3/18/2013- Gamers by Thomas K. Carpenter

I finally came across a book that's easy to summarize, which feels like quite an achievement. Gamers, by Thomas K. Carpenter, which I downloaded for free from Amazon.com, is a sci-fi YA novel and the first book in a series. It's about Gabby, an improbably brilliant young hacker who lives in a futuristic world in which life has been turned into a video game. Though she primarily uses her hacking skills to help her friends, rather than for selfish reasons, she becomes concerned upon discovering that the LGIE, a governing organization that keeps track of the game, has been digging around in her personal files. When Gabby decides to investigate this for herself, she discovers, ever so shockingly, that her lovely, idyllic life may not be all that it seems.

Snarkiness aside, I thought that Gamers was a fairly entertaining book. It's nothing that I'd go crazy recommending to people, but it wasn't a chore to read by any means. The characters were likable, the world that they lived in was well thought out and littered with references to old-school gaming, and the story was suspenseful enough that it was easy to keep picking up for a few minutes of reading. I did, however, think that it had a few major issues.

My first problem with Gamers, and probably my biggest one, is that I'd feel charitable saying that it was a bit derivative. I don't want my finger pointing to be too specific, but the last chunk of the novel is about a high stakes competition where the students at Gabby's school are forced to compete in a ruthless game, where the losers may be killed and the winners are given grand rewards. This game is created by a ruthless agent of the aforementioned LGIE, it forces, at several points, the students to fight one another, and the stealthy, antisocial girl is named after an animal. No mass audiences sit and watch the Final Raid, as it's called, but it makes parallels between Gamers and certain other series easy to draw.

I had a couple of smaller problems with Gamers, but neither of them were nearly as distracting. One of them was that there were a few errors with grammar and verb tense, but, for me,  those were only momentary issues. I also hated the cliffhanger of an ending, since, in the interest of getting people to continue with the series, it left absolutely nothing resolved. It's possible to end some aspects of a story while still keeping readers interested in the characters, but Gamers actively created new plot points in the last few pages of the book. It wasn't horrible, really, but it was frustrating.

Even though I may not seem to have the nicest things to say about Gamers, I did sort of like it. It wasn't boring, I didn't hate the characters, and, even though the vast majority of characters that lived there were doomed, the novel's world seemed fairly cool as far as dystopian societies go. If you're looking for a few hours worth of fluffy reading material that's appropriately perilous to the cast, you could certainly do worse than to read Gamers.

3/11/2013- A Nest of Spies by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

I was going to start trying to start each of my posts here with a summary of the book that I was writing about, but A Nest of Spies, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, may not be the best book with which to begin that. This novel, released in English in 1917, is the fourth book in the Fantomas series, which I've written about here before. What I've read of the series so far is about a super-detective, Juve, and his journalist friend, Jerome Fandor (though his identity is way more complicated than that) going after the inexplicably resourceful super-villain, Fantomas. I'm not sure what I can say specifically about A Nest of Spies without inadvertently spoiling the whole thing, but am pretty sure that I can safely say that it's about a remarkably complicated plot against the nation of France in which, shockingly enough, Fantomas happens to be an instrumental figure.

Despite some slow parts in the middle, A Nest of Spies is a very entertaining novel. It is only barely plausible, and the number of footnotes that refer back to massively convoluted plot points from earlier in the series gets really ridiculous, especially towards the end. Having read the last three books, however, I thought that reading this one was quite fun. It had stolen bears, bands of anarchists, and a royal ball, with all of that just within the novel's final stretch, so I'm not sure what else I could have possibly expected from it.

As entertained as I was by A Nest of Spies, however, I can't deny that it had some issues. First of all, if you read this without being willing to keep track of the characters' extensive lists of aliases, you'll have to be prepared to get quite lost. Since the novel is about spies, some of that is unavoidable, and, to be completely fair, most of the characters keep their false identities down to just one. There were some points, though, particularly when I was reading late at night, where I had to backtrack like crazy to remember who I'd been told, particularly among the secondary characters, was pretending to be who or was working for who. Fandor's disguise, which becomes one of the central parts of the book, is clearly presented, but some of the others just get ridiculous.

