Most of the Anita Blakes fall into a standard formula-not that’s there anything wrong with that-but Blood Noir does not fit the normal pattern. Oh there is sex galore, Blood Noir starts off with Anita having sex with two of her Sweeties before we get to any kind of plot or story at all. But then, Anita Blake, US Marshall, Vampire Executioner, Human Servant to Jean Claude The Master Vampire of St. Louis-and holder of countless other titles, has never been a subtle character. I like that about her. Blood Noir is another book, like Micah, that fills more like…
Category: book review
It’s a Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
There will be profanity. Being Death isn’t as easy as it sounds. Or at least, being a death merchant isn’t all that easy-not that it’s all that hard most of the time either. It’s a Dirty Job by Christopher Moore is a funny, profane, and occasionally touching book. It’s about a junk dealer who discovers that he has the responsibility of collecting soul vessels and seeing that they find their way to their rightful owners. Along the way has to deal with Sewer Harpies, other Death Merchants, The Emperor of San Fransisco and his foul mouthed Goth shop worker. Oh,…
Bill Bryson’s Thunderbolt Kid
“Happily,” Bryson writes, “we were indestructible. We didn’t need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver.” Listening to Bill Bryson as he reads, with some relish, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, one is struck by the idea that he must have sent off for one of those Hypnosis Kits he found in the back of comic books in the 1950s. His voice is soothing and plesant but seems to be hiding something. It’s a slightly confusing account of what it was like being a rich kid in Iowa in the 1950s. There…
Getting In Touch with Your Inner Fish
Dinosaurs are a pretty recent phenomenon-people only started to study the Terrible Lizards about a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s one of those things that makes you wonder. DaVinci was intrigued by fossils and was one of the first people to ask why seashells were hanging out on mountaintops. The locical explantion at the time was that this was evidecne of The Great Flood. Once the idea of Devine Design was put to rest, the real science of Dinosuars and all the other odds and ends laying around in the fossil record took on new meanings. With the advent…
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday is a rather depressing bit of business. It is the story of a writer and the trouble he causes all his creations, apparently to entertain himself. Though it is never really clear if the Creator is entertained or not. He seems as sad and pathetic as the characters whose strings he pulls. There is madness and mayhem and a lot of talk about bad chemicals and so on. The book is written in an odd style, even for the great and odd Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions is about a number…
Robert Fulghum-What on Earth
I read All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten when it was first published twenty years ago. This was a book filled with short essays about Robert Fulghum‘s dreams and wishes and what he would do if he could do anything. As it turned out, this little book was his key to doing anything he ever wanted to do-and I feel sure, any number of things he never thought he would get to do. He followed up that first success with a couple of other books filled with his essays, which were a little less profound, since…
The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven
I listened to The Draco Tavern on a recent trip to Tyler. It’s a series of short stories which are loosely related to each other, but the only real constant is the Bartender Rick Schumann. Rick Schumann is characterized brilliantly by narrator Tom Weiner. He has the perfect touch as a 1940s Film Noir character running a space age watering hole. My father in law was a huge fan of sci fi and grew up reading the pulps and listening to the radio. Now it needs to be said here that radio was the perfect format for science fiction-and by…
Steve Martin Born Standing Up
Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything.-Steve Martin I listened to the Audio Book version of Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up-read by the author. The pieces of Steve Martin’s life are told in a simple, clear manner, with the occasion bit of silliness toss in for good measure. Steve Martin is no longer a stand up comic. We knows this because every time he is interviewed for anything, he asked-So when are you going back to Stand Up? This question is always greeted with a pained/shocked expression and a simple answer-Never, I will never do Stand Up…
Folio Society and Easton Press
“I cannot live without books.“ –Thomas Jefferson One of the fun things about being a blogger is writing about things you are interested in, like rare books, Easton Press, The Folio Society, and what makes a good book, a good book. In my experience as an occasional book dealer, I have found a number of good books and a number of books that should have been good but turned out not to be. I have been a book dealer, off and on, for the last twenty years or so. I have owned many Folio Society, Easton Press, and Franklin Library…
Welcome to The Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, his writing is both highly intelligent and totally silly. Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of short stories. Kurt Vonnegut’s sci-fi stories are often shocking in their premise and more shocking in their solutions. They are written in the such plain and straight forward style that the sci fi elements often sneak up on you. Welcome to the Monkey House is the story of a world which is overpopulated, so the World Government comes up with an Ethical Solution to the problem. Birth Control is bad, so they just devise…