation between these two warring countries is not very well explored. It is hard to get a read on the stakes when the make-up of the conflict is so vague. Still, while I’ve spent most of my time complaining, I actually liked The Office of Shadow quite a bit. Silverdun is a great character, one who has already grown significantly in the last book and grows further here. And the world of Faerie here is interesting enough that I wanted to know more. The Office of Shadow is almost a great book, but it has enough flaws that it ends up being merely interesting.

Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn

Diana Gabaldon

I sped through books 2-4 of Gabaldon’s Outlander series. I’ve read them before; this was a speed reread just trying to jog my memory for what was going on heading into Written in My Own Hearts Blood. Plus, my interest in this series was rekindled by the TV Adaptation (see post coming … sometime soon). I do like each of these books, with Voyager likely being my favorite in the series.

Dragonfly in Amber is interesting because it is the one true tragedy, meant in the sense of genre and not judgment, in this series. It starts by letting the reader know that the happy ending from the first book did not last, then slowly showing how everything went wrong. It also feels like the end of the first chapter of this extensive saga. Most of the characters introduced in the first book are out of the series after this one, with the next book building up the supporting cast again. The sense of inevitability as things go wrong really helps it feel all the more tragic. Still, since it is tragic, it also tends to be an entry in the series that I am not too eager to revisit.

The third book, Voyager, is a pretty big shake up. The book ranges all over the place. It starts with a really neat section where in the present (actually 1968) Claire, Roger and Briana search for records of Jamie surviving Culloden is intertwined with Jamie’s first hand experiences in the 18^th century. Once they track him to 1767, Claire does the inevitable and goes back again. After meeting Jamie in Edinburgh, Claire and Jamie’s adventures take them from Scotland to the Caribbean. It is a far reaching adventure that introduces a host of new characters to replace all the ones lost in Dragonfly in Amber. It is a long book, but one with several separate stories going on, starting with the search for Jamie, then Claire and him getting to know each other again and then their experiences in the New World. It is really just a load of fun.

Finally, Drums of Autumn is Briana and Roger’s book. It does have Clair and Jamie settling in the North Carolina wilderness, but the most compelling story is the romance between Briana and Roger. At first it is just her adjusting to living without either of her parents. Eventually, inevitably, Bree ends up also going back through the stones, followed closely by Roger. Drums of Autumn is not as tight a narrative as the previous three books. Aside from the first bit of Voyager, they each covered a relatively short time period. Drums takes place over the course of several years, time enough for Jamie and Claire to turn a bit of North Carolina wilderness into a thriving community. This is the first part of the American part of the series and the first where my memory of the order of events starts to get shaky.

Next month I hope to get through the next two. I am already at the point where I can’t remember what happened in which book, so the next few should be slower going than the more familiar ones.

The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved the Greece – And Western Civilization

Barry Strauss

This was an interesting look at the Battle of Salamis between the Persian Empire and the Greeks. It is a good primer to that conflict, giving the reader a good introduction to the big players in that fight and the political set up that lead to not only the war but the two sides’ manner of prosecuting it. It is hard to say much about nonfiction when you aren’t that familiar with the subject, and I’m not here. That is why one tends to read nonfiction, to gain understanding, which this book does a good job of imparting.  The writing style, though, is good. It is informative, but not dry. It tells it like a story, albeit one with research behind it. While there is enough uncertainty is events that long ago, The Battle of Salamis does a good job of presenting what happened along with a few likely scenarios for how it happened. In all this a good read.

Have His Carcase

Dorothy Sayers

Yet another Peter Wimsey mystery, this one being the second to feature Peter’s love interest Harriet Vane. Have His Carcase is one of the most enjoyable Wimsey stories. It starts with Harriet stumbling across a body while talking a walk along the beach during her vacation. Being a mystery writer and fairly versed in the ways of murder and murder investigations immediately gathers relevant details, which is fortunate since by the time she makes it to the police and the get back to the scene the body has went out with the tide. With Harriet involved in a murder, Lord Peter Wimsey is not going to be far behind. He shows up to help her investigate and renew his attempts to woo her. The two of them work together to get to the bottom of a case that involves a disappearing body, an uncertain time of death and victim with absurd Ruritanian notions.

While I’ve enjoyed Ms Vane’s other appearances, I think this one may be her best. She was mostly just the victim/suspect in her first appearance and in the later Gaudy Night she works separate from Peter almost the entire time. Here the two of them actually work together. They do have some nice chemistry. You can see her appreciation for his talents and exasperation with his idiosyncrasies. He has to try to help her without overwhelming her; to convince her that he is not just there to rescue her. I liked the contrast between their fledgling relationship with the sad and dysfunctional ones of the victim and her gigolo fiancé.

