GrahamChops

The Cardturner, by Louis Sachar

2011-07-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

Got some news for you folks: after a two-year run, I'm going to retire this blog and focus exclusively on my main blog, here. I just don't have time to post here regularly, and if you really want my opinion on books, you can just check out my Goodreads account. (And if we're friends on Facebook or Twitter, all my Goodreads stuff links to those anyway, so yeah.)

So this, my final Chop, is of Louis Sachar's (HOLES, SMALL STEPS) The Cardturner. It's about a kid named Alton who helps his blind uncle play bridge, and he learns some life lessons in the process.

I'm sure that sounds generic, like maybe it's been done before, but I can tell you I've never read another book like this one. Alton is a very well-written 17 year-old boy. His uncle is a very convincing grumpy old man. His parents are overbearing (realistically), his best friend is kind of a piece, and the main love interest is perfect for him.

The writing was wonderful. Alton frequently broke the fourth wall, most often to explain the rules of bridge (a difficult card game with billions of possibilities) to the reader. These sections can be skipped without detracting from the story (I think the way Sachar did this was very clever.)

This book reminds me of Holes, not by formula but by feel, because of how well it all comes together in the third act. You don't realize what the author's been setting you up for until it happens, and you're impressed by the creativity of it.

Overall, The Cardturner is the first "WOW" book I've read in 2011, the book I'll recommend to everyone no matter what genre they like to read. It's not a sci-fi or a fantasy, it's just good teen literature that is good for anyone.

And as far as the rating is concerned, it's a PG. Mild profanity here and there, one A-word, and one instance of blasphemy. (Personally I'll never justify blasphemy, but the frustration with which is was used is certainly understandable. You'll know when you read it.)

I read the hardcover version, and I think it would be wise to read it in print. Normally I do audiobooks but I doubt this one would translate very well into that, because of all the bridge lingo.

So pick it up and enjoy!

And thanks to all of you who have made this a fun blog. I'm sure I'll still review movies and books over at OGP from time to time. See you out there.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-07-06T22:29:00.001-07:00

Maybe you've heard of this movie that came out, called Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Being the big TF fan that I am, I saw it on opening night and in 3D. I know a lot of TF purists and die-hards like to get together and hate on Michael Bay, and that's fine. Whatever. The guy doesn't exactly crank out Shakespeare, but spoiler alert: the original cartoons weren't that great either. (And if you want to argue otherwise, go back and watch them. I'll wait.)

(Oh, what's that? Not that good anymore, now that you're not a kid? Surprise.)

Anyway, I had a ton of fun watching it. Nobody does "demolition porn" like Michael Bay. Of course, nobody does plot holes like he does either, but one could argue that he's keeping Transformers true to its original form, because the 1986 movie had more holes than Swiss cheese.

(Seriously. Go watch it. I'll wait.)

Anyway, in thinking of a way to review the movie, I figured I'd just go through character-by-character and tell each of their stories briefly. Major spoilers ahead, so come back and read this after you've seen Dark of the Moon in theaters. Ready? Here we go.

Basic plot: back during the Cybertron war, some Autobots got on a ship called the Ark and tried to escape with some secret technology that could have changed the war. Their ship was shot down, and it drifted through space until it crashed on our moon in the 1960s. America and the USSR then engaged in a space race to get to the moon and examine the ship. We brought some parts back, and they've been in hiding. Present day, come to find that the ship was captained by Optimus Prime's predecessor, and the tech he carried was for a massive teleportation bridge. The Decepticons activate the bridge and teleport an army from the moon to Earth.*

**I don't remember the explanation of how the army got there. I think there actually was one, but I just don't remember. Also, a deep analysis will probably find some plot points that are temporally incongruent with the previous two films. I don't care.

ANYWAY. Characters.

OPTIMUS PRIME: We get to see more of his history, and his relationship with his mentor, Sentinel Prime. We see him get his hands dirty in battle the way kings of old would lead troops into war. And while he doesn't revel in destroying his Transformer brethren, he sure doesn't hesitate when the time calls for it. The final battle between him, Sentinel and Megatron shows that when some bad dude needs his head chopped off, Optimus will do it. He's a great character in this one.

SENTINEL PRIME: Recovered from the Ark and revived by Optimus Prime's Matrix of Leadership, Sentinel learns of the end of Cybertron, and realizes that he has a way to save his home planet. He just has to betray the Autobots and enslave the humans in order to do it. After five Autobots and a ton of humans risk their necks to protect him from a Decepticon ambush, he turns around and shoots Ironhide in the back, killing him. He doesn't go 100% evil, but he's definitely bent. He defects because he feels its the right thing to do, and ends up answering to Optimus for it. The fight between Optimus and Sentinel was just epic. Two sides of the same coin. Gandalf versus Saruman. Just amazing. PS, Optimus wins.

SOUNDWAVE: Hey hey, they got him out of orbit! He's not a satellite anymore! He's a sick Mercedes roadster, ostensibly given to the new female lead as a "work perk," then later revealed to be a trap. In the final fight, he dies by a headshot from Bumblebee.

SHOCKWAVE: Heavily marketed, and heavily underused. He had an awesome intro, totally ominous, like there was some sick backstory to why he was there on Earth, piloting some huge tentacle-driller-machine...but we never got it. In fact, he only had one word of dialog we could understand, and that was "Optimus." The rest of the time he was speaking the Decepticon language. Oh, and he never transformed either. He had his moments in the final fight in Chicago, right up until he died via a headshot, probably from Bumblebee, but I think it was Optimus who got him.

BUMBLEBEE: For the first time he's really away from Sam, at least in the beginning, when he's off working with the Autobots to protect Earth. But he and Sam team up for a couple of epic rides. And Bee is as heroic as ever.

SIDESWIPE: Somehow he's a convertible Corvette this time, and they don't bother with the holographic drivers. I question the wisdom of that decision. Sideswipe gets his moment in the highway battle protecting Sentinel, and later in Chicago fighting Decepticons.

MIRAGE: I don't understand why they called him "Dino" instead of "Mirage." This isn't the freaking Flintstones. He was a Ferrari, and had a cool Italian accent. His moment of awesomeness came in the fight to protect Sentinel from the Dreads.

WHEELJACK: Like Mirage, they didn't call him by his name, but referred to him as "Q", like a James Bond character. His head made him look like Einstein, and he was a scientist. He died in Chicago, executed by Soundwave shortly after being taken prisoner.

THE WRECKERS: Topspin (blue), Leadfoot (red), Roadbuster (green.) Nothing says AMERICA like freaking NASCAR vehicles loaded to the kills with machine guns. These dudes primarily stayed in NASA custody, working on the Autobots' spaceship, because--to quote one of the human characters, "We don't let 'em out much...they're @$$holes." And they were. But when it came time to throw down, these dudes were merciless.

MEGATRON: I liked the first Megatron scene in this movie, although it makes absolutely no sense. Why is he in Africa? I'll accept that he stayed there after the Egypt incident in Revenge of the Fallen, but then how did he get to America later? No ship, and he doesn't fly anymore. He turns into a beat up Mack Titan, and in his robot mode he looks like a ravaged desert traveler complete with cloak and shotgun. The look totally worked as far as awesomeness, but not for practicality. I guess it went to show that he lacked the resources to save himself after the second movie, and was surviving as a pile of scrap in the desert.

Still, when he met up with Sentinel in Washington DC and then made his way to Chicago, I felt like he was regaining some of his former glory. Then he picked a fight with Sentinel, and later Optimus, and he got his head handed to him.

The moment was perfect, too: he tried to play the classic villain card, saying to Optimus, "After all...what would you be without me?" (Because villains define their heroes, right?)

Optimus simply replies, "Time to find out." BOOM. Kills Megatron. Awesome.

WHEELIE and BRAINS: Wheelie was the RC truck from TF2, and he's joined by an equally small guy named Brains who turns into a laptop. They managed not to be crude, and to be more than just annoying little mechanical Jar-Jars. When it came time to shine in Chicago, they captured a Decepticon fighter, flew it up into one of the larger ships, and tore the ship's controls apart from the inside, crashing it into the river. Presumed dead, they have a hero moment.

RATCHET: He goes up to the moon with Optimus to recover Sentinel, and...doesn't really do much else, just helps with the fighting.

IRONHIDE: As stated above, Ironhide gets betrayed by Sentinel and is killed. He gets an insanely brave moment though, because as all the Autobot sportscars are making a mad dash to get Sentinel safe inside NEST headquarters, Ironhide floors it back out into the action and rushes head-on to take out two of the Dreads by himself. (Sideswipe gives him some backup.) They end up in a Mexican standoff, two Dreads, two Autobots, and when the fight gets real, Ironhide kills both of the Dreads. It makes his bold sacrifice all the more tragic when Sentinel turns around and caps him. He died well.

STARSCREAM: I must say, I am disappointed in Starscream. As much as I hate those who bellyache about the original cartoon, I'm on their side with this one. Starscream wasn't an unbending sycophant, he was a traitor! He tried to subjugate Megatron at every turn! If Megatron was so obviously weak, Starscream would've capped him and taken over as ruler. Instead he got taken out like a punk, killed by none other than...Sam Witwicky.

Yes. Sam Witwicky killed Starscream.

That's all for this post. In the next one I'll discuss the human characters--because they were all equally interesting as well, and even a little inspiring.

Book Chop: Hard Magic (Grimnoir Chronicles #1)

2011-06-22T08:12:00.000-07:00

Title: Hard Magic
Author: Larry Correia
Genre: Noir/Historical Fiction/Speculative/Probably a few others
Verdict: A complete success.

When Larry Correia said that the first Grimnoir Chronicles title was the best book he'd ever written, he wasn't just being his usual animated self. The juice is worth the squeeze with this one.

History gets a nice shakedown with this series. People all around the world start developing magical abilities (mostly akin to superpowers, think X-Men) during the 1800s, and this changes the course of several worldwide wars. The most notable among these is World War One, in which America employs "actives" (people who use magic) along with high-tech weapons and equipment developed by the likes of Nikola Tesla. Because of these developments, World War Two never happened, Hitler was executed before rising to power, Japan becomes America's biggest threat, and a brewing social conflict between actives and normals looms on the horizon.

Enter Jake Sullivan, an active "heavy" (he prefers the term "spiker") with the ability to manipulate gravity. He's a veteran of the Great War, the youngest of three boys, and a convict who was sprung early from jail so he could help the FBI bring in criminal actives. Sully works with the likes of Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover (both portrayed well in the book), and he's one job away from full freedom. Things are looking fine until he has a run-in with the Grimnoir, a group of organized actives who are actually fighting to save the world from evil magicians.

From there, the story is a rip-roaring ride of fun and intrigue. Correia shows his very adept hands when it comes to manipulating history and science for interesting storylines. The writing is an improvement over what he's shown in the MONSTER HUNTER books, and I think the fact that this one is written in third person really lends itself well to revealing the deep characters. Everyone in here has a good backstory, and it's all relevant to telling the tale as a whole.

I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Bronson Pinchot, who also did ON STRANGER TIDES. The guy is awesome. I think it was better than it would have been, had I read it in print. To put a rating on it, it's a solid R, for language and violence (lotta gore) but no sexual content.

A fun book, and I'm looking forward to the next book in this series even more than I'm looking forward to the next MONSTER HUNTER.

Enjoy.

Book Chop: The Forgotten Locket (Hourglass Door #3)

2011-06-14T21:51:00.001-07:00

Title: The Forgotten Locket
Author: Lisa Mangum
Genre: YA Paranormal romance
Verdict: A solid finale.

Two years ago I got to read an advanced copy of The Hourglass Door at work. I occasionally spice up my reading list (robots/dragons/explosions) with some YA paranormal romance, because despite the large amount of crappy books in that genre, there are some that I enjoy--maybe even as a guilty pleasure.

Mangum's trilogy doesn't have to be a guilty pleasure, though. Even dudes can enjoy this one, though it is a straightforward romance. In the first book, Abby meets a new boy at school, Dante. Dante is a time traveler from Italy...500 years ago, to be precise. They hook up. (That's the point.) In the second book, Dante is taken from her, and she actually has to work to get him back.

This is the third book, the end of the story.

I liked it, as I liked the previous two. One of the great strengths of the trilogy is that the main character girl is smart (without reminding you on every page,) attractive (without pretending she's not, or assuming she is,) and capable of taking initiative. A common staple of this genre is the helpless stupid whiny girl who sits around and spends 400 pages describing how hot the Main Guy is while he does all the heavy lifting for her.

Not so with Mangum's books.

The first big challenge of this book is when Abby goes backward in time, and has to leave behind the familiar setting of her hometown. Granted, a lot of that town changed in the second book when Dante's rival, Vicenzo, really started to bugger things up with the timeline. I guess the next biggest challenge was dropping her 500 years in the past, away from Dante, who was--when she last saw--blinded by Vicenzo's knife.

What happens in the next 400 pages...well, it's not relevant for me to tell you hear if you haven't read the previous two books. Suffice to say that it's an intriguing exploration of Mangum's previous time travel ideas--building on it, evolving it, keeping it exciting.

If I have one complaint, it's that it took a long time to get to the crowning moment of the trilogy; it was really near the end of the book, and I went from feeling suspenseful to getting impatient. Maybe I'm just a guy. If you've read these, let me know in the comments.

Overall, I'm glad to see the series ended well, and that while it's a romance, it played its sci-fi elements very well. Even a dude can enjoy this. So check it out.

Movie Chop: X-Men First Class

2011-06-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

X-Men: First Class

I think I've managed to see every X-Men movie on opening day, with the exception of this one. It wasn't for any lack of excitement, but more of a case of practicality--I like taking the missus to the theater when it's not so crowded, so these days we wait a week.

But anyways...

This one's a prequel to all the other X-Men flicks. As I said on Facebook the other day, I like how it completely made X3 and that lousy Wolverine movie into something of the past. Granted, there were a few things that were inconsistent with all of the previous X-men films, but this one on its own was a really good story.

You've got Erik Lensherr in a Nazi concentration camp in WWII Poland. At the same time, Charles Xavier is in New York. They're children, they don't know each other, but we see how they meet each other and how they end up working together. Erik is on a revenge-bender for the murder of his family, while Charles is trying to figure out his role in the next phase of human evolution.

Ultimately, Erik's scenes were more fun to watch, but that's not to say Charles was a waste of screen time either. In a lot of ways they were the same character, just with a different set of circumstances behind their upbringing. They share equal levels of passion in the pursuit of their goals.

It's cool to see that Professor X wasn't always the moral bastion that we know from the previous films. There was a time when he wouldn't hesitate to mess with someone else's mind if he thought he needed to. And there were other times when he did it and really shouldn't have. His discipline had to come from somewhere, and it comes from the experiences he has in this flick.

We get a taste of how Magneto got his start, and what it was like when he worked with Xavier. However, the amount of time they worked together in this story is inconsistent with the other films. (In X3, they were still together well into their sixties, and Prof. X was still walking. The events of First Class make that impossible.) But if one movie has to lose in the annals of franchise history, I say screw X3. First Class was better.

Saw some cool mutants, too: Havok and Banshee being my favorites. Ultimately I can't pick just one, because McAvoy as Xavier and Fassbender as Magneto were flat-out brilliant picks.

Overall, if there is one thing about that flick I didn't like, it was the F-bomb that Hugh Jackman dropped during a really cool ten-second cameo scene mid-movie. And if there are two things I didn't like, the second one is January Jones as Emma Frost. She belongs on a soap opera, not my movie screen.

So go see it. It's a really fun one.

Book Chop: Good Omens

2011-06-05T21:39:00.000-07:00

Title: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Authors: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Genre: Magical Realism/Fantasy/Satire
Verdict: A real gem

Note: I listened to the audiobook.

Prior to picking up this book, I'd only read three titles by Neil Gaiman: Stardust, Anansi Boys and The Graveyard Book. The first was a case of "the movie was better than the book " (IMO), the second was something a sleeper that I rather enjoyed, and the latter was quite a treat. I think Gaiman's a cool guy and a talented author, based on those three. I've never read any of Pratchett's work, though I understand he's something of a heavy-hitter.

Good Omens is the story of an angel and a demon who team up to bungle the Apocalypse by causing the delivery of the infant Anti-Christ to go awry. He's raised by an American living in England, and plays with other children like normal. These scenes where he's playing are some of the more philosophical parts of the book, without being preachy or featuring characters that speak much higher than their age level would permit. In the category of "kids say the darnedest things," you see real wisdom in the words of eleven year-olds. (One of my personal favorites was the scene where they decided to be the Spanish Inquisition.)

The exchanges between Aziraphale (the angel) and Crowley (the demon) are also entertaining. You have one character who can't see the faults of being so uptight and rigid and obedient, and another who can't be trusted or valued based on any system of morals because he has none.

There's actually a whole array of interesting characters--a witch-hunter and his apprentice; the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, in various forms; and an antique book dealer who holds the titular collection of prophecies. My personal favorite was the group of bikers who followed the Four Horsemen, adding themselves to the mix with such titles as "War, Famine, Grievous Bodily Harm, Really Cool People," etc. That scene alone makes me want to own the book in print so I can go back and re-read it often.

I appreciate how each scene, each chapter, stood out as its own short story in a way. You could read one portion independent of the rest of the book (at least until you get to the climax) and have plenty to discuss and ponder, theologically speaking.

And above all, the humor is top-notch. I laughed aloud at plenty of it, and stopped to recount certain portions to my wife as I read it. I've been told that Pratchett is a remarkable satirist, and if that's the case I'll be looking into his work (especially since this one was written all the way back in the early 1990s.)

Be warned that there is some profanity speckled here and there. A few S-bombs, one F-bomb, and some Adult Topics that pop up without much warning. Still a PG-13, but not a light one.

Movie Chop: Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides

2011-05-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

Breaking from my regular format, I have some things to say about the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise in general, but I will get into specifics about On Stranger Tides.

In 2003 when I first heard of The Curse of the Black Pearl, I thought meh, they're making a movie about a Disney ride. I saw the trailers, it seemed decently interesting, so I made plans to see it. After all, it had been a hard summer: my grandmother passed away, and I was about to leave the country for my mission, and my little brother Ian had already seen the movie and wouldn't stop talking about it.

(Ian never gets like that about stuff, so that's how I knew it was cool.)

So like everyone else on Earth with a pulse, I saw it and fell in love with it. Brilliant story, great acting, visually delicious, wonderful soundtrack...just enjoyable on all levels. Bruckheimer and his gang knocked it out of the park.

Then 2006 rolled around, and with it Dead Man's Chest, the eagerly anticipated sequel. It was to Black Pearl what Empire Strikes Back was to A New Hope: a pretty good story, but totally incomplete, and would remain so until the cliffhanger was resolved.

And let's be honest with ourselves: it was a pretty big damn cliffhanger. Darth Vader was Luke's father, and Han Solo was frozen in carbonite to be delivered to Jabba the Hutt? That's not nearly as big as Captain Jack Sparrow looking a kraken right in the mouth and running straight at it, going down with his beloved ship...only to learn moments later that Captain Barbossa is still alive.

A lot of people disliked Dead Man's Chest. I understand why--it was a different treatment from the first one, but I still thought it was great. Jack Sparrow was still wildly entertaining, had plenty of good quips, and generally kept things moving in a curious direction.

A year later, At Worlds End hit theaters...and you'd better believe I had midnight tickets. It had everything that I expected from a third film: we found out how Barbossa survived (sea goddess), where Jack went (Davy Jones' locker), and how the crew of the Black Pearl could retrieve him (sailing to the end of the world.)

The whole thing ended with an epic sea battle between the Caribbean's two most awesome pirate ships: the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchmen. Some argue that it was pointless to unite a pirate navy against the British fleet only to not have them fight, and I agree...but I also get why they didn't do it (time! budget! whatever!) so I'm not bothered. (Although I did start to yawn and roll my eyes when Calypso grew to 50 feet tall, spat some jibber-jabber, turned into a pile of crabs, and fell off the side of the Pearl.)

And now, in 2011, we have On Stranger Tides. In a lot of ways...I'm unhappy.

Don't get me wrong: it wasn't a bad film. I for one got my expectations up way too high. Last year I read the Tim Powers novel twice, because it was so amazing. It had very little in common with the movie's story (which I anticipated, and that's fine) but I did hope that the movie would still enthrall me. Maybe not in the way that the book had, but in the way that the previous three had.

I could bore you with a long and detailed list of why I think this is, but...wait, yes, I'll bore you with that list.

1) CHARACTERS
In this one, we only saw three characters who had been in the three previous films: Sparrow, Barbossa, and Gibbs. Keith Richards reprised his role as Captain Teague for a whole three minutes, and my wife insists that one of the British sailors was in the previous films, but I dunno.

Blackbeard was historically and folklorically accurate, so that's cool. They even threw in the "Hell, if I didn't [insert dastardly act] every now and then, you'd forget who I was" line.

This story did lack Will and Elizabeth. I didn't think I'd miss them. But I did.

In fact, I missed all of Jack's crew. That was a problem: what's a Captain without his crew? Can you really have a whole Star Trek story with just Kirk and Spock? I don't think so. This film didn't get me the way the others did, because it was basically Star Trek with no Scotty, Uhura, Bones, Sulu or Chekov (or even the Enterprise for that matter.) I guess that while you couldn't have an awesome POTC movie without Jack, you can't have one with just Jack either.

And the crappy thing about that is, they could've included the old crew. But instead they injected a bunch of new (and really, really meaningless characters for whom I cared nothing.) There was, I dunno, some nameless missionary who hooked up with a near-pointless mermaid, then some zombies (that talk?) and a Spaniard who's like, ooh-aah, dangerous, and he appears all of four times.

I will say this: Barbossa was really something in this flick. Not enough to be a scene-stealer, but pivotal and meaningful. A man of passion. Watching the whole movie really pays off to see how it ends for him.

2) SETTING

They filmed this one in Hawaii--and it feels nothing at all like the last three.

I think it's cool that they used mermaids in this one. They've done everything else--skeletons, sea monsters, fish-people, massive storms...it fit well.

Wonder where they'll go from here.

3) ORIGINS

It's lost the original feel of being based on the Disney ride. (Even the third one had the sounds that came directly from the ride, including the parrot saying "Dead men tell no tales."

Jack did say "It's a pirate's life for me," which was close, but still. Maybe I'm being too nitpicky...

However, the redeeming moment in this category was when Jack and Barbossa went aboard Ponce de Leon's ship. I won't spoil it, suffice to say that it was very entertaining.

4) COMIC RELIEF

It also lacked Pintel and Raghetti (the two dunce pirates, one of whom had a wooden eye.) I missed them too.

Jack was still funny, but not as funny. No really quotable quips or memorable one-liners from this one. Well, maybe one or two, but not like the last ones. :(

5) CONTINUITY

I will say this much: each of the three previous films gave me an ending that wrapped up the whole thing in spectacular form, and when I walked out of the theater I was wholly satisfied. This fourth film had a wonderful ending, even if it took a really weird road to get there. In a lot of ways it solved its own problems and set up the any future films to be as good as the last ones...if they handle it right.

I even really liked the way the third movie ended. It was really heart-wrenching, a great conclusion, a victory for all the good guys. Again, so was this one. I just hope that if they do a fifth one, they look back to what made the first one great.

I dunno, I think I'm done complaining now. Go see the movie and decide for yourself. And if you don't see the movie, at least buy the soundtrack. Hans Zimmer will never disappoint you.

I'm kind of burned out on pirate stuff for a while, so I'll let it be and go read something else. Have a great night.

Book Chop: Lamplighter (Monster Blood Tattoo, #2)

2011-05-18T08:26:00.001-07:00

Title: LAMPLIGHTER
Author: DM Cornish
Genre: Middle-grade high fantasy
Verdict: Really picks up the series and puts it on its feet.

In December I read and Chopped the first book in this series. You'll note that I described it as a "delightful book about nothing."

Well, after having time to chew on that (and read the sequel) I have more to say about it. As mentioned before, Cornish's road to publication was a little off the beaten path: he'd spent years developing the world of the "Monster Blood Tattoo" series, more as a hobby than anything else. When a literary agent came into the mix, he was paid small advances to write 1000 words per week. Eventually they got a story good enough for one book, and that was FOUNDLING (book 1.)

FOUNDLING was a good adventure. New words to learn, new concepts to understand, and characters to meet. The entire book is about Rossamund, an orphan, who leaves his orphanage and reports for duty at the Lamplighter Corps. On the way he gets delayed, and meets a bunch of people who are important later.

In LAMPLIGHTER, things really start to pick up, and we see this vivid and detailed world through a much larger scope. The Lamplighters are a military organization, protecting people on long country roads from monsters. They walk from one fortress at dusk, light the lamps, and sleep at another fortress, then return the next morning to douse the lamps. If they find monsters, they fight them. If they kill them, they take the blood-ichor from the monster and give themselves tattoos (hence the series title.)

Rossamund meets new characters, reunites with old ones, and learns of a sinister plot within the Lamplighter Corps: people are making monsters and hiding them inside the fortresses, attempting to take them over.

I really don't want to say any more than that, because the story and world are both interesting enough to merit your full attention. Especially the last few chapters, wherein you learn something devastating about Rossamund's true origins.

The third book, FACTOTUM, is already out. I intend to read it soon. The series gets a PG rating--some grotesque monster violence, and some characters get injured, but nothing worse than say, the Spiderwick Chronicles movie.

Enjoy!

2011 Summer Project: Atlas Shrugged

2011-05-13T23:33:00.001-07:00

Announcement, you guys: I've got a blogging project here that's going to take a few weeks during the summer.

You've probably heard of a book called ATLAS SHRUGGED. It was written in the 50s by Ayn Rand, and recently it's become a big deal in popular political debate.

I've heard people on the right adore it, and people on the left bash it. I'm interested in finding out why, because I know nothing about the book, other than it deals with a chick who runs a train company.

Then I looked at the actual book: over 1000 pages. Holy crap, I've got no time for this.

So I looked at the audio book: 60 hours. Holy crap, I mean...ugh.

Even the downloadable version from Audible.com is in 8 segments (most books are 1-2.) I could play it at double-speed and it would still take me a crazy amount of time and attention!

Then I realized I could make a blog project out of it. So I am.

Here's the deal: with the book broken into eight segments of 8 hours each (roughly), I could listen to one segment per week over the course of 8 weeks, and finish blogging the book sometime in July. I'll post a Chop of each individual segment, to get a feel for what the whole book is about: characters, philosophy, message, etc.

I want to know what ideas are in this book, why they're such a big deal, and whether or not I really agree with them. I have no real expectations of it, since I don't know why it's so polarizing. I intend to find out, and divulge my findings here.

