Book Reviews

Summary: Christian soccer mom fights demons and bad guys.

I have been in a reading rut for the last couple weeks.  It is not that I don’t have lots to read (I always have lots to read.)  It is that nothing is really all that interesting.  So I have been bouncing all over the place trying to find something that I want to read.

John Ringo is one of the authors I discovered because of Baen’s free ebook library (see link below).   Ringo writes all over the place.  He has a series of military science fiction.  Some light fantasy, some fantasy/science fiction mix, and a series of modern techno-thrillers (that have a lot of sex and verge on porn).

Princes of Wands is a bit of a deviation from all of those.  It is a collection of four short stories about a Christian soccer mom that fights demons and evil powers through the power of Christ.

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Summary: Roald Dahl’s autobiography of his childhood written for children.

As you can imagine, I spend a good bit of money on books.  I saw an estimate that the average household only buys 1 to 2 books a year.  And that nearly half of the book purchases are from about 5 percent of readers.  If that is actually true, I would not be surprised if I am in the top 1 percent.

I try to read books that I pick up free on kindle.  And I often listen to the monthly free audiobook from christianaudio.com.  And I do get some free books to review.  However, I pay full price for most books I review and that gets expensive.

My regular source of free books is my local library.  I almost never go and check out a book in person.  I mostly avoid paper books.  But I do check out audiobooks via the Overdrive system from my local library.  The main problem with Overdrive in my area is that everything is always checked out.  So I often will go for weeks and get nothing.  This week I had three of my holds come up all the same day.

Boy by Roald Dahl was a bit of a whim book.  I know it is a bit of anathema for many children’s book lovers, but I have not read much by him.  Boy is a autobiography oriented toward elementary students.  Growing up I read a lot of biographies.

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Summary: A funny (occasionally crass), but real self-help book for married men.

Last week Orgasms are for Women and Marriage is for Men was offered free for kindle.  Because I try to post virtually all of the free Christian kindle book on Bookwi.se, I ran across it.  I do not always look into a book, but those that seem a bit sketchy or maybe categorized wrong I try to look at.

I read the intro before posting it and then read the rest of the book over the weekend.  It is a quick book (around 50 pages) and most people will read it in about an hour.

I think that it is a mostly helpful book.  It is written under a pseudonym, but the author claims to be a former pastor and marriage counselor.  He said that in his experience, 99% of the motivation for marriage and premarital counseling was to get the counselor to change their spouse’s behavior (this seems about right to me).  This book is oriented around the idea that you cannot control the other person, you can only control yourself.  So get your stuff together and forget about theirs.

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Summary: A cynically nihilistic take on some of the most beloved fantasy books.

As much as I enjoy books stealing ideas and remaking stories (like Fuzzy Nation), Lev Grossman has soured me on the concept for a while.

I was not a big fan of the first book of this series, The Magicians.  I thought it was really well written and had some great ideas.  But I just did not like the characters.  But I still wanted to read the second book.  It was written so well, I figured the second would have to be better.

After having read it, I think this opening line from an Amazon review gets it exactly right.  “Joyless, dismal, and cynically nihilistic–that was the first novel in this series.”

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Summary: The parallel book to Lost Hero

This is a book that is hard to discuss without at least some spoilers.  The Percy Jackson Series was a complete series based around the character Percy Jackson, son of the Greek God Poseidon, as he discovers that he is a demigod and works to save the gods from being other thrown by the Titans.

This series is after the first series, but has some of the same characters.  So I would read Percy Jackson first, then this.  In the first book (spoilers start here) we are introduced to Jason Grace, son of Jupiter and his two friends Leo and Piper.  What is revealed at the end of the first book is that the Greek Gods also have Roman sides to them and there is a whole world of Roman demigods that have been kept apart from the Greek demigods.

Jason was from the Roman side and was sent to Camp Half-Blood (the Greek side) by Hera in order to join the Greek and Roman demigods together to overthrow Gaia and the Giants.

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Summary: A new set of heroes are on a quest to free Hera and stop something worse than the Titans from destroying the Gods (and maybe all of humanity with them.)

The Percy Jackson and the Olympians were rightly a popular series of young adult books.  They include magic, heroes, Greek Gods, adventure and lots of historical and mythical references.

With The Lost Hero, Riordan takes the same setting and starts a new series with new main characters.  Jason has no memory of his past.  But he is son of Zeus and and already battle tested and a leader, but he has never been to Camp Half-Blood before.  Leo is a mechanical genius, but after the death of his mother he has been hiding his real power.  Piper is the daughter of a famous movie star and constantly in trouble for theft.

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Summary: We have a way that we attached to romantic partners.  Finding a partner that is compatible with our attachment type makes those attachments more secure, longer lasting, and more fulfilling.  Oriented toward single adults more than couples.

I am fascinated by science books about human relationships and behavior.  One of the best I have read is Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me.  You can get the point by the title, and nearly two years after I read it, I still frequently bring it up in conversation.  Another interesting and more general book like this is Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

Book of this genre are best when they really are based in science, but they attempt to make the science real in lay person terms and ideas.  Mary Roach, who wrote Bonk, takes the tack of writing about the science through her own discovery.  She is a very present character in her books.  The authors of Mistakes Were Made were more traditional science writers.  They referenced studies and gave lots of examples but they were mostly writing from as academic narrators.

Some books get to science based or take a fairly simple idea and run it into the ground far past the attention spans of most readers (The Narcissism Epidemic I think fell into this trap.)  But ever since the original Freakenomics and some of Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell’s books became popular, this style of science/self-help/popular non-fiction came out, there have been many authors that are trying to find the secret to writing good books, that are actually useful and based in real science and understandable.

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Summary: A geologist is paid to survey Jamaica by a secret cabal of financiers that wants to take over the island and create their own country.  MI-5 enlists him to get to the bottom of the plot.

People familiar with the very popular Jason Bourne movies may be aware of the name Robert Ludlum.  He was the author of the original books.  He wrote 23 novels in his lifetime under a couple different pseudonyms and sold 300-500 million books in 33 languages.

I read the first three Bourne books a few years before the movies came out.  (The movies are very good, the books are very good, but they are only slightly related to one another in content.)

I knew the next Bourne movie was coming out soon so I decided to pick up another Ludlum book.  After the first three Bourne books all other Bourne books have been written by Eric Van Lustbader who licensed the characters. (Ludlum died in 2001 from injuries that he sustained in a fire.)

Ludlum likes to write about grand conspiracies, large corporations with secret agendas, shadowy spy agencies and other extremists.

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Summary: A former Irish military man is trying to escape his past by working as a bouncer at a seedy New York City club.  When a girl he likes ends up dead, his quiet life become much more messy.

I like to experiment with my reading.  My experiments lately have not been all that successful.

I am a fan of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books. And since I have finished the last of the Artemis Fowl books I thought I would explore Colfer’s first adult novel.

The first thing is that it feels like Colfer is trying to make up for having written young adult books all of his career by having the characters swear every two lines.  It is not completely outside the realm of possibility with these characters, but it feels forced and unnecessary.

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