Bookstooge's Reviews On the Road

Thursday, February 23, 2023

‘Til Death Do Us Part! (Web of Spiderman #1) ★★★✬☆

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Title: ‘Til Death Do Us Part!
Series: Web of Spiderman #1
Writer: Louise Simonson
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Comics
Pages: 25
Words: 2K

This particular Spiderman comic takes place after the Secret Wars (where all the super heroes went off world to fight for/against aliens and got lots of cool tech). Spiderman had gotten a black suit that enhanced his powers but once he came back to earth Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four found out it was a living symbiote and was trying to take Peter Parker over. Reed drove it off with a sonic gun and Parker thought they had it safely locked away.

All that info? They convey in 2 pages. TWO!!! No shilly shallying, no filler, just in your face info dump. That’s how it should be.

And with this comic the suit escapes and tries to take Parker over again. While he’s being attacked by a group of super villains. He fights off the villains but can’t make it to Reed Towers to get help from the Fantastic Four, so he manages to get under some really loud bells and the noise drives the symbiote away. It appears like the noise is enough to actually destroy it and that is where the comic ends.

This was originally published in 1985 or ‘86 which was when Spiderman was really beginning to take off as a comic book hero. He had several comics dedicated to him (Amazing Spiderman, Spectacular Spiderman and now this Web of Spiderman) and seemed to be doing well.

I enjoyed this even while it was just too short for my taste. But I definitely want to keep reading. How long I keep reading, well, that’s an entirely different question 🙂

★★★✬☆

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #14 ★✬☆☆☆

Title: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #14
Authors: Peter Laird & Kevin Eastman
Rating: 1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Comics
Pages: 51
Words: 2K

Everyone is hanging out in Casey’s old hometown. A bronze cow is stolen from the roof of a convenience store and Casey decides to solve the case. Turns out the cow is solid gold and a national treasure of Slavakia. An unscrupulous businessman is trying to buy it and the Feds are on the case. While Casey, with help from the turtles and April, bumbles about like an idiot.

Yep. I’m done. This was stupid and idiotic. Casey is just dumb and the turtles do nothing to make him smarter but simply enable his stupidity. Plus, we have ninja turtles and all the authors can think of for a storyline is a gold cow? It’s not even bad, it is worse, it is banal.

I’ve got a marvel comic I want to try next, so that will be coming later today. I figure there’s no sense wasting time and waiting until next month.

★✬☆☆☆

All My “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” Reviews

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Majestic ★★☆☆☆

Title: Majestic
Series: ———-
Author: Whitley Strieber
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 267
Words: 95K

Majestic is the name of the secret government agency tasked with dealing with aliens, etc in the United States Government. This book was published in 1989 and in 1993 the tv show The X-Files started airing. I will eat my hat, and quite possibly my boots too, if Chris Carter, the creator of the X-Files didn’t read this book and lift parts of it whole sale to create the X-Files mythology. The head of Majestic is even a bitter old man who has given himself cancer by smoking so much (one of the main villains in the X-Files is the Smoking Man). Because I have seen the X-Files, this felt like an origins story and was rather boring since all the bits and pieces had already been revealed. The differences and specifics were small enough and didn’t matter enough so I wasn’t really interested.

This is supposedly non-fiction posing as fiction to protect Strieber, but come on. And it committed the cardinal sin of being boring. I mean really, really, really boring. And aliens invading us, or protecting us or evolving us, or whatever the heck Strieber is claiming (all of the above at the same time plus some other stuff as far as I could tell) should NOT be boring.

I am debating whether I want to try again with Strieber. Part of writing reviews is so I can think about things like this and not make a snap decision. Sometimes not continuing isn’t even on my mind (like with Universe 2 from yesterday) until I start writing and then I can easily make a decision. This isn’t like that unfortunately. I have been considering this since about halfway through this book and I still can’t make up my mind. Am I hitting a bad run of Strieber or is he really just not for me? Is he really boring like this book? If he is, do I dare give him a 3^rd chance? Cat Magic was also very boring, so you know what? I’m done with Strieber. I’ll leave him to those who want him.