So check back for updates, starting next week with Part One of the ATLAS SHRUGGED book Chop. 1000 pages = a really big tree...but that's why I chop.

Book Chop: Drawing Out The Dragons

2011-05-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

Title: Drawing out the Dragons
Author: James A. Owen
Genre: Autobiography/inspirational
Verdict: One of the most useful books of its kind.

Three summers ago I read my first James A. Owen novel, HERE THERE BE DRAGONS. It featured three well-known British authors as protagonists who protected a map of fantasy lands. The whole thing was loaded with inside jokes, and had a brilliant mish-mash of mythology that struck me as quite clever.

Every book since then has been on the same level.

Only recently have I learned just how amazing Mr. Owen's story really is.

DRAWING OUT THE DRAGONS is the story of how he became to be the writer he is today. In a sense it's like Stephen King's writing book (which I haven't Chopped), and John Scalzi's writing book (which I have.)

It's only 100 pages, and that's in eBook form, so if I tell you much of anything, I run the risk of ruining the whole thing. So I'll keep it brief:

1) As a kid, Owen was marked for death in a hospital. (True.)

2) Superman saved him. (Legit.)

3) For a long time, everything sucked. (It happens.)

4) Then he said, in a polite way, "Screw you, Life. I'm driving the rest of the way." (Inspiring.)

5) Now he has a fan base. (The dream.)

6) It's a pleasure to be part of it. (Fact.)

I've rubbed shoulders with a bunch of people who are successful in the way I'd like to be. One thing they all have in common is that they work their @$$es off through years and years of career suckage, and they really put it all on the line for the craft they love. In this book, Owen details how to make it work.

For $4.99, this book is a steal. Buy it here. Take two hours to read it. And get back on top of your life.

Especially if you're a writer.

Book Chop: Blood Rites (Dresden Files #6)

2011-05-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

Title: Blood Rites
Author: Jim Butcher
Genre: Urban fantasy
Verdict: Maintains the awesome pacing, humor, and story.

This is going to be a short Chop, because I'm starting to get a feel for how these Dresden books go. It's kind of like reading a mix between Burn Notice and Harry Potter. There's the overall story arc of the war between wizards and vampires, and then each individual episode (or book) shows Harry handling a particular case.

Then you mix in some humor, some cool new mythos, a cast of interesting characters, and a mystery, and you're off.

In book six of this series, Harry is dealing with vampires again, specifically of the Black Court (the really nasty ones.) He also finds out he has a half-brother, which I didn't see coming. Consequently, he learns more about his mother.

The one really sketchy part about this book (and the series in general) is the amount of sexual content. However, I'll be the first to say that Butcher is more careful about it than his urban fantasy peers (who are his inferiors.) Book five (DEATH MASKS) was bad enough to prompt me to skip a few minutes ahead on the audio book, and I didn't miss anything I regret.

The reason I bring it up with BLOOD RITES is that Harry is handling a case of murders on the set of a pornographic film. When the details of the case were revealed, my initial reaction was that I might not be entirely thrilled with this story. Still, I let it unfold and told myself that if it got bad, I'd shut it off.

Jim Butcher has written Harry Dresden as a chivalrous character with solid values about women, and how they should be treated. Those values didn't get set aside to write a story about a porno; rather, Dresden strengthened his resolve to be true to himself, and we saw the industry through his eyes. Sex in those films, in those studios, is nothing like the real thing. It's cheap, uncomfortable, meaningless, and damaging.

That being the case, it played into the urban fantasy lore, and--surprisingly--into the story.

As it turns out, vampires (and their secret underground power circles) have a big hand in the pornography industry because it damages peoples' understanding of love versus lust. Love makes people immune to certain types of emotional vampirism, so it's in those vampires' interest to keep people from knowing what pure love is. Pornography destroys that understanding.

I'm not only pleased that Butcher presented it this way in his story, but that he also did it without beating the reader over the head. You could look at it as "just Harry's opinion" on certain things, but when you get into the whole fantasy element of it, you see the real-world principles behind it. Bravo, Butcher.

I'm going to be reading the next six books in the series during the rest of this summer. Book 13 comes out in July, so I should be just in time to catch that one. And stay tuned for a post on some other things I'll be reading--there's gonna be a summer project here on GrahamChops.

Double Chop: Dresden Files #4 & #5

2011-04-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

THE DRESDEN FILES is a great urban fantasy series about a wizard named Harry Dresden who lives in Chicago. He works as a wizard publicly, helping people here and there with missing items and the like. He's usually broke, his apartment sucks, his car is a piece of crap, and he does lots of cool stuff with magic. The stories are unique, inventive, original and entertaining, and the same could be said about the diverse array of memorable characters.

Each book thus far (there are a dozen, and I've read five) deals with a different type of magic, or at least focuses on one in particular.

#1 STORM FRONT is about an amateur wizard who doesn't control his powers very well. He's killing people during storms, and Harry has to stop him.

#2 FOOL MOON is about various types of werewolves on the loose. One group is a gang of college kids, one is a band of FBI agents, and one works with the local mob. Harry is caught in the crossfire of all three as he tries to stop a series of wolf-related crimes and slayings.

#3 GRAVE PERIL is about the ghost of a demon that Harry had to kill a few months ago. It comes back with other ghosts and is causing all sorts of supernatural mayhem. On top of that, the local vampires have a beef with Harry, which he accidentally solves by...um...killing them all.

#4 SUMMER KNIGHT deals primarily with the Fae. The faerie courts are at war with each other. One of the Queens killed the Summer Knight, and there's a lot of intrigue running around to pin it on other people. Harry gets caught up in the middle of it and has to solve everyone's problems using his wits and magic. It ends with an all-out battle in a stormcloud over Lake Michigan.

#5 DEATH MASKS takes a turn away from wizards, werewolves, ghosts and fae, choosing instead to focus on the more mythological/magical/paranormal applications of Christianity (Judas' noose, his thirty silver dinars, the Knights of the Cross, the Shroud of Turin, etc.) More ripples from problems of the first four books are hitting Harry as well: his girlfriend has been turned into a vampire, the Vampire Court wants Harry dead, the White Council of Wizards feel about the same way, an evil demon wants Harry's soul, and a lot of people die.

There are many things to like about this series overall. The magic is well-defined and specific, and easily understood. Again, the characters are memorable. The humor is rampant and I love it all. There's plenty of tension and high cost, too: Harry spends most of every book tired, sleep-deprived, hungry, out of magic, broke, and with about ten people gunning for him. So they move pretty quick and--thus far--all in real time.

Content caveat: the amount varies, but each book has heavy language, and in one way or another there is sexual content. Probably an R rating, so proceed with caution.

Book Chop: The Name of the Wind

2011-04-22T22:55:00.000-07:00

Title: The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicle #1)
Author: Patrick Rothfuss
Genre: High fantasy
Verdict: Name of the (long)Wind(ed) but still intriguing.

Can't even begin to tell you where I should start with this. It's a beast of a book, and a proper Chop would be a similar beast. Let me run down the facts:

1) A number of authors I like/read/follow on Twitter have all had great things to say about this book, so I checked it out at the library on audio.

2) It was published in 2007. The sequel, THE WISE MAN'S FEAR, just came out last month.

3) Rothfuss really took his time with it. In the preface he thanked his dad for teaching him to take his time and do things right.

4) It's the story of a man named Kvothe, an apparent hero-turned-outlaw who's hiding from...something. Kvothe meets up with a scribe who's operating under the name of Chronicler. Chronicler wants to write Kvothe's story. After appropriate deliberation, Kvothe agrees, saying it'll take three days.

5) The series is a trilogy. Each book is one day of the story being told.

6) Kvothe tells his story from the beginning. As a young boy he traveled with his family. They were very dedicated performers and storytellers. One of the guys traveling with them was a magician who'd trained at an as-yet-unnamed-but-highly-revered "University." The guy teaches Kvothe tons of stuff about magic, and Kvothe is smart so he picks up quick.

7) Kvothe's father is working on a song about some fabled demons called the Chandrian. The song calls the Chandrians' attention, and they show up and slaughter everyone except Kvothe, who was wandering in the woods.

8) Kvothe spends the next three years as a homeless Dickensian urchin, learning to survive on pretty much nothing.

9) When he gets his act together, he heads to the University and BS-es his way in, based on the stuff he learned from the guy traveling with his family.

10) From there, it's a lot like Harry Potter, but I don't say that in a derogatory way. It's a lot more grown-up though, including everything from public lashings to loan sharks to raucous drinking to powerful upperclassmen crapping on the little guy. All of it was well-done and enjoyable, thorough and detailed without being overly attentive to irrelevant things (like, for example, how clothing is made.)

11) After a few semesters of rivalry and schooltime whimsy, Kvothe hears of an attack at a wedding 70 miles away. The details of the attack are similar to how the Chandrian killed his family, so he goes to check it out. Whoops! Not Chandrian, just a drug-addict dragon. (Spoiler alert.) Kvothe kills it.

12) When he comes back, he has a showdown with Ambrose, the "Draco Malfoy" of the story. Kvothe uses magic to break the dude's arm, instinctively summoning the wind. One of the professors sees him do it, and offers to teach him how to refine his talent.

13) The end of book one.

14) There are frequent interludes where Kvothe and Chronicler are talking to each other, before Kvothe goes back to telling his story.

15) The magic was really well thought-out, almost to the point of being a science. Imagine everything you read about Allomancy in Sanderson's MISTBORN series. It's even more detailed than that.

16) The humor was spot-on.

17) As a stand-alone book, I don't think it accomplished much, but it established a whole ton of stuff. We get a lot of detailed backstory on the main character, including anecdotes and pivotal moments of learning. On their own, these individual experiences make great stories. The book is almost just a collection of them. I'll have to read the others to see what the result is.

18) It's 662 pages, or 27 hours on audio. Good luck.

19) I don't personally believe that a book needs to be this long. But I guess Rothfuss, his agent, his editor, his publisher and his friends disagree. To an extent, maybe I do too, because I liked it well enough. Still.

20) Profanity speckled here and there, including sensual references. A soft PG-13 on this one.

Enjoy.

Book Chop: Mortal Engines

2011-04-22T22:41:00.000-07:00

Title: Mortal Engines
Author: Phillip Reeve
Genre: Sci-fi/dystopia, YA
Verdict: Cool premise.

Dozens of centuries in the future, all cities are mobile. Larger cities "eat" smaller cities and absorb them to keep going. It's called Municipal Darwinism, and everyone practices it.

Okay, not everyone. There are Tractionists (moving cities) and Anti-Tractionists (stationary ones.) They're at war. The Anti-Tractionists are behind an impenetrable wall. The Tractionists are after a deadly weapon that can break through the wall and let them at an unlimited supply of immobile prey.

The main character is Thomas Natsworthy, an orphan historian apprentice. When his city, London, catches a dangerous stowaway who tries to kill someone important, Thomas witnesses the attempt and is cast out of the city to keep from talking about it. He eventually meets up with Hester Shaw (the stowaway) and learns the truth about London's intentions.

Their trek across a barren wasteland has them cross paths with smaller cities, dangerous pirates, airship crews, and resurrected half-robot men who are the ultimate soldiers. Thomas and Hester have to (begrudgingly) trust each other in order to survive and stop London from breaking into the Anti-Traction League.

The premise of the book was extremely interesting, and the tech was pretty cool too. It could have benefited greatly from some interior artwork, like Scott Westerfeld's LEVIATHAN trilogy. Spectacles like the ones contained in MORTAL ENGINES really need visuals.

Characterization felt a little flat to me (I never really cared about the characters, just the story) and by the end I was rushing to see how it all played out. The story had a definite end, with which I was satisfied. There are four books total in the series, and I'll probably read them down the road. A pretty good book. Unfortunately it's not available in audio format, but I think it's up in digital.

Pretty clean too, as far as language and sensuality, but plenty of violence and a rather high body count.

Book Chop: Ship Breaker

2011-03-13T14:57:00.000-07:00

Title: SHIP BREAKER
Author: Paolo Bacigalupo
Genre: Dystopia YA

I first heard about this book at the Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers conference in Sandy, UT last June. The editrix who worked on the book was presenting at the conference, and read samples of books she'd worked on as a way of showing us what she likes. I filed it away in the back of my mind and kept listening.

Last month when I signed with my own agent, she told me that my manuscript reminded her of SHIP BREAKER, as far as the world and the voice. So I decided to check it out.

The premise is a common one for sci-fi: in the future, the world is too polluted by human activity, and [Evironmental Disaster X] changes the layout of the world. In this one, sea levels have risen to dangerous highs, the climate has altered, and there's an overabundance of workers with a major shortage of work to be done. One has to bust butt all day for very little pay in order to survive.

Enter Nailer, a kid who works on a ship-breaking crew. They salvage old tanker ships and sell the material. When a freak hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico, a high-dollar luxury yacht washes up on shore with a few rich people inside, all dead.

Except one.

Nailer and his friend Pima face a choice: kill the last survivor, salvage her ship and live like kings off what they make, OR, save the survivor and help her get home. Having just had his own near-death experience, Nailer chooses the latter, and the adventure begins.

I can honestly say there was never a dull moment. The narrative was great, the dialogue was engaging, and the characters all had clear and meaningful motivation. The world felt very realistic, and I don't feel like any of the major plot points were contrived or poorly established.

A good, fun book.

I'd probably rate it a PG-13 for language, so be aware of that.

Book Chop: I Don't Want to Kill You (John Cleaver #3)

2011-03-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

Title: I DON'T WANT TO KILL YOU
Author: Dan Wells
Genre: Paranormal horror

What a bittersweet ending to a darkly clever trilogy. I don't read a lot of horror, but since I like Brandon Sanderson's work and I enjoy the Writing Excuses Podcast, I gave Dan Wells' books a try two years ago and I've never regretted it.

The I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER trilogy is unique and tremendously entertaining. It follows John Cleaver, a teenage sociopath who is obsessed with the history and pathology of serial killers. When a real killer shows up in his town, John saddles up and defeats him as only another serial killer can. This unleashes a hornet's nest of problems, not the least of which is John's own dark side.

If Dan Wells is good at one thing, it's giving you what you don't expect, while still keeping you interested. I didn't have many predictions for how this book would end, other than the generic "everything is fine" ending. But I didn't get that.

Everything wasn't fine.

In fact, to many characters, things got very bad before they never got better.

And yet it wasn't a tale of despair, but one of costly triumph. It showed just how hard it was to fix a broken human being, and who had to pay the price to fix him.

One thing I'm impressed with is Wells' ability to present horrific topics without delving into long psychosexual scenes, or lacing the dialogue with profanity. The strength of the story is much more chilling than that.

I recommend the whole trilogy. Mild language throughout, though.

Book Chop: Monster Hunter Vendetta

2011-03-13T14:19:00.001-07:00

Title: MONSTER HUNTER VENDETTA (MHI #2)
Author: Larry Correia
Genre: Urban fantasy

Correia's really making a name for himself. I enjoyed this book tremendously, even though I sat back and scratched my head at the results of a literary analysis.

Lemme explain.

Aficionados of urban fantasy are all aware of the success of the TWILIGHT franchise. (In fact, most anyone will be aware of that.) One of the more common potshots people take at TWILIGHT is that Bella Swan is just an object of projection, a faceless character that the reader can "wear" in order to live out her most extreme romantic fantasy about the "perfect" ideal man.

I bring this up because--to an extent--the first two MONSTER HUNTER books are pretty much the same thing, and I don't say that in a bad way. Because this kind of projection would result in the reader having an extensive daydream about saddling up in Kevlar armor, grabbing a few knives and high-powered firearms, and blowing monsters into red dust for exorbitant amounts of money.

Now. Ask me which fantasy I'd rather project onto.

But the strength of this series thus far doesn't just lie in the satisfaction of the daydream. The story is pretty good too, especially in the sequel.

Brief rundown of book one: main character, Owen Pitt, is an accountant by day, gun nut by night. Finds out his boss is a werewolf. Kills his boss. Gets recruited to a secret group of people that hunt monsters for pay. Works a few jobs, grabs a few bounties, burns through some fun chapters. Then Owen learns he's the product of a prophesy and has to slay some supernatural spirit lord in order to save the world. He does. There's a hot chick in there somewhere. The end.

Well, book two builds on that story and goes deeper. It has that effect where the story doesn't just roll forward; it ripples outward, getting bigger, and pulling on the strength of the first book to make the plot stronger. Owen's family have a more prominent role, and they gain three full dimensions as far as their purpose. He doesn't just have a caring mom, a psycho war-vet dad and a rockstar brother--they become involved in his life and his career as a monster hunter.

I'd say the second book relied a lot more on character than it did on plot, because so much of what happened ended up revealing backstories for everyone, and they were all connected. A very fun book, and not just a mindless read (although there are plenty of good action scenes, and hardly a dull moment.)

Content was pretty much R-rated, so be aware of that.

Book Chop: Half-Moon Investigations

2011-03-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

Title: HALF-MOON INVESTIGATIONS
Author: Eoin Colfer
Genre: Middle-grade non-spec fiction

Eoin Colfer is one of my favorite authors. His sheer brilliance with humor, plotting, voice and characters will never fail to amaze me. I've loved his other works, most notably AIRMAN and THE SUPERNATURALIST, and this book didn't disappoint.

It's set in modern-day Ireland, about a boy, Fletcher "Half" Moon, whose pasttime is criminal investigations. He takes his work seriously, even to the point of having a contact in the police department (and he's not even in high school yet.) The book centers on one particular case where Half-Moon's friends start losing random and seemingly unconnected items, and they hire him to track them down.

What happens from there will take Half-Moon neck-deep into his most serious case ever, one that involves the actual police, and points to him as a prime suspect.

The book reads really easily, without talking down to the reader. Colfer's just talented that way. The jokes sneak up on you, hidden carefully in the narrative, and the characters are unique and memorable. It's like reading a CSI case that doesn't beat you over the head with clues. I'm 26 and I still didn't figure out the mystery until the end, and the hints were all there.

Content was clean, and the whole book overall was very entertaining.

The Next Phase

2011-02-17T08:10:00.001-08:00

That's a pool at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. I took this pic at like 6 in the morning in the fall of 07 when I was making a delivery to some new restaurant they were building.

It has nothing to do with this post.

Well, I've got an agent now. Two years after I started this blog, my career really gets underway and I start taking slightly larger steps. Part of that involves my blogging, and what I blog about. Book blogging has been a lot of fun and introduced me to a ton of really cool people in the Utah blogosphere. (There are so many book aficionados there, reader/writer alike.)

As per the advice of a friend, I'm going to really ease up on my book blogging from here on out. I'll still read just as much, and post regularly at Goodreads, but in-depth reviews won't come here more than twice a month. Furthermore, I'm only going to Chop books that I'm really excited about.

Why? Well, the brutal truth is, in writing nationally you don't get to punch your fellow authors in the stomach. (Nor should you want to.) There are some crappy books out there, and it's up to readers to decide what they are. I just want to point them to the really great ones and do well by my fellow writers in the interim.

I might Chop more than just books from time-to-time as well. TV shows and movies, for example, will pop up here and there.

That's all. I'm gonna get to work now. So should you. Y'all take care, and keep reading.

Book Chop: Matched

2011-01-23T13:29:00.000-08:00

Title: Matched
Author: Ally Condie
Genre: YA Dystopia
Verdict: A less thrilling take on the dystopia trend, but not insubstantial.

A few things out of the gate here: I listened to the audio version, which was pretty well-done. The narrator they got for it was good, she sounded young without sounding childish. That's kind of a peeve of mine, when the age of the narrator doesn't match the age of the first-person POV. But anyway...

Ally Condie has published a bunch of books with Deseret/Shadow Mountain, but this is her first major national title. It's definitely a chick book, though being in the dystopia category you'll hear people throw around titles like THE HUNGER GAMES and GONE in the same conversation. I think a more apt comparison is Lois Lowry's THE GIVER, because the story here is not at all centered on the action, but the meaning of a totalitarian government.

Cassia Reyes is your teenage protagonist. In the Society, all the tough decisions are made for you and people don't focus on what makes them different from others. The point is for everyone to have the same things and to be the same thing, as far as net results go. Your spouse is chosen for you during a matching ceremony, based on compatibility factors. They don't make mistakes.

When Cassia attends her matching ceremony, she's paired up with a guy she already knows, which is rare. But then a glitch occurs, and for a second she's matched with a guy who's not legally eligible for matching. This sets Cassia on a quest of curiosity that eventually leads her to question whether the Society has perfection down to a science, or if their cradle-to-the-grave coddling is its own form of suppression.

Featuring many concepts that our own society is debating today (speech restriction, death panels, heavy censorship, etc), it's a thought-provoking look at what freedoms we're willing to give up in exchange for what guarantees. Just don't look at the "dystopia" label and expect it to include teenage monsters killing each other in a labyrinth. It's more of a romance than anything else.

Book Chop: Monster Blood Tattoo #1 "Foundling"

2010-12-20T17:06:00.000-08:00

Title: Monster Blood Tattoo #1: Foundling
Author: DM Cornish
Genre: Fantasy
Verdict: A delightful little book about nothing.

Weird. But cool.

After reading this one, I had to do some research on it. The Wiki page revealed something that makes a lot of sense. But I digress.

FOUNDLING is set in a world where monsters are real, humans fight them, and a mashup between life and mechanics isn't all that uncommon. (Ships, for example, have living monster organs "grown" into them.) Likewise, people can undergo surgeries to gain what are, in effect, superpowers. In the midst of these warring superhero monster-killers and the monsters themselves is our young hero, Rossamund.

Rossamund is a "foundling," a fancy way of saying he's a wandering orphan who go picked up. He starts out at the orphanage, hoping that one day he'll get drafted into the navy. Too bad! He gets picked up to be a "lamplighter" instead, which sounds like a crummy job. When he leaves to report for duty, he gets picked up by slavers poising as businessmen.

The slavers get shot at by the military. Rossamund escapes by jumping off their boat into the rivver. Then he meets Europa, a lady with surgical lightning powers. They have a run-in with monsters and kill them. After some more wandering they meet a mailman, who's pretty cool. Then they run into the slavers again, and the lightning lady kills them. Rossamund reports to the lamplighters for duty a few weeks late.

The end.

I'm actually serious. That's the end of the book.

It seems like I'd destroy it for that being the entire plot, but it was really enjoyable for some reason and I can't put my finger on it. Maybe because it was technically fantasy, but with suspended sci-fi explanations for a lot of things...which I haven't seen a whole lot in YA fiction, and I like. A lot.

But to the backstory: Cornish developed the world for the story in his spare time over the course of many years. Eventually an agent picked up his world and liked it, and offered him a rare contract, one wherein he would turn in 1000 words per work for very small advances. Eventually he got a story set in this very detailed world (I mean the map alone is more detailed than most epic fantasies I've read) and the first book was born.

The second and third books are about twice as long as the first one. I can only imagine how much deeper the story gets as it progresses. I'm intrigued enough to keep reading, but yeah--it's a good little book wherein virtually nothing happens with regard to plot. It was still fun though. So I tip my hat to Mr. Cornish.

Book Chop: Ex-Heroes

2010-12-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Title: Ex-Heroes
Author: Peter Clines
Genre: Superhero zombie apocalypse
Verdict: Crude, with a good story, albeit a problem here and there.

I was looking at another book online when Amazon recommended me this one. I think that's how I found it. It's put out by a small press, so I doubt I would have heard of it otherwise.

Clines combines two staples of science-fiction and horror for something I've never seen a take on before: superheroes after a zombie apocalypse. Some of the heroes even become zombies themselves. It's really, really cool. I Am Legend meets Resident Evil and X-Men in less than 300 pages.

The heroes themselves are an interesting spread. In a lot of ways they were modeled after the heroes of WATCHMEN, including Zzzap/Dr. Manhattan, Mighty Dragon/Nite Owl, Stealth/Silk Spectre, Gorgon/Comedian, and Regenerator/Ozymandias (to an extent.) Not too many of them had original powers, but with superhero stories there isn't a whole lot that hasn't been done and isn't ridiculous either. (I did like Gorgon's power: he had these goggles he wore all the time, because if he made eye contact with people he could drain their energy and become temporarily stronger.)

The book had a cool format too: most chapters were in the present, but every other chapter or so was a flashback written in first-person from one of the heroes, giving just enough insight to show who they really were, and also tell an important part of the story. Mighty Dragon and Gorgon had some pretty basic crime-fighting stories, while Zzzap showed what the start of the apocalypse was like, and Regenerator showed how the whole mess started. Other chapters, like the origins for Cerberus, were just plain cool.

Downside? A lot of profanity, a lot of crass talk. Naturally gruesome as well, and of course there's at least one obligatory slut character. (The leader, Stealth, has Skank Potential, but she only dresses that way.) The story had some flaws, including a plot hole about the reveal of the villain, and why he was so bad. Also, why hole up in Los Angeles when you can go out into the neighboring farmland and thrive out there?

In the end I was glad to see that it wrapped up in a cool way, and victory for the heroes--as well as the people they protected--wasn't a clean rout. It cost them, and it showed a bit of the aftermath. Given that Clines is a screenwriter, the story was pretty visual, and would make a good flick.

Book Chop: Beastly

2010-12-02T19:42:00.000-08:00

Title: Beastly
Author: Alex Flinn
Genre: YA Paranormal
Verdict: Surprisingly substantial

I heard about BEASTLY from two sources: Bree Despain mentioned it on the Writing Excuses podcast when she was a guest star, and I also saw a trailer for the movie version that looked semi-interesting. (Only when I saw that same trailer with the sound on did I realize the movie will be a turd.)

The basic pitch? It's "Beauty and the Beast," told from the beast's point of view, in high school, during modern times. In the midst of many-a-teen-crappy-romance books, this one is actually a gem. It didn't ignore the original angle of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, and stayed true enough to the bones of the story with a modern application.

Kyle Kingsbury is the head honcho hot guy at his snobby prep school, where his hot-but-stupid/mean girlfriend only wants material things to be happy. When an ugly girl confronts him in class about his disgusting obsession with style-over-substance, he hatches a plot to embarrass her in front of the whole school at a dance.

Naturally this chick turns out to be a witch, and casts a spell on Kyle, turning him into a beast. Unlike the crappy movie trailer, this doesn't give him awesome-looking tattoos and battle scars--it turns him into a fur-and-fangs monster, more reminiscent of the Disney version.