My other problem with the book, which is more superficial, is with the disguises themselves. I'll grant that Juve and Fantomas get to be awesome at putting together disguises that no one could possibly see through, since I bothered to put "super" in front of both of their character descriptions. When it comes to Fandor, though, who admits that he's a bit iffy on the quality of his disguise, I feel that I can say without spoiling too much that, if he's spending days on end with someone he knows, and they're spending the night in a hotel room with him on top of that, they should probably be smart enough to recognize him, especially if slightly later in the novel, they can spot him on a crowded street. Since we're not supposed to believe that this character is a total idiot, I couldn't get past his or her apparent inability to recognize faces as anything but a major plot hole.

Even though I'm complaining a lot now, I did really like A Nest of Spies and am disappointed that I'm almost out of Fantomas books. If you'd like to read this one, or any of the other books in the series, for yourself, all five of the translated volumes in the public domain are available at both Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com.

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.

2/20/2013- Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. Braddon

Hello! Today, I hit the mark of having read eight books out of my seventy-five book goal for the year, which doesn't sound all that impressive, but, since it put me over being ten percent towards my goal, I was fairly excited. For the time being, though, that information isn't very relevant.

A few minutes ago, I finished reading Lady Audley's Secret, an 1862 novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Like most of what I read is, it was an impulse download for my Kindle from which I had very little idea of what to expect. In this case, however, I was not disappointed at all. Despite the fact that Lady Audley's Secret seems at times to be way too long, with passages of household descriptions that seem to drag on for pages and pages and enough unnecessary plot twists to fuel a daytime soap opera for months, it's one of the most entertaining books I've read for ages. I'm not sure that anyone would have put it quite this way in the 1860s, but basically, the novel is about a rich slacker who becomes obsessed with his best friend's disappearance and tries to prove that his uncle's spoiled and much younger new wife, the titular Lady Audley, had something to do with it. This very well could have made for a boring book, but I think that what makes Lady Audley's Secret so fun is that it seems to be insane trash. It's full of blackmail, murder, bizarre lies that take hundreds of pages to unravel, secret keeping maids and their drunk husband-cousins (which I realize was acceptable at the time, no matter how weird it seems now), and a lot of snobbery about French novels. It does take a while to get through, but it almost never gets boring. When it does start to drag, however, it's never long before some strange and nearly inexplicable plot twist comes along to break up the monotony.

Because Lady Audley's Secret is from 1862, it is in the public domain and can be easily found as a free ebook. I read the edition available from Amazon.com, since it was convenient to download, but it is also available at Project Gutenberg, where it can be found alongside piles of other novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

2/6/2013- The Lady Astronomer by Katy O'Dowd

Hello! It's been a while since I've posted here- exactly three finished books- so I feel like I need to do at least one catch up post! Two of the three books I read were Spice and Wolf volumes 5 and 6, a pair of Japanese novels translated into English and set right in the middle of a series, so, for fear of slipping and typing up paragraphs and paragraphs of spoilers, those, for now, are not getting their own posts. They were both very entertaining, though, and I can't wait to read the seventh volume!

For today, my post is about The Lady Astronomer by Katy O'Dowd, which is another book I downloaded on a whim when it was free on Amazon.com. (Currently, it costs $2.99, which also isn't too steep.) It had pretty good reader reviews on the site, but, as it is with most of the books I download when they're free, I really didn't know what to expect from it. I did know it was a steampunk novel, since that was written all over the reviews, and no one was complaining about the spelling or grammar, so that was enough for me.

What I got from The Lady Astronomer was a book that I'd have no problems recommending to a junior high girl that wasn't put off by magic or robots in her reading. It's cute and cheerful, with really cool mechanical stuff littering every chapter and characters that are quite likable. I did think that, at the start, things seemed a little disjointed, with chapters leaving off and picking up at places that seemed slightly random, and the romantic elements that kick in about halfway through seemed forced, like more of an unnecessary subplot than anything else. Once Lucretia, the leading lady, has to go on a trip on her own, I felt like her leaving the supporting cast behind really got the story to pick up, giving it more focus and suspense than the first half of the book had. Still, as a whole, I thought that reading The Lady Astronomer was enjoyable, even if I wasn't exactly the target audience. It reminded me of something that I would have gotten as a surprise from a book order flier when I was in school, and I can easily imagine it being in one of those now.