★★☆☆☆

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Universe 2 ★★★☆☆

Title: Universe 2
Series: Universe Anthology #2
Author: Terry Carr (ed)
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 231
Words: 70K

Marginally better than the previous volume, but with some of the names involved, I expected a LOT better. Here’s the TOC:

RETROACTIVE
by Bob Shaw

WHEN WE WENT TO SEE THE END OF THE WORLD
by Robert Silverberg

FUNERAL SERVICE
by Gerard F. Conway

A SPECIAL CONDITION IN SUMMIT CITY
by R. A. Lafferty

PATRON OF THE ARTS
by William Rotsler

USEFUL PHRASES FOR THE TOURIST
by Joanna Russ

ON THE DOWNHILL SIDE
by Harlan Ellison

THE OTHER PERCEIVER
by Pamela Sargent

MY HEAD’S IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, NOW
by Grania Davis

STALKING THE SUN
by Gordon Eklund

THE MAN WHO WAVED HELLO
by Gardner R. Dozois

THE HEADLESS MAN
by Gene Wolfe

TIGER BOY
by Edgar Pangborn

The weirdest, out there, completely bonzo’d gourd story was without a doubt the one by Grania Davis. A couple of druggies go to Mexico or South America, or some place south of California and get stoned out of their gourd and eventually turn into monsters. It was very disturbing, mainly because they had a young daughter (toddler age).

However, I still am not sold on this series. I’ll give it one more book to try to actually interest me but if it doesn’t, I’m going to have to call it quits. I’d probably be better off quitting now but I don’t have another anthology series lined up and I want that. Now that I just wrote that, that is absolutely silly. I would be better served simply not reading something than something that is sub-par, like this Universes series. So I’m done.

And this is one reason WHY I write reviews as well as rate the books I read. Being introspective sometimes takes time to allow my thoughts to stop swirling and to settle and that is when I have moments of clarity like the above paragraph.

★★★☆☆

Universe 1

Monday, February 20, 2023

Traitor’s Gambit (WH40K: Ciaphas Cain #6.5) ★★★✬☆

Title: Traitor’s Gambit
Series: WH40K: Ciaphas Cain #6.5
Authors: Sandy Mitchell
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 32
Words: 9K

Cain gets involved in stopping a group of renegade humans who want to help the alien Tau by destroying the flagship that is protecting the human’s world. They all die, Cain and Jurgen escape and Cain looks like a hero.

I like that these Cain stories deal with other villains than just the Ruinous Powers (ie, the demons from the warp) that characterized the Gaunt’s Ghost series. It is also quite interesting to see humanity rejecting the Tau because they are aliens and not humans. Their tech is better, their world/universe view seems to have a greater chance of surviving in the long term but even Cain just rejects them categorically. It shows how much the Empire of Man has truly become an Empire of the Emperor. Kind of depressing, but then, the whole point of the Warhammer 40K universe is to be depressing. Thank goodness Cain lightens things up.

★★★✬☆

All My “Ciaphas Cain” Reviews

Bog Wraith - MTG 4th Edition

Sunday, February 19, 2023

The Void War (Empire Rising #1) ★★★✬☆

Title: The Void War
Series: Empire Rising #1
Author: David Holmes
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 339
Words: 132K

Sometime in the year 3000 there is a Human Empire and some blathering idiot of a historian decides to chronicle the Rise of the Empire. Thankfully, we get a science fiction novel that tells a good cracking, exciting and interesting story instead of a dry history filled only with names, dates and statistical data. As you can probably tell, I am not a fan of history books (sorry Matt, they’re all yours!).

The Little (disgraced) Rich Boy makes good and starts becoming Somebody. Along the way he helps defeat Space Communists (Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!) but doesn’t get to marry the Princess (Boooooooo!). However, Ensign “Chickie Boo” Underling is standing in the wings and while they hate each other at first, it’s all a big misunderstanding and so by book’s end they are besties. (Awwwwwwww!)

Everything is based on The British Navy, in Spaaaaaaace! (say that while remembering the Muppet’s skit, Pigs in Spaaaaaace). Jack Campell did this first with his Black Jack Geary aka Lost Fleet series, but unlike Campbell, Holmes skips all the boring bits (like waiting 6hrs for space missiles to actually arrive or waiting 6hrs to shoot your own space missiles) and thus we zoom along at a pretty good breakneck pace. (don’t try shooting missiles at home, kids. That is not Batman & Robin approved behavior!)

I look forward to reading more in this series and hope it stays as good as this book was.

