Sunday, April 25, 2010

Book 16: Mister Impossible

A Loretta Chase novel recommended by the Smart Bitches (see the blogroll). I finished this some time ago. It was a fun regency romance. I tend to gravitate all my historical reading to that particular era. I don't really have anything to add on this you can't read from the Bitches. I just needed to keep my count somewhat on target.

Book 15: Not Quite A Lady

Another Loretta Chase, also recommended by the Bitches! In Not Quite a Lady, the heroine's secret, shameful past is actually a secret and shameful. I really liked the ending of this book. I have another couple of Chase books on my library queue for summer reading.

Book 14: Home is Where the Wine Is

Crazy Aunt Purl has another funny, philosophical memoir for us. It is not just a rehashing of the blog. There is new material in here. There are also patterns though I haven't done any of them yet. She has a lot of stories about reentering the dating scene. I would strongly encourage anyone wanting to read this book to read "Drunk, Divorced and Covered in Cat Hair" first. Or the archives of her blog. The context is good. CAP has some good dating and travel stories in here. If you have ever wanted to travel by yourself, her stories of doing so are great-- practically propaganda for the solo act.

Book 13: The Living Dead

Zombie Short Story anthology! The stories range from tragic, to terrifying, to NOT ACTUALLY CONTAINING REAL ZOMBIES. I resent the addition of metaphorical zombies and people just talking about their contingency plan. The bulk of the stories were good, don't mistake me. However, this ginormous book could have been a reasonable size if about 4 of the stories were left out. The opening story "This Year's Class Picture" was great-- the story of a lone teacher and her zombified charges. Also worth the read was "Malthusian's Zombie" which is creepy enough for a beginner to the zombie genre but not over the top gross. There are a lot of big names of horror in here and some smaller names, so this anthology would also be good to pick up for ideas of authors you may want to try.

Book 12: Coyote

This is the opener of a SF series on space exploration by Allen Steel. I read a short excerpt of this online and then felt compelled to get the full length novel. Imagine a future where the US has busted up into 4 nations. The South has all the rednecks and of course, they are persecuting the intellectuals and other dissidents. So what do the intellectuals do? (edited 5/1 for clarity) They steal a billion dollar space exploration vehicle, go into cryosleep, and wake up a couple hundred years later on a Strange New World-- Coyote, one of the moons of a distant planet. They set about building homes and lives and civilization. The 200 yr old teenagers grow up. And then, eventually, another ship shows up.

This book was very well written. The characters were great and the whole pioneer spirit was woven into the new future. I was not sure where the political parallels were going until the very end. I really approved of the final resolution. And that's all I want to say, because I would rather say too little of the book than too much.

There are other books in the series, and I expect they will be scattered throughout my summer.