1/25/2013- The Missing Link by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers

Hello! I'm on my second of two days of subbing for high school and junior high band, which has been a lot less traumatic than I initially expected. That really has nothing to do with my post for today, though, as I just finished reading another book, called The Missing Link, by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers. I have a habit of downloading free eBooks from Amazon.com and loading my Kindle with them before I forgot what it is that I downloaded and when I did it. Because of that, I cannot say with any certainty when it was that this book was free. Currently, though, it's $2.99, which also isn't a bad price.

It would take me ages to explain what goes on in The Missing Link, but to be overly simplistic about the whole thing, it's a novel split three ways between a bizarre takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, a pair of misfits road story, and a bunch of homeless people doing some post-apocalyptic demon fighting, all in the face of a worldwide Internet outage. I thought that it went on for way too long, with the chapters set in downtown Chicago occasionally feeling out of place, and at times, I suspect that four-letter words and bizarre comparative language that couldn't be comfortably quoted in polite company were being thrown around just for the sake of their presence. What The Missing Link did have going for it, however, is that it wasn't at all boring and constantly seemed creative. I can't say that I'd recommend it to everyone, and it won't end up on my all-time favorite books list, but it was interesting and, for quite a bit of it, entertaining. It also had several parts that I get the feeling will be very memorable, particularly the next time that my PC's virus protection decides that a game I've been playing for years has suddenly decided to launch the world's most ineffective attack on my computer.

If you have a solid attention span, spend a lot of time online, and aren't easily offended, The Missing Link might be worth checking out. Otherwise, you may want to find a book that's not tailored to such a wildly specific audience.

1/23/2013- Revenge! by Robert Barr

Hello! It's been a while since I posted here, since I haven't read as much as I should have lately, but, as I'm a substitute teacher in a high school library today, I just finished reading a book! Today's book was Revenge! by Robert Barr, which I knew absolutely nothing about before I began reading it. A few months ago, though, I was impressed by the general loopiness of one of his other books, Jennie Baxter: Journalist, so I didn't see why this wouldn't be worth trying to get through.

Rather than being a more traditional novel, Revenge! is a collection of twenty short stories, which makes it really convenient for placement on an e-reader. None of the stories are terribly long, and since, as you may have guessed from the title, most of them focus on the subject of revenge, there's plenty that happens in each of them. I have to admit that I wasn't very impressed by the two Westerns in the middle of the book, but that's more because I don't like Westerns very well than it is because they were poorly written. If someone is really into cowboys shooting at each other, I'd imagine that they'd be just as bored by the cheerful and cute romantic comedies that are also included in the book, with which I was happier.

Revenge! isn't a perfect book, especially if you, like I did, plan to sit and read all twenty of the stories right in a row. By the last few stories, the stacks of bodies and ruined careers, along with the carefully crafted plans that lead to them, start to get a little boring, but there's just enough humor and stories that stray from the darker parts of the theme to keep it from getting unreadable. Not all of the stories are that memorable, either, but they are good enough to hold your attention as you're reading them.

If you'd like to read Revenge!, it is downloadable as a free eBook both from Amazon.com and the more charitable Project Gutenberg, as are several of Robert Barr's other books.

With this post almost finished, I think that I'm going to try to post here more often, with a post for every book I read rather than one for every four or five of them. Because of that, the posts will be shorter, but hopefully, they'll be a little less irritating to read and to write, too.

A Catch-Up Post for My Recent Reading

Hello! I have been remiss in posting here lately, so this is a little bit of a catch-up post. Since the last time that I posted here, I have been subbing a lot and reading a lot, so I have seven novels and novellas to write about. Because of the sheer amount of books I have to cover, I won't be writing all that much about any of them, but regardless of that, it should be a fairly long post.

