After really enjoying Dan Simmons’ The Terror, I was stoked to hear the subject for his next novel- Charles Dicken’s final, incompleted mystery novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.In it, Simmons uses his considerable skill for blending fact and fiction, following Dickens (through the voice of narrator Wilkie Collins, a fellow writer and friend of… [Read more…]
March 29, 2010
Jonathan Maberry’s The Dragon Factory continues the saga of Joe Ledger, Mayberry’s featured protagonist and a team leader of the Department of Military Sciences (DMS), the United States’ ultra-clandestine team of special operatives who work with a blank check and near-total autonomy from the rules and regulations of modern warfare to keep the country (and… [Read more…]
March 3, 2010
February flew by, and so did the books-I whipped my way through 5 books, so I thought I’d consolidate them into one post. Here’s a haiku for each one. Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, by Laura S. Scott Statistics were dryBut anecdotes compellingConfirming our choice Poker Nation: A High-Stakes,… [Read more…]
February 20, 2010
I’ve always been a fan of short story collections. The short story is a great, under appreciated form of prose-since the writer doesn’t generally have the space to become long-winded, the stories come out lean, terse, and to the point. I always think that the best writers are the ones who can tell a great… [Read more…]
February 7, 2010
The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson, is a look into the psychic spy operations that have been funded and supported by the government from the LSD experiments in the 50′s to blasting interrogation subjects with the “Barney” theme song in the war on terror.I usually have no patience for either hippies or… [Read more…]
February 5, 2010
This is a little late, but a few weeks ago I read Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton last book. It was actually found as a finished manuscript in his desk after he’d died, and I blew through it in about a day. As it’s name suggests, Pirate Latitudes is a traditional pirate novel in setting, but… [Read more…]
January 26, 2010
Hannibal: The Novel, by Ross Leckie, is a historical fiction depicting the life of…surprise! Hannibal of Carthage, the Scourge of God, Rome’s Greatest Enemy, and most definitely not the refined cannibal that made Thomas Harris a millionaire. Probably stemming from my own delusions of grandeur, I’ve always been fascinated by conquerors of old, and Hannibal… [Read more…]
January 22, 2010
Stephen King’s latest book, Under the Dome, is about a small town on the East Coast that finds itself encased in a glass dome. It’s a simple enough idea, but King turns that one-sentence premise into 1074 pages of lightning narrative. The dome is semi-airtight, lending itself to create its own atmosphere, and the mystery… [Read more…]
April 6, 2010
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