One thing I liked about Flinn's book is how thorough it was: there weren't any contrivances in getting from point A to point B. Kyle tried a LOT of things that he thought would break the spell, a lot of "cheap fixes" before admitting to himself that he had to do it the witch's way: love someone and earn her love in return. And I think she showed it in such a way that it was believable. Even better was the fact that it was short--the audiobook was less than six hours, and the narrator was good.

The format was also interesting: it starts with a chat room transcript. The room moderator is one "Mr. Andersen" (aka Hans Christian, who wrote fairy tales.) Frequent members of the chat room who show up to discuss their problems are modern versions of the Beast, the Little Mermaid, the Frog Prince, etc. While you only see Kyle in the book, you still get to learn about other people going through other love-related issues via these chats.

Unlike most teen paranormal romances, this one has something meaningful--and true--to teach about love. Flinn didn't skip that in her story just to get to the good parts. Andersen gave her the skeleton of a perfect story generations ago, and she held to that while still writing enough of it to make it her own.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, and will probably read it again. It's an entertaining book that doesn't drone on, and teaches something good to its target audience. Available in paperback.

Book Chop: In Dark Streets Shineth

2010-11-28T19:46:00.001-08:00

Title: In Dark Streets Shineth
Author: David McCullough
Genre: Historical
Verdict: An excellent Christmas book

This one's a quickie. I met David McCullough at a book signing last May, and he's got a great manner with crowds, a dignified sense of humor and a wonderful presence. This is a man who has accomplished great things, a historian in whom I can find no fault. I hope to do at least one thing as great as he has with every book he's penned.

IN DARK STREETS SHINETH is about Christmas Eve in 1941, a few short weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It's a message of optimism and hope, praise to God, and the strength of family and country through wartime. There's a brief snippet of history regarding the hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and some other poetry, and how it mattered in that time period.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are the main "characters," as they spent the holiday together in the U.S. and addressed the American people with this message. (Their individual addresses are included in the back of the book.)

The book comes with a DVD of McCullough narrating the story with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir inside the LDS Conference Center last December. I watched it this morning--it's not super long, but again, very uplifting. I can see it becoming a part of my family tradition in years to come.

Read it and enjoy.

Book Chop: Brian's Winter (Hatchet)

2010-11-28T18:26:00.000-08:00

Title: Brian's Winter (Hatchet #3)
Author: Gary Paulsen
Genre: Young adult survivalist fiction
Verdict: A flagship among books for young boys.

It feels like I might have Chopped this book before. There's a good chance I don't care, because I'm lazy and I just finished reading it to my fiancee this evening. I loved Paulsen's Hatchet books--they are so simple and yet so amazing. If there's another series like it out there for young readers, I am not aware of it and anticipate being unimpressed.

The first book in the series, HATCHET, is about 13 year-old Brian Robeson, who is traveling on a small plane to visit his father in Canada. The pilot of the single-prop Cessna has a heart attack mid-flight, and crashes the jet into a lake in the middle of nowhere. Brian has to rely on his wits and just one tool: a hatchet, given to him as a parting gift from his mother. He has a really cool adventure and learns lots of great survival tricks, and is eventually rescued at the end of the summer.

The sequel, THE RIVER, is about how a government agency wants to take Brian back out in the wilderness to learn what he knew. To keep it realistic, Brian insists on no survival gear and only one agent to accompany him. A storm comes through and the agent gets struck by lightning and falls into a coma. Brian must then build a raft and navigate it down a river for a hundred miles.

BRIAN'S WINTER is an alternate ending to HATCHET, wherein Brian wasn't saved during the summer and had to keep going into winter. What do I love about it? Well, for one thing it's a great classic adventure. It's positive and uplifting, while being realistic and also showing us city folks what nature is really like. There's the "romantic view" of roughing it with the "true view" of the dangers one faces in the wild.

Paulsen is a great writer, too--he mentions in the foreword that he researched the topic prior to writing the book, but he didn't just plug Brian's character into his survival notes. Brian's still a real character, and the little insights into his mind help to pull you into the story, especially at the end when he's rescued, and he's come to actually love living in the woods. He even considers it "play" in a sense, and he's become a part of nature that way. It makes me long for that romantic side of it, but not so much that I'd want to tolerate the cold and suffering the way Brian did.

There are more books in the series, that I definitely want to read. I'll post the reviews as I get them. Highly recommended.

Book Chop: The Lost Hero

2010-11-17T20:50:00.001-08:00

Title: The Lost Hero (Heroes of Olympus, #1)
Author: Rick Riordan
Genre: MG/YA Fantasy
Verdict: Good.

I really liked Riordan's Percy Jackson books. Read the Chops here and here. I picked up THE RED PYRAMID a few months ago and was about bored to tears with it, so that made me skeptical about his new HEROES OF OLYMPUS series--a new Camp Half-Blood adventure.

It's okay though. The series was good. It had everything enjoyable about the first series in it, including new and unexplored tales in Greek (and Roman) mythology. He changed it up a little though, by following three characters in third person narrative so as to explore many new facets of the world.

The three characters are Jason, Leo and Piper--children of Zeus/Jupiter, Hephaestus and Aphrodite respectively. They're among the most powerful of their kind though, and they've been chosen for a quest (naturally.) But unlike previous quests involving the recovery of artifacts or objects, they have to save Hera from being devoured by a giant...and Olympus has cut off their children from having contact. Despite the bridge-building efforts at the end of the Percy Jackson books, the young 'uns are on their own again.

Some parts lagged a little, but overall the pacing was good and it reminded me what I loved about the original series so much. It set up the rest of the series really well, so I'll keep up with it. Definitely worth a read.

Book Chop: The Girl Who Could Fly

2010-11-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

Title: The Girl Who Could Fly
Author: Victoria Forester
Genre: Middle-Grade sci-fi
Verdict: Well, wow. What a neat little book.

Last year I saw this book when I was working for Deseret, it came in with a regular shipment. The hardcover artwork totally didn't capture my attention. It looked kind of lame, and I wasn't going to read it just because Stephenie Meyer plugged it. (She did give props to THE HUNGER GAMES, one of my favorite books, but that's not a measuring stick.)

Well, the above image is on the paperback, and when I pulled it out of a box this year I did a double-take. It looks really cool, doesn't it? Kind of comic-booky, like a graphic novel. It took me a minute to realize I'd seen it before, and actually wanted to look at the inside this time. They still gave prime placement to the Meyer quote on the front cover, which let's be honest, is a smart move. You put Meyer's name on something, and millions of chicks will buy it even if it sucks.

Anyway, I bought the book based on the premise: a little girl discovers she has the ability to fly, and gets taken away to a facility for kids with special abilities. I figured there'd be a lesson included, and not just a good story. I'm glad I got that impression.

The main character, Piper McCloud, starts out in a "Little House on the Prairie" setting. The narrative and character voices fit that setting very well, and it's a lot of fun to read. Forester did a good job with that. That kind of changes when she goes to the Facility, where she meets other kids with powers (speed, intelligence, X-ray vision, etc.) Not many of these powers are super original, and that's fine. It works for the story.

The second half of the story is part X-Men, part Incredibles. The focus of the facility is to remove special abilities from people that have them. In fact, it kind of smacks of Lois Lowry's THE GIVER. And that's a good thing. Piper and her new friends have to find a way to save the facility's occupants from Dr. Hellion, the lady in charge of the place.

I liked the varying tones of the characters. Piper was religious by way of upbringing, very proper and very polite. Science got the stage as well through other characters, so it showed intellectual diversity (although the phrase "reverse global warming" showed up in a really contrived context, which was a little much.)

The story had a very good moral by the end, one that came across easily without being heavy-handed. Instead of tearing excellent people down to a standard of "normalcy," it celebrates the things we all exceed in, the things that make us different by way of talent and accomplishment.

My only complaint has to do with perspective: at times (and at random), it would switch from one character's point of view to another character, with no break, no indication, no proper structure. It pulled me out of the story a few times, as overall it was written in third-person limited. Not a bad book, but I didn't like that aspect of it. I think an editor should've caught it, but oh well.

A good book, and worth the 7 or 8 bucks in paperback. I'll be reading it again.

Book Chop: Dreadnought

2010-11-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

Title: Dreadnought (Clockwork Century #3)
Author: Cherie Priest
Genre: Steampunk
Verdict: Enjoyable, liked it better than the first one.

If you read the Chop of BONESHAKER, you know what that's all about. DREADNOUGHT is set in the same world, same time, but none of the first book's characters make an appearance until the final chapters.

Brief recap of the world: 1880, North America, the Civil War is still going on (alternate history, remember this.) Mexico, Texas, Washington (west coast), Confederacy and USA are all different countries at this time.

Our main character is Mercy Swakhammer Lynch (dang I love that name. SWAK. HAMMER.) She's a nurse in a Confederate hospital, and her husband is a soldier fighting for the Yankees, so they've got some marital problems to work out. I mean most people keep it in the family.

Mercy gets word that her husband died (spoiler alert! j/k, first chapter) so the only family she has left is her father, Jeremiah SWAKHAMMER!!! who lives out in Seattle. She's not even sure if he's still alive, but she got a telegram that he was sick and wanted to see her a while back. She packs up her gear and gets on a dirigible (it's a zeppelin, basically) and heads out west.

But surprise! There's still a big gnarly war out there. Her zeppelin accidentally gets shot down by an anti-aircraft gun operated on the Yankee side of the line. She survives with a few other people and crash-lands in a war zone, between two fighting walkers: a steam-powered Yankee contraption, and a diesel-powered Confederate monstrosity called the Hellbender.

***Side note: I complained about not seeing enough fighting in book 1, even though Jeremiah SWAAAAK!!!!HAMMAAAAAA!!!! had the toys for it. Well, in this book she gave us quite the tease, showing us two 'mechs that didn't end up duking it out Rock 'Em Sock 'Em style. I am disappoint.

Back to the story: the war has shut down the train lines. The only train going anywhere is the Yankee train called the Dreadnought, a machine that makes a very good case for these books having illustrations (again, disappoint.) It's a big beefy bad-ace train that is armed and armored for the next four apocalypses. Mercy, a Southern girl, hides her identity and boards the train, having no desire to do anything but get to Seattle.

Think it's that easy? Of course you do. Sap. There are other conflicting parties on the train, including a Texas Ranger (with six guns) who's out looking for a band of missing Mexican expatriates; a pair of Mexican inspectors, who are looking for the same band of people but for different reasons; a scientist escorting an unseen cargo in the back of the train; and a few other really well-rounded characters.

If you've read BONESHAKER, you know what happened to the Mexicans that the people are looking for: they fell victim to exposure to the Blight gas, effectively making them zombies. This news has implications for everyone on the train as it heads west.

That's just the setup for the adventure, and it's plenty interesting on its own. I had problems with BONESHAKER (it was worth 3 stars) but I think DREADNOUGHT redeemed it well enough. Overall it was a better book than the first one, and you don't need to read the first one to understand what happens in the second one. It's just a little cooler if you do.

The series name is THE CLOCKWORK CENTURY. The two books discussed here are #1 and #3. Book #2 is called CLEMENTINE, and was only released on a limited run in hardcover this year. According to Cherie Priest's website, it'll be re-released by Tor in paperback next year, and is currently available on the Kindle for three bucks. I guess it was just some crazy contract thing that made the book go out of print in the first month, but once it comes out in paperback I'll give it a read.

For now I'll be keeping up with this series.

Book Chop: Way of Kings

2010-10-08T04:17:00.001-07:00

Title: The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive #1)
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Epic, epic, epic fantasy
Verdict: Um...wow.

Well, yeah. This book is 1007 pages, and Sanderson has been working on it for the better part of a decade. I've read everything else he's published, and this really breaks new ground.

It's set in a world that gets rocked by storms once a week, big gnarly hurricanes and the like. The plants are all able to retracts into salt-proof husks, and the animals are mostly crustacean-esque.

The book starts with a group of knights who had some kind of special weapons that they used to police the world. They decided to leave their weapons behind and abandon their cause. 4500 years later, things haven't gotten better. (That kind of time span blows my mind...I mean 4500 years ago, Rome wasn't even a thought--so much has changed since then, I can only imagine.)

Fast-forward to the present, and you're following a few main characters: Szeth, a slave-assassin who has to follow every order given to him except any order to kill himself; Kaladin, a volunteer soldier-turned-slave who was once a surgeon's apprentice; Shallan, daughter of a king whose house is on the brink of bankruptcy; and Dalinar, uncle to the king, who keeps having strange visions of the Knights and what they did in their time.

Szeth, by far the most interesting character, appears less than half a dozen times. Kaladin gets most of the remaining screentime, which is fine because his story was really great. Dalinar's story had all the politics and history, while Shallan's story told most of the worldbuilding. As far as what happens with each of them, well, read the book.

It's hard to know what to say about it, and I see why Sanderson has a hard time summing it up. This is the kind of gourmet fantasy that you don't just recommend to someone--they have to have read long, detailed fantasy before, something to prime them for it. Sometimes I felt this book was long for length's sake only. I got to the end of a thousand pages and thought, man, this is definitely a "first-in-a-series" book. But there's so much to absorb in it, it's not what you'd sit down to read just to pass the time. You get into a book like this in order to know every detail of this fantasy world, to get lost in it. Stories like this are what people did for escapism before Blizzard invented the World of Warcraft.

All that being said, I'm not sure how I feel about it. Overall it was cool, but for what happened to the characters between the beginning and the end, it could have been shorter--or if it had to be a thousand pages, it could have advanced farther. But like I said, that's just the kind of book it is, and there's a market for it, so it doesn't need to change.

I'm interested in reading book 2 when it comes out in a couple of years. That'll be the one that determines whether I keep up with the series.

Book Chop: Behemoth (Leviathan #2)

2010-10-08T03:30:00.000-07:00

Title: Behemoth (book 2 of Leviathan)
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Steampunk/historical fiction
Verdict: A satisfyingly good sequel.

Before I get into the Chop of this book, indulge me in my complaints. Look at this picture here and tell me what's wrong.

This is an example of a publisher looking at everyone who bought its book last year, scratching its chin and saying "How can we flip the bird to ALL the people who shilled out twenty bucks for the hardcover of this book?" You've heard me gripe about this before, and my complaint isn't going away. I'm going to throw a fit like a French two year-old who wants candy at the grocery store. These people designed a beautiful hardcover, changed it for the paperback, and then made the hardcover of the sequel match the previous paperback.

I will not ever discuss Behemoth without mentioning this problem. I don't care who's responsible for this decision or why they thought it was a good idea--until it's fixed, I will give you no peace. I know this isn't Mr. Westerfeld's fault, it's the publisher's fault. Well, I say screw you just as loud. I will not buy the hardcover. Instead, I got the audio version, narrated by Alan Cumming, who is amazing with voices. If anyone is going to be ticked about that, it should be the insanely talented Keith Thompson, who drew all of the illustrations for these books. You don't get those on the audio.

Keith, please join me in hating the publisher for this decision.

Anyway, now that I've gotten that off my chest, I'm also ticked that I didn't get a trailer for book 2 like I did with book 1.

Okay, I'm really done complaining now, because Behemoth was just as fun and entertaining as Leviathan. A very worthy sequel that ignored no problems and pulled no punches. Book 1 saw an Austrian prince, Alek, on the run from Germans who want him dead because he's a political threat. On the English side of things, a girl named Deryn joins the Royal Air Navy disguised as a boy because she misses aviation after he father's death. When Deryn gets aboard the HMS Leviathan and the ship eventually crash-lands in the Alps, Alex and his crew decide to help.

Book 1 ended with the British airship adopting Austrian technology in order to get airborne again. They had to carry a cargo of some precious eggs to the Ottoman Empire, so the mission was important.

Book 2 shows us that nothing has changed. The Brits are suspicious of their new Austrian passengers, and Alek's men are still bent on getting him into hiding until the war passes. When he escapes the Leviathan in Turkey, he joins up with a band of rebels who want to overthrow the Muslim sultan.

There is a lot more political intrigue in this one, but Westerfeld doesn't let it get boring at all. He is a very talented writer and I don't think he wastes time--all 500 pages of this are exciting, and of course there is plenty of new Clanker technology and Darwinist creations to broaden your expectations.

Overall I loved the book and I'm glad it didn't end with a glaring cliffhanger. There is plenty to be resolved in book 3, Goliath, due next year (after they take their time deciding how to screw you with that cover as well.)

Okay, I'm done. Go listen to the audio of this book. Thank me later.

Book Chop: Hunger

2010-09-06T21:07:00.001-07:00

Title: Hunger
Author: Jackie Morse Kessler
Genre: YA paranormal
Verdict: Unique, liked it.

I can't remember where I heard of this book. I think it was an Amazon recommendation. It's not out yet, but I was able to pick up a digital copy on my birthday for an advanced review.

Oh, and a notice to the whatever-your-initials-are-government-agency-who-wants-to-know-where-I-get-my-books, go pound sand. It's not any of your business where I get them, or under what conditions, or how it affects my opinion. Free speech, people. All you need to know is that it was legal. Smiley face.

Sorry, I'm just in a mood. Calming down now.

Anyway, the book is about Lisabeth Lewis, a girl who struggles with anorexia. She is assigned the mantle of Famine, one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (Biblical.) Interesting concept--I wanted to see how it played out, and for the most part I was satisfied. (I gave it three stars on Goodreads.)

PROS about the book:

--Quick, crisp writing. It's less than 180 pages and reads fast. No dwelling, no over-descriptive passages. Hit-it-and-quit-it narrative, third person.

--Portrays eating disorders in such a way that you see how people justify them, making them all the more dangerous. It doesn't present them in a positive light. In fact it felt a lot worse hearing about them from the mind of someone who thinks they're acceptable. I think that message will hit home.

--It was a message-book without being a preachy-book.

--Death had a fantastic sense of humor. I think it's cool that a lot of people assign that to him. Mark Zusak did it with The Book Thief, another one I read this year.

--I think this is the first time I've read a book with an obnoxiously self-deprecating female protagonist that didn't try to pretend its female protagonist wasn't self-deprecatingly obnoxious. (A little chiasmus there for ya.)

--The ending resolution was very redeeming. I kept asking myself "How is this going to have a productive ending?" But Kessler delivered on it. She didn't just give you a cool concept and then fail at the end. This book is supposed to teach something to people with eating disorders, and she doesn't offer any quick fixes. Fixing an eating disorder is necessary and hard.

--The author's afterword was sincere and touching, showing Kessler's authority on the issue, given that she had an eating disorder in the past. It was by far the most meaningful part of the whole package.

--A portion of the proceeds of the book go to help people with eating disorders. So that's nice.

CONS of the book:

--Some of the scenes were a little too informative, like when Lisa went to the bathroom. That's one of those things where I know what happens, I don't need it written out for me.

--Profanity was few and far between, but the F-bomb made an appearance.

--It's implied that Lisa's best friend, who is bulimic, has the hots for Lisa's dad. Um, sick.

I think there were a few more things, but none of it is coming to me now. I'll probably follow up with these books, since it's a series and I think there are three more coming out. If the cons don't turn you away or bother you, give it a shot.

Book Chop: On Stranger Tides

2010-09-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Title: On Stranger Tides
Author: Tim Powers
Genre: Historical fiction/fantasy
Verdict: Surprisingly enjoyable.

Not that I was surprised at having enjoyed it, but maybe I didn't expect to like it as much as I did in the end. I figured it would just be another pirate novel, like Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes, though this one came out back in the '80s.

To be honest, I'm one of the readers who picked this book up when I heard Bruckheimer was going to base the next Pirates of the Caribbean off the plot. I wanted to know what it was about.

Well, Bruckheimer is most certainly not going to put all the characters from the book into the movie. Looking at the IMDB page, I can only find one: Captain Blackbeard. Between Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth, I wouldn't be surprised if Disney bought/optioned this movie just for the elements in it and the title. There will likely be very little in it that ends up in the movie.

At the same time, I'm thinking Bruckheimer (who handled the first three movies) probably read this book before, because a lot of themes and even some character names/personalities seem similar to those of Will Turner, Elizabeth Swan and Jack Sparrow.

Anyway, the book: it follows the exploits of one John Chandagnac, a French guy on his way to Haiti to straighten out his uncle for having robbed his father when it came time to inherit a plantation. While on the high seas, the pirate Captain Philip Davies overtakes his ship and makes prisoners of the crew. John ends up running with Davies and becomes a pirate, and they simplify his name down to "Jack Shandy."

Shandy is escorting Beth Hurwood (the Elizabeth character) all around, and she gets caught up in the whole mess of the plot when Davies eventually runs into Blackbeard and makes a run on the Fountain of Youth in Florida. It's a crazy journey through a not-alive dreamworld, where Jack learns how to practice voodoo and fight zombies.

The Fountain of Youth isn't just some place where you drink water and live forever: it's where you take your soul out of your own body and put it into someone else's. After Blackbeard figures this out, he amasses a fortune, hides it and allows himself to be slaughtered, after having prepared a second body for himself somewhere else. Shandy leaves his crew only to find out that his uncle has done something similar.

So Shandy runs from one pirate crew to the next, traipsing all around the Caribbean to save Beth Hurwood, avenge his father's death, rob his uncle and free himself from pirate oaths. Shandy himself is not the charismatic humor machine that Sparrow is, but I imagine his character will be replaced with Sparrow in the movie. I think Davies will be replaced by Barbossa, and of course Blackbeard will be the third pirate captain. I'm almost certain a "Beth Hurwood" kind of character won't exist. And anyhow, the female lead in the movie is Penelope Cruz.

The book was great. I highly recommend the audio version (second image) which just came out in July of this year. The narrator does a spot-on job with the voices.

And like I said, the story of the book probably won't have a whole lot to do with the movie, but that's okay. I think the movie will be pretty good too. We'll just have to see. For a second opinion, here's my boy Jack Sparrow:

Book Chop: Mockingjay (Spoilers. DUH.)

2010-08-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

Title: Mockingjay (Hunger Games 3)
Author: Suzanne Collins
Genre: YA dystopian
Verdict: 90% awesome, 10% WTF

Well, this is it. If there was only one book I wanted to read all year, this was it. I could've foregone anything else for a chance to find out how the Hunger Games trilogy ended.

I won't bother with the premise, the pitch, all that stuff--if you've read this far, you know the series. My initial Chop of The Hunger Games wasn't all that great, more of a geek-out really. For a more in-depth analysis, you'll have to see how it stacks up against similar stories in this Chop here.

I've decided to list Pros and Cons about Mockingjay. There are spoilers. So don't read on if you don't want to know who dies and who doesn't.

BASIC OVERVIEW OF THE PLOT.

District 13 exists underground. Their leader is President Coin. She wants to control the Capitol, and Panem. President Snow (of the Capitol) wants to control District 13. They keep each other at bay with the threat of nuclear missiles. If either of them fires, there will be too few humans left in North America to maintain a "sustainable population." So they don't annihilate each other outright.

Coin mounts a propaganda effort to turn Panem's citizens against the Capitol. This involves filming Katniss, the Mockingjay, in successful military maneuvers. Beetee, the techie tribute, hacks into the Capitol's TV broadcasts and puts the "propos" videos on the air over Snow's own broadcasts. Snow retaliates by airing interviews of a captured and tortured Peeta calling for a ceasefire.

The Capitol attacks a hospital in District 8, killing the helpless injured people inside. Katniss and Gale shoot down some of the fighter jets that bomb the place, and promise escalation in response. Gale and some others then launch a rescue mission into the heart of the Capitol to rescue Peeta.

Peeta has been "hijacked"--a term used to describe brainwashing. Upon seeing Katniss he tries to kill her, and from then on has difficulty distinguishing reality from the memories Snow inserted into his mind. Others rescued include Joanna Mason and Enobaria, Tributes from the Quarter Quell.

Katniss trains for District 13's army. They're going to launch a full-scale assault on the Capitol. Using intelligence gleaned from spies, they get a layout of the random armaments the Capitol has placed in the city, called "pods." Katniss and Finnick Odair instantly recognize the layout as being similar to the Hunger Games arena, giving them the advantage.

Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, Gale and some new characters form a squadron of snipers meant to attack the Capitol. Slowly their numbers dwindle as they get closer to the President's mansion. When they finally reach it, Snow has the place surrounded by children, using them as human shields. Bombs go off in the plaza, injuring and killing several of the children. When 13's medics rush in to help, Katniss's sister Prim is among them, and she's killed when the rest of the bombs detonate.

Katniss goes on a major drug bender. When she awakes, the remaining tributes (six of them: Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, Enobaria, Beetee and Annie, wife of the late Finnick) are brought to a room by President Coin. She puts it to a vote whether or not to hold one final Hunger Games using the children of President Snow's elite inner circle.

Katniss is supposed to publicly execute President Snow. Instead, she kills Coin, because Snow is dying anyway from poison.

Katniss goes back to District 12. She doesn't see her mother or Gale, and ends up with Peeta. END.

Okay, the Pros:

The opening scene with Katniss going through the ashes of District 12 was really great. Informative, but vintage Collins in the sense that it was clear, quick and gripping. She's an excellent entertainer and this was on par with the previous two books.

District 13 was a haven, but it wasn't like some magic card being played where it made everything all easier. In a lot of ways it just gave Katniss a new challenge, and a political one at that. She goes head-to-head with Coin on many occasions.

Book 1 gave us screen time with Peeta. Book 2 gave us a little more with Gale, but we got a lot more in book 3. He's been a well-developed character from the beginning and it was cool to see him in action instead of just hear about it.

Finnick got fleshed out a lot more, and provided an excellent plot device for the end of the book. We find out why he's such a manwhore if he's in love with a girl (Annie), and why he always tries to get secrets out of people. Very good dimension with him.

Prim is fleshed out more too, not a whole ton, but you see her develop and become a little more mature. I would've preferred more time with her but we got what we needed.

Haymitch gets sober. He's quite productive.

The action scenes were fantastic.

One of my biggest predictions was that the Hunger Games would still play a role in the story. They had to. It's a Hunger Games novel, the games have to be centric. But since the arena was destroyed in book 2, it would be too much of a contrived stretch for them to somehow end up back in the game. (My initial guess was that Katniss would challenge or force Snow into another Games, but it didn't happen that way.) The Games play a role by proxy, and it totally works. And yes, Snow is a player, at least in theory.

The new characters are easily identifiable, especially the soldiers in Katniss's group: Tigress, Jackson, League 1 and League 2, Castor and Pollux, and Boggs. I especially liked Pollux, a former Avox, who gets a chance to retaliate against the Capitol.

The final push through the Capitol was AMAZING. Scenes like that are why I read these books in the first place.

