3/4/2013- Game Over by Joseph Locke

I mentioned in my last post that I planned to read a bad and outdated novel about video games that I found as I was subbing in a high school library, so, over my lunch break, I did just that. However, Game Over by Joseph Locke is not just an outdated book about video games. It is also, without any warning whatsoever from the outside of the novel, an outdated book about Satan opening an arcade where angry teenagers pretend to kill each other so often that they actually start doing it. It was every bit as bad as I expected, and I don't really see how, with so much focus being on either the promise of God's salvation (or the power of a possibly magical local youth pastor), the author could have justified the fact that this book contains some of the most bizarre and horrific murders that I've recently seen in print. True, the fact that it was as subtle about its Christian leanings as a cereal commercial is about the benefits of getting up and eating a pound of solid sugar is makes it so there was no mistake about what side the author fell on in the God vs. Satan debate, but the uses of household tools (and the axes that all of the parents in this town seemed to decorate with) hardly made me think of spending a morning in church. I was also, admittedly, disappointed in the fact that, since the games were powered by Hell itself, there were no details about the technology used to run the devil's own arcade.

I cannot say much in defense of Game Over, since it was an oddly written and bizarre plea for specifically Christian salvation that ended more quickly than any of the free eBooks I've read that seem to exist solely for the purpose of getting you to buy the rest of the series ever have. If you feel the need to read a book about the devil ripping a small town to shreds with an early-90s video arcade, however, I have no way of preventing you from finding Game Over for yourself. At the very least, it's short enough that sitting down to read it won't take up too much of your time.

3/4/2013- The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted by Lindsay Buroker

A few months ago, when I was sitting in the teacher's lounge and waiting for my next assignment on a very odd day of substitute teaching, I read Flash Gold by Lindsay Buroker, a steampunk novella that I'd found for free while browsing Amazon.com's bestseller lists. I'd just finished another free novella I'd found that was so bad it was a bit puzzling, so my expectations for Flash Gold were not remarkably high, but I was pleased to find that it was very enjoyable. It took me a while to get to it, but after that, I actually bothered to buy the second and third books in the series for my Kindle (which wasn't very expensive at all), leading me to believe that the author's making the first book available for free was an effective tactic.

Today, I finished reading The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted, which was, like the first book in the series, very entertaining. It wasn't hard to tell that this was the middle of a trilogy, since the plot with Kali, the main character, and her ex-boyfriend seems to wrap up conflicts introduced in the first book, and, as someone who has read books before, it seems obvious that the mysterious woman pursuing Kali is the set-up for the series' grand finale. It was still fun to read, though, with interesting dialogue, a lot of cool steampunk nonsense, and, though this is a slight spoiler, two likable main characters who don't waste too much time in actually admitting that they like each other. It reminds me a lot of the Spice and Wolf series in that it's about nice people traveling around and having adventures in a fantasy setting, not taking itself too seriously as it goes. So far, though, the Flash Gold books have been moving a lot faster, and where Spice and Wolf deals with politics and economics, the characters in Flash Gold deal with the much more immediate issues of bounty hunters and explosions.

Though I'm tempted to read the third Flash Gold book right now and finish off the whole series, I saw a really outdated YA novel about the perils of video gaming in the back of the library that I think I'm going to read instead. Despite my distraction, though, I am genuinely interested in seeing how the series ends and coming back here to type my opinions on it into the void.

3/1/2013- Robotech #11: Metamorphosis by Jack McKinney

I am not sure that reading novels based on weird dubs of 80s sci-fi anime is the best use of my time, but I do it anyway. I've been reading the Robotech novels like crazy lately, though I've been doing it wildly out of order, and on Friday, I finished Metamorphosis, the 11th of them. (The last one that I read was the 7th, so that should tell you my high regard for logic in this case.) It was something that I found at a used book store, so after I started reading it, I realized that it was the second book in the New Generation story arc. The story still made as much sense as it would have anyway, though, so it didn't bother me.

