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defrog
Book reports – just in time for the holidays!JUST FINISHED
You Suck by Christopher Moore
Published in 2007, this is the belated sequel to Moore’s 1995 book, Bloodsucking Fiends, about new vampire Jody and her minion/boyfriend Tommy, a well-meaning but not-too-bright 19-year-old with literary pretensions. Despite the 12-year gap in writing, the action takes up almost immediately after the first book left off, with Tommy awaking to find out that now Jody has turned him into a vampire out of love. I can’t say it’s necessary as sequels go, but like a lot of Moore’s work, it’s good fun and proof that the best genre novels are by people with no respect or interest in the genre’s traditions. Which also means it’s a perfect antidote to the Twilight franchise – particularly the character of teenage Goth vampire wannabe Abby Normal, who narrates some of the story in OMG-teenspeak. If Moore didn’t intentionally create her to poke fun at Twilight, it’s a hell of a coincidence. For that alone, I’d recommend it, if only as a gift to the Twilight fans in yr family. That’ll teach ‘em.
JUST STARTED
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod
I’ve never MacLeod before (not being that big on space operas), but he also writes near-future speculative fiction, to include this book (which I got for cheap, I confess) in which the Faith Wars are over and religion is barely tolerated in the countries that fought it. Meanwhile, robots are self-aware and expressing interest in religion. It sounds dodgy on paper, but the opening prologue neatly does away with the stereotypes, so I’m interested to see where this goes.
RECENT TITLES
Look At The Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
As much as I love Vonnegut, I mainly bought this as an airport emergency book (it was the only book in the stall worth considering), because I’m often wary of posthumous releases of unpublished material – in this case, 14 short stories previously unpublished for unexplained reasons. Honestly, many of these stories seem undercooked by Vonnegut standards – a lot of great premises with endings that don’t always satisfy. Still, it’s not bad.
The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein has written some of my favorite sci-fi books, but I haven’t read him in ages, so I picked up this late 50s work about Dan Davis, an engineer who gets screwed by his business partner and fiancee who have him cryogenically frozen to wake up in the year 2000 – and finds a way to go back in time to get his revenge. Davis is an annoying character, but well-written, and the story’s time-travel paradox holds up about as well as such paradoxes can be expected to do. All up, it’s a pretty good book that reminds me why I used to read Heinlein (the somewhat creepy love angle notwithstanding).
Skin Tight by Carl Hiassen
In which Hiassen takes on the plastic surgery industry with a tale of a former State Attorney investigator finding himself marked for assassination in relation to an old unsolved case involving the disappearance of a plastic surgery patient. A bit flawed in terms of character development, but as usual, Hiassen has great fun skewering the plastic surgery industry and its clientele, and tabloid TV journalism while he’s at it.
The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown
Brown’s first novel, and the first of the Hunter & Hunter detective series featuring teenage Ed Hunter and his carny Uncle Ambrose, who team up to solve the murder of Ed’s father. After having read Brown’s stranger books (What Mad Universe, Martians Go Home and Night Of The Jabberwock), it was kind of odd reading this pretty straigtforward mystery with some commentary on alcoholism’s impact on families, but side from getting a little too detailed about Chicago’s street layout, it’s a decent story that Brown tells well.
The Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Oh, well, you know. More tales of Holmes, many focusing a little more on his early days, in which we learn he actually has a brother who’s even better at deduction than Holmes. Also, we get the first appearance of Professor Moriarty. As usual, some are better than others but it’s hardly wasted time.
The Naming Of The Beasts by Mike Carey
The fifth book in the Felix Castor series, and one that finally tackles one of the underlying premises of the story arc – Castor’s friend Rafi Ditko, who is possessed by the demon Asmodeus and now on the loose in London (both incidents basically being Castor’s fault), and Castor has to form an unsavory alliance to settle things once and for all. Great stuff as usual.
The beast inside,
This is dF