The idea of using tracker-jacker venom to brainwash people worked perfectly within the book. It connected book 1 to book 3 on the sci-fi level, using what she already had at her disposal. A great idea.

When Katniss trained her arrow on Snow, and instead turned and shot Coin, I cheered. Amazing.

The epilogue: while not my favorite device, it worked for this book. And the closing line was beautiful. I still feel touched by it. Collins really hit the nail square on the head with that.

The Cons:

Katniss spends a lot of time at the beginning wandering around helplessly through District 13, hiding and sleeping in closets. I get that she's traumatized by what's happened to her, but she's too weak. She's become consistently weaker since book 1, and that sucks because she was such an inspiring female lead. One thing I hate about YA with female leads is that they're often weak or flawed and focus on their shortcomings way too much. That's unacceptable for male leads, and I won't accept it from female characters either. Her internal drive to overcome fear and weakness should have been stronger. There were better ways to show that the war was wearing on her.

There are far, far too many times in this book when Katniss gets injured, knocked out, hurt, whatever, and we instantly cut to her waking up in a hospital, drugged. In book 2 after she realized she'd be going back into the Hunger Games, she went over to Haymitch's and got drunk. Okay. I'll accept that. In this book, she does a lot of morphling and turns to drugs for comfort. Sure war is an atrocity, and people find different ways to cope with that. But literature is supposed to be an inspiration, a way to show us to beat those self-destructive ways of coping. There's a better medium between realism and storytelling. It got old fast, like doing that was an easy-out.

When Prim died, I was at first confused. The way she wrote that scene, it was hard to tell that it was Prim who'd rushed into range of the bombs. If I'd been reading the physical book and not the audio version, I'd have thrown it down at that point. I'll accept Snape killing Dumbledore, but I will not accept Prim Everdeen getting blown to bits by a firebomb. Hi, my name is Suzanne Collins, and I just completely negated the whole reason for my main protagonist going into the Hunger Games in the first place. And for what?

Katniss's relationship with her mother took a major backseat. We got even less time with her than we did in book 2. And after reading book 1 again, I get the feeling there was something between her and Peeta's dad once, something that didn't get a lot of resolution or acknowledgment. Overall it's not that important, but it irks me. Consider me irked.

When Coin brought the victors together and made them vote on whether or not to hold a final Hunger Games, there's no way in hell Katniss should have voted yes. She even thought of Prim and wondered if the Capitol people had kids her age. So why vote to have another game? To make them lose someone the way she did? Perhaps. But there's also the heavy thought bearing down on her that President Coin is no different from President Snow. When the leadership changed, nothing did. The votes should've been done differently to get a "yes" overall, or maybe Coin's reaction should've been different with a "no." Katniss would still have killed her. But that just made no sense.

Katniss's post-war drug bender was annoying. The pity and sadness and sorrow, sure--but you don't let someone in her condition self-medicate without supervision. They locked her in an empty room and gave her pills. She should've been under other observation.

Mrs. Everdeen disappeared after Prim died. We heard about her, but never saw her. She ended up working in a new hospital somewhere. No reconciliation with Katniss, no discussion about Prim, not even a funeral. WTF. "Hey, I lost my husband, now my baby daughter's dead. I'm starting a new job. Here's a handwritten note, XOXO, Mom."

Ditto for Gale. After he and Katniss got closer (we were even treated to a pseudo-Eclipse-esque tent scene, which sickens and infuriates me to no end, because Collins basically turned Katniss-Gale-Peeta into Bella-Edward-Jacob, and DAMMIT I'm trying to keep this brilliant franchise far, far away from the literary bowel movement called Twilight) he just disappears. The last we see of him is when he gets carted off by the Peacekeepers as Katniss is still making a run on Snow's mansion. Later we hear that oh, hey, he got a job in District 2. He's probably got a girlfriend or something too. Life's good, k thx bye! No reconciliation, no exit, nothing.

And then Peeta shows up on Katniss's doorstep. All we get is a "Well, he's never entirely the same as he was before getting hijacked, but we're in love." Suddenly all her doubts are washed away, and they end up making babies. The end, epilogue.

So there's my beef. Book 1 is still the most awesome. Book 2 delivered on the demands of a sequel to such a great book. And Book 3 did the same about 90% of the time. But for that other 10%, they really, really screwed the pooch.

It could've been perfect. But oh well. I'm still grateful to have been able to read it, and still learned loads about great storytelling. Thank you Suzanne Collins for writing a series that has affected me in a positive way like no other fiction series has. Can't wait to see what you come up with next.

Book Chop: The Sons of Liberty #1 (with interview!)

2010-07-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Title: The Sons of Liberty #1
Authors: Alexander and Joseph Lagos
Artists: Steve Walker and Oren Kramek
Genre: Graphic Novel, Historical fiction/fantasy
Verdict: I've read 40 books this year so far. 5 of them I've actually been excited about. This is the only one out of those 5 that wasn't a sequel. That ought to tell you something.

Hold on to your belts, people--this one's a kick in the pants.

I wish I could remember how I heard about this book, or stumbled across it. That initial moment of contact is just a blur in my mind because the concept alone had me chomping at the bit for more information. I bought the hardcover (WORTH IT) and read through the whole thing in one evening. Just...wow.

The Sons of Liberty is set in colonial America during the Revolutionary period. The main story centers on two runaway slaves named Graham (HOO-AH!) and Brody. After surviving a brutal electric experiment at the hands of Ben Franklin's son, they develop superpowers that enhance their strength, speed and coordination. Soon they get it in their heads to start fighting back against slave-owners in the name of liberty. Donning masks and practicing the African martial art of dambe, they become the Sons of Liberty.

The story was solid, the characters were unique and vivid, the research was thorough, and the artwork kept my eyes glued to the pages. Also to my pleasure, the dialogue was clean--no profanity was needed to "enhance" the emotions anywhere, and even the violent scenes were tastefully done.

The overall package was very impressive. I decided to check out their website and drop them an email. To my delight, they answered a handful of my questions, providing you readers with the very first GrahamChops interview. Enjoy!

1) So naturally, I'm curious: how'd you choose the names Graham and Brody for the main characters?

Alexander: Ha! Well, the name for our character, Graham, is the last name of a good friend of mine. He and his wife were incredibly kind and generous when I first came to New York—inviting me to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas when they realized I was going to be alone in my apartment. They were just wonderful, supportive friends, so I guess I felt compelled to honor their last name in our book. Plus, it’s just a cool name! Brody though came out of nowhere. The name just popped into my head. There is something sweet and innocent about it but at the same time strong.

2) Did you want to stage a novel in the American Revolution, or was it the fugitive-slave-angle that got you started on your story?

Alexander: THE SONS OF LIBERTY was actually born in a dream. In it, I was sitting in a movie theater and on the big screen were these two men wearing long coats, tri-corn hats and masks running and jumping over colonial rooftops. On the streets below were a large group of Redcoats chasing after the two masked men and firing their muskets trying to cut down them down. At one point, the two men leapt down from a building, landed in an alley way and removed their masks revealing they were two African American men. I woke up and could not believe what I had dreamt. I immediately went for pen and paper and scribbled “two runaway slaves become masked vigilantes during the American Revolution” I was instantly excited by the dream and worked on it for awhile developing the concept.

I realized very quickly it was a story too big and complicated to work on by myself so I phoned my brother. Growing up, Joseph was the writer in the family and very inspiring to me. He understood immediately how best to develop and write the story. The idea of two runaway slaves becoming masked vigilante superheroes during the Revolutionary war was so amazing to us it became and still is our everyday obsession.

3) How many volumes do you intend to write for Sons of Liberty?

Alexander: We are contracted for four books. But the story could easily run for many more.

4) How much research do you do? Does it involve an in-depth study of the historical figures, or do you just get the particulars and then adjust the characters as the story requires?

Alexander: Being as this is a superhero adventure we wanted it to be fun and action packed but once we started writing the story we realized we had a responsibility to capture the period as authentically as possible. We immersed ourselves in the learning process and got our hands on everything we could about Colonial America, the American Revolution, and slavery. We visited historical sites, went on walking tours, attended reenactments, and spoke to historians. We bought books on costumes, landscape, architecture and tools of the period. We researched language dialect to give conversations a more authentic feel. We watched films, documentaries and educational programs. We referenced maps and art from the period. So, yeah, we got into it! But it was amazing; we learned so much stuff that seems to have been overlooked by school history books.

5) Have you guys written any regular novels prior to Sons of Liberty? If so, what's different about writing the story for a graphic novel?

Alexander: This is our first book and first serious collaboration with each other. However we grew up creating, writing stories and drawing comics so this didn’t feel like too much of a leap for us. But the difference between writing a novel and a graphic novel is that GN’s are written in script format. The approach is almost identical to a script for a film--with scene description and character dialogue.

Joseph: One of the challenges of writing in the script format is communicating ideas in a concise way so that the artist and colorist can identify and develop the concept visually. It is always a thrill to see the unique spin the artists give the interpretation of the panels and how a little
bit of each of us goes into molding the final product.

6) Who are some other historical figures we can expect to see in future volumes?

Alexander: You can expect to see Crispus Attucks, John Lamb, Benjamin Banneker, John and Sam Adams and many surprises!

7) Do you have any personal background with dambe? How'd you choose that as the martial art for the story?

Joseph: We thought it would be interesting to find a martial art from the Lagos region of Nigeria.
Dambe, otherwise known as “Hausa boxing” was an ideal fit. Like everything else in this series, the more we researched the more we came to appreciate the complexity of this fascinating custom. Dambe has two important roles in the SOL series; it introduces Graham and Brody to a fighting system that offers focus and controls their new found abilities, while empowering them both physically and spiritually by providing a link to their African roots.

8) A lot of readers on GrahamChops are aspiring writers themselves, mostly with regular novels. What advice might you have for someone wanting to write a graphic novel?

Joseph: Have fun with it! When Alexander and I are working together, we try to inject the things we enjoy into the story and try to picture every panel in the script as a movie still. We pitch ideas back and forth and generally have a good time doing so. Developing a solid script is important, but so too is having fun.

9) How much involvement did the artists have after you wrote the story? Did you have to describe the setting in detail and work with them as they produced the artwork?

Alexander: The scripts are very detailed and provide a lot of reference information and if there
is something very specific we want to include we’ll shoot them e-mails with art/photo refs. I’ll draw rough sketches of the characters and costumes and provide that to our artist as well. But Steve is very good at doing his own on-line research for photo/art refs. Once, when I stopped by his studio, I was very impressed with this huge binder he filled with hundreds of pages of colonial architecture and costumes that he had printed out from his internet searches. Steve and Oren are serious professionals and a real joy to work with.

10) Last of all: how long were you all working on Sons of Liberty before it got picked up? Give us an idea of the timeline--from conception to execution to delivery. Tell us the story behind the story, if you will!

Alexander: It all started way back in 2001. Once Joseph and I had a clear understanding of the concept and basic storyline we started researching the period and comparing notes--discovering incredible lost facts about history that we knew we wanted to include in the story. Then we created historical and fictional outlines and drew up character sketches. The fact that we didn’t have a book deal and time just kept crawling by was actually a blessing in disguise. It allowed us time to fully learn about the period so that we could tell a rich and involving story.

In 2004, we set about putting together a proposal package that included the story, timelines, and some of my rough sketches. Then at the end of 2005 we decided to remake the proposal package and hired Steve Walker to re-draw my sketches and illustrate new character pin-ups. This was a far more polished and professional presentation. In the middle of 2006, we had a pretty solid draft and shared it with a friend of ours who connected us to a literary agent. She read it over a weekend and loved it.

In early 2007, we signed with the literary agency and it was just a matter of a few months before she sold it to Random House Publishing. By the middle of 2008 we had a completed and publisher accepted draft of book one and turned it over to the artist to begin the illustration stage. At this point Joseph and I were free to focus solely on book two. THE SONS OF LIBERTY book one was released this past May and we couldn’t be more thrilled!

There you have it. Thanks to the Lagos brothers and their publicist for providing me with this interview; I can't wait for book 2. This is one of few books that I'll be telling everyone about. In the meantime, you can purchase the book here on their website, and become a fan on Facebook here. (I'd encourage you to check out the photos section there--they've got a promo poster that I couldn't find anywhere else online, and it rocks.)

Keep 'em comin', gentlemen!

Book Chop: Grave Peril (Dresden Files #3)

2010-07-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

Title: Grave Peril
Author: Jim Butcher
Genre: Urban fantasy
Verdict: I'm sold.

There will be two dozen books in the Dresden Files by the time Jim Butcher's done. He's halfway there, so I'm catching up now. At least it's not like the Wheel of Time series, where I have to read a dozen of them and they're all over three hundred thousand words.

Anyway, the first book, Storm Front, established Harry Dresden as a wizard-for-hire in modern-day Chicago, and not a lot of people take him seriously. He's put to the test up against a powerful novice sorcerer and has to destroy the guy before he wrecks half the city.

In the second book, Fool Moon, Harry is up against werewolves, loup-garoux, lycanthropes and hexenwulves for a host of different reasons. Also very enjoyable.

In this third book, we're getting a taste of the overall story arc for Harry. We see some of his past reckless deeds come back to haunt him, and we're introduced to new, powerful characters who will help him later on. Harry's up against the ghost of a demon that he and his friend Michael slaughtered a few months ago, and they'll have to go through hell and back in order to quell the uprising.

Butcher's writing is fast-paced, so it doesn't take forever to read the book. It's also got humor sprinkled throughout, and he doesn't go easy on Harry--not by a long shot. Things just get worse and worse for him. I'm interested to see how the rest of the series plays out.

Readers keep in mind though, there's a heavier amount of language in this book compared to the last two, and frequent sex-talk. Just a heads-up.

Book Chop: The Fourth Nephite

2010-07-15T06:02:00.000-07:00

Title: The Fourth Nephite #1
Author: Jeff Savage
Genre: LDS YA fantasy
Verdict: Good new series for LDS teens

Frequent readers of GrahamChops are no stranger to Jeff Savage's work, or the arch-rivalry he and I came so close to having. We run into each other a lot at authorly functions in Utah Valley, and I get to hear about his projects with his various publishers.

Last year he added a new series to his lineup of work when his publisher asked him for a hardline fantasy novel for LDS teens. After letting the idea simmer, he came up with The Fourth Nephite, a book that relies heavily on the Book of Mormon and LDS Church History as the source material for its story.

The plot centers on Kaleo Steele, an LDS teen who is less-than-excited about the gospel, the scriptures, attending seminary, all of that. He's not out living life riotously, but he doesn't believe the Church is true and doesn't want to bother with it.

When he gets caught at a bleacher-party with an open beer the day before his Big Football Game, his seminary teacher makes him a deal: he'll forget that he saw Kaleo there if he (Kaleo) goes up to Salt Lake and meets with the mysterious Ladan.

Soon Kaleo finds himself stuck in underground tunnels that lead to 19th century Palmyra, New York, the site of an excitable religious uprising. A man named Joseph Smith is the center of much debate and hysteria--people seem to love him or outright hate him, mostly the latter. They decry his so-called visions as born of the devil, and mock him for claiming to have seen God.

After Kaleo meets the Smiths and a number of other prominent residents of Palmyra, he's forced to decide what he really thinks about the situations and circumstances that brought about the Restoration of the Church. Was it the result of a deluded man? A con artist? Or a true Prophet?

Savage doesn't pull any punches with this book. It smacks of Chris Heimerdinger's Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites series, but isn't so heavy-handed in showing Church history. The characters show their feelings and opinions without being preachy or beating the reader over the head, and I think that will help teens get the message of the story quite well. His descriptions of Palmyra in the 1800 were really vivid and well-researched, and included an index of historical facts at the back to show what was real and what he'd woven into the story as necessary.

I was also impressed with the narrative and the quality of writing. Savage used some of his best work for The Fourth Nephite. I never got bored or skimmed over it. He didn't go easy on his characters either--tension ran high near the climax, and I liked that. Kaleo didn't have an easy way of resolving the issues he had to deal with.

The Fourth Nephite is due out next month. I got to read an ARC at my work. A quick, enjoyable read.

Triple Book Chop: Hunger Games versus Running Man versus Battle Royale

2010-07-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

Titles: The Hunger Games, The Running Man, Battle Royale
Authors: Suzanne Collins, Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), Koushun Takami, respectively.
Genre: Future dystopia
Verdict: Read on.

Because I love The Hunger Games so much, I frequently read stuff about it online, and occasionally I find people who have bad things to say about it. (Yeah, believe it or not.) The most common complaint is that it's a rip-off of other books with similar themes that came before it. Which books, you ask? Well, they're listed above.

Side note: some people have tried comparing it to Lord of the Flies by William Golding, but that's a little too far-reaching. In LOTF, the boys were marooned on a desert island after a plane crash and started killing each other because they reverted to the most basic, animalistic form of society--it was a literary examination of how nations function when they're run by adults, i.e., not all that differently.

Out of these three books, Collins' work most closely resembles Golding's, if only in narrative tone and description. Other than that, I don't feel the connection is strong enough to make a comparison in light of the other works.

Anyway, here's the rundown. Hunger Games is in blue, Running Man is in green, and Battle Royale is in red.

Year published:

2008, 1982, 2001 (2003 in English)

Setting:

North American nation of Panem, date unspecified

United States, 2025

Japan, alternate history (sometime after 1947)

Main conflict:

Every year, the Capitol forces 24 children to fight to the death in an arena.

A man needs money to buy medicine for his sick daughter, and decides to compete on a game show.

The nation forces 42 random teenagers onto an island where they have to kill each other.

Reason for conflict:

The Capitol needs to remind the Districts that they have no power to rebel.

The economy sucks in the future, and game shows pay big.

The nation depends on the fear of the population to keep their power.

Reason for characters' involvement:

Katniss Everdeen volunteered to go in her sister's place.

Ben Richards loves his daughter, and she's dying.

Shogo Kawada was gassed on a bus and woke up inside the Program.

Consequences of non-compliance:

Katniss has to comply or she'll be killed in the arena.

Richards chooses the highest-paying game show, The Running Man. He's declared an enemy of the state, and Hunters are sent after him with kill orders. He has to stay alive for 30 days or else he loses and will still be hunted until dead.

If an entire 24-hour period passes in which nobody is killed, all of the Program's unwilling participants will be executed via exploding collars.

Consequences of failure:

You die.

You and your family die.

You die.

Literary voice:

Flawless. Just enough detail for you to envision what's going on. Moves wonderfully.

A little hard to follow sometimes, description also minimal.

Tedious like you wouldn't believe--probably because it was translated from Japanese. Extremely over-detailed, at least twice as long as any of the other books.

Main differences:

THG was an examination of the evils of totalitarian power and the effect that it has on societies and individuals. Supreme dictatorial power is never obtained except at the expense of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The characters all struggle to cope with life in their own different ways, including those who have won the Hunger Games in the past. Also, though it deals with a gory subject matter, Collins did so with minimal focus on the graphic parts of combat, and focused more on the precious nature of life.

TRG was basically an exercise by King to get a lot of his negative emotions out on paper. The ending of the book made the whole thing pointless.

BR had a cast of carbon-copy characters. But for the names, they weren't that easy to distinguish. One of them defied the rules of the Program and found a way to beat it, but not after days and days and days of an explicit gorefest that just didn't need to be shown.

Caliber of audience:

Best-selling authors and critics of all walks have praised THG since it came out.

Hey. It's Stephen King. If you know people who love his work, you know what his whole audience is like. (That's not a bad thing, just a fact.)

If you love senseless violence, BR is your dream come true. Let me be the first to say that those who get out and defend it like it's the most original bastion of this idea in print have a lot to learn. Moreover, the people who revel in it are pretty damn sick and twisted. (That's not an opinion, that's also a fact.)

Overall verdict:

The Hunger Games is definitely not the first time this concept has been dealt with. Forcing people to commit acts of violence and murder for entertainment goes all the way back to the Romans, and probably even before that. Doing it as an act of political suppression is nothing new either, so Battle Royale fans can stop claiming to own the deed to that piece of real estate.

To best illustrate what I'm saying, look at Fantastic Four and The Incredibles. They both have a near-identical lineup of a bigly huge buff guy (The Thing/Mr. Incredible), someone who stretches like rubber (Mr. Fantastic/Elastigirl), someone who can go invisible and create shields (Invisible Woman/Violet), and a hotheaded younger brother character related to the invisible girl (Human Torch/Dash.) If Incredibles is a rip-off, I don't care. It did a better job with that cast of characters than Stan Lee ever did.

Or even look at Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves and Avatar. Every single one of those stories is exactly the same. Avatar just had the best execution of it. Granted, the story is complete dog s***, but it's still the best of the crop, and the other three movies all came before it.

Even after having gone through these three books, I still feel a major disconnect between The Hunger Games and the other two. It's on such a higher level that a comparison hardly merits mentioning. And when you do compare them, it blows the others out of the water.

The third and final installment in The Hunger Games trilogy is Mockingjay, out August 24th of this year. Mark your calendars.

Book Chop: Rush Limbaugh an Army of One

2010-06-11T15:20:00.001-07:00

Title: Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One
Author: Zev Chafets
Genre: Biography/Current Events
Verdict: Worth your time no matter your politics.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Rush Limbaugh. I agree with him more often than not, though I'll be the first to say he's not a role model (interesting that he himself declares this, as recorded by Chafets in the book.) My mom listened to him when I was a kid, right around the time Bill Clinton got elected in 1992. His ideas and humor are the reason I ever started to give a crap about politics.

If all you ever learned about Rush Limbaugh comes from his radio show, you don't know the whole picture. Ditto if you listen to his rivals, or the news. Zev Chafets seriously does his homework in this book, and there's stuff in here I could never have guessed about Rush. It's brutally honest, far from an attempt to cast him in a positive or negative light--the kind of non-fiction I love to read. The attention to accuracy covers his rise to radio fame just as much as the facts surrounding his drug addiction for the last decade or more. Here are just a few things I learned from the book that I never knew, and this after listening to Rush for two decades:

--How and why he didn't serve in Vietnam

--How he got his start in radio, and where it went from there (all I knew was that it was the only career he wanted, aside from aviation)

--His family's thoughts on his role in modern politics

--The goings-on in fall of 2003 when he was busted for acquiring and using prescription drugs illegally

--His personal rules on involvement in the election process as a media figure

Some of these things are tidbits I could have guessed at, but it was interesting to see it from someone's POV other than Rush's own. Chafets was respectful without trying to dress him up or down.

I had a Government teacher once who was a Democrat, and he was very adamant about encouraging his students to make up their own minds about values and issues. I remember the day he did a segment on Limbaugh, showing a few clips from his defunct early-90's TV show. All he said was "Watch these and decide what you think about him." The clips were common fare for Rush, showing him act about the way he always does. And of course, the students had varying opinions on him.

Chafets' book approaches the subject of Limbaugh's life with that same objectivity. If you know nothing about him, this is the book to initiate you. If you love him, you'll learn something new. If you hate him, you'll learn LOTS of somethings new. Give it a whirl.

Caveat: there is sporadic profanity near the end of the book, usually direct quotes from Rush Limbaugh and James "Bo Snerdley" Golden, from when they're off the microphones. Just so you know.

Book Chop: Morpheus Road The Light

2010-06-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

Title: The Light (Morpheus Road #1)
Author: DJ MacHale
Genre: YA Horror
Verdict: Hmmm.

The only other book I've read by DJ MacHale was the first one in his Pendragon series, chopped here. So this was semi-familiar ground, treading into MacHale's mind.

The Light is an interesting book. It's definitely a hardline horror novel, centering on a kid named Marshall and his best friend Cooper. Marshall's the timid, responsible one, and Cooper is the wild child, so they're good friends. (?) When Cooper gets busted for hocking counterfeit Yankees tickets (more because they're the friggin Yankees than because they're counterfeit), his parents take him out of town for the summer to keep him out of trouble.

The night Cooper leaves, Marshall starts having strange visions of a creepy skeletal dude (see cover of book) that he's been drawing all year. His name's Gravedigger. He's skeletal. He's creepy. (Established.)

The next several hundred pages consist of supernatural stuff haunting Marshall and Sydney--Cooper's hotter, smarter older sister. They go to where Cooper's parents are, at a lake town somewhere, only to find that Cooper's gone missing.

What happens beyond that is straight out of a classic horror film, with plenty of creepy/grotesque stuff and loads upon loads of TENSION. The ratio of tense stuff to downtime is an easy two-to-one.

The ending is sad, or maybe a little bittersweet. I'll say this much: it's definitely the first in a trilogy, in the sense that not enough happens for this to be its own story. All you get after 400 something pages is 1) There's a bad dude, 2) he's looking for something, 3) Marshall's involved somehow.

I'm kind of excited that this book got published. I think it's cool that YA is moving toward "clean horror"--novels that rely on the psychiatric element of fear rather than the gross-blood-hacking-off-limbs-in-your-face fear. If I had done one thing different with this book, I wouldn't have listened to it on audio. I wanted to kick the narrator in his hoo-hoo a couple of times because he was so bleepity blank annoying. Definitely the kind of book I'd rather just read.

Give it a whirl.

Book Chop: Anything Considered

2010-05-19T16:13:00.001-07:00

Title: Anything Considered
Author: Peter Mayle
Genre: Fiction/Culinary mystery thriller of sorts
Verdict: Delicious.

Readers of this blog will have to go all the way back to April of last year to see the first Chop of Peter Mayle's work, called A Good Year (the basis for the Ridley Scott film of the same name.)

Anything Considered was a lot like AGY as far as the characters were concerned. Much like Mayle himself, the main character, Bennett, worked in advertising in Britain before moving to Provence, France and enjoying the simpler life. Problem is, the simple life doesn't pay the bills and Bennett is running out of money. He doesn't want to leave the small town of Provence, or the people he's come to love there, so he decides to break new ground. He places an ad in the local newspaper: "British man, thirties, fluent in French, anything considered except marriage."

Within a week he gets a hit on his ad: a rich gentleman named Julian Poe wants to hire Bennett to be his body double in Monaco. Poe is a foreigner, like Bennett, and as such he gets taxed 60-70% per year if he lives in France for more than 6 months at a time. In order to cheat the government, Bennett goes to Monaco and pretends to be Poe--drives his car, eats at his restaurants, basically does all he can to generate a paper trail showing that Poe "left France." Bennett gets to live the high life for free, and Poe gets to stay in France without any problems.

Right?

Of course it's not that simple. :-)

Turns out Poe is using Bennett in a much larger scheme surrounding the French truffle market. Truffles, a delicacy in France, only grow randomly; mankind has not been able to farm them with any degree of success because of all the random factors that contribute to their germination. They're in such high demand every year that the price is astronomical--as much as $400 per pound (and this was in 1996, when Mayle wrote the book.)