Sakuri
Jacob Henzel
This was a book that I found for free on Amazon.com, though I think that it was a special offer that day, and then proceeded to read five or six months later. Though I haven't read any since starting this blog, I really like reading light novels, or usually fluffy Japanese novels that have four or five manga-style illustrations and sometimes get turned into anime. However, none of those have been quite as much like an anime as this Western novel was. To be fair, the sort of anime it resembles is an early to mid-90s hour long OAV, like they'd run on Friday nights on the Action Channel, right down to the quirky characters, gratuituous technobabble, bizarre sci-fi set pieces, and somewhat rushed ending with an odd and vaguely preachy last minute twist, but things could certainly be worse than that. Much like those OAVs, I can't say that this is one of the finest pieces of literature that I've read in my life, and I'm not sure that I'd recommend it to friends who weren't into that sort of anime, either. If Sakuri sounds like it would be up your alley, though, and you can get past a few typos in the Kindle edition, it's an entertaining novel.

The Vampyre: A Tale
John William Polidori
As I'm sitting here and trying to remember all of the stuff that I've read for the past couple of weeks, I am having a lot more trouble remembering this 19th century vampire novella than I am remembering the contemporary homage to sci-fi anime, which I don't think speaks well for the author, who happened to be Lord Byron's doctor. It isn't a bad story, really, but compared to a lot of other vampire stories, even from the 1800s, it's a little boring. It's still worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing. Since it was the first story of its sort, it has some historical significance, and it's short enough that even if you do get a little bored, you'll be done with it soon. Plus, the foreword and afterword on the Project Gutenberg text of this, which are trying to convince the reader that Lord Byron probably isn't as awful as they've heard he is, are pretty interesting.

Monsters: A Bloody Love Story
S.M. Reine
This was a novella that I found for free on Amazon.com, and my second piece of Halloween reading. I think that the subtitle's classification of it as a love story may be misleading, since, despite the two leads having something of a romantic connection, it's more of an incredibly bloody action story. I certainly don't have any problem with that, and had read that it wasn't a mushy romance or anything of the sort in the largely positive on-site reviews, but I'm not entirely sure that it's a good thing to finish a book and be reminded more of Daybreakers than anything else in pop culture. Still, if you want to read a vampire story with a tough heroine and a vividly described de-gutting, I can't think of anything else that would fit that description.

Flash Gold: A Steampunk Novella
Lindsey Buroker
Like a lot of the other stuff I've been talking about today, this was a free novella that I'd downloaded from Amazon.com. I downloaded it the day that I bought my Kindle and, out of some inexplicable suspicion of free contemporary novels, didn't read it until just the other day. Since I'm not an expert on steampunk literature, I can't really compare Flash Gold to any other examples of the genre, but I can definitely say that it's the most charming novella that I've ever read in which a character has a bag of disembodied heads. It was interesting enough to make me want to read the rest of the series, which I suppose is the best thing that a free book can do, and, if you're also interested in reading it, it was still available for free as of last week.

Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss
Justin Richards
When I'm doing a reading catch-up post on a blog and the most specifically targeted novel that I'm writing about is not the homage to 90s sci-fi anime, I feel like there may be a problem with my reading choices. Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss is a fake pulp novel prequel to a book that the Doctor was reading in one episode of Doctor Who, starring a character from the show under a psudonym as she battles enemies from the show that the book never takes the time to explain. If you just read that description and thought, "Oooh, is that a book about River Song fighting the weeping angels?" and don't mind that it takes less than an hour to read, then my recommendation does not matter and you'll probably go and buy it anyway. If you are not a fan of Doctor Who, however, I don't see how this book would make any sense at all. At times, it's very good at emulating the style of pulp novels, and at the very least, it's not boring, but I can't say that I liked it all that much. I read the Kindle edition of this novel, available from Amazon.com.

Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle
Ishin Nishio
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that I was a fan of light novels, which don't get translated into English and sold in stores that often, so when I see them for sale cheaply, I tend to buy and stockpile them, since it's a lot more practical to spend five dollars on a book to get my dork fix than it would be to pay 30 dollars for an anime DVD. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle was one of those impulse buys, and after my negative experiences with the Book Girl series, I didn't expect much from it. The first three-fourths of the novel, however, were very entertaining, and though the central murder mystery didn't seem to make much sense at all, it moved quickly, seemed to be well-translated, and was full of characters that were likable, interesting or both. In the last fourth of the book, however, things really seemed to stumble. The ending did not really make the murder mystery make a lot more sense, but the explanation of it and the detail that it goes into would make Sherlock Holmes walk into a room, smack the protagonist in the face, and tell him to get on with it so that the readers could get on with their lives. As if it weren't already plodding enough, the initial explanation of what happened is then followed by a second explanation of more stuff that happened and why everything in the first explanation was incorrect. At that point, I almost threw my copy of the book across the library I was sitting in and smacked my head against the desk. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle isn't a bad book, really, and I'm at least curious about the second novel in the series, but I have never read something that grinds itself to a complete halt quite like this does.

Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings
Annie Hamilton
In a case of complete whiplash, I followed all of the contemporary and not quite critically lauded sci-fi that I'd been reading with a 1916 romantic comedy, though I can't say that the writing quality of Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings was any better or worse than what I'd been reading before it. It does have some entertaining parts, and the lead couple in the novel, which is not a spoiler because it would be nearly impossible to read this and not expect them to get together, fits together very well. The fact that it is sugary enough to make you vomit and unapologetically decisive about what a woman's place is, however, right down to one character complaining that all modern women think about is trying to get their right to vote, makes it very difficult to recommend. If you would like to read it, though, I found it on Project Gutenberg.

I've finally caught up on writing about what I've read here, so I'm done posting for now! Currently, I'm in the middle of reading Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World by Fanny Burney, so I'll probably write about that in the next few days. So far, it's very enjoyable, but in an 18th century novel, I never can tell what could happen to needlessly infuriate me and cause me to spend several paragraphs of text complaining about it.

Two Books That I Don't Spend Paragraph After Paragraph Complaining About

Hello! Since my last post here, I've read two books, though the fact that both of them were short makes that fairly unimpressive. As is not the case with most of my posts, however, I actually enjoyed both of them, so I guess that I don't get to complain as much as I usually do tonight.

The first of the two books, which I read on Monday, was Net of Cobwebs by Elisabeth Saxnay Holding. I'd downloaded it on a whim from Munseys.com without reading much about it first, so, from the title, I'd expected it to be some sort of ridiculous horror novel or something like that. Instead, it was a murder mystery where the crimes committed parallel the mental breakdown of a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In a lot of pulp novels that I've read, it seems like they're old or cheesy, but that wasn't the case with Net of Cobwebs at all. It was an interesting book where the solution to the mystery wasn't obvious at all, and I liked it so well that, after everyone else had left the teachers' lounge, I sat and read it until my lunch break had ended. It's not a lengthy novel at all, either, so if you enjoy mysteries and are looking for a good free ebook, I would recommend it strongly.

The second of my most recent reads, Jennie Baxter, Journalist, by Robert Barr, is definitely not as good as Net of Cobwebs was. It was, though, at least as entertaining. Although it sounds like a boring and typical woman-with-a-nifty-career novel from the 1890s, and certainly starts like one, too, at some point, things in the novel just go a little loopy. This may bother some readers, but when I start to read a book thinking that it is going to be about the newspaper business and end up reading a book with princesses, mad scientists, and Sherlock Holmes knockoffs, I am not disappointed. At times, it does border on "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich" sexism, and it has a really idiotic sudden resolution. Jennie Baxter, Journalist was not boring at all, though, and the fact that it ended up being so bizarre and over the top didn't hurt it at all. If you'd like to read it, too, it can be found for free at Project Gutenberg, Amazon.com, and Munsey's. The ebook of it from Amazon does contain a couple of typos, but they're nothing that harms the story as a whole.

The Timelessness of Insufferable Romantic Comedies

As you may remember, in my last post, I said that I was reading, and would soon complain about Excuse Me!, a 1911 novel by Rupert Hughes. The other day, I finished reading it, and my opinion of it didn't improve any as I was reading, so I at least have plenty to say while I'm complaining. My problem with the novel wasn't at all that the plot and all of the convoluted rubbish that it was made of were dated. I have no problem reading about people who travel by train as a matter of necessity, and I'm smart enough to use a magical Internet machine to find out about the turn-of-the-century American divorce laws that so much of the novel hinges on. In fact, if you're interested in that sort of thing, you may even find the book interesting, which is why I brought it up.