I got my usual four books in this month, but I am already blowing by that for next month. I’ve got one finished and one near done for August already. The four books in July were some really good ones, and a wide mix. I’ve got some adventure, some mystery, some fantasy, some magic realism; tons of stuff for just four books.

The Thief

Clive Cussler and Justin Scott

This is just pure adventure. This time, Isaac Bell is helping out a man who has found a way to shoot talking motion pictures, while working against a German man trying to get the invention back for the Kaiser. This time Isaac’s fiancée Marion takes a larger role than before, since the case deals with her line of work.

There is very little outstanding about the Thief, other than it more ridiculous than usual plot. It is an excellently executed adventure. While the clients invention of a talking picture would be a big deal, the villain, a German called the Acrobat thanks to his athletic abilities, want it so he can use propaganda to make sure the United States is on Germany’s side should they go to war with France and Britain. It is a flimsy plot, but one that makes for some fun scenes and set pieces. It is slightly less ridiculous for Isaac to display the prowess he does here than in The Race, when he immediately picks up how to fly a plane as well as the expert pilots in the race. Here he just works as a stunt man on film sets, which fits him perfectly. Really, this is just a might fun adventure.

The Final Solution

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is great, and this book doesn’t change that. It is a bit different, being essentially Sherlock Holmes fan faction. Of course, the old detective in this book is never directly named as Sherlock, but it is clear who he is. It is also better thought out than calling it fan fiction would suggest. As the title would suggest, while it is a mystery it is also about the Holocaust. A young boy has lost his parrot, plus a man has been murdered, and an elderly Sherlock Holmes decides to help track down the bird, which will likely lead to the killer. The boy, a young Jewish kid who was traumatized by what he saw before he fled Germany, is unable to speak, but Sherlock is still able to help him. It is an excellent novella, a satisfying mystery with plenty extra to chew on as well. Like everything else by Chabon, I highly recommend this.

Written in My Own Hearts Blood

Diana Gabaldon

This is the eighth book in Gabaldon’s Outlander series and it continues to be enjoyable. Though I could swear I’ve read book seven, An Echo in the Bone, I can’t for the life of me recall most of what happened in it. So that made some of the early chapters in this one kind of frustrating. After I found my footing, it was a great ride. Somehow this book is almost a thousand pages long, yet still left me wanting more. It also somehow felt uneventful for a book of this length. Part of that is the problem with a long running series like this. After eight books, this series is populated with a host of interesting and intriguing characters and there just aren’t enough pages to go around. That is a problem that plagued the middle part of my favorite book series, the Wheel of Time. Here it is less pronounced, but still extant. Another problem it shares with that series is that that this book feels less like a complete piece and more of a chapter in a larger Saga. In the first half of this series, each book was complete, though they all left hooks for further stories. Outlander is the story of how Claire came to be in the past and with Jamie. Dragonfly in Amber is the story of how that all fell apart. Voyager brings them back together and ends with another fresh start. The two books previous to Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, while the definitely contain complete stories, don’t feel as complete as the previous ones. They are as enjoyable on a page to page basis, but not as cohesive a whole. Of course, I may just be misremembering them, since I can’t really recall book seven all that well.

Heart’s Blood takes Jamie and Claire, and all their friends, through the Battle of Monmouth and finally back to their home in North Carolina. Plenty of time is spent hobnobbing with historical figures like George Washington and Benedict Arnold, one of the big draws of the series for me, as well as balancing the conflict of being friends and relatives with people on the other side of the conflict. There is also the aftermath of Jamie’s son William finding out that he is the bastard son of a Scottish traitor. This book has the younger players really growing up. Ian finds love, William takes some adult responsibilities and even young Germaine starts to become a man. In a section that kind of doesn’t work, Roger ends up mucking about in the history of this series, revisiting things that have long since been dead while Brianna deals with some sort of kidnapping plot. Having those two in the future makes it hard to incorporate them in the story, though I think that problem has been resolved. The real problem is with William’s portion of the story. While he does show growth, the book ends with almost none of his questions being answered. Not only about him and his father, though that part of the story does have a least some sort of closure, but also about his search for his possibly dead cousin and/or his cousin’s wife/widow and child. Speculation about him and her is present from the very start, but it is not at all resolved by the end of the book. I assume there are answers to come in the coming volumes of this series, but that means years of waiting and a significant portion of this book used to essentially tread water on this story.

Still, it is another fine entry in this series. I can’t recommend anyone start with this book, but it is a fine continuation of this series.