BUT, Poe found a formula to grow them and it's 90% successful. Naturally there are people who want to get their hands on the formula and would kill him to do so. He has Bennett move the case with the formula, but Bennett botches it and accidentally lets it fall into the wrong hands. Now in order to keep from being killed by Poe's black-belt assistant Shimo, he has to come up with a plan to recover the case.

Aside from Mayle's crisp, enjoyable writing, the characters in this book were what really sold me on it. I loved the way they spoke and acted, each of them eccentric in their own right. It was a real treat the way he got the details of European behavior to show through the pages. It took me back to rural Spain in a way, and it's rare that a book can get away with that so well.

I read this in hardcover, but it's out in paperback now, and it's a quick read. I'd recommend you read it outside on a sunny afternoon.

Caveats: profanity, frequent sexual references. Not overly vulgar or crass, but it's present.

Book Chop: Fool Moon (Dresden Files #2)

2010-05-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

Title: Fool Moon (Book 2 of the Dresden Files)
Author: Jim Butcher
Genre: Urban fantasy
Verdict: A worthy and thrilling follow-up. Very satisfied.

I read and Chopped the first Dresden Files novel, Storm Front, back in December. You all have Porter to thank for getting me started on this series, which is well-written, enjoyable, interesting, and hangs with you for days after you turn the last page.

Harry Dresden, wizard-for-hire, has a problem: werewolves are killing people every full moon. It'd be an easy case to solve if it was just a case of a random person who turned into a wolf when the moon did its thing, but knowing Harry it's never that simple.

Soon he finds himself embroiled in a huge conspiracy/cover-up case between the local crime bosses and the FBI, leaving a trail of dead civilians in their wake.

The overall scope of the plot was very intriguing. Butcher did his homework on werewolf lore and put it into the story with a well-defined set of rules for each type of werewolf (lycanthropes, hexenwulves, etc). You had street gangs, mafiosi, federal agents and rich fat cats who all turned into different kinds of wolves for different reasons. You had good guys doing bad things for misguided reasons, and bad guys doing misguided things for personal reasons, while Harry is doing reckless things for the right reasons and getting constantly screwed.

I'd been warned that this was the most lackluster of all the Dresden novels. If that's the case, then the rest of the series will be mind-blowingly awesome. I really liked Fool Moon and the way it used the elements at its disposal. Jim Butcher hit the mark with this one dead-on.

Caveats: this book had remarkably more profanity than the first one, as well as its fair share of F-bombs. Sexual content present as well. Readers 18 and up.

Book Chop: Mr Monster (IANASK #2)

2010-05-10T20:40:00.001-07:00

Title: Mr Monster (I Am Not A Serial Killer #2)
Author: Dan Wells
Genre: Paranormal horror
Verdict: HOLY CRAP

Here's last year's Chop of Dan Wells' debut novel, I Am Not A Serial Killer.

I could sit here all night typing about this book. It blew my mind in ways I could never have anticipated. It was smart--downright brilliant even. I can't fathom the amount of thought and thorough understanding that went into making this story.

It follows up with teenage sociopath John Cleaver, who in book 1 was desperately trying not to become a serial killer. He was obsessed with death, and his family runs the town mortuary, and he studied serial killers because of how interesting they were. He also put rules into place to keep himself from getting too close to the edge of his sanity.

Then, when a paranormal monster comes to John's town, he has to let out his dangerous side in order to kill the thing. He's the only one who can, and he succeeds. The problem is, now that he's killed, he's having a real devil of a time trying not to do it again.

And that's where the trouble begins in book 2. Wherever you think that trouble ends, I promise you, you are wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG. You will not see this coming, I don't care who you are.

The people who judge the Whitney Awards were singing praises to book 1 of this series. One of the crappy comparisons they made though was when they called it "Twilight for boys." Then I thought about it and really, in a sick way, it makes perfect sense. Twilight is an emotional overdose where girls project onto the main character, putting her on like a pair of pants, and living vicariously through her passionate fantasy. It exposes the deep dark desires of every girl's heart, laying it out in the open, in plain view for all to see.

Dan Wells' IANASK books don't necessarily put out every guy's fantasy in the form of killing things, but rather it strikes a profound and previously untouchable chord in the depths of male psychology. It engages male readers in an emotional way like no other book series really can. I plowed through Mr. Monster last night in one sitting, and it was easier than when I blitzed Catching Fire last summer in a matter of hours. I just fell into the story and climbed out hours later, dirtied, bloodied, beaten, chewed up, spit out and gasping for breath, and all I can think about is how much I want to know how it ends.

The author packs into 270 pages what no other big best-selling author could do in 400 or more. If horror is your thing, read these books. If horror is not your thing, give them a try. That's all I can say. Just go for it.

Oh, and in the words of the author: "Sorry about the cat."

Book Chop: Spells

2010-04-30T21:44:00.001-07:00

Title: Spells (Wings, book 2)
Author: Aprilynne Pike
Genre: Teen Romance Fantasy
Verdict: Well, see what Mom Chops has to say about it:

Today's Chop is a special guest Chop by none other than my own mom! Here's her verdict after finishing an ARC of Spells:

I thought Aprilynne Pike’s debut novel Wings was a fresh concept and her follow-up novel proves she’s got the stuff to carry out the fantasy. I want to make it very clear, I’m on team Tamani. David is a nice guy, but he’s not as invested as Tamani is. I didn’t feel cheated by the lack of details of how well Laurel knew people on Avalon. I think it’s a layer of the onion the author will surely in the future. I like the focus on relationships and the new faerie lore was not as overwhelming as books with an older target market can be. Descriptions were just detailed enough to progress the story but not so verbose that I felt I’d never get out of a bog of heavy details.

Laurel’s characters is blossoming well. She’s not perfect, and yet she’s not the pity-party type either. She’s essentially having to re-learn all her faerie skills, but it’s not like riding a bike. She’s really having to work at it. She’s given a warning about what will happen if she lets her guard down when she returns to the human world. It was brilliant how I just watched her do it without even realizing I should have been screaming “No, Laurel!”

David is a nice guy. He’s supportive and does have a jealous streak. He’s getting a bit more frisky with Laurel, and I think it shows a lack of respect for her. He’s also a bit more reckless and that caused some concern for me.

Tamani is the guy every mother wants for her daughter, but he’s an excellent voice/bridge between the fae and human worlds. He’s not the only fae to explain their world, but he is best at clarifying what does and doesn’t relate between Laurel’s human point of view and her attempt to apply it to the fae world.

New characters are going to be lots of fun to watch develop. No plot spoilers here, but I’m 100% behind Laurel on her caution. Nice roundup for the end of this book, she’s not as brutal as James Dashner with the cliffhangers, but she leaves you wanting the next book like NOW!

I’d give this book 4 ½ stars, only because I don’t like boys with roving hands, boys in girls’ rooms, and definitely no boys sleeping over. No apologies, those are just the rules that keep you safe. When you blur certain lines, trolls get in and things get ugly.

Book Chop: The Book Thief

2010-04-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Title: The Book Thief
Author: Mark Zusak
Genre: Historical experimental fiction
Verdict: I loved it, and yet, I have a complaint.

Wow. This book was beautiful.

I've read a few books in recent years that were "experimental" in their genres, in one way or another. The Princess Bride was a big one, and very revolutionary at that. Obviously that's where the bar sits on brilliant narratives. A few others wear the hat well, like Stephen Lawhead's Scarlet and just about anything by Eoin Colfer.

Well, Zusak's 2006 barn-burner The Book Thief takes experimental tones in a new direction. The book is narrated by Death, and without sitting down and having any kind of detailed or outlined explanation of "who" Death is, you get a very good idea of what he's like, based on his narrative.

Death is intrigued by a young girl named Liesel Meminger who lived during Hitler's Germany. orphaned and abandoned, her foster parents teach her how to read, and she finds solace in books. Slowly but surely she learns the power of words, and she comes to love books so much that she'll do just about anything to get her hands on them--even pull them from Nazi burnings if she can get away with it.

So it's the story about a little girl who steals books, and the influence they have on her. Other significant events take place around her, and you get a taste of what it would be like for a 13 year-old orphan girl to experience Nazi Germany and see how utterly senseless it was. Everyone in her life has a backstory--since just about all of them have had a brush with Death--and you learn how all their lives are intertwined: her foster mother and father, her real mother, her younger brother, the boys in the neighborhood and their families, the mayor and his wife, and a Jew on the run from the Third Reich.

Honestly, I'm having a devil of a time figuring out how to sum it up. I was 400 pages into it (550 total) and I thought to myself, this book isn't really about very much, but I'm enjoying it and moving through it rather quickly. Part of it was the interesting characters, and most of it was Death's intriguing point of view. (The guy has a sense of humor--not morbid, not sarcastic, but something that seems to actually fit the mentality that Death ought to have.)

The language was beautiful too--Zusak employed the 5 senses flawlessly. I could always feel the town of Molching where Liesel lived. At times I could even smell it, taste it. I felt like I was there. He did a very good job on that front. Furthermore, it was poetic without being flowery or overly ambitious. The prose rushed along with a smooth texture that allowed you to see everything from multiple angles. Symbolism played a heavy part in telling this story.

My only single solitary complaint was the ending, the very last sentence in the book. It's that single, solitary phrase that makes it hard for me to argue what the point of the book is (other than demonstrating the power that words have.) I won't give it away, but it's enough for me to say that I think it didn't make much sense, it didn't really tie the whole conversation together.

Maybe it was my expectations or hopes, but that last sentence didn't live up to them for me.

Have any of you read it? What did you think of the ending?

Book Chop: Fablehaven #5

2010-03-30T07:06:00.001-07:00

Title: Fablehaven: Keys to the Demon Prison
Author: Brandon Mull
Genre: Middle-grade fantasy
Verdict: A thorough success

This is the final book in the Fablehaven series. I posted my Chop a year ago, and you can read it here. Much like my Maze Runner Chop, I'm not going to talk much about the actual book. I'd only be describing the feel of the series, and already did that in the original Chop. I don't want to give away plot points. So instead I'll talk about the launch party.

About the book itself, it was a very worthy conclusion to an entertaining and imaginative series. The characters were consistent while still learning new things and growing personally. Mull tied up pretty much all of the loose ends in the series and brought everything together nicely. He created a few openings to write another Fablehaven series later if he decides to--for now he's made it clear that he's glad it's over and wants to work on other stuff. But yeah, Keys to the Demon Prison had plenty of stuff in it to keep your attention.

The launch party was a blast. They've held it in a theater at Cottonwood High School in Salt Lake for the last three years, and I've had the chance to go to the parties for books 3-5. Usually they have a little song-and-dance number, some funny skits from DC Comedy (Mull wrote sketches for them in college), a few games and giveaways, and then Brandon will talk for a few minutes about his books before he sits down to sign for a couple of hours.

Last year's party for book 4 was kind of kiddish, so I just read while the shindig happened around me until it came time to sign. This year they stepped it up a bit, so it was enjoyable for the kids and adults alike. The skits they did were pretty funny: they had one where they brought the Quiet Box on stage and were deciding who to lock inside it. They had a choice between Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Percy Jackson, Katniss Everdeen (Hunger Games), and the kid from Diary of Wimpy Kid. While they argued, each presented their case--for example, Percy thought they should play Capture the Flag, while Katniss suggested they all just fight to the death. In the end, Percy shoved the Wimpy Kid inside, and in the process he freed Jack Sparrow. (The guy who played Sparrow did a good job too).

The best part, in my opinion, was a follow-up to a December news snippet you might have heard of. There was a kid in Texas named Chase who was basically dying from cystic fibrosis. He was a fan of the series, and the general prognosis was that he probably wouldn't live until the fifth book came out. Mull heard about it and called the kid up, then told him the entire plot of book 5 under the condition that he keep it a secret. It was a very touching story for all involved, and it made me proud to support an author who cares that much about his readers.

Well, after getting the call, the kid Chase started to feel a lot better. He hasn't recovered completely, but he's off the respirators and was even able to come to the event in Salt Lake, where Mull pulled him up on stage and made him an honorary member of the Knights of Dawn. Everybody gave them a standing ovation, and one well-deserved.

Other authors were at the event, including Shannon Hale and James Dashner (I didn't get to sit with him this year though.) As I waited in line to get my book signed, I talked to the people ahead of me and we had a cool convo about books we like. I just love talking about books. It seems simplistic, but I don't care. It's fulfilling. Maybe someday my work can help a sick kid find wholesome escapism. That'd be beautiful.

So yeah, got my book signed, then called it a night. Great party.

Brandon Mull's next series, The Beyonders, comes out in a year, and there will also be a sequel to The Candy Shop War coming soon, entitled The Arcadeland Catastrophe. Keep your eyes peeled.

Book Chop: The Golden Spiral (Hourglass Door #2)

2010-03-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

Title: The Golden Spiral
Author: Lisa Mangum
Genre: YA Romance/Sci-fi
Verdict: A worthy sequel, builds competently on its predecessor

Can you believe I've been at this for almost a year now? April 7th was the First Chop last year. The older I get, the faster it goes.

Anyway, enough of that. Another thing that happened last year was the Chop for Lisa Mangum's The Hourglass Door. I got to read it in March of '09, thanks to the sweet perk hookups of working at Deseret (the book came out in May). I just can't rub that in your face enough. At the end of the day, it's not a big deal--after all, there are bigger books out there--but some of you reading this blog, you're jealous, and that's good enough for me. Oh, and neener, neener, neener.

I'm here to tell you that the second installment in this trilogy, The Golden Spiral, is just as fun as the original. A lot of the "mystery" angle is gone because now Abby knows who/what Dante is. That's fine. She's actually a lot more involved in what Dante does, which isn't usually the case for female protagonists in YA lit. Most of the time they stand by while the "Darcy" figure (for lack of a better term) does all the heavy lifting, and occasionally they describe how his physique makes their pulse go erratic.

Well, in this book, Dante spends the first half pretty much trapped on the bank of the river of time, and Abby has to figure out how to save him using the schematics to the da Vinci's Hourglass Door that he gave her. In the meantime, her old enemy Zo, who has gone through the door twice and can now control time, is wreaking havoc on Abby's past--changing her environment, her friendships, even her family.

The characters grew a lot, the challenges were new and significant, and the whole story moved in an interesting direction. It was consistent while building on its predecessor, and still had the same action/romance feel as the first book. It's very much a romance, but I could read it as a dude and not feel like I was checking my manliness at the door beforehand. That's an accomplishment.

Anxiously awaiting book three.

Book Chop: My Ridiculous Romantic Obsessions

2010-03-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

Title: My Ridiculous Romantic Obsessions
Author: Becca Wilhite
Genre: YA Romance
Verdict: Story was good, pretty realistic

Let me open this review with a big, fat, huge, 'IN MY DEFENSE' pre-qualifying statement, since I am a MAN and apparently this isn't the type of book I should be reading. (According to one of the ninnies who complained about my review of another YA chicklit).

The bookstore where I work has an employee-reading-incentive program, where if you read a handful of books off of the approved list, you get perks. I like perks. Perks are like mass, accleration and gravity in the sense that they make the world go round.

So anyway, I don't like to just camp in one genre, so I pick from a few different ones (the point of the program is for the employees to know a little about every genre). Last year I read Wilhite's "Bright Blue Miracle" and although the story didn't resonate with me, she's a talented writer and has a good voice.

I walked into this book expecting not to like it, because let's be honest, romance novels are to women what action flicks are to guys: they appeal to a basic biological need that is often devoid of reason and long on contrivances. Let's not focus too much on story, character depth or motive. I just wanna see stuff get blown up. Girls just wanna get swept off their feet by Fabio.

Well, the back cover says "This is not your typical romance novel", and that feels about right. It's about a girl who beats up on herself psychologically and emotionally (we all know one) because she got embarrassed by a major A-hole guy in high school (we all know that one too). So when a genuine nice guy takes an interest in her in college, naturally she's uber-suspicious and reluctant to assume he might actually like her.

The climax and ending of the book were really well-done, very thorough. Basically this novel does a great service to nice guys who often get shafted by girls who refuse to accept polite and tactful advances for what they are: tasteful demonstrations of affection. Not very often in literature do the guys' feelings get considered--it's only the women who can get hurt.

In the end, Sarah (the main character) learns a valuable lesson about how to read a guy, and makes amends with the dude who's been falling all over her since chapter one. Sarah was a convincingly real character without being overbearing, and Ben (main dude) had a lot of admirable traits while still having a major flaw. He wasn't an impossibly ideal male protagonist, a Darcy or Cullen by any stretch.

So in the end, yeah, I liked it, and I'd recommend it to people looking for a good, clean, uplifting romance. At 180 pages, it's pretty short too.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go read The Running Man. :-)

Book Chop: Boneshaker

2010-02-20T12:55:00.000-08:00

Title: Boneshaker
Author: Cherie Priest
Genre: Steampunk/alternate history
Verdict: Great concept, exciting world, scattered focus, semi-disappointing by the end.

WOW. I am really behind. Sorry that it's almost been a month. A lot has been going on. I've been working on my writing, I've been dueling the Tech Support Demons of HP, and I'm trying to get my mechanic to fix a problem with my car that I'm quite certain he caused. Needless to say, I've been a busy boy.

So it's a miracle that I've found time to finish reading anything lately, except for audiobooks while working on stickers. I'm not really in the mood to Chop Enchantment by Orson Scott Card, 'cause it deserves a good Chop. So I'll Chop Boneshaker instead.

If you remember my Chop of Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, you'll remember what "steampunk" is. Frequently it's an alternate history genre in which machines, clockwork devices and technology play a prominent role.

Cherie Priest is great with this genre. On her website she frequently writes steampunk essays and explains why the genre is becoming so popular lately. As far as Boneshaker is concerned, she does a great job thoroughly exploring the hows and whys of the world she's set up.

It's Seattle, Washington. The year is 1880. Washington is not yet a State, and the Civil War is still raging back east. (This is one thing she changed.) Also, Seattle's population is around 40,000 (not the 5,000 it actually had in that year). The California Gold Rush is over, and now people are setting their sights on the frozen north, on the Klondike region, searching for ore in the Alaskan ice. Many an investor are looking for ways to dig through the tundra, and one man--Leviticus Blue--claims to be able to build a machine that can do just that. All he needs a little cash.

Sponsored by Russian prospectors, Levi builds the Boneshaker, an underground drilling vehicle that can make short work of hard earth. Only problem is, on its test run the Boneshaker goes apesh*t and tears up half of the foundation holding up some of the most important buildings in Seattle. Not coincidentally, four of the buildings he brings to the ground are banks.

It doesn't end there: he strikes a vein of buried volcanic "Blight" gas, which destroys the bodies of those who breathe it in, turning them into zombie-esque "rotters". In the ensuing chaos, all those who survived Boneshaker's initial run and the Blight gas flee the city, building a 200 foot-high wall to keep the heavy gas from spreading any further. Levi was never found to be held accountable.

Fast forward sixteen years. Levi's widow, Briar Wilkes, is living in the Outskirts with her son Zeke. She never told him anything about his father, and spoke very little able the day the Boneshaker destroyed the city. Driven to recklessness by curiosity, Zeke runs away with some supplies--an air mask and a map--and sneaks into the city to see what he can learn about his father. When Briar discovers that he's gone, she follows her motherly impulses and goes after him.

What ensues is a lot of fun. You learn that there are survivors in the city, people who've found a way to pump air into sealed compartments in the underground. They have made a new life for themselves there, though they are divided into factions: the Chinese, who keep the billows running; the rotters, who wander around looking for whatever they can eat; Maynard's, a group of survivors who just try to get by; and Minnericht's men.

Minnericht is a doctor who builds all kinds of high-tech devices and uses them to subjugate the people of the city to his will. Everyone owes him something, and he has eyes everywhere. And there's a nasty rumor going around that Minnericht might not actually be his name. In fact, he has a frightening amount of traits in common with another man who brought the city to its knees sixteen years ago...

From there, you meet a ton of really cool characters--my personal favorite was a six-foot-eight Swedish bad@$$ named (get ready for this) Jeremiah Swakhammer.

Yes. Swakhammer. Please take a brief moment to consider the awesomeness of his name in comparison to the following:

I mean, those names are pretty butch, but come on. Swakhammer.

Overall, it's a story about a mother and her son; she's dealing with her past, while he longs to know the truth of it. Soon they'll have to confront it together in order to have any closure.

Pros of the book: Very descriptive, used the five senses, awesome machinery, completely thought-out, used familiar elements in a new way and explained them in a manner that made it believable (especially with the Blight gas). Lots of cool gadgets, and she doesn't baby her characters: it's hard for them to get what they're after.

Cons of the book: some parts just dragged, and were maybe too descriptive. There's a late reveal near the end that deals with the villain, and it left me thinking "Oh, really? That's it? Okay. Who's this guy and why's he important?" I don't think the setup for that was implied heavily enough. ***The next point is a matter of taste*** For how much awesome tech there was, and for how much potential @$$kicking could have happened, I didn't get to spend as much time in the brawling scenes as I would have liked. That is to say, Jeremiah SWAKHAMMER--SWAK. HAMMER.--didn't get enough screen time.

That's all. Fun book though. Oh yeah, and keep in mind that although Zeke is a teen character, it's not what I'd call a teen book. It's got a more mainstream fiction feel to it. There is also a good amount of profanity in it. It's not over-the-top, but it's there.

Book Chop: Monster Hunter International

2010-01-25T19:14:00.000-08:00

Title: Monster Hunter International
Author: Larry Correia
Genre: Fantasy
Verdict: Pretty entertaining, and the pages turned fast enough for me to ignore the length.

I heard about this book through the Writing Excuses podcast. If you don't follow it on iTunes, you can buy the CDs on their website. "Fifteen minutes long, 'cause you're in a hurry and we're not that smart." Except they are smart. The WEP is put on by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler--all of whom have books that I have Chopped in 2009.

When Brandon was on tour for the new Wheel of Time book, Larry Correia sat in for him and told his story of how he got published. Basically he set up a website where he posted bits and pieces of the book. Then he self-published it, and sold enough copies to pick up the attention of a large publisher, specifically Baen. The book just came out a few months ago, and it's quite a ride.

Correia admittedly models it after late-night B-movie monster flicks, with one minor twist: his main character, Owen Pitt, is a total bad@$$ gunslinger who bench presses 400 pounds. The book starts when Pitt, an accountant, is doing some after-hours work and finds out that his boss is still in the building. Then he finds out that his boss is naked. Then he finds out that his boss is a werewolf.

The next twenty pages feature Pitt repeatedly breaking the "no firearms at work" rule while he whoops up on the werewolf all through the building. Using a gun in his ankle holster, he plugs his boss over and over again, busting up cubicles and eventually shoving him through a 14th-floor window, and then heaving a huge desk on top of him for good measure.

Five days later, Pitt wakes up in the hospital, heavily scarred and unsure of what happened. A representative from a private firm approaches him and confirms the truth: monsters are real, and they really want to kill people, but fortunately there's good money to be made in killing them first. Just to show he's legit, he gives Pitt the full bounty that was out on his werewolf-boss: $50,000.

From there, Pitt goes to train with this group, called Monster Hunter International. Drawing on childhood training from his Green Beret father, Pitt shows remarkable propensity with firearms, and proves his worth in his first battle with vampires on a boat.

The story is pretty cool. It gets deeper and deeper--there's a prophecy about a warrior who can end the world or save it. Pitt starts having dreams about who it might be. He also gets visited by ghosts who try to help him understand his purpose and mission, the role he plays in that prophecy. Pitt sees that there's something deeper at work here, something more than just a bunch of monsters roaming around the world. There's an evil power that wants to eradicate humanity, and only MHI has the firepower to stop it.

Correia is good at putting his characters in situations that suck. Not Twilight suck, but Harry Dresden suck. He's not afraid to beat up on them. I didn't feel like there were any contrivances--just good opportunities to introduce fun characters and interesting scenarios that would be amazing in movie format.

Overall Pros for this book: Finally we get a B-movie monster story where the characters have plenty of ammo and firepower on hand, and are smart enough to kill monsters from the get-go. The humor is pretty good, the action is fantastic, it moves rather fast, and the characters get what they deserve in the end. Also, Correia decided to pass on sex scenes--and there were plenty of opportunities to go down that oft-traveled path. Props to him on that.

Overall Cons for this book: Foul languages, albeit not overly so. It was there though. Also, I know this was FANTASY, but there was a complete bull-crap scene in which Owen Pitt fell out of a van at 50 or 60 miles per hour, tore off most of his skin, and got up to beat the hell out of a gargoyle with a tire iron. I'm sorry, I don't care how awesome you are, YOU CAN'T IGNORE THAT MUCH ROAD RASH THAT FAST. That was not acknowledged enough in that particular scene. But that's just me. Also, in a few spots the writing felt a little...I dunno how to say it in just one word, but Correia repeated himself. I think he used certain phrases too much. I'm willing to let that slide, 'cause I'm overly attentive to that stuff.

So yeah, I'd recommend this book to a lot of people, provided they don't mind the language and graphic monstrous arse-kicking that takes place in it. It was pretty fun. Plus, it takes a pot-shot at Twilight near the end, and I'm okay with that :-)

Book Chop: The Dark Divine

2009-12-29T15:08:00.000-08:00

Title: The Dark Divine
Author: Bree Despain
Genre: Paranormal YA romance
Rating: 3-4 stars

I finished Bree Despain's debut novel in a couple of days, which lately says a lot.

You can read the first chapter here on her blog. It's very well-done--fast, informative, and interesting. All you aspiring authors, take notes.

Anyways, TDD is a paranormal YA romance, which is "the trend" right now. Sometimes books like this are a major hit, or they're mediocre, or they fall hard. I don't think TDD will be the latter. It was pretty enjoyable.

The main character is Grace Divine. Now before you go jumping down my throat for the name, note that she's got some Jewish ancestry, and her name was originally Divinovich, but it was shortened to Divine when her ancestors immigrated. It's not like she named someone "Chase Danger" or something.

Grace is the daughter of a pastor. She goes to school with her older brother Jude. It's a Christian school; the book has a very Christian feel to it, but it's not a propaganda-type book, or even Christian lit. Moreover, Despain has used the element of Christianity to tell this kind of story, to add a different perspective to it, or even complicate things on the paranormal side. I mean, you can take any whiny Arizona girl and ship her up to Washington and introduce her to a vampire, and okay, whatever. There will be complications. But how much more complicated would it be if you were dealing with potential demons and you were devoutly religious?