As interesting as the uniquely old-fashioned parts of Excuse Me! were, they couldn't at all outweigh the things that I disliked about the book. The worst part of it, I think, is how wildly hateful it was. In 1911, the whole thing may have been par for the course, but the author seems to have been not only incredibly racist towards African Americans and Jewish people, but also had a deep, abiding distaste for British people. Whether this was all meant satirically or not, it was nearly unreadable by today's standards, partially because it was shockingly mean, and partially because the author was terrible at writing dialects.

The other thing that inflicted massive harm on the novel was the fact that Marjorie, the female lead, is a fictional character that I hated more intensely any other. She's supposed to be cute, sweet and demure, a shining example of comedic womanhood, but instead, she came off as a jealous, racist, and perhaps schizophrenic idiot. She fawns over a stupid little dog in a basket, throws hissy fits because her fiancee had a girlfriend before her, and has to steel herself for the possibility that she may have to be married by a Jewish justice of the peace. This statement may not mean much to a lot of people, but when I read, I pictured her as Katherine Heigl, which is not a compliment to either the character or the actress.

To make the whole thing even more ridiculous, Excuse Me! isn't just an idiotic romantic comedy with an improbably convenient ending. Excuse Me! is an idiotic romantic comedy where the improbably convenient ending is a train robbery.

If you really want a short romantic comedy in the public domain to fill some space on your Kindle, I haven't come across that many yet, but I can't imagine many of them being worse than Excuse Me! was. Even though I read it quite a while ago, though, I can say that The Wall Street Girl by Frederick Orin Bartlett is a much more readable alternative, without all of the weird and unnecessary plot complications involving unlikable characters that the reader barely knows. It isn't an amazing, life-changing book, but it's at least as good as a pleasant, watchable romantic comedy that might pop up on cable TV on a Sunday afternoon. Both novels are available at Project Gutenberg, and The Wall Street Girl can also be downloaded for free from Amazon.com.

Retro Gaming Tech and Turn of the Century Telephone Tech

Today, as it has been before, I've read two books to write about here, though they are fairly different. The first of these is The Genius Guide to Classic Videogames Hardware 01, which seems to have been largely put together by Retro Gamer magazine. I found it for less than five dollars on the Kindle store after getting all excited that I'd found a copy of Retro Gamer at a mall in the Quad Cities, which had led me to search the magazine's title on my Kindle. I was very happy by the book, which was a lengthy and exhaustive history of video games in the United Kingdom. As such, it wasn't always entirely applicable to American gamers, but not even the most obscure gaming systems were made to sound boring. I really enjoyed reading about all of the 8-bit computers in the early parts of the book, and though I was disappointed that they didn't tried to defend the quality of the titles available on the Virtual Boy, since that could have been fascinating, I was interested in what they had to say about the machine. I also would have liked to have read about the Neo Geo, but, since it was also an arcade system, I do understand why they didn't include it. They did write about the Neo Geo Pocket Color, however, which more than made up for it.

The other, completely dissimilar book that I just finished reading is The Story of a Doctor's Telephone: as Told by His Wife by Ellen M. Firebaugh. This book is by no means as preachy as Daisy: The Autobiography of a Cat, which had so many miserable and torturous images of animal abuse as a means of combating it that it was repetitive and difficult to get through, but if you come out of this book thinking that the author wanted everyone to drink, burn down the forests, and get diseases so their children go blind, you were probably not paying much attention. To be fair, for the most part, it's a quick read and an entertaining set of antecdotes about being a country doctor in Illinois in 1912. It's sort of cool to read about how people reacted to telephones when they were new inventions, and the medical information isn't boring, either. The didactic nature of much of the book gets really tedious in spots, though, and while I appreciate the structure of the novel, in which you hear about the doctor's various phone calls and what sorts of house calls they lead to, it doesn't hold up throughout the brief length of the book. The Story of a Doctor's Telephone isn't totally without interesting parts, so if you'd like to read it, too, the full text of the novel can be found for free at Project Gutenberg or Amazon.com.

I just started reading another book that I'm not sure if I'll get through called Excuse Me!, but whether I finish it or not, I'll be here to complain about it soon! Until then, I hope that all of you have a nice week and find lots of interesting things to read.