The Golem and the Jinni

Helene Wecker

This one was certainly interesting. It follows two magical beings as immigrants in early 20^th century America: a Golem created for a man to be his wife, though he died on the crossing passage so she is alone and masterless, and a Jinni who had been trapped for centuries but unleashed by a tinsmith. While situations as virtual immigrants are similar, their points of view and natures are not. The Jinni want’s nothing more than to be free of the spell that traps him in human form. He acts just as would if he were still a still free in the desert, with no concern or regard for anyone else. The Golem, however, is intimately aware of everyone’s feelings, being able to sense people’s thoughts, and desire’s nothing more than to fulfill her purpose and help them. They both have to deal with being immigrants in America, along with trying to conceal and master their natures.

The first three quarters of the book are excellent. It slowly reveals the characters and their problems. Soon the two protagonists meet and help each other grow. Unfortunately, the ending is a real let down. The slow building cracks in the two’s facades of humanity start to crack naturally as they become more involved with people, but the novel doesn’t allow this to come to fruition. The last part of the book does not deal with the very human problems of these inhuman characters, it becomes all about the magic of how they came to be. The struggles that each character has been facing aren’t really dealt with, merely pushed aside to have a big magical ending. Not that their problems are solved by any means, merely that a completely different kind of struggle takes over the last quarter of the book. It was much less compelling than what came before it. Still, The Golem and The Jinni is an enthralling read, just one that has a somewhat suspect ending. There are some really well drawn characters here, very human whether they are human or not.

I hit my reading average again in May. I would be reading more, but I am stuck on a book I’m really not enjoying. Not because the book is particularly bad, it is just not what I want to read right now. Unfortunately, I am constitutionally incapable of not finishing a book I’ve started. So instead of reading, I do something else, like play DS or watch basketball. Still, I guarantee that I’ll have that book finished by the end of June and hopefully a higher total number of books read. This month is almost all mysteries.

The Magician’s Nephew

CS Lewis

I really wish I had read the Narnia books when I was younger. The two I’ve read so far have been excellent children’s books, but definitely children’s books. They are good, but definitely for a young audience. Still, CS Lewis is a great writer and he writes kids really well. His child characters actually feel like children, changing rapidly from the most selfish little assholes to kind and generous sweethearts. Of course, the children don’t appear quite as simply foolish as many of the adult characters here. The magician is a complete fool, and even the Witch is both dangerous and ridiculous.

This is a slightly more involved tale that The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe. That one is fairly simple. They children go to Narnia, then save Narnia. Here, you have Polly and Digory going back and forth, visiting several different worlds, accidentally bringing people back with them, and the creation of Narnia. But the book is no longer than the next one (since I read them out of order) just a little more scattered. Still, there is something clearly building in Lewis’ melding of mythologies.

A Bitter Truth

Charles Todd

This is the first (I think) in a series of mysteries about Bess Crawford, a WW1 Nurse. She returns to England on leave only to find a battered woman freezing on her doorstep, so she takes her in. Helping Lydia, the woman on the doorstep,  leads to Bess getting involved in a murder and a mystery about a missing child. It is not great, but it is largely enjoyable. Lydia’s family is haunted by past and current traumas and their suspicious behavior is actually justified by the situation. At least, it is if you accept the pall cast over this family by a death that happened more than 30 years before.

Bess is an interesting enough character, but her role in this book is odd. She plays the role of the traditional detective, investigating the mystery but revealing little about herself. But when it comes to the actual crime, she doesn’t do much. She is mostly an observer. Now, with the plot thread about the missing child she is the big mover, but she has little to do with checking murder. Still, it was a fun read overall.

A Murder is Announced

Agatha Christie

Another Miss Marple mystery. I am starting to get a better feel for how Marple’s stories work. She doesn’t really do most of the investigating, she simply solves. Other people do the legwork. Miss Marple does more investigating in this book than she did in the previous books. She actually gets involved rather than just showing up to name the murderer.

This is a rather fun story. Several neighbors of Letitia Blacklock all get letters saying there is going to be a murder that night. There was a party planned, and everyone assumes it is part of a party game. When someone actually dies during a quickly deduced fake break in, everyone’s secrets start to come to light. The eventual solution is a little farfetched, but in a fun way. It is not something that anyone would guess, but doesn’t really break the rules.

Unnatural Causes

PD James

I picked up two of these Dalgliesh books when they were cheap on Amazon, and now I’ve read them both. They are very good mysteries, with very strong suspect characters and crimes, but I don’t care at all about the protagonist. Maybe I need to read more of these or read them in order, but he’s left no impression on me after two books. He’s just kind of there to move the plot along.

Here, a man washes up in his boat with both of his hands severed. Suspicion then falls on the inhabitants, most of them writers, of the small community where the deceased man lived. Dalgliesh happened to be visiting his Aunt, a resident of said community, at the time and assists in solving the murder. Neither of James’ books really lit me on fire. There is nothing particularly wrong with this book, but it simply didn’t grab my interest.