The paranormal element is...well, I don't want to give it away. There are monsters of a sort, but I won't say what kind, because even though they're familiar, they're presented in such a way as to make them new and interesting.

The characters were well-rounded. The villains and heroes weren't obvious, not by any major stretch anyway. A few things were predictable, but not many. A few things were similar to Twilight, but again, not many.

Overall, you follow Grace as she tries to overcome some inner turmoil involving a new boy at school. Well, not "new"--he used to be her adopted brother, until a few years ago he got in a fight with her real brother, and they ran out into the woods. Her brother came back not long after, covered in blood, and the other boy--whom Grace loved--was gone.

I'm not sure if it's the start of a series. It feels like it is, and the ending left it open, but even so, it stands on its own pretty well. There's only like, one loose end by the time the thing finishes. Despain's writing is pretty good too, and easy to read.

So yeah, I liked it, and you should take a look at it!

Book Chop: Pirate Latitudes

2009-12-29T14:03:00.000-08:00

Title: Pirate Latitudes
Author: Michael Crichton, RIP
Genre: Historical fiction
Rating: 3.5 stars

Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes was quite a fun book. The reception hasn't been that great among readers, and I think I know why.

I've read a lot of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. I don't feel like the bulk of them do this book any justice. If people aren't complaining about it outright, they're praising it blindly.

The first thing you have to keep in mind is, the man has passed away. Dead guys don't edit their own books. I'm not sure what the progress bar looked like when he died last year, but I doubt it was kicking at 100%.

Unlike Crichton's other works, he intended for this one to just be fun and adventurous--like Jurassic Park, but without the tedious scientific details. He mentioned in an interview after the release of Next that he wanted to get back to writing something like that. For fun and adventure, the book succeeds on all fronts.

It follows the exploits of a gang of "privateers"--pirates, by any other name--in the employ of the English crown in the 17th century Caribbean. At the time, the Spanish empire still ruled the seas with an iron, albeit drunken, fist. You've got a killer lineup of characters, from Captain Hunter to Sanson, Don "The Jew" Diego, Bassa...oh heck, just watch the UK trailer:

Everything in that trailer is in the book. After Hunter and his crew are commissioned to steal a Spanish galleon full of gold, they hit just about every snag you can think of: Spanish warships, storms, island savages, sea monsters, betrayal on ship, betrayal at home...if the trailer is misleading in any one thing, it's that the pirates are just fighting against Captain Cazalla.

Not true. They fight against anything and everything. There's no central, solitary enemy. Everyone in this book is out to get them.

Crichton must have studied sailing a lot, because the book is riddled with detail about how to navigate ships the way they did in those days. Still, it's not as complex as the genetic lectures in Next or the physics lessons in Timeline. It's all explained as the story is told. At 250 pages, it's a lot quicker to read than, say, State of Fear or Prey.

As for downsides, it has a couple, to be perfectly honest. While remarkably devoid of profanity (especially in comparison to the double R-rated Next) there is plenty of sexual innuendo, and even a few uncomfortable descriptions of the act itself. I understand that Port Royal in 1665 wasn't the moral bastion of the Caribbean, but when those scenes came up it made me roll my eyes and turn to the next page. I kind of wished Crichton had breezed past that, the way he did with the language. There are more compelling ways to tell a story.

Also...spoiler moment. Scroll down.

When Hunter faces off with Cazalla about a hundred pages into the book, the resolution to their fight is very anti-climactic. Crichton had built up this perfect villain, very well-done, and when he duels with our perfect hero, we get about three paragraphs of action and it's over. That's what made me feel like the book was unfinished.

End Spoiler Alert.

It's a quick read and a fun one, but for the flaws outlined above. Imagine if Crichton had written Pirates of the Caribbean with his own story and characters--just set in that world, that time period. That's what you've got. I hope Steven Spielberg follows through with his plans to make a movie.

Book Chop: A Christmas Carol

2009-12-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

Title: A Christmas Carol
Author: Charles Dickens
Genre: Literary Fiction/Ghost Story
Rating: It's a classic, what do you think?!

Whilst searching for an image to put up for tonight's Book Chop, I found far too many, since Dickens' masterpiece has been around for so long and has been adapted so many times. It was a three-way tie between Patrick Stewart, Jim Carrey and the Muppets. Carrey took third 'cause I haven't seen his movie, despite Porter's beefy review of it. Muppets took second 'cause they're close to my heart, but no matter what, no Muppet will ever equal the awesomeness that is Patrick Stewart. I mean come on, the dude was Jean-Luc Picard AND Professor X AND Ebenezer Scrooge AND Captain Ahab. Take THAT, Kermit the Frog.

Anyways, this is the first time in my memory that I've actually read this story in Dickens' own words. And by "read" I mean "listened to". Audible was giving it away free to members this last week, and it was narrated by Tim Curry (who was, ironically, in Muppet Treasure Island, as Long John Silver--while we're talking about our favorite felt puppets). Curry is a vocal pimp. He did a great job with the voices. Unique without trying too hard or overdoing it.

There's pretty much nothing about this story that you don't know unless you're not one to celebrate Christmas. BUT, since one of my most loyal Chop readers is of that particular persuasion--and we here at GrahamChops do our best to accommodate everyone :-)--the basic rundown is, you've got an uptight old grouch named Scrooge. He loves money, loves counting it and keeping it. No matter how much he gets, he's always frigging miserable.

Meanwhile his nephew Bob Cratchett works for him, earning something between "nothing" and "jack squat" every week. He's got a million kids to feed, one of which is deathly ill, and hardly anything to bring home for Christmas, yet he's happier than a tornado in a trailer park. Scrooge can't understand why.

The night before Christmas, Scrooge goes home and is visited by the ghost of his old partner Jacob Marley, who tells him that three spirits will visit him to show him the errors of his ways. Those spirits are the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.

Past shows Scrooge what he was like in his youth, back when he was in love with a beautiful woman. But she left Scrooge because his love for money and wealth overshadowed her in his life.

Present shows Scrooge how happy the Cratchett family manages to be despite their meager income and sick child, Tiny Tim.

Future shows Scrooge how Bob Cratchett tries to comfort his wife after the death of their Tiny Tim. He also shows Scrooge how nobody mourns him when he's gone, just shows up to pilfer his belongings.

One of the most important scenes is when Scrooge recognizes the chains on Marley's ghost, made of money boxes and latched to a heavy trunk. Marley bound himself in life to a love of money, and it was all he laid up for himself in the next life. Scrooge saw many other ghosts like this, ghosts who wanted to help people now, but their chains prevented them from doing it. They passed up the chance in life, and now have their reward.

I don't think the overall story is about greed vs. love, per se...I think it's more about goodness in general, which is all about choice. Scrooge wasn't obligated to give away his money or be generous with it, and that's why it was so good when he finally decided to do it. He started taking care of Cratchett and his family not just because it was the right thing, but because it was the good thing. It was good because he could choose to do it.

And in doing good to others, he finally found happiness.

Book Chop: The Next 100 Years

2009-12-03T23:02:00.000-08:00

Title: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
Author: George Friedman
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 4-5 stars

The premise of this book is so preposterously interesting that I decided to actually read peoples' reviews on Amazon to get a feel for its reception. You've got your two-bit hacks who don't know jack sh** that claim George Friedman is the illegitimate child of Hitler and Jennifer Aniston, and on the other side you've got your overly jingoistic people who don't care much for facts as long as America wins.

(You know, people like me.)

Well, somewhere in there is the truth.

The premise is that, using the past as a model, Friedman can predict a possible global scenario for the next century, and he explains with evidence and data why he thinks it's most likely to play out that way.

The book starts with an examination of the last century as seen through twenty-year cycles: the rise and fall of impossible-to-beat powers, how their geography plays to their strength/detriment, and how social, political, industrial and technological influences will play out in the future.

Now, despite Friedman's credentials, this book has to be taken with a grain of salt, and he fully acknowledges that in the epilogue. In no way is it a guarantee, or even the most likely scenario. He just shows what could happen and explains--with compelling facts--why he believes it will go that way. Russia will break up into a collection of nation-states that support themselves; Japan will form an alliance with Turkey when it becomes the major power between Europe and the Middle East; China will fall back on itself and break up as it has done countless times through the centuries; Poland will become the major European power with America's help, then will turn on us in the same century; Mexico and America will go to war; and when America has geo-synchronous battle stations in space, Japan will have small outposts on the moon, from which it will launch an attack akin to Pearl Harbor, knocking American space stations out of orbit with a surprise assault.

Friedman is remarkably detailed. Again, the future is wildly unpredictable, and he recognizes that. Still, the book helps you see what factors affect the rise and fall of certain nations, and why the nations he predicts will stay in power. Truth be told, I found much of the content to be intriguing and worth my time, especially since it will help me come up with a better outline for my book Porting, which takes place both now and a hundred years from now. I've gotta know what happens in between :-$

So check it out. It's very interesting and informative, even if it ends up being wrong. Friedman is a good guy and I like his observations. Hopefully I'll get a chance to read this in print more slowly 'cause there's a lot to consider.

Book Chop: Storm Front (Dresden Files #1)

2009-12-03T22:44:00.000-08:00

Title: Storm Front: Book One of the Dresden Files
Author: Jim Butcher
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 4 stars

Okay, new rule: I'll Chop whatever I want, whenever I want, and you are all completely powerless to stop me. I win. All the time.

Porter gave me this book a few months ago and I dragged my feet on it. My mom watched the TV show when it was on, too. After the first few pages, I kind of wished I'd gotten to it sooner.

Harry Dresden is the kind of character I can really identify with, minus the wizard thing. And the living-in-Chicago thing. Basically he's a contemporary wizard living in our society, like Harry Potter only with a job and he doesn't whine as much. He runs his own private investigation "firm", has trouble paying the bills, doesn't have much luck with the ladies, and mechanical stuff just breaks whenever he's around it. I feel you on that last one, Dresden.

There's so much to like about this book. It's written in first person, it reads quickly and flows very well, it's informative while telling about things that are happening, and the cast of characters is rich and varied. Harry gets a call from the Chicago PD to check out a murder in which a man and woman had their hearts blown out of their chests in the middle of the night. It could only have been done by magic, and since he's the guy to go to about that, they bring him in. At the same time, a young mother of three hires Dresden for $500 in cash to track down her recently missing husband.

The two cases aren't related...are they?

Could be. But not in the way you think.

As Dresden solves both crimes, he has to deal with new curves being thrown at him left and right, including:

1) A wizard bounty hunter from the White Council that is just aching to find a reason to have Dresden killed

2) A pushy, sexy reporter who isn't afraid to use her...ahem...resources to get a story out of him

3) A crazy air-spirit trapped inside a skull who constantly argues with Dresden and talks him into making love potions

4) And an amateur magician who draws on the terrible power of storms and uses them to kill people from afar (hence the title).

Despite dealing with the scum of the earth and the underworld, Dresden is an old-fashioned gentlemen who treats women with respect. I found that really appealing about his character. There was graphic content in the book, but not dwelt upon (both with the violence and the sex). Occasionally he'd be descriptive about one of the grotesque crime scenes. Rough language was prevalent but not overdone--probably appearing once every ten to twelve pages (300 pages in all).

In fact, with the exception of the dodgy content spattered throughout, I don't have much to say badly about Storm Front. I'm looking forward to reading the others in the series.

Book Chop: Uglies (series)

2009-11-22T22:31:00.001-08:00

Title: Uglies, Pretties
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Post-apocalyptic YA Sci-fi
Rating: 5 stars

Well, Westerfeld is pretty much a bad@$$, what can I say. I mean, I read Uglies before I read Leviathan, which was made of pure awesome. I was hooked on Uglies after the first few chapters.

It's set in a future (year is never said, nor location) where most of humanity was wiped out after a biological plague turned out fossil fuels into self-destructing explosives. Now the only humans live in hippie-dream cities made of recyclable materials, and vanity is the only god they worship. Everyone before the age of 16 is known as an "ugly", and they're conditioned to think that the only way they can become "pretty" is through an operation they get for free at age 16.

Enter Tally Youngblood, who wants nothing more to be pretty. Her best friend Peris became pretty a few months ago, so he no longer lives in her town; he lives in a new, hi-tech city where all he does is party from dawn til dusk.

Tally meets Shay, another ugly who isn't completely sold on the idea of becoming pretty. She says she's fleeing the city and going out to live in the "Smoke", where other escaped uglies live. Tally won't go with her, since she's just a few days away from getting the pretty operation.

Then the unthinkable happens: Shay escapes, and the Specials (basically the CIA) tell Tally that they won't give her the operation unless she follows Shay's instructions, locates the Smoke, and tells the Specials where the renegade uglies are hiding. If she doesn't comply, Tally will remain ugly...forever.

So what does she do? Serve herself and betray hundreds of free people? Or deny herself what she wants most just so others can stay ugly too? Can being pretty really be so bad for everyone?

Maybe it can...if the operation does more to you than just make you pretty...

Both of the first books in this series have splendid cliffhangers. Though told in third person, they're still written from within the head of the character they focus on. The technology is quickly described and well-thought out--think hoverboards and super computers and stuff. Many of the ideas in these novels will blow you away. Plus, Westerfeld is a master of minimalist writing--he doesn't linger with his descriptions. Hit it, quit it, lay waste, make haste. He gives you his ideas in the least amount of words possible, then plows ahead with the story like a steamroller on jet fuel.

I'm stoked to read Specials and see how the trilogy ends. There's a fourth book, Extras, which as I understand doesn't pertain a whole lot to the trilogy, nor does it feature most of the original characters, so I'm ambivalent on that. For now, we'll see. But I highly recommend these ones. Westerfeld is a very talented writer.

Book Chop: Christmas on Mill Street

2009-11-22T22:27:00.000-08:00

Title: Christmas on Mill Street
Author: Joseph Walker
Genre: Christmas novel
Rating: 3-4 stars

I don't have much to say about this book, but it was good. It's like a small novel version of A Christmas Story, only it's about a sled, not a rifle. There's a good moral lesson about kindness and humility, as well as love of family.

It's about a family that moves to Utah from Arizona. The youngest son sees snow for the first time and wants to get the awesomest sled that he can, so all the kids at his new school will like him and think he's neat-o (elementary school politics). He still teeters on whether or not he believes in Santa Claus, and his evil older sister plays against that belief. She makes a deal that if he can get that sled from Santa without telling his parents about it, she'll do the dishes for a few months, etc etc.

It's a quick read and a heartwarming tale, and it fits the bill of its setting (early 1960s). It has its humor and meaning, and I think the author did a good job with the first-person voice. Worth your time while it's in season.

Book Chop: Tuesdays With Morrie

2009-11-22T22:11:00.001-08:00

Title: Tuesdays with Morrie
Author: Mitch Albom
Genre: Non-fiction memoir
Rating: 4-5 stars

This one's a classic. Mitch Albom tells the tale of his favorite professor from college as he died of Lou Gherig's disease, a sickness that slowly destroys the connection between brain and body. His name was Morrie, and he was a notorious peacemaker, a free spirit and a relentlessly kindhearted man.

Albom (a real guy--this book is semi-memoir) is brutally honest in this book...about himself, and the kind of person he was, and how Morrie helped him to become so much better. He and Morrie were close in college, and then later Albom became a freelance writer and started making all kinds of money. He put a price tag on success and put important things aside. Then he managed to see Morrie on the news one night and found out he was dying. This was 12 years after Albom graduated.

He went back to see Morrie every Tuesday for the rest of Morrie's life (a few months) and re-learned all of the important personal and spiritual lessons he'd set aside after college. Those lessons are the "Tuesdays with Morrie." To see what the lessons are, read the book...and prepare to take notes. Better yet, prepare to do a brutal (but probably necessary) self-evaluation and see how you can make the most of your life, for yourself and for others.

It's a real eye-opener.

Book Chop: Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow

2009-11-22T21:54:00.000-08:00

Title: Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow
Author: David Gemmell
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: 4 stars

I don't care if this is the first in a trilogy. It's getting Chopped, 'cause I'm way behind and I don't have time for this crap.

This is the first book I've read from David Gemmell, per Porter's request. And if you haven't started following Porter's blog, get with it. He's one of my best friends and my fellow Rough Writer. Anyway, Gemmell wrote a lot of fantasy and historical fiction--mostly the latter from what I understand--and the Troy trilogy was his swansong. Lord of the Silver Bow is the first in that trilogy.

Basically Gemmell takes the tale of Homer's Odyssey and makes a smashing good novel out of it. He knows his history very well, and it shows in the quality of the story he tells, what with knowing the background of Greece and the Mediterranean area several thousand years ago. There's probably some making-stuff-uppery in it, and if you have questions about that, ask Porter. He's the history buff. (I'm just buff.) But I digress.

The story starts with Gershom, survivor of a shipwreck, hanging out in the middle of the sea during a storm. Next chapter you meet Agamemnon, the Mykene king; he hears a prophecy from his holy men saying "beware of the horse." Since the black horse is the symbol of the warrior prince Helikaon, Agamemnon puts out a HUGE bounty on him. Next chapter you meet Helikaon, and he's pretty much a pimp. I don't think he wears a shirt more than twice in the whole story, and never when he's kicking someone's ace. Which is often. Like, a lot often.

From there the onslaught of new and wonderful characters never ceases: Argurios, the honor-bound Mykene warrior; Odysseus, the tale-spinning ugly man and friend of Helikaon; Andromache, goddess-princess betrothed the Hektor but in love with Helikaon; Hektor, who's dead; I mean the list goes on and on. Helikaon spends the whole book saving himself while trying to come to terms with the fact that he's falling in love with Andromache--an emotion he never thought he'd feel after seeing his mother dead when he was younger.

Despite it's being 500 pages long, it's a real barn-burner and a great start to a trilogy. I'll read the others and Chop them one by one. I know my rule is to do series books after two, but then, I made the rule, I can break it, and MWAHAHAHAHAHA you'll still read my Chops anyway. I hope.

Thanks and keep reading!

Book Chop: Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics

2009-11-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

Title: Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics
Authors: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 4-5 stars

These two books are real winners--I didn't realize there was going to be a second one until about two weeks ago. I immediately got it off of Audible, the medium I'd used to absorb the first book.

I listened to Freakonomics in the summer of 2008, after I'd pillaged my mom's audible library for books I thought I'd enjoy. This one turned out to be a hit. The basic idea centers around an economist--Levitt--and his unique approach to understanding the world through measurable standards. He's a straight-up economist, but as the header of the book says, he's a "rogue economist". That is, he applies his skill with statistics to the world around him in ways other people wouldn't normally consider, and he comes up with some pretty startling--yet mathematically defensible--results.

For example, in book one they analyze a crack-cocaine drug ring and compare it to the layout of McDonald's, showing why drug dealers (who make SO much money) still live with their moms in the inner-city. Or how the Roe v. Wade decision probably affected the crime rate in our generation. Or how Superman in the comics defeated the KKK in real life decades ago.

The first book deals with a limited range of topics, and analyzes them in extensive detail. It's a lot more entertaining than it sounds--the narrative is quick and easy to digest, and the writing still has an entertaining voice to it.

The second book, Superfreakonomics, takes the same principles from the first book and applies them to a broader range of subjects, showing how carseats for children are less safe than seatbelts, terrorists can be caught preemptively with bank software, altruism is always motivated by incentives (like everything else), and how global warming can be cheaply, easily and effectively solved within a matter of years. There's even a comparison between the modern-day prostitution industry and the brothel business of a hundred years ago, complete with economic and social data on why it's changed the way it has. Oh! And an analysis of the human-organ-harvesting industry in America and Iran!

There's a little bit of language in the first book--F-bombs, and the like--but it's all quotes taken from interviews with gang members that haven't been edited. In the second book there was only one F-bomb, but again it was a direct quote from someone. Other than that, all is well.

Fun, informative, and totally able to break paradigms. Well worth the time to read.

Book Chop: Something Wicked This Way Comes

2009-10-25T15:23:00.001-07:00

Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Author: Ray Bradbury
Genre: Literary fiction
Rating: 4 stars

If Halloween was a book, it would be Something Wicked by Ray Bradbury.

You've heard the saying "Something wicked this way comes." It's nothing new. In fact, it's from Shakespeare's MacBeth, and is preceded by the line "By the pricking of my thumbs..."

That line in its entirety appears in the book, as well as in the 1983 film, for which you can see the trailer here: (keep in mind it's three minutes long, and the art of awesome movie trailers had not yet been mastered)

Anyway, it's about two friends: Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who are both 13. They were born crazily close to Halloween, and though they're best friends, they're complete opposites. (Hence their names--hallow, and night). One day, very late into the season, a carnival comes to town, but its an evil carnival. It gives people things they think they want and takes away the things that truly matter. Will and Jim are conflicted with each other about what to do with the carnival.

Jim, for one, is obsessed with it, whereas Will wants to stay away from it. They have some very interesting and deep arguments about good and evil that are surprisingly well-written. Given that it's literary fiction, it's not too heavy-handed either.

I won't give away the ending. It's enough for me to say that it has a beautiful life lesson in it about the power of familial love. The movie pulls it off pretty well too.

Also, the audio is done by my main man Stefan Rudnicki, who--as we've established in previous Chops--has so much testosterone in his voice that he can make Barbie dolls sprout back hair if they're in earshot.

So if you can get this from your local library this week (shouldn't be too hard, Bradbury's stuff has been around for a while and this is one of his more popular ones), take a whack at it while it's still in season!

Book Chop: Peter and the Starcatchers (series)

2009-10-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

Title: Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, Peter and the Sword of Mercy
Authors: Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
Genre: Literary re-hash/fantasy
Rating: 3-4 stars

This is another series I've only made it halfway through. Dave Barry is an excellent humor writer, and I've heard Ridley Pearson writes a lot of Disney-themed stuff--but Barry's name is what really sold me on this.

It's a prequel series to Peter Ban, basically. It explains where Peter came from, where he got his powers, why he has problems with his shadow, why Captain Hook was after him in the first place, and so on. Funny thing is, it's riddled with inconsistencies when compared to J.M. Barrie's original (you can see a complete list here) but I imagine I'd only be bothered by that if I remembered all the details of Barrie's Peter Pan.

The first book (Starcatchers) was loads of fun. Barry and Pearson wrote a very fast-paced novel, and they're not afraid to make it hard on their characters. The second book wasn't as fast and was a lot more trying for Peter and Tinker Bell. Not without reason, of course, but it just wasn't as fun. I haven't read the third one, and the fourth one just came out.

The first three are available in paperback. I'd recommend checking them out and seeing what you think. They read pretty quick, and Jim Dale does the audio version (he does Harry Potter too).

Book Chop: Alvin Maker Series

2009-10-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

Title: Alvin Maker novels (Seventh Son, Red Prophet, others)
Author: Orson Scott Card
Genre: Historical fantasy
Rating: 4 stars

Sorry guys, I'm lagging again. I'm in that rut where I'm reading series books, and I'm still on the first one. Right now I'm in the first of David Gemmell's Troy trilogy, but I think I'll break from that really quick to read Pretties so I can Chop that series.

Anyway, this series by Card is another winner. It's an historical fantasy about the Miller family in America, in the early 1800s. To people of the LDS faith, it's clear that the story smacks of Joseph Smith's life in his teens, as Card borrows several anecdotes and elements from Smith's life and tweaks them to fit the Miller family--for example, being visited thrice in the night by a spirit, or surviving a terrible leg injury, or "carving a stone from the mountain without hands" (albeit this is in a literal sense here). There are more similarities, but those are the major ones.

That doesn't weaken the story or anything, though. It made it a lot more interesting for me. It's not an LDS novel by any means, though. It's about a young boy, Alvin, who's the seventh son of a seventh son. Nature and the divine powers play against each other through this boy. He has a strong relationship with the Indians, who revere him for his birthpowers and know what he's capable of doing.

The first book just chronicles his family's acceptance of Alvin's powers, of nature's attempts to destroy him, and of the local preacher's rejection of the family's beliefs.

The two things that play best to Card's strength are A) his detailed knowledge of what life was like in that time period, and B) his amazingly good writing voice, whether it's narrative or dialogue. The story flows off the pages and reads rather quickly. I did the first one in paperback and the second one on audio. To date there are six (with a seventh planned), and they've been spread out over the last 20 years. I think Card has a knack for dragging his series out, considering this was only supposed to be a trilogy.

I've heard the books get worse as you go, but I'm not taking that for granted. I'll keep picking at the series and see how it goes. For now, the first two books are pretty good--I actually liked Seventh Son better than Ender's Game.

Book Chop: Leviathan

2009-10-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

Title: Leviathan
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Genre: YA Steampunk
Rating: 5 stars--enthusiastically

I don't care who you are. Go read this book right now.

The first Westerfeld that I read was last month--Uglies, the first in a series of four books. Pretties is coming in the mail this week and I'm stoked to read it 'cause then I can Chop the series.

Oh wait, Leviathan is the start of a series too, isn't it? Guess what? I don't care. This is my Chophouse, I make the rules, and I can break them. I'm not going to sit around until October of next year and wait for book 2 to come out just so I can Chop this story.

For starters, watch the book trailer. This will give you the background and intro to the story. I won't waste time describing that, except to say that World War 1 with animals versus machines is so awesome it makes me cry:

There you have it. This book came into Deseret sometime last week and all I had to do was look at the cover/inside map, and I was sold. Keep in mind, this is after reading the sample chapter included in the back of Extras, which didn't impress me terribly. I actually thought it was kind of weird, but that's because there was no context. I didn't write it off just then; I told myself I'd learn more about it. Well, this stuff above did the trick.

Keith Thompson's drawings throughout the book (there are about 40 of them) are the cherry on the icing on the cake made of pure awesome.

Everything is right with this book: characters are well thought-out and unique. The worldbuilding is spot-on. The fight scenes, chase scenes, plot-building scenes...there isn't a single dull moment. If Uglies was great, Leviathan is epic. This book is Westerfeld's true masterpiece, and I can confidently say that after having only read two of his many titles. This is the book that will make me read his entire backlist, because I want to get my hands on all of his books. He's earned the royalties he'll get from my purchases.

Congrats, Westerfeld: you're in the Collins/Dashner/Crichton club.

I'll probably read this one again in the near future.