The Mystery of a French Mystery Novel's Rapid Downward Spiral

Hello! Yesterday, I finished reading 813 by Maurice Leblanc, which was my next book to finish in the early 20th century French series (though I'm reading it in English) about the "gentleman thief" Arsene Lupin. I have a lot of enthusiasm for the series, partially because it's very entertaining and partially because Adult Swim used to show an anime, Lupin the III, which was very loosely based on the books, so my opinions on the novel are probably pretty biased. That's not to say that I've loved every one of the Arsene Lupin novels. The Hollow Needle in particular drove me up a wall, since I really disliked Beautrelet, the brilliant and remarkably cocky young detective on Lupin's trail, and I thought the last half of it was a little boring, too. 813, however, was a fast-paced, entertaining and enjoyable novel until about the last fourth of the book.

 I don't know what I could say about any of it without spoiling the whole thing, as spoiler alerts are very important to avoid with books that are nearly 100 years old, but during the last part of the book, I almost slammed my Kindle shut and shoved it back in my purse. My first problem with it was that, in the final stretch of the main story, there was a series of events that happened that, though it was perfectly logical, was so infuriating and depressing that it made me actively angry to read it. If that would have been the end of it, I would have been fine with the whole thing. After all of that happens, however, and a bit before it, too, there are so many false endings that it just gets to be sort of funny. I can think of at least four instances where the whole story could have ended, ready to go to the next book in the series, but Leblanc decided to keep going after each of them. By the time Lupin joins the French Foreign Legion (which is a spoiler, but not a very applicable one), I was not quite sure why the book hadn't ended.

Despite my complaints about the last part of 813, it was still an interesting book that I'd recommend with the same warning I posted above. If you'd like to read it, too, the full text can be downloaded in several formats from Project Gutenberg or as a Kindle book from Amazon.com.

Rubbish Sci-Fi and Spiffy Pulp Novels

Hello! It's been a bit since I last posted here, so I have read multiple books since the time of my last entry. Because there are several books to talk about, I don't have a fancy picture of a book cover to put up, for which I apologize. Hopefully, however, the tale of my treks through free book lists shall prove sufficient entertainment for all of you who have somehow stumbled across this blog.

Plenzes, by Chris Lang, wasn't the first thing that I read since my last post, but since it isn't a pulp novel, it gets its own special paragraph. I would very much like to be nice when talking about this sci-fi short story, which I found for free on Kindle through http://www.ereaderiq.com/, but it is difficult. The author did have a lot of interesting and well-thought out ideas about the future of social networking, and they didn't seem as far-fetched or terrifying as they probably should have. However, his main character was an unlikable and abusive jerk, the twist at the end came out of nowhere, and the whole thing was plagued with typos. I don't think that I would have gotten through the story had it been a full length novel.

The other two books that I read, The Big Sin by Jack Webb (which was also obtained as a free Kindle book from Amazon) and The Corpse That Walked by Octavius Roy Cohen (from http://www.munseys.com/), were much more entertaining. Admittedly, I really enjoy reading old pulp novels, especially if they seem to think logic and reality are bothers while telling a story, so I'll probably post quite a bit about them in the future. I have read some of them that are so idiotic that even I can't stand them, though, and luckily, neither of these novels falls under that category.

I have to say that of the two books, The Big Sin is undoubtedly the better novel. It's more realistic, more thoughtful, has more likable characters, and is bereft of any major plot holes. It was a quick read that never got boring for a page, and it would be easy to recommend to anyone who really wants to read a book from the 1950s about a priest and a Jewish cop solving the murder of a Mexican showgirl. The Corpse That Walked, however, is about a nice, honest, and not all that smart guy who gets plastic surgery so he can pretend to be a wanted criminal while people are trying to kill him and his intrepid go-getter girlfriend poses as a reporter to uncover the sordid truth behind his exploits. It is ridiculous, over-the-top, and never even tries to be plausible, so, naturally, it was much more entertaining than the more serious novel that took the time to think about religion, prejudice, and justice. The beginning of The Corpse That Walked is painfully slow, particularly if you're reading it a chapter at a time at 1 in the morning, but once it picks up at about the halfway point, its hard to argue against the borderline insanity of the plot being, at the very least, interesting.

Yesterday, I started reading 813 by Maurice Leblanc, so that will at least be included in an upcoming post. Until then, however, I'm hoping to at least keep this blog surviving!