Bookstooge's Reviews On the Road

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

April '24 Roundup & Ramblings

Raw Data:

Novels – 16 ↑

Short Stories – 0 –

Manga/Graphic Novels – 0 –

Comics – 1 –

Average Rating – 3.35 ↓

Pages – 3479 ↑

Words – 1229 ↑

The Bad:

Drop Shot – 1star of all that fallen human nature is, and calling it good.

Lord Hornblower – 3stars, but man, Hornblower is a scumbag of a character.

The Good:

Persuasion – 5stars of Austen persuading me, yet again, of what a fantastic author she is.

The Diary of a Superfluous Man – 4stars of Russian melancholy, depression and death. Talk about wonderful!

Movie:

While I’ve only seen two versions of Persuasion on the screen, this 2008 BBC version did a very good job imo.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

More reading, more posts, more good ratings (second highest months rating this year, whoooo!). Bookwise, another splendiferous month. I’m getting spoiled folks. So don’t be surprised if in the next couple of months the other shoe drops and I have horrible book after horrible book and you see me whining and complaining about how terrible all the books are.

I was all over the place emotionally. For a wide of variety of reasons. Work would be great one day and then absolutely brutal the next and I just couldn’t spring back from the brutal ones quite as quick as I used to. Several of the new people at church didn’t keep coming like I was afraid and that really bummed me out. You can’t be a Christian in a community of Christians and not go to church. Your connection to Christ will wither and you’ll fall away. I got some new diabetes equipment that works really well, but the learning curve is pretty steep and so it was both good and bad all at the same time. Had a wonderful morning date with Mrs B at a local diner (Mrs B could breakfast food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, 7 days a week) and I must admit, I stuffed myself to the gills.

I got sunburnt on my head, in April! We were working next to lake and the sun was shining but it wasn’t that warm, so I had my hoodie on. Put the hood up to protect my head but the wind kept blowing it off and it was off enough that I got a sun burn. First of the season, sigh. I also walked through a tick nest one day and ended up with 12 ticks on me. Thankfully, I got them off before they embedded, but it was just disgusting. Work is disgusting in fact!

Went to the gun range one Sabbath with my brother. Tried out my new drum magazine for my 9mm carbine. It has a 50 round capacity. I just tried it with 20 and it performed flawlessly. Next time I will use a whole box of 50 and load it up, but man, that’s a lot of money to literally shoot away, even with ammo prices not being astronomical like they used to be. I also shot my brother’s 1911 .45 caliber pistol. That’s what the Shadow uses 😉 I’ll tell you what, there is no way I would single handedly shoot that thing. While it’s not a monster, it’s too big for just one of my hands. So dual wielding like the Shadow does, that’s for the movies.

The month ended with me getting some sort of head cold and a cough. It was bad. I ended up having to call out of work one day and I lived off of cough drops and robitussin. I’m hoping that that is it for spring time sickness and that I can go forward into the summer’s sunshine and stay nice and healthy.

Cover Love:

Derai by Edward Tubb. I already talked about this in the review for Derai, but I think it bears repeating that that IS an awesome book cover!

Plans for Next Month:

I actually have two poems to go live. Not my own (duh!), but from a fellow blogger I follow. I don’t expect it to be a regular thing, but even something a little different is good. It’s spring time, so it’s time to shake winter’s slumber off and wake up. Even if only for May, hahahaha 😀

I hope to have another Marvel Champions post up. I’m having fun with the titles alone, so that has guaranteed I’ll keep them coming for a while.

Depending on when Dune 2 drops on bluray and I get a hold of a copy, I might end up reviewing that for my movie selection at the end of the month. I’m “almost” excited for that 🙂

Other than those things, it’ll be Book Reviews, Book Reviews, Book Reviews and Magic Cards.