Book Chop: Song of Albion (Trilogy)

2009-10-14T05:30:00.000-07:00

Title: Song of Albion Trilogy (The Paradise War, The Silver Hand, The Endless Knot)
Author: Stephen R. Lawhead
Genre: Celtic fantasy
Rating: 4 stars

This one is over a year in the making. I first read The Paradise War last summer on audio when my mom got me the book for my birthday. I'd read Lawhead's Hood and Scarlet and totally loved them, so I wanted to get into his backlist. The cool thing about this trilogy is that, unlike his other books (which are all period pieces about King Arthur, Robin Hood, Saint Patrick, etc), this trilogy is contemporary and perhaps even a little autobiographical.

It's about two friends in college named Lewis and Simon. Simon's a Brit, Lewis is American, and they're colleagues at Oxford. Lewis is there as part of the Celtic studies program on a rare study-abroad venture. One day Simon reads about an aurochs (an Ice Age-era beast) randomly appearing on some dude's farm in the newspaper and wants to check it out. Lewis doesn't believe it's legit, since aurochses are extinct, but goes along for the kick of it.

Turns out that there's a cairn near the farm--a stone circle that serves as a portal between Earth and Albion, the ancient land of the Celts. Lewis and Simon go through the portal and live as ancient Celtic warriors, and both find what was missing in their lives: adventure.

But soon the story pits friend against friend, as Simon takes up with the young prince Meldron, who wishes to take the High Kingship of Albion from his father. Lewis sides with Meldron Mawr, the High King, and a war breaks out there in paradise.

Lewis and Simon are in Albion for years, though time is immaterial there. In fact at one part they even step through the cairn again to find that only a day has passed on our side.

The first book is about the above conflict. The second book is about the search to replace the High King, and the third book is the resolution of the overall conflict of Lewis' presence in Albion, since he doesn't truly belong there but can't stand the thought of leaving.

With the exception of the concept of a parallel alternate world, this trilogy is severely unique. This is no Narnia here--it's intense, it's engaging, it's beautiful, and Lawhead's knowledge of Celtic lit and lore really comes to life in these books. I did them all on audio but I definitely want them in my collection. I only gave them four stars and not five though because you do have to have a stomach for long and somewhat tedious poems here and there--"songs", as they're called. 4 stars 'cause I couldn't recommend it to just anyone and know they'd like it...but it's a high 4 stars :-)

Book Chop: The Lost Symbol

2009-10-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

Title: The Lost Symbol
Author: Dan Brown
Genre: Thriller/Speculative fiction (heavy on the speculation)
Rating: 4 stars

You've been hearing a lot about this book. I know this because, as we've established, you have an Internet connection, which means you live near civilization, or at least somewhere that people are saying things. If not, well...ugh, I don't have anything witty to say.

I liked this book. I'm kind of pissed at the critics who had their reviews written before it even came out (or before they even read it), jumping on the "I Hate Dan Brown" bandwagon. Then there are the people who call him a bigot or an anti-Christ or whatever they want to make up. Usually these are people who read The Da Vinci Code and had their Christian belief system challenged for the first time in their lives, and somehow thought that complaining about it would do damage to Mr. Brown.

Well, it didn't, and those people are kind of foolish. The best way to give notoriety to something is to make it controversial. If you don't believe me, check out the sales of all the books that people have tried to ban from public schools, starting with obscure titles like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Anyway, to the actual book: it was well-done. It was still a signature Dan Brown novel in the sense that some of the writing was outright crap, meaning either Brown still hasn't proofed his own writing, or his editors are just thinking "Why should I try? It's got Brown's name on it. It'll sell." I got kind of tired of him saying his own characters' names over and over again--first and last together.

"Kathleen Solomon did this, and then Kathleen Solomon thought about something else. Like Robert Langdon. Meanwhile, Robert Langdon was walking down the hallway. Robert Langdon looked down at Robert Langdon's watch."

Seriously Dan, it's okay to use words like "he" and "she" once in a while. Also, we know there's only one Robert you'll ever be referring to. It's cool, man.

In comparing this book to the other two Langdon novels, I'd say it's better than Da Vinci Code and tied with Angels & Demons. A&D remains his smartest book, whereas The Lost Symbol is going to make the best movie. I think the villain in this one was extremely well-motivated. He probably won't have the "shock value" of the A&D villain, at least not when you find out who he is, but his actions throughout the book made you really hate him. Like, you want a bus to just completely run him over. That's the mark of a well-done villain.

The plot centers on the society called the Freemasons and a secret they carry. Supposedly it's the key to "apotheosis", or becoming a god. The villain wants to know the secret, and he tricks Robert Langdon into figuring it out for him--or at least, he tries to force Langdon to find what he needs. From the big shocking intro, you have a few things that are trademark Dan Brown: long intros of important characters with backstories, a brutally long and drawn-out drowning scene, a few chases, and lots of flashbacks into previous lectures Langdon has given as a Harvard professor.

Still, in this story, Langdon has to get his hands dirty, and he goes through a lot more physically than he did in the other books. It takes place in Washington DC, making this the second Dan Brown book to do so (the other being Deception Point--still my favorite). It shouldn't surprise me that his two best books take place in America :-)

All patriotism aside, I am pleased with the outcome of this book, and for one major reason: it actually has meaning. Da Vinci had some controversial application, but was ultimately fiction; A&D supposedly stoked the coals of the science-versus-religion argument, but most (if not all) of the religious people I know have no problem with science and its pursuit.

Lost Symbol, on the other hand, has a really great message about religious tolerance, and opening one's mind up to exploring the existence of God. It's not in the form of heavy-handed lecturing from the all-knowing Langdon, either; Langdon himself finally has to confront his own atheism, which is nice to see. Brown pulls him out of the role of a static character, and Langdon does some nice self-evaluation.

When he does argue, he does it in defense of the Freemasons--a society whose purpose and practices are grossly misunderstood by the masses. When characters in the book refer to the Masons as a cult, or as satists, Langdon forces them to back up their claims and not be so judgmental--after all, the practices and tenets of nearly all religions can be made to sound cultish and sinister if told with the right slant or bias (a point which the Langdon character handily illustrates in a flashback scene).

I could go on and on about that, but the point is, this book (despite its technical flaws) was better than I expected, and I'm glad Brown's main character had to learn something for once. It helped the reader to really learn something as well.

If you liked his other books, you'll be more than satisfied with this one I think.

Oh! And funny side note: he takes a pot shot at his own book Digital Fortress in Lost Symbol. It was rather comical. If you've read DF, you'll know it when you see it.

Book Chop: The Maze Runner

2009-10-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

Title: The Maze Runner
Author: James Dashner
Genre: YA Sci-fi/dystopia
Rating: 4 stars

Well, this has been a long time coming. I alerted the general public that I'd be doing a Chop of this book back in June when I read the ARC. (It's right HERE). I was hooked up by the wonderful Noreen Marchisi at Random House, who is James Dashner's publicist.

There have been multiple reviews of this book across the web. James has an amazing following of loyal, well-read fans. The Lateiner Gang has an interview with James on their blog right now, and Magenta reviewed her copy of the ARC in the past few weeks.

I'll say this: it's fantastically well-done. It moves a little slowly in first gear, but that's because this is more of a 1969 Cadillac than a 2009 Viper: it's all top-end speed. You have to keep your foot on the gas through the first few gears because this book's engine is a complete torque monster. Once you get into the 130-150mph range, there's no looking back. So yeah, slow start, fast finish, wicked cliff-hanger.

Basic premise: twenty-something teenage boys (and one hot teenage girl, poor thing) are trapped inside an unsolvable maze patrolled by amorphous monsters called Grievers. None of them have any memories of their life from before the Maze. They have to find a way out of the Maze, and every day is harder than the last.

You can read more reviews on those other blogs. I chose not to review this book outright other than saying it's worth your time and it deserves its constant comparison to Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. It's on a different level, and has a different feel to it, but it'll pull you in just like THG.

Instead of all that, I've decided to tell you my story with this, kind of like the time when I reviewed Jeff Savage's FarWorld series.

I met James Dashner in March of 2006. I'd only been home from Spain for 5 months, and the first draft of the first version of my book Sidewinder wasn't even finished. James had only made it as far as book three in his Jimmy Fincher saga, and the fourth would come out later that year. I was at the LDStorymakers conference and Dashner was one of the key speakers there. (Storymakers is put on by a number of LDS authors in the Utah Valley area, whether they write LDS stories or national market books). Savage was there was well, though he only had two stand-alones and a Shandra Covington book in print back then.

My, how the times have changed.

Dashner taught a class on hooks and cliffhangers--the "enter late, leave early" mentality that allows a writer to minimize the amount of bullcrap he (or she) must write in order to tell a story, while maximizing the reader's interest at the same time. It was during this class that he told us about his book called The Maze Runner, and the ideas he'd had for it. He even shared a few of his chapter cliffhangers, and I was intrigued to see where it went.

As the rest of 2006 played out, I finished the first draft of the first version of Sidewinder. I didn't really start any new projects, except for my NaNoWriMo novel which would eventually become the third Lunaratus book. (I'm revising the first one right now). When the time came around for Storymakers in 2007, I couldn't go because I had to work. I only worked on the Sidewinder books that year, but didn't make any significant progress with them.

In the early months of 2008 I saw Dashner's The Journal of Curious Letters and picked it up right away. I'd read the first Jimmy Fincher book (part of the way anyhow) and was interested in seeing where this new, bigger series went. I attended the conference in 2008 for the second time, and it was a real ride. I loved it, and I was excited to tell James that I liked his book.

Near the end of the summer of 2008 I decided to dig up his blog. I remembered him talking about that book Maze Runner in '06 and wanted to see if anything was going on with it. Lo and behold, that very day he announced that Maze had sold to Random House, and he could now write full time.

I've gotten to know James better in the year since then, what with hanging out with him at the Fablehaven 4 launch party, the 2009 Writer's Conference, and CONduit. When I finally held Maze Runner in my hands in June of this year and got to read it, I got a slight taste of what he must get to go through every day now that he's living the dream. It was amazing to see those cliffhangers that he'd mentioned all the way back in 2006. He and his editors did such a wonderful job with this book that it makes me feel all tingly inside.

So I went to the launch party in Salt Lake tonight and had a blast. James signed my copy of the book, which now sits proudly in my collection. I can't wait to read it again. It's a true gem, and the sequels should be even better. (I made sure to wear my Ireland jacket tonight--the same one I was wearing at the conference in 2006, just to complete the full-circle journey as one of the first Maze fans--hehehehehe neener neener neener).

James, here's to you, brother. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you deserve this. Your book is totally worthy of the hype and I won't hesitate to recommend it to anyone. The only reason it gets 4 stars is because I'm super pissed at the cliffhanger ending. It gets the job done, 'cause I'll read the second book next year, but consider this the official carrot dangling in front of your eyes :-)

Enjoy your tour, and keep doing what you do best.

Book Chop: Robert Langdon Series

2009-10-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

Title: Robert Langdon series (Angles and Demons, The Da Vinci Code)
Author: Dan Brown
Genre: "Thriller" (whatever that means)/Makingstuffuppery
Rating: 3-4 stars, depending on the book

There are only about a million different covers for both these books, so if you see it in a store and it looks different from these images, please remember that I do not give a crap.

Bottom line: good books. If you haven't heard of them, you're lying, because you're reading this on the Internet, which means you're not Amish, which means you've heard of them. Dan Brown writes controversial stuff, and that makes his stuff sell, which is good, 'cause heaven only knows it's not the quality of his writing that seals the deal.

Main character: Robert Langdon. Harvard professor, totally smart, perfect memory, knows everything, doesn't believe in God (except to take His name in vain), and likes telling people that what they know is wrong. Sometimes he's even right about that.

Angels and Demons was the first Langdon book. The movie--if you saw it--follows it pretty well, with the exception of the ending, and the fact that they made the Da Vinci Code movie first. But that's just the ever-growing movie/book gap for you.

In A&D, Langdon gets a call to fly to Geneva, where a super-secret laboratory has been robbed. He learns that the lab is used for generating actual anti-matter. At this lab, most of the scientists are atheists, but the successful scientist is a devout Catholic. He gets killed and his anti-matter is stolen and taken to Rome. At the same time, the College of the Cardinals is in conclave--the process by which they choose a new Pope, as the previous one was dead--and there are four preferred guys: a Brit, a Spaniard, an Italian and a German. One by one they keep ending up dead, and their killer is supposedly a member of the Illuminati--a group devoted to science that was obliterated by "the Church" many centuries ago.

Langdon's quest? Save the cardinals, find the anti-matter (which could blow up the Vatican) and monologue about every single piece of art he sees in the meantime. I'll not give away the ending.

In The Da Vinci Code, Langdon gets dragged into a millennia-old quest to find the Holy Grail in France. There's an equal amount of thrill and plot twists in this one, beginning with the murder of a museum curator and ending with---HA. No. Read the book. Basically he's dealing with another secret society, this time the senechaux instead of the Illuminati. Knights Templar play a role too, and of course the big questions are: 1) Did Jesus Christ ever marry? and 2) Did his potential bloodline continue to our time?

Brown backs up his science really well, and knows how to structure a good story. His writing style isn't that great, but obviously millions of people are willing to overlook that. His evaluation of religious histories is about 90% accurate, with the rest being what you'd call precision guesswork, if not outright makings***uppery. But hey, that's what fiction is for.

Currently I'm reading The Lost Symbol, the third Langdon book that (finally) takes place in the USA. Very compelling and I'm interested in seeing how it ends--only 5 hours left on the audio. Out of the two books above though, Angels and Demons is the better one. Check them both out though if you'd like.

Book Chop: Saving Madeline--CONTEST

2009-09-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

Title: Saving Madeline
Author: Rachel Ann Nunes
Genre: Suspense/Romance/Thriller
Rating: 4 stars

This is it, ladies and germs! The big Kahuna! The first ever GrahamChops giveaway! GrahamChops has teamed up with suspense author Rachel Ann Nunes to give you a shot at winning her newest novel, Saving Madeline. This is also my first involvement in a real, legit blog tour with a major national publisher. (Shadow Mountain is also behind Fablehaven, The 13th Reality and FarWorld, but Nunes writes for an older audience).

All you have to do to enter this contest is leave a comment on this post. Rachel will keep track of all the other blogs involved in the tour, and out of all the entrants, one will be selected for a free copy, provided by Rachel herself!

Independent of that, I'll even sweeten the deal: if there's enough interest among you loyal GrahamChops followers, and if by some chance none of you wins, I'll go buy a copy of the book next week and do my own giveaway right here. But if you want to be involved in that, you have to comment on this post before September 26, 2009.

Now, for that actual Chop:

I'll say right out of the gate that I don't normally read "suspense", or "romantic" anything, with the possible exception of Twilight, and that was just to find out what the mammoth worldwide phenomenon was all about.

Still, this being my first venture into Rachel's books in recent memory, I was delighted to realize what I was missing out on. Saving Madeline is hardly chick lit, as I expected it to be. Yes, there is a happy ending, and yes, it involves romance. But that's not the meat of the story.

The main character is Caitlin McLoughlin, a do-good public servant who wants to help the good guy and put the bad guy away. Enter Parker Hathaway, a hard-working father and ex-husband whose had his fair share of run-ins with the law over alcoholism. When his ex-wife shacks up with a drug dealer, Parker fears for the safety of his son and daughter. Despite court orders, Parker makes a quick decision and picks up his daughter (Madeline) and does whatever he can to rescue her from such a dangerous situation.

Naturally this constitutes a run-in with the law, and Caitlin ends up taking the case in order to rescue Madeline. But when she meets Parker and sees him for the good man he really is, she's forced to choose between the letter of the law and what's really right.

The characters are interesting, the conflict is compelling, and the tension is high. Romance, meet suspense; you two will get along so well with each other.

So check it out to see what happens! And if you want to take a stab at winning a free copy, LEAVE A COMMENT! Best of luck to all of you!

Book Chop: You're Not Fooling Anyone...

2009-09-12T08:58:00.000-07:00

Book Chop: You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop
Author: John Scalzi
Genre: Nonfiction
Rating: 4+ stars

Wow. Wish I'd have gotten to this book sooner. I've Chopped Scalzi before with his debut novel Old Man's War, which was very well-done but heavy on graphic content. (Hey, that's just the kind of thing we indicate here at the GC.)

Lots of authors write books on writing. Louis L'Amour did, and his book is on my all-time Top Ten. Stephen King also wrote a winner. Both of those were basically autobiographical and explained how they grew as individuals, and later how that shaped their writing. King's book had more of a technical side, whereas L'Amour talked about accuracy, detail and propriety of content.

Scalzi takes a completely different approach, talking mostly about the business side of writing, and the attitude a writer ought to have toward his/her job. "Ought to" meaning "what has worked for Scalzi", which isn't necessarily a bad thing. He pulls down a six-figure income working freelance, not including the advances he gets from his novels. Every topic from relating to other authors, to dealing with plagiarism, to online flame wars, to getting an agent...it's all the business side.

If you haven't been exposed to Scalzi's work before, this is a good place to start. There's some language throughout but he doesn't keep it prevalent--most of the entries in this book are posts from his blog, which has been around for over a decade. I didn't find myself disagreeing with much of anything in this book either--it transcends writing advice, and you can see his general personal philosophy and outlook on life, and it's really great. He seems like a very independent, likable, headstrong guy who only deliberately offends people back. I don't know, maybe I haven't read enough of his work on his blog, but that's the impression I get from his book.

In fact, if you were to take GrahamChops, give him a 6-fig salary and a full-time writing career, and make him more left-wing instead of right-wing, you'd have Scalzi. (Plus he's married and has a kid, and he's shorter than me, but those are just extra details).

So yeah, tons of good advice in here, definitely worth your time. Certain chapters had me laughing out loud and thinking I'd even recommend this book to people who aren't writers. It's that good.

Check it out if you get a chance.
. .

Book Chop: The Princess Bride

2009-09-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

Title: The Princess Bride
Author: William Goldman
Genre: Romantic comedy
Rating: 5 stars

It's been a while since I read this one--over a year, actually. I should probably read it again, or at least get familiar with it, because when I write Ghost Machines in November, I want it to have this same kind of tone.

The Princess Bride is a classic. It was ever since the 1980s when it became one of the greatest films of all time. That's when the book really took off. If you've read the book, chances are it's because you've seen the movie.

The movie was epic and brilliant and wonderful. The book is still ten times better. It's funny, it's witty, it's intelligent, it's touching...it's everything a feast of a book should be. It's nothing conventional, and it's all the better for it. I can't say enough good things about it.

Remarkably, the story from the film is very close to the story from the book. The book just has more in the narrative, as well as extra scenes that provide more background for the build-up of the characters' intentions.

If you haven't picked up this book (come on you cheapskates, the paperback is seven frigging dollars), do it this weekend and git 'er done. This is one of the top ten best books ever.

Enjoy.

Book Chop: Catching Fire

2009-09-09T20:33:00.001-07:00

Book Chop: Catching Fire
Author: Suzanne Collins
Genre: Future dystopia
Rating: 5 stars

As promised, here's the Chop of Catching Fire, the second book of the Hunger Games.

I'm going to do my best to separate the spoilers from the rest of the Chop. So when you hit the Spoiler Alert, STOP READING. I'm not responsible for what happens after that.

I always wondered how Collins would follow up something so amazing as The Hunger Games. How would you write a sequel to that story that didn't so wholly deviate from the original? What would have to happen? How bad would it get? And how would a crop of such amazingly vivid characters handle the newest turn of events?

With excellence. That's how.

If you're concerned about Catching Fire living up to the original, put those concerns to bed. From the get-go, this book is all about one thing: bad@$$ery. And if it's about two things, it's bad@$$ery and fortitude. It's intelligent, it's true to its original theme, and it's a page-turner in every sense of the word. Very few times in my life have I read a book and gotten to where I see the end of a chapter coming up, and I cover the last few lines with my fingers because I don't trust my eyes not to give it away. This was one of those times.

So if you loved the first one, prepare to be thrilled by the second one. And now for the spoilers:

***SPOILER ALERT***

---Katniss gets a surprise visit from the president of Panem, a total hard-A named President Snow who makes no bones about the fact that he knows Katniss and Peeta aren't really in love...and that it's all an affront. The problem is that the rest of Panem is mounting a rebellion, inspired by Katniss' bold refusal to kill Peeta during the 74th Hunger Games.

---Gale kissed Katniss...and President Snow knows about it.

---Peeta takes it like a total champ and even though he's in love with Katniss, he's realistic about it.

---While touring after the Games, Katniss and Peeta learn about the rebellion, and even witness the "Peacekeepers" execute a man for saluting Katniss. Later, Katniss hears about other uprisings in other districts.

---One day Katniss sees some people who escaped and are hiking to District 13--the district that was overthrown by the Capitol 74 years ago. (13 was in charge of nuclear production). It becomes clear that D13 isn't as destitute as the Capitol wants everyone to believe. Quite the contrary...

---The 75th Hunger Games are about to take place. Every 25 years, the Games are even more elaborate than normal (it's called a "Quarter Quell"). They change the rules during the Quell, and each Quell has been different. This time the Capitol changes the rules so that the tributes for this year's Games are only chosen from a crop of previous victors, which means Peeta and Katniss have to go back into the arena and compete in the Games against people who've competed before.

I won't give away the ending. I will say, though, that a whole SLEW of new and interesting characters come to light in the Quell, including a total champ named Finnick Odair. You'll have to read it to find out more about him.

So go buy the book now!

Also, later on I plan to read Battle Royale, The Running Man, Lord of the Flies and a few of the other books that have been compared to Hunger Games and vice versa. There's some controversy out there that I want to clear up and I can't make an informed judgment without reading these other books.

Enjoy!

o if y

TV Show Chop: Mobile Suit Gundam

2009-09-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

TV Show Chop: Mobile Suit Gundam
Producers: Planning Sunrise
Genre: Anime
Rating: 4-5 Stars, depending on the version

Sorry I've been out of it for the past week. I had a moderately bad motorcycle accident on Saturday, which you can read about here if you're curious. Blogging makes it so I don't have to repeat it to everyone, and only those who want to know will have to hear about it. :-)

As for my reading habits, most of what I've read lately are first books in a series, and I can't Chop them until I read the others. Amazon has semi-worthy reviews of them, including Tales of the Otori #1 and Uglies. I'm in love with the former and increasingly impressed with the latter. Looking forward to Chopping them.

Anyway, I decided to do my first-ever TV show Chop. I won't do these often, and when I do, they'll probably be cancelled shows. Let's face it: anything that's on right now and worth watching, you've probably heard of it (except, possibly, Deadliest Warrior, which I reviewed here.) So the old stuff needs to be propped up.

Mobile Suit Gundam is a Japanese cartoon franchise dating back in the two-decade range. As is common with Japanese cartoons--and their American counterparts--there are multiple, temporally incongruent versions of this shows, all of which could stand as the "true version" of its story. But that's just something we as Americans would notice because we have a different mindset when it comes to developing ideas and telling stories. Nothing wrong with that, it's just different. I like both methods, myself.

Anyway, MSG has had multiple variations, and I'm only familiar with two of them: Wing and Double-0. The image above is from Double-0, and features the four main Gundams: Dynamus, Exia, Kirios and Virtue. It's set in a very realistic future (300 years away) when the world is divided into three major countries, all of which possess intricate ground-based space stations that provide a limitless supply of solar energy. This makes fossil fuels obsolete, bankrupting countries whose economies depend on oil sales (i.e. the Middle East). War is widespread across the world, fought with tanks, jets and high-tech "Mobile Suits", or humanoid mechanized fighting machines of all shapes and variations.

One day a commonplace battle is going on in the Middle East when suddenly a new, high-powered mobile suit called a "Gundam" appears and destroys all the other suits in range--in about five seconds. Three other Gundams appear in other areas of the world, intervening in conflicts and destroying the forces on both sides. That same day, an anonymous group claims responsibility for the intervention, calling themselves "Celestial Being". They claim the right to intervene in all armed conflicts or matters of war, and promise to destroy anyone who promotes war, no matter their cause. Since their weapons are powerful, their armor (made of "gundanium") is indestructible, and their solar reactor engines are limitless, nobody can refuse to acknowledge their supremacy.

From there, the show explores what kind of things would happen if such a group were to exist. How would these politically and economically-motivated super-countries respond to such a presence? What about smaller countries that are fighting centuries-long conflicts based on race or religion? What about terrorists? Would the world just roll over and accept Celestial Being's terms?

As far as the dialog goes, there is a fair amount that gets lost in translation between Japanese and English, but that's to be expected. I don't usually hold that against animes that end up in the US. If you can set that minor annoyance aside, the characters are amazing, the animation is BEAUTIFUL, and the story is extremely intelligent and compelling. Sometimes it borders on creepy or excessively dark, as some of the Gundam Meisters (those who pilot the Gundams) have very sad or tragic pasts--things that led them to join Celestial Being in the first place.

There's mild profanity in the English version. Also, there are a few "gender-indeterminate" characters--another quirk of Japanese animation. Some characters look female but are male and have male voices. It throws you off a little.

You can watch episodes of Double-0 on YouTube for free. If you take away the opening and ending credits, each episode is about twenty minutes long. I'm 11 episodes in, and I'm hooked. The main header for the YouTube page is here.

The other show--with which I am more familiar--is Mobile Suit: Gundam Wing. Set in a different timeline entirely, the GW world depicts an Earth surrounded by massive colonies in space. A huge organization called the Oz Corps basically calls the shots on Earth by controlling a massive army of mobile suits, all of which are themed after Zodiac symbols--Cancer, Pisces, Taurus, Leo, Virgo, etc.

Earth is at war with the colonies, and five scientists in space decide to launch a secretly-timed retaliation. They build their own Gundams--more advanced than anything Earth has--and train children to pilot them. For 15 years they labor to make the pilots super-awesome, and they each master various forms of weapons usage, hand-to-hand combat, and mobile suit warfare. Then, when each of the pilots turns 15, the scientists send them to Earth in their Gundams all at the same time with only one mission: destroy Oz.

In the above photo you have the following characters and their Gundams: Trowa Barton (nationality unknown) with Gundam HeavyArms; Duo Maxwell (American) with Gundam Deathscythe; Heero Yuy (Japanese) with Gundam Wing; Quatre Rebarba Winner (Arab) with Gundam Sandrock; and Chang Wufei (Chinese) with Gundam ShengLong.

The animation in Wing doesn't even come close to Double-0 in quality, because it's older. Also, the real-world ramifications and possibility of the Wing storyline are much less believable. It's more of a comic-bookish kind of story, but still very entertaining. If Wing had Double-o's animation at the very least, I'd suggest buying it right now. At the moment, it's not available on YouTube like the other one.

So check out Double-0 if you've got some time.

