Book Reviews

Reposting my 2012 review of Fuzzy Nation because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99

Summary: A first contact story with cute small fuzzy beings.

One of the things I really like is reinterpretations.  I like to listen to remakes of classic songs.  I like to watch remakes of movies and I like to read reinterpretations of old stories.  Some authors have make their entire careers from this type of writing.

As far as I know Fuzzy Nation is the first time that John Scalzi has tried it.  A classic 1962 book by Beam Piper is the inspiration for Fuzzy Nation.  I have not read the original yet.  (But the original is included in the Audible.com Audiobook and available for free on kindle.  So I will read it soon. Reviewed it here.)

The story starts on a foreign world.  Corporations have started buying up the exploitation rights for newly discovered worlds.  Jack Halloway is a surveyor that looks for new areas to mine.  Halloway is a loner and works hundreds of miles from the closest real settlement.

While away, his house is invaded by several small mammalian type animals.  As Jack gets to know them he realizes that there may be more to this world than anyone has realized.

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Reposting this review because the Kindle edition is on sale for $0.99.
Summary: Short discussion oriented book about what being a church member really is all about.

Someone at Rainer’s publisher has been paying attention to the blogosphere. I Am a Church Member (on sale last week) is a good response to Rachel Held Evans CNN post of two weeks ago.

This is not the only good response, but it is a one method of responding. Evans, I believe, was trying to describe her desires for the church based on her frustrations with the dysfunction of the church. (I don’t think she was trying to ‘demand’ that the church change to fit her desires as some have charged.)

Thom Rainer instead is trying to start with a healthy church and discuss what it means to be a good church member to that healthy church.

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Summary: A skewering of some convenient targets.

I don’t read a lot of Christian fiction.  Most of it I think tries too hard to get a message across and not hard enough to tell a good honest story.  And I think that is the central problem with Evangellyfish.

Douglas Wilson is a good writer.  He strings words together nicely and is pleasant to read.  But from the beginning this seemed like a book that was just too safe and predictable.  It is held up as good satire.  And that does seem to be what he is attempting.  But I happen to really love some good satire.  Christopher Buckley is one of my favorite authors.  Coffee with Jesus, the Colbert Report, Jonathan Swift, etc have left us with a world of satire and so in an age that is cynical about pretty much everything, satire needs to be even more carefully crafted than ever.

What I think that Wilson missed is that the best satire is not only from the inside, but against your own side. Evangellyfish is safe in particular for Wilson. A review on Amazon that I read after I finished captured my thoughts exactly,

“The book bills itself as dangerous and edgy, but it came across to me as par for the Wilson course. Pop quiz: which pastor lives like a hypocrite, full of deceit and sexual sin: the mega-church pastor or the Reformed pastor? Of course the mega-church pastor! What sin does the youth pastor struggle with? Of course sexual sin! Which female character villainously manufactures a campaign of vicious slander: the reporter, the secretary, or the midwife? Of course the midwife! After all, she’s already guilty of near-manslaughter just for having babies outside the hospital (at least according to the book!). To anyone familiar with Douglas Wilson, none of these caricatures are surprising.”

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Looking for Alaska by John Green is the first of five novels written by the young adult author. Published in 2005, this novel is about a young high school student who decides that he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps by attending the same boarding school that his dad went to. In order to suck the marrow out of life (side note: I read that YOLO is for people who don’t know what carpe diem means), Miles leaves the comforts of home to go off and have his own adventures. He acquires a roommate and a set of friends belonging to his roommate and through their relationships, their actions, their reactions change each other’s lives forever.

I can now say that I have read all of John Green’s novels with the exception of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which he co-wrote with David Levithan. I really enjoy John Green’s novels. Just like I have said in my other reviews, I appreciate that his novels bring excitement and eloquence to the lives of teenagers, and there is no involvement of vampires, witches, death matches or futuristic factions. I definitely liked this book better than An Abundance of Katherines and probably would tie it with Paper Towns (these three novels don’t come close to topping my love for A Fault In Our Stars).