Like the other based-directly-on-episodes-of-the-cartoon Robotech books that I've read, Metamorphosis is decently written, if not occasionally a little dry, but full of parts where it seems like the author, constrained by the source material, is ready to pound his face into his writing desk. There's one part of this book in particular, where the book tries to explain why, if all of the Macross stuff took place in the same area just a few decades before, the characters come across a primitive society that prays to a dam that's almost worth every page of the novel. It's all sort of ridiculous, and this one, more than the other books in the series, is incredibly episodic. Seeing as I'm irrationally fascinated with Robotech, though, I really enjoyed it. It had enough sci-fi nonsense to last me through breaks on two less than thrilling days of subbing, and the characters in this story arc were really likable, too. Given the extremely specific target audience of this novel, I'm not sure if it would be proper for me to recommend it to anyone else. Still, for my own purposes, I'm way too excited that I've still got a stack of Robotech books to get through.

2/25/2013- The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster

Hello! Today, I finished reading The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster, which I'd excitedly downloaded upon noticing that it was a sci-fi pulp novel available for free from Project Gutenberg, an online provider of out of copyright eBooks. (As I type this, it is still available.) It was the story of a caveman-esque tribal man named Burl (because that's what everyone in outer space is named) who figures out that he can do something other than flee in terror from a variety of horrifying giant bugs, leading him to accidentally create the beginnings of civilization. Even though there was nothing wrong with it, as it seemed to be well written and well though out, I didn't really like it. The characters were simplistic, which makes sense, since they were all members of an extremely primitive tribe and not conditioned to do much other than try to survive. That made it seem dry and boring, though, with a minimum of dialogue and almost no interpersonal interactions that extended beyond, "Hey, look! I think we can eat this dead monster bug's leg!" If you're a reader that really finds insects and detailed, scientific descriptions of horrifying insect monsters fascinating, though, I can see where you might really enjoy this book. It could also really satisfy readers that are into adventure stories where one man cuts nature to shreds until he unquestionably has dominion over an entire planet. I don't think that The Forgotten Planet is a bad book, but it isn't at all my cup of tea.

2/22/2013- Maid for Me by Kat Lieu

Hello! I have some stuff to do over at my cross stitch blog, so I'm not going to write too much here today, but on Friday, I finished reading Maid for Me by Kat Lieu, which was a book too bizarre to just be ignored. Usually, I say that I don't know what to expect when I download a free Kindle book, but in the case of Maid for Me, that was only partially true. Both the cover and the description made it seem very anime-influenced, though the description made it sound like a cute and fluffy romantic comedy, and the cover, which showed an anime girl in her relatively conservative underwear standing next to a maid's uniform, made it seem a little like the kind of anime where a girl spends 26 episodes dropping things and bends over to pick them up a dozen times an episode. The book was free, so I figured that if it ended up being the latter, I'd figure it out within 10 pages and delete it with no risks taken.

Luckily, Maid for Me ended up being more of a romantic comedy type of story, though, in terms of anime, it was more like one of the weird OAVs that used to cost 3 dollars from the Right Stuf Bargain Bin than it was like the sort of series where people can stand around for 50 episodes and still not know who they want to go out with. It has a resilient leading lady with an improbable, but appropriately tragic back story, a pile of boys who think she's really fabulous despite her beaten-into-your-head lack of self-confidence, gambling, threats of bizarre ritualistic violence, and local politicians. It wasn't my favorite thing that I've read this year by a long shot, and I was irrationally bothered by a couple of comma errors that I found, but it was enthusiastically executed, self-referential, and, while it lasted, entertaining, if nothing else. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to someone that didn't like anime, but, as a person who finished it and then though about how long it had been since I'd watched my VHS of Assemble Insert, it didn't seem like a wasted hour. If you'd also like to read Maid for Me, it's currently available on Amazon.com as both an eBook and a paperback, though currently, the eBook is 99 cents rather than free. It's really short and incredibly strange, and as someone who didn't despise the book or have a violently positive reaction to it, I think I'm in the minority, but if you think it sounds interesting, you may end up liking it.