I didn’t actually get a lot of books read in March.  Mostly because one that I did read, Words of Radiance, was so gosh darn long it didn’t leave me a lot of time to read anything else.  Also, I’ve managed to clear my pile of unread physical books down to just a handful and fantasy novels.  The problem with those is that they tend to be really long, which hurts my overall count.  Still, I expect to get back on track in April and May.

Words of Radiance

Brandon Sanderson

The second part of Sanderson epic doorstop series is even better than the first. It does have its rough patches, not unsurprising for a book with a page count well over one thousand, but is overall a very entertaining read. The Stormlight Archive certainly has a different feel than most doorstop fantasy series. While it is only two books in, Sanderson has done a great job of keeping the focus tight. While he is carefully illuminating the fascinating world this series takes place in, the focus has remained on a cast that is remarkably small for a book this size. There are a few chapters that, at this point, are simply world building. The bulk of them, however, follow just a few characters; Shallan, Kaladin, Adolin and Dalinar. Also, by the middle of this volume they are all in the same geographical place, further centralizing the narrative.

While the first book belonged to Kaladin, following his origins and journey, this one is Shallan’s. Here we find out her history and what made her travel halfway across the world to steal something from Jasnah Kholin. Kaladin still has his part, but Shallan is the big mover here. The parts of Words of Radiance set in the present, most of it, were excellent. Especially Shallan’s growth from a sheltered young girl to a more wise and cunning woman, a real player in these machinations. But her past, while not without merit, seemed a little “after school special”-y to me. That sounds harsher than I really mean it to. Her situation is largely gotten across quickly in those scenes, but Words of Radiance repeatedly returns to belabor the points, every time giving just a glimpse more. That recipe worked much better in the first book, but I was not as big a fan of it here, despite actually liking Shallan more as a character than Kaladin.

Most of these epic fantasy series have larger than life protagonists. They are generally heroes, if not at the start then by the end, and accomplish great, near superhuman feats. In The Stormlight Archive, many are expressly superhuman. At first it is due to the Shards, weapons and armor that grant magical abilities to their users. As this book goes on, the Knights Radiant, people with great powers who “failed” and faded into legend, begin to be reformed and their great powers return. The exceptionality of the protagonists and antagonists is made explicit. They are not really normal people anymore. This is not something unique to this series, but the proliferation of such specialness is. In the Wheel of Time, only Mat, Perrin and especially Rand had anything like that. It definitely gives the series an interesting hook.

In the end, what you get with a Words of Radiance is a classic feeling fantasy epic that really does its own thing. Sanderson is putting his own spin on classic elements to create something that, while not exactly new, is still refreshing in a world where most epic series are more than a decade old.

The Sweet Forever

George Pelecanos

I read this for a book club that I’m in. I wasn’t really familiar with Pelecanos or any of his work, but I really liked this. It is a crime story set in the 1980’s, apparently the third in a four book cycle set in Washington DC during four different decades, with some recurring characters and an emphasis on the evolution of the city. The Sweet Forever starts with a gangbanger dying in a car accident and a guy who happens to be around steal a big bag of drug money out of the car. The rest of the dead boy’s gang are on the lookout for the money, as are a couple of corrupt cops. The only witness to the theft of the money is a youngster who likes to hang out around the local record store, which is owned by Marcus Clay, the one of the recurring characters of the series. I don’t want to give away much of the plot, but it obviously builds from there, with these various factions playing off each other until everything comes to its bloody conclusion.

There are a lot of things woven in with the crime plot. For starters, it all takes place during the opening weekend of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Nearly all the characters are watching Georgetown and Maryland, the local schools, especially Maryland star and eventual second overall draft pick Len Bias. There is also a lot of very casual cocaine use. Drugs are an ever present threat, with cocaine and alcohol and the foreknowledge amongst the police of the coming scourge of crack. That ties back in with everyone’s love of Len Bias, who would die from drug use only a few days after being drafted. It lends the whole thing a sense of macabre irony. So a great read all around.

Presidential Elections: From George Washington to George W Bush.

Paul F Boller

 

Another thing I found on the Kindle Store. It gives a rough overview of every Presidential campaign up to Bush and Gore in 2000. It is not particularly in depth on any of them, but it is a nice introduction to the issues brought up in each of the campaigns. This wasn’t anything particularly profound or enthralling, just something I read a chapter or two at a time before bed for half a month. I was in it more for the historical side, but the emphasis was more on the recent elections with a more political focus. That is not surprising, the more recent elections will obviously be better documented, but I’d rather read about the 1912 or the 1824 election than the 1992 election. Still, it was entertaining enough.