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Summary: Dresden, not quite as much of a mess this time, is searching for the Shroud of Turin, everyone else is trying to kill him.

Dresden is Chicago’s only professional Wizard.  Essentially he is a Private Investigator for supernatural issues.  That is when he is actually working and not trying to save the world from certain destruction.

Death Masks comes fairly closely on the heals of Summer Knight.  The Red Court (the vampires) have declared war on the White Court (the Wizards) and in particular on Dresden. So the vampires are still trying to kill him.  The local crime lord,who Dresden has previously had an uneasy truce with, seems to have some of his goons after him as well.  And Susan, his (maybe ex) fiancée who is part way through her transformation to a vampire herself after trying to save Dresden in book 3, is back in town.

All of that is in addition to an actual job, finding the Shroud of Turin, which was recently stolen.

Michael, a Knight of the Cross, who was last in Grave Peril (#3) and is one of my favorite characters, is back.  Michael is Catholic and devout and carries a sword around while defeating evil, raising his brood of kids, working as a contractor and keeping his wife happy.  This time he is joined by two other Knights that are trying to save Dresden.

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The Complete Sherlock Holmes: The Heirloom Collection is indeed the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. All four of his novels are included as are all of his short stories. From reading the novels and many of the short stories, one can discover exactly how Sherlock and Watson have become the beloved detective and sidekick that we know them as today. You can also see how some images or characteristics of the detective may be more accurate than others.

Admittedly, since the collection is almost sixty hours of listening I read not all of it but A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hounds of Baskerville, all of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a few from the Memoirs of Sherlock of Holmes, including the one where he supposedly dies along with Moriarty, and the short story entitled The Empty House, which is the one in which he makes his triumphant return. It is my opinion that no adaptation or at least no adaptation of the 21st Century has gotten the character of Sherlock Holmes wholly correct. Some adaptations, especially the older ones, have painted him as simply serious crime solver. Some make him out to be an anti-social, strange inventor and boxer/badass (Sherlock Holmes movies of 2009 and 2011). Others turn him into a genius that is so weird that he could possible suffer from Asperger’s and couldn’t function without the help from Watson (BBC’s Sherlock). It is my impression that while many of these characteristics are based on Conan Doyle’s original Holmes that they are exaggerated depending on the focus or feel of the movie.

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Summary: A farcical skewering of politicians, money and regular people trying to make a living.

A few months ago Audible was having a buy one get one free sale.  One of the options was Strip Tease. I couldn’t really find anything to match with the other book that I did want, so I threw it in my cart as a free extra.

I have read two other Hiaasen books, but it has been a while.  I remembered them as funny, sort of mysteries concerned primarily with local Florida issues.  After I was about half way through Strip Tease I went back and read my previous reviews.  I was not kind.  I thought the characters were basically unlikable and while the writing was ok, there was very little redeeming value in the books.  And basically I feel the same about Strip Tease.

Strip Tease is primarily about Erin, a young divorced mother who is working as a stripper because it is the only way she can earn enough money to pay her lawyer to try and get back her daughter from her dirtbag ex-husband.

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Summary: A classic young adult quest novel based in 2044, but built on 1980s culture.  A fun book for both adults that lived the 1980s and teens that were years from being born.

My Sister-in-Law introduced me to this book.  Published last August it was several lists of the best of 2011, but I had not heard of it until her recommendation.

Wade is living in 2044.  The US has degenerated into lawlessness.  The world economy is in ruins because of huge shortages in oil, energy, water and food.

The world is falling apart, but there is one consolation, Oasis.  The Oasis is an immersive online world.  Most people now live more in the Oasis than in the real world.  Students go to school in the Oasis, adults work in the Oasis, everyone escapes reality in the Oasis.

The creator of the Oasis is James Halliday.  Five years before the start of the book, Halliday died and left his enormous fortune and the entire company to whomever solves his puzzle.  Wade (his avatar is named Parzival in the Oasis) and many others have made it their goal to solve the puzzle.  It is their lottery, their work, their only hope.

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