Audiobook Chop: Rings, Swords and Monsters

2009-08-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

Title: The Modern Scholar: Rings, Swords and Monsters
Author: Prof. Michael D.C. Drout
Genre: Biography/History
Rating: 5 Stars

I'll keep this one pretty short, since you're all probably sick of me Chopping audiobooks. This one came out last fall during November. Professor Michael Drout is an erudite with respect to fantasy fiction and the history thereof, especially concerning the life and writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Rings, Swords and Monsters is a collection of lectures Drout has given about Tolkien and his contributions to the fantasy genre, as well as the evolution of fantasy from mere escapism to a valid literary medium. He extensively outlines how Tolkien came up with the books set in Middle-Earth and why they were so detailed.

It's a very easy audiobook to listen to and I retained loads of information from it, even though it was 12 hours long. I totally lost myself in this detailed explanation of the genre I love so much. It was especially gratifying because I can now defend the time that I dedicate to writing fantasy as more than just my personal devotion to a craft--fantasy is every bit as important as historical or biographical writings, even philosophical illustrations. Drout explains how.

I can't say enough good things about this book. I hope the lectures come out in print sometime so I can underline them and index them. Until then I'll just have to make do with his blog. Check it out.

Book Chop: Where's My Jetpack?

2009-08-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

Title: Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived
Author: Daniel H. Wilson
Genre: Non-fiction/humor
Rating: 4 stars

"Wherever a dangerous new technology exists, there is a guy with cool goggles and streaky blond hair, waiting to shatter his fibula."

So concludes chapter 1.1 of Where's My Jetpack?, a section that explains the title tech-piece, its history and its practical application. As with his other book, How To Survive A Robot Uprising, Dr. Wilson delves into the history of many different types of technology first pitched to humanity in the pages of science fiction comics, or on the silver screen. Fifty years ago, everyone thought we'd have flying cars by the year 2000. Clearly that's not the case...or is it?

In this book, Wilson shows that many of these technologies are actually available, if at a crippling price--but they do exist. Even the fabled jetpack, the ray gun, the moon city, the moving sidewalk, the food pill, the flying car...all these and more are technologies that for the most part have been developed and truly do exist, but not always in practical form.

Concise, witty and informative, Wilson's Jetpack is a wonderful insight into the world of yesteryear and shows us how much farther we have to go in order to reach "the future of the past". Very much worth looking into, as I got a ton of ideas for Sidewinder: The Cold Within while listening to this on audio.

Oh yeah--Stefan Rudnicki does the narrating on this one, so ladies, take a breather every few minutes.

Book Chop: How to Survive a Robot Uprising

2009-08-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

Title: How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion
Author: Daniel H. Wilson
Genre: Non-Fiction/Humor (sort of)
Rating: 4 stars

Daniel H. Wilson is a really smart dude with a doctorate in something. I don't know what it is, but he has "Ph.D" after his name, so he must be legit.

HTSRU is an excellent book. Wilson, who knows a lot about robotics and high-tech equipment, explains what sort of technology is on the market--or not--and how a robot could use it to exterminate a human being. On the positive side, he explains the best tactics humans can use to fight against this technology, everything from sensory equipment, targeting programs, infrared, sonar, radar, the works--even tech you haven't heard of yet. This book has it all.

Wilson also likes to throw in his own little jokes here and there, and the narrative is funny while being informative. It gives the book a good pace. Also, there is an abundance of comical drawings and depictions not unlike the ones on the cover of the book (see above). On top of that, he integrates quotes and bits of lore from sci-fi films and TV shows where robots are featured, especially the psycho killing kind.

The only things that keep it from a 5-star rating are that it's not the kind of book you read cover-to-cover. Some parts are tedious, and that was sad :-( Also, one of the quotes he uses is from Sarah Connor in Terminator (1984) that employs an F-bomb. It's in there, that's all I'm sayin'.

I'm currently listening to Where's my Jetpack?, another of Wilson's non-fiction analyses of technology and the practical application thereof. A Chop is forthcoming.

As for this book, well, let's just say that until you read it, you're not prepared to fight Skynet like I am, and if a robot is chasing both of us, I won't even have to trip you to be the one who survives. So get reading :-)

Picture Book Chop: Pingo

2009-08-08T23:20:00.001-07:00

Title: Pingo
Author: Brandon Mull
Illustrator: Brandon Dorman (Fablehaven, Farworld)
Genre: Picture book
Rating: 4 stars

In the spirit of "not everything can get five stars", Pingo gets four, 'cause it's a kids' book. By kids I mean 6 and under.

That's not to say it won't touch your heart and tickle your aorta. You'll like it.

The concept is pretty straightforward: boy grows up. Boy has imaginary friend. Boy grows up more, decides he's done with imaginary friend. Imaginary friend isn't down with that. Imaginary friend screws with boy's head for the rest of his life until he's old and senile, committed to being his imaginary enemy.

If you're going to read this book, pick it up at the store and take the 90 seconds that it takes to get the whole story. Just remember this is a picture book. You buy it for the artwork so your kids can stare at the pages for 10 minutes at a time and let the images stimulate their imagination--and Dorman's artwork is spot-on for that task.

Moreover while you're reading it with the young 'uns in your life, you'll see the meaning of the story unfold more clearly. We're wildly imaginative when we're young, and as we grow older we tend to put those things away. But they come back to haunt us in adulthood when we're trying to be all serious and hardworking and realistic...we don't accept them again until our lives are nearly over. People see children and the senile elderly the same way: those out of touch with reality.

But what does that really mean? Nothing. Just that those in touch with reality are out of touch with their imaginations. That's why their lives suck and they decide to take up other coping mechanisms, like drinking. (Not in the story). :-)

Overall it's really cute, another delicious treat from Brandon Mull's mind, backed by Brandon Dorman's impeccable artistic talent. I hope they keep working together with Shadow Mountain; they certainly haven't forgotten their imaginations, and it's made their reality all the sweeter for it.

Book Chop: Schlock Mercenary vol. 1

2009-08-08T23:10:00.001-07:00

Title: Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management
Author: Howard Tayler
Genre: Comic satire
Rating: 5 stars

Howard Tayler is brilliant, both as an artist and a humorist. I first was introduced to his work by way of the Writing Excuses podcast, to which Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells are also contributors. Sanderson writes epic fantasy, Wells writes horror, and Tayler writes satire.

Schlock Mercenary is an online comic strip about mercenaries in space. Sergeant Schlock is a 500-lb pile of amorphic doo-doo with a dry sense of humor and a wreckless sense of "give me what I want". As pointed out recently in one of the online comic strips, Schlock has only four points on his moral compass: eat it, kill it, make friends with it, or take a bath in it. He carries around a pair of huge plasma guns (that always make an "ominous huuummmmmm" right before they fire) inside his own stomach which he can regurgitate at will. And he's not afraid to shoot anything.

With his fellow crewmembers he embarks on for-hire missions where the pay is good and the action is better. Legality is never a concern and moral hindrance is a completely alien concept.

Under New Management is the first volume in the now five-volume collection of Schlock books. It's the best start-up story that can be assembled from the comic strips that Howard has been doing for a decade. You can find the rest of the books in the shop on his website here.

The best part about Howard's strip is that it's free. You can read a new Schlock comic every day on his website, and then buy the collections about once a year. I just finished Under New Management last week and I'm going to be buying the other books one by one so I can get caught up. It's definitely worth a look-see.

After all, it's free :-)

Book Chop: The Alliance

2009-08-08T22:58:00.001-07:00

Title: The Alliance
Author: Gerald N. Lund
Genre: Sci-fi/dystopia
Rating: 4 stars

Before reading this book, I'd never read anything by Gerald Lund. I guess that's kind of a big deal, so let me explain.

Lund is a genius. The only reason he didn't invent things like the light bulb, the cell phone and gravity are because someone else beat him to it...but not by much. Specifically he's a history buff, and a humbling one at that. I'm almost positive there is nothing he doesn't know about American history, especially that of the west.

His trademark series is The Work and the Glory, a nine or ten-volume saga about a family that joins the Mormon church during the time of Joseph Smith the prophet. It chronicles the suffering they went through and the kind of lifestyles they lived, and was even made into a series of movies that have done well. His other notable books are Fire of the Covenant and the Kingdom and the Crown books. Most recently he released The Undaunted, a story about Mormon pioneers who settled other areas in the western United States after the main body of saints settled the Salt Lake Valley.

I actually got to meet the author four years ago in Spain while I was on my mission. He was in the Europe West Area Presidency and gave us an excellent day-long conference that broke down many gospel principles in exquisite yet comprehensible detail. Aside from being a wise erudite, he's a very gripping and engaging teacher.

The Alliance was one of his first novels, published in the early 1980s by Bookcraft. Recently these books have surfaced again, and I picked up a couple of them. This particular story is a national-market book (Magenta, that means that unlike his other works, this isn't a story with Mormon characters in a Mormon setting, like the rest of his novels). It still takes place in Utah/Colorado, that area.

It's set in the future in a post-nuclear holocaust world. Some people live in villages and carry on old-fashioned lifestyles, but there is a group of people that have formed an alliance and still have access to extensive technology. They use this technology to impose mind control on the populace, and every so often they conquer villages of non-Allied peoples.

The storytelling is great and the characters are very interesting. Like all things Lund, the content is compelling while also being clean--no language, no sex, etc. He doesn't write flat characters either; even the good guy has his major imperfections, and they come into play in a way that's very realistic. The main struggle is between freedom and control--an age-old battle that mankind will always have to fight, but Lund specifically poises one question: in a perfect society that has no crime and no aggression, what do you do with those who don't wish to be a part of it? What's better, everyone choosing for themselves or a few people choosing for everyone?

Tech, survival, great ideas, and some nail-biting scenes are some of the great components of this story. Pick it up if you get a chance. It's worth your time, not just for the entertainment value, but for the message as well.

Book Chop: I Am Spock

2009-08-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

Title: I Am Spock
Author: Leonard Nimoy
Genre: Autobiography
Rating: 5 stars

This book deserves every star. There's not a thing about it that isn't flawless in every way. Nimoy is a brilliant writer and truly eloquent in how he tells his story.

I Am Spock is a rebuttal of sorts, one meant to clear up Nimoy's intentions with regard to a book he wrote in the 1970s which had a chapter entitled I Am Not Spock. He explains why he wrote that chapter, and how the public grossly misconceived his intent behind it, and how it affected his career as an actor, director, etc.

Basically I Am Spock is the story of Leonard Nimoy's life up until 1996 when the book was published. More specifically it focuses on how he landed the role of Spock in the original Star Trek TV series. He tells an enchanting tale of just how difficult it was to get that series off the ground and then keep it in the air (or on the air, as the case was).

In so many ways, Nimoy fully defined Star Trek with his interpretation of the Spock role. His improv, ideas and actions on the set became the hallmark of Vulcan culture and backstory, and Nimoy explains--humbly yet accurately--how that's the case. From the original series all the way up to the six movies he starred in, as well as the two-part cameo he played in The Next Generation TV series, Spock has ever been the backbone of Star Trek. Even though this book came out 13 years before the blockbuster movie with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, it lays out the bulletproof case as to why Leonard Nimoy has to play Spock. He's the only one who can.

Not to say that Quinto did a bad job...in fact he was entirely worthy of the torch passed to him on screen by Nimoy in this summer's film.

Anyway, I listened to this book on audio, but it's available in paperback. The audio was exceptionally awesome because Nimoy himself read it, and when that happens, you know the author's intent is always accurately reflected. Pick it up. It's a short, delightful read, and I'm excited to go through it again.

Book Chop: Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys

2009-08-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Title: Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys
Author: Dave Barry
Genre: Humor
Rating: 4 stars (would be more, BUT...)

If you've never read anything by Dave Barry before, this is a great place to start. Or, you can just read his old columns from the Miami Herald, where he wrote once a week for several years.

In this book, Dave Barry makes the remarkably complex into something mind-blowingly simple--if you're a woman. If you're a guy, you'll spend this whole book either laughing yourself into stitches, or just nodding your head like it makes all the sense in the world.

It's only broken down into a couple of chapters, because that's how simple guys are. Barry actually approaches the topics with the analytical structure of a therapist, but still keeps his signature tone and talent for connecting random thoughts in ways you probably would've never considered.

Highlights of the book are the chapter on why guys care more about their sports teams than they do about their girlfriends; how 1980s cartoons (i.e. G.I. Joe, He-Man) influenced the present generation of guys; how guys approach the delicate issue of "fixing" stuff; what goes on inside a man's head when a woman tries to determine the status of their "relationship"; and so on.

I dog-eared many a chapter of this book so I could go back and share it with my friends. Keep in mind, this book is specifically a guide to GUYS, not MEN, as Barry himself says in the beginning that there are way too many books on how to be a MAN, and they're all way too serious. There is a major difference between being a MAN and just being a GUY. This is the comparative list between the two categories that is featured on the back of the paperback book:

MEN versus GUYS

Vince Lombardi..................Joe Namath

Oliver North.................. Gilligan

Hemingway.................. Gary Larson

Columbus......... Whichever astronaut hit the first golf ball on the moon

Superman .................. Bart Simpson

Doberman pinschers.................. Labrador retrievers

Abbott .................. Costello

Captain Ahab.................. Captain Kangaroo

Satan .................. Snidely Whiplash

The pope ..................Willard Scott

Germany.................. Italy

Geraldo.................. Katie Couric

The only thing that would give me any trepidation in recommending this book to someone is the scattered language throughout---Barry occasionally drops a g-d or the S-bomb. It's not crazy common, but it's there. Still a wildly funny book.

There's a DVD of it too, which I haven't yet seen but I'd like to get my hands on it.

Book Chop: The Sight

2009-07-27T07:23:00.001-07:00

Title: Fire Bringer, The Sight, Fell
Author: David Clement-Davies
Genre: Animal fiction
Rating: 3 stars (Sight only)

The Sight is the only book that I've actually read out of this trio. I just included the other ones so you know what saga they belong to. David Clement-Davies writes animal fiction, kind of like Watership Down, a story whose characters are almost all rabbits. From what I understand about Fire Bringer it's a story of deer in Britain. Sight is about wolves in Romania.

First and foremost, this book is a tragedy. So let me just throw that out there right now. A lot of the underlying themes are about rash judgment and ill character--on both sides (good guys and bad). Clement-Davies creates a lot of things in the world of The Sight, including a massive amount of slang that is sometimes hard to follow.

Basically the story deals with wolves who are fighting amongst themselves. One group, a family, is trying to stay away from their crazy deranged half-sister, who's a real b-word. When they won't let her near their new cubs, 'cause she's a jerk, she curses them all and one by one they die depressing deaths. The ending of the story has meaning to it, so it's not just about death and destruction.

Fell is the sequel to this book, also the name of a small wolf cub in The Sight.

Overall, Sight was a pretty slow read and the made-up words weren't that easy to follow, but the story has merit. It's a long book though, in the neighborhood of 500 pages, so it's really got to be the kind of thing you want to read or it's going to be a chore. Still a good book.

Graphic Novel Chop: Transformers Stormbringer

2009-07-25T11:36:00.001-07:00

Title: Transformers: Stormbringer
Author: Simon Furman
Genre: Graphic Novel
Rating: 3 Stars or better

An interlude between the first two books in the Infiltration saga, Stormbringer is something of a flashback to Cybertron when Optimus and Megatron were forced to team up in order to defeat a world-destroying Transformer named Thunderwing.

Like a lot of the graphic novels for TF, there was good character insight, mild story, and exceptional artwork. Lotta melee in this one, worth looking into.

I'm tired now, I've post like five Chops about graphic novels. Can you tell I parked in front of that section at the bookstore today? Sheesh. :-)

Graphic Novel Chop: Hearts of Steel

2009-07-25T11:27:00.001-07:00

Title: Transformers Evolutions: Hearts of Steel
Author: Chuck Dixon
Genre: Graphic Novel
Rating: 4 stars

There is very little in the way of a detailed story here. It's more of a concept that gets explored through very awesome artwork, and I LIKES it!

Imagine if the Transformers had woken up during the Industrial Revolution instead of during the 80's? Bumbleebee would've been a steam engine, not a VW Bug, and he'd have teamed up with none other than John Henry to beat up on the new Decepticons--complete with a bi-plane Starscream and an Ironclad version of Shockwave.

Here's a Google index of the Hearts of Steel characters.

Like I said, not much in the way of a story, but like a lot of TF comics hitting the shelves these days, it takes place in the west, specifically California, Nevada and Utah. Nevada baby, that's my home!

It's kind of hard to find, but if you get your hands on a copy of this, skim through it for the artwork. Best part of it. Also, there's a video some dude put up on YouTube (make sure you select the hi-def option, it's beautiful) of a steam engine transforming into a robot. It's only 20 seconds long, but I hope it gets someone's attention. Hearts of Steel would be great even if just made into a CGI movie on DVD.

Graphic Novel Chop: Maximum Dinobots

2009-07-25T11:13:00.001-07:00

Title: Transformers: Maximum Dinobots
Author: Simon Furman
Genre: Graphic Novel
Rating: 3-4 stars, probably closer to three

I love the Dinobots. This story is actually a tie-in to the Transformers: Infiltration universe, wrapping up some loose ends with side characters there.

It's about the Dinobots--a small band of five machines that fight for the Autobots. They turn into dinosaurs. In the original, they're just a bunch of dim-witted warriors that talk very much not good and fight like crazy psychopaths.

Maximum Dinobots gives them a lot more intelligence and emotion, though. It starts with their leader, Grimlock (T-Rex) examining the wreckage of his ship on a glacier in New Zealand, thinking about what got him there. He's been labeled a deserter by the Autobots, a traitor by his fellow Dinobots, and a liability by his rival Decepticon, Scorponok.

The other Dinobots, Swoop (pterodactyl), Snarl (stegosaurus), Sludge (brontosaurus) and Slag (triceratops) have been taken over by Scorponok and forced to work with a government group that knows all about the Transformers (not Sector Seven).

The story is about Grimlock's quest to keep his team unified--and they all finally realize they a team, despite their whole "we just tolerate each other because we like to blow stuff up" mentality. There was a surprising amount of emotion for these just being dino-robots. Other characters make an appearance, including the Infiltration version of Hot Rod. You also get to see the oft-underplayed Monsterbots, who help Grimlock when he's alone.

My only hang-up was the artwork--it was pretty sloppy and a lot of the time you were just looking at a mass of colors and lines on the page. Hard to do with detailed images, I know, but still. It's worth reading in the store like I did :-)

Graphic Novel Chop: Transformers Infiltration

2009-07-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

Title: Transformers: Infiltration, Escalation, Devastation
Author: Simon Furman, Don Figueroa (Artwork)
Genre: Graphic Novel
Rating: 4 stars, maybe a little less

As is common with the comic-book versions of cartoons or movies, the story isn't all the same, and often appears to take its own tack or follow its own timeline.

The Infiltration saga is something of a reboot of the original Transformers story that started a couple of years before the 2007 film was released. Neither storyline has much to do with the other.

The Autobots and Deceptions keep about 80-90% of their original appearance, though their vehicle modes are easily identifiable. (Camaro, 350Z, Lambo, etc). The Autobots arrive on Earth in the Ark, the Decepticons arrive on the Nemesis. They duke it out, humans get involved, side with the Autobots, etc.

Unlike the original 1984 cartoon, which was painfully incoherent and riddled with such a mess of plot holes as to render it almost completely pointless, the Infiltration series has more continuity and more of a viable point to it. Autobots and Decepticons are both on Earth seeking a new energy source; Decepticons want to use it against the Autobots, Autobots want to stop the Decepticons.

It's a good series, the artwork is well done and not too confusing. Doesn't do any damage to the original story either. Check it out.

Book Chop: The Looking Glass Wars (Series)

2009-07-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

Title: The Looking Glass Wars, Hatter M, Seeing Redd, ArchEnemy
Author: Frank Beddor
Genre: YA Fantasy
Rating: 3.5 stars

Frank Beddor usually does film and stage productions. He's attached t There's Something About Mary, an R-rated Ben Stiller flick that I never saw but was huge several years ago :-P. More significantly he's got his hand in the ever-more-popular stage version of Wicked.

Well, this is his first foray into children's literature and he does it really well. This series is a different take on Alice in Wonderland, playing more heavily on the implications of a connection between Wonderland and the real world. The characters are rendered differently than you might think, and Beddor explains that in his own way.

In Wonderland there is a political uprising, and the King and Queen are murdered. Their daughter Alyss is forced to escape to the real world with her bad-A blade-wielding bodyguard, Hatter Madigan. They get separated in transit, and so Hatter spends a decade moving through the real world, going all over the planet in search of Alyss.

Alyss, in the meantime, gets picked up and turned over to an orphanage. She eventually meets Lewis Carroll and tells him her story in an effort to enlist his help, but him being the selfish bugger that he is, he just writes it down as a children's book to rake in some cash. The fame and notoriety of the book is what eventually leads Hatter to Alyss. He takes her back to Wonderland where she re-learns how to use the magical powers of her imagination, and they overthrow her Aunt Redd, who originally killed her parents so long ago.

In Seeing Redd, Redd comes back and tries to retake Wonderland by enlisting King Arch, who reigns over Borderland (between Wonderland and the real world). There's a lot of character development in this book, but it's more long-winded than the first (which is very concise and to the point throughout).

Hatter M is a graphic novel that chronicles Hatter Madigan's search for Alyss. The story is some what weak and creepy, and the art is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. Don't even waste your time on this one at the library, it's very poorly done.

The third and final book, ArchEnemy, comes out in October, and the cover looks friggin' sweet. Check out the link above for a picture of it on Amazon.

Enjoy!

Book Chop: The Heldan

2009-07-19T15:09:00.000-07:00

Title: The Heldan
Author: Deborah Talmadge-Bickmore
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 4 stars

There's a story behind why I enjoyed this book so much. Let me explain.

When I was in the tenth grade, and had virtually no taste in movies, books or music, I picked up and read Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. I wanted to read it because the movie was coming out that summer, and it looked cool, because I was 15 and--as I said--had no taste.

The book didn't suck as bad as the movie did. It's indicative of what you could get away with in the sci/fi and fantasy genres thirty years ago (B.E. was written in the early early 1980s). Despite the book sucking, there were still plenty of elements I liked about it, namely that the world was well-defined and I felt like I could see all those things happen. I could see a wide open, silent landscape ripe for exploring and understanding, especially a thousand years after the earth had begun taking over cities. It was just really cool to think about.

Well, Deborah Talmadge-Bickmore created a world that was just as tangible and put it in a book that didn't suck. The Heldan is the story of a young woman named Senea who gets pulled into her tribe's military/law enforcement band through a process equivalent to the draft, though with a few more details. Life is hard for her as she strives to train to become a heldan warrior under the harsh, heavy hand of her master Vayhawk.

This is an outdoorsy book. Vayhawk and Senea pretty much do all their training while roughing it outdoors. Lots of excursions take place in the heat of the day, and a good portion of those excursions get interrupted by invading raiders from an enemy tribe--an element that Deborah uses to sort of hijack the story and screw up the helden's plan for the day. There is also an excellent story arc with a challenge of heldan Games, where Senea has to duke it out with another warrior. This keeps the story on track but breaks up the monotony of "Let's go camping, let's train, oh crap here come the Ja'Sid warriors again."

It was also a very visual book. I could see these places clearly in my head and it really made me want to travel down to Moab, Utah and ride the White Rim Trail on a mountain bike. Deborah
expressed the desire for me to "go easy on" this book the last time I saw her in June, given that it was her first, but there was really no need. I liked it; it was a relaxing dip into the waters of bread-and-butter fantasy without being overly epic or underdeveloped. This is one of those fundamental fantasy stories that doesn't rely on elves, dwarves or dragons, or a quest for a sword or a ring or treasure or anything like that. It's more of an adjustment from a complacent lifestyle to a demanding life of action, and the character responds to it with admirable composure.

This book is out of print, but you can find used copies of it online at Amazon. Just click on the link at the top. Also, go drop by Deborah's blog, I'm sure she'd love to hear from you!

Book Chop: Old Man's War

2009-07-15T20:02:00.000-07:00

Title: Old Man's War
Author: John Scalzi
Genre: Sci-Fi
Rating: 2 stars

This is one of those books that I didn't want to give a low rating, but ended up having little choice in the matter. "Choice" in the sense that I have values to answer to, and this book constantly found itself at odds with those values.

Plot: In the future, mankind is at war for land and colonies on other planets outside our solar system. We need soldiers to fight those wars. Old people on Earth can enlist to fight in these distant wars once they reach the age of 75. They're taken into space and their consciousness is transferred into a new, genetically-engineered, patented body (with trademarks all over it) that is stronger, faster, more alert, computer compatible, and has an amazing level of endurance. This army goes from planet to planet fighting all sorts of alien races.

Problem I had: In the name of being "realistic" (license to put in whatever you want that is crass, base or immoral) Scalzi puts these new-bodied people on a spaceship and they have ridiculously gargantuan mass quantities of wanton sex, since one of the perks of their army bodies is that they can't reproduce.

The F-bomb also makes a prominent appearance even more often than the bombs actually used to fight the aliens.

If we're looking at just the world-building, the humor, the tech and the ideas of this story, Scalzi hits it out of the park. It's really cool, funny and pulls you in. But there was just such an intensely overboard amount of hard-R language and graphic content--both sexual and violent--that I found myself shaking my head and wishing he would get past that. Yes, this book won a lot of awards, yes Scalzi gained profound notoriety for it. I truly think he's a brilliant writer, he's just in the group of people whose content hangs on the very edge.

Audiobook Chop: Elantris (Graphic Audio Version)

2009-07-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

Title: Elantris
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Rating: 5 stars
Format: Graphic Audio Presentation

I've already Chopped Elantris. Still an excellent, fresh and original book. Loved it. This version was an excellent audio rendition of the story.

I like that each character had his or her own voice, so it was easy to distinguish one character from the next. The sound effects were immensely cool too, especially when the Shaod completed and the Elantrians duked it out with Dilaf's monks in Teod. Unbridled awesomeness.

Again, I haven't been ignoring you guys. July is going to be a hard month for Chops, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading. I've got 2-3 more books ready to be Chopped, and just no time to do it. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. I need to build my website and get the first draft of a book finished in a few weeks, 'cause I'm gonna destroy Arlene in the writing contest over at Inking Cap. I cannot be stopped. I rise, you fall. You picked the wrong planet, clear a path, give me your face, damn I'm good, second to none, that's how I roll.

Anyway, look into this audio version of Elantris. Lotta fun. Also, it's about seven hours shorter than the regular version. Condensed, and with greater awesomosity. Everybody wins.