2/21/2013- Bianca in Black by Elizabeth Sax Rohmer

Hello! I'm in the high school library again today, which, as always, gives me a lot of time to read. This morning, my book of choice was a 1958 mystery by Elizabeth Sax Rohmer titled Bianca in Black, which I'd gotten for 50 cents from a used books for charity bin at Wal-Mart. It wasn't really a bad book, but compared to a lot of the books I'd read recently, it seemed very simple. In it, a beautiful fashion model named Bianca, who refuses to wear any colors other than black, keeps marrying men that she doesn't love, and all of them promptly drop dead. Of course, she didn't do it, since she's a lovely damsel in distress, and of course, Bruce Willoughby, the detective who stumbles upon her falls madly in love with her, meaning that he feels responsible for solving the murders and clearing his darling love's good name. It wasn't an awful book, and, as I read it, it was interesting, but the plot moved in an incredibly straight line, with no room for subplots or even red herrings that were addressed for more than a few sentences at a time. It drove me crazy that through the whole book, Bianca did nothing but ask for help and beg that Bruce stay away from her, as she was ever so dangerous and didn't want to hurt him, and it was also a little strange that the entire mystery wrapped itself up in the last four pages, with nothing from the characters but an, "Oh, it's really too bad that happened, isn't it?" in response to the whole thing.

I realize that I am probably being unfair to Bianca in Black, but at about the same time, I'd bought another used book from the same line (both were labelled as Airmont Mysteries) called Crime and Judy, in which a lady detective coming up against institutionalized sexism and her wheelchair bound brother fight a swamp full of Communists, so my expectations for this were very high. What is interesting about directly comparing the two books, however, is that they were both obviously formatted to fit in a 124 page book, which means that while Crime and Judy has a pretty reasonable text size, the print in Bianca in Black is so small that it makes old Bibles look like the large-print editions of magazines.

Bianca in Black probably wasn't worth the eye strain that I got from reading it, but since I got it for 50 cents, it's hard to be upset about that. Reading it was an okay way to spend the morning, and it's not like I have to sit and read through it again and again. If it sounds like the kind of book you'd be interested in reading, it is long out of print, but it looks like, at least online, used copies can be found easily and cheaply.

2/20/2013- Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge by Maurice Leblanc

(For some reason, this did not post when I wrote it last night, so a lot of my statements about having posted already today are no longer relevant. It sounds weird, but as far as concerns about my blog go, I feel that it may be the least of my problems.) 

Hello! I know that I already posted here today, but I just finished reading Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, by Maurice Leblanc, which I bought from the Kindle store (found, as always, at Amazon.com) about a week ago. I started reading it while I was still subbing in the library this afternoon, but it was really entertaining, so I decided to finish it before eating dinner. It was a bit different from some of the other Lupin novels I've read in that Lupin spends it acting more as a detective than an active part of the plot. The first half seemed to me like a pretty normal mystery, but I actually preferred the second half, which is both a mystery and a somewhat sick soap opera at the same time.

In writing about Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, I think that it's also worth noting that in the middle of the book, there's a supposed drowning that's almost directly lifted from the last Fantomas book that I read (Messengers of Evil- Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas, which isn't at all a wordy title), which was very jarring. The aftermath of the event in question isn't all that similar, since Juve, the super-detective from Fantomas, is a bit more efficient than Lupin is in terms of getting things done, but it still seems strange. Despite this, though, this was a genuinely difficult to unravel mystery, and not just because it was bizarre or convoluted, like the goings-on in Lady Audley's Secret earlier today, and it was fun to read, too.

Though I've already said plenty about the book in question, I want to say that the coolest thing about my having read Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge is that it's a new translation of the novel by Josephine Gill, making it readily available to English language readers. Before finding this last week, I'd downloaded all of the Lupin novels that I could find from Amazon and Project Gutenberg, feeling sort of disappointed that once I'd read them all, the series would be done for me, unless I got much better at reading in French. When I did see all of the new translations, though, I got really excited and downloaded one of them immediately. As far as the quality of the writing in it goes, it seemed to me to be on par with most of the other Lupin books that I'd read, with some parts of it, particularly the conversations between the Gentleman and Thomas le Bouc, seeming more contemporary than what I'd read in the others. I can't imagine people going "that guy" in 813, which I thought was the draggiest of all the Lupin books I've read, but here, it didn't at all seem out of place. There were a couple of missing periods, and, at least on my old-fashioned buttons on the side Kindle, the formatting had some weird giant spaces between the words, but that didn't bother me much. I still plan to read more of Josephine Gill's new translations, though in the future, I'm hoping to skip the part where I get so excited that they exist that I read the novels completely out of order with the rest of the series.