★★★✬☆

PG’s Ramblings 2018 Review

Saturday, February 18, 2023

PCP: The Libraricus

The church I was attending at the time celebrated the 3 major feasts that are written about in the Old Testament in the Bible. It was a time to gather together, meet old friends, go to meetings (and boy howdy, there were a lot of meetings), and meet new friends. It was also one of the best times to introduce someone, as the grapevine was pretty alive. So everybody who knew me got to meet Miss Library. It really was obvious we were in love and that marriage was inevitable, but I was so introspective (too much so and still am) that I “wasn’t sure”. It really took me awhile to realize just how in love I was with her.

I was a library regular. Every weekend I’d go to the library and load up on books to read for the week. One of my big fears was running out of books to read during the week, so I always took a big stack. I became a familiar and knew the librarians and got to know the Head Librarian. So it wasn’t a big stretch to get them to open the Wadlicus up one Sunday afternoon so I could “show” Miss Library the library and spring the proposal. She tells me she had no idea. I believe her because she’s very similar to me in the subtlety regards, ie, we’re as subtle as hammers. But it was perfect. We both loved books and what could be more fitting than a proposal in a whole building dedicated to books?

Stay tuned for next week’s post-wedding adventure in… The Land of Snow and Ice!

All “Project Christmas Present” Posts

Friday, February 17, 2023

Latency (Hunter Bureau #2) ★★☆☆☆

Title: Latency
Series: Hunter Bureau #2
Author: Blaze Ward
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 197
Words: 62K

When I read and reviewed the first book, I mentioned that there were key words or phrases that usually only came from a political side that was completely opposed to everything I stand for in terms of morals, principles and guiding principles. So instead of either brushing it off or making a mountain out of a molehill, as I was reading, I just highlighted stuff that caught my eye. That’s mostly what this review will contain, is quotes from the book. I am not trying to provide context within the story or anything like that. I’m planning on hiding it all behind the Details code so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.

Location 147: (speaking of handguns)Greyson’s grandfather had had something like that, demilled when the aliens decided to make humans safer.

Location 378: Back when the US was a thing and had an army they liked to sic on weaker nations.

Location 611: be allowed

Location 726: And they hadn’t done androgynous in those days. Being less than stridently hetero in the late 20th Century was an invitation to get beat up. Fucking barbarians.

Location 793: The bits that were left were generally the ones the Army had found useful as tools. Deliberate cruelty. Premeditated self-defense.

Location 972: Universal Basic Income kept people from starving,

Location 1184: Mostly, ex-special forces, so knuckleheads who liked to solve problems with extreme firepower.

Location 1332: Honest men got no reason to bolt,

Location 1904: Superfast trains had already worked in other countries because the governments had been able to get right of way. In the old United States, NIMBY had delayed everything for so long that it was never economical to actually build. Not In My Back Yard. Then the middle-class bastards had the audacity to complain about bad roads and crowded….

Location 2135: Greyson was just old enough to remember the great awakening in this culture, when everyone discovered that there were more options than white-bread hetero. Folks like that had always been there, but for the longest time the power structure in his country had come down hard on anyone deviating from the strict party line, both legally as well as socially.

Location 2277: would still be the rest of his lifetime and maybe all of Rachel’s before the planet started cooling down again, but hopefully they’d managed to save it in time.

Location 2686: Back in the bleak days of a War on Crime that was a thinly-veiled War on Black People that had started before 1618 and never really been forced to subside until aliens landed and threatened to crack heads together.

Location 2849: Sandwiches he brought from home instead of lunch out.

Location 2927: where a young white boy like him had had no business being.

Location 2951: But then, most men didn’t know how to deal with a woman who was tougher than they were, and probably smarter.

Location 3206: If Greyson had shown some of his otherwise private political leanings with the places he had mailed his packages, that was between him and God. And God supposedly loved everyone, so Greyson figured he was on safe ground

I read to the end of the book and with all of those quotes decided that I won’t be reading any more by Mister Blaze Ward. Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to replace this series with. Choices, choices, choices.

★★☆☆☆

Mirrors (Book 1)

Thursday, February 16, 2023

The mysterious case of the missing reference

This week my father asked me to get ChatGPT to write a two-page report on the efficacy of green leucaena seeds for controlling gastro-intestinal parasites (worms) in children. He could have done it himself but you how oldies are with new technology so I duly obliged. ChatGPT spat out a report that was very good […]
The mysterious case of the missing reference

So, the AI has learned to lie to us. Skynet is coming folks!