Monday, April 29, 2024

Drudge Skeletons - MTG 4E

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Vanguard (Genesis Fleet #1) (Lost Fleet) 3Stars

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Vanguard
Series: Genesis Fleet #1 (Lost Fleet)
Author: Jack Campbell
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mil-SF
Pages: 264
Words: 103K

I originally read this back in ‘17 when Campbell was starting this trilogy. My reception of it was pretty lukewarm, as I was getting tired of Campbell’s schtick and this felt very lazy to me. So as he published the rest of the trilogy, I just let it slide.

Fast forward to now and the trilogy is finished but he has also continued to write more Black Jack Geary adventures. The Lost Fleet: Outlands trilogy is also complete, so it seemed like a good time to dive back into the universe that Campbell had created.

My reactions while reading this book were exactly the same as in ‘17. There were some good space action scenes, but the politics of the situation were just as important to the story and made it not so fun. The problem is, once I was done and thought about it, I realized that Campbell HAD to write it this way. This Genesis Fleet trilogy is about the creation of The Alliance, a political body. Therefore politics has to play a large part in what happens. It is ugly and unpleasant but shows the necessity of such things. While it is more “fun” to read about a Space General Emperor (as in the Empire Rising space opera) sweeping all before him with his mighty space fleet and routing the evil villainous politicians in a week, that’s not how it works because of human nature. When you have a group of humans working together, the best you can hope for is that nobody is pleased but nobody wants to kill the others. Which means making decisions that aren’t optimal. Campbell does just that. I didn’t like it, not at all. I want my heroes to swoop in, throw down the gauntlet, save the day and ride off into the sunset on their space horse. While whistling a jaunty tune.

I suspect the rest of the trilogy will follow similar lines. Politics are going to play a very large part and I’m mentally and emotionally preparing myself for that. The things I put up with. I should get an award, or at least be Sainted. Saint Bookstooge has a nice ring, don’t you think?

★★★☆☆

From Fandom.com

The Genesis Fleet chronicles events in the years leading up to the formation of the Alliance in the early years of the Faster-Than-Light Jump Drive. The books mainly focus on 4 characters on two of the newly established colonies of Glenlyon and Kosatka, after capturing a ship threating extortion on the new colony of Glenlyon, Former Fleet officer Robert Geary, ancestor of the legendary Admiral John ‘Black Jack’ Geary, is forced to defend his new home on a ship of volunteers, while on the surface former enlisted marine Mele Darcy leads a militia of volunteers with improvised equipment against the hostile forces of the colony of Scatha. Meanwhile in the nearby system of Kosatka relies upon the diplomatic skills of a failed polition and businessman, Lochan Nakamura, and assistance of a former red from Mars, Carman Ochoa, ancestor of Battlecruiser Captain Tanya Desjani. While the new colonies struggle to fight off aggression from other colonies Old Earth and the Old Colonies begin downsizing their militaries, selling off surplus military equipment and ships, both Glenlyon and Kosatka supplement their defence forces with recruits and officers from Old Earth and the Old Colonies. Three years later Glenlyon calls on Marine Captain Mele Darcy and Fleet Officer Commander Robert Geary to help defend them again after losing a warship to an enemy fleet, the only hope for lasting peace comes from people like Lochan Nakamura hoping to form an Alliance with other systems also facing attacks on their own borders.

Vanguard (2017 Review)

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Doctor Syn (Doctor Syn #1) 3.5Stars

Title: Doctor Syn
Series: Doctor Syn #1
Author: Arthur Russell Thorndike
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 209
Words: 69K

This was NOT at all what I was expecting, not one tiny bit. I remembered vague bits of an old Disney show called “The Scarecrow’, a Zorro’esque creature fighting evil and righting wrongs. And that is what I expected here, a man in disguise fighting corrupt authority figures while Robin Hood’ing it for the little guy.

Ha!

This is the final book, chronologically, in the Dr Syn series. It is however, the first published book. I suspect Thorndike wrote this as a standalone story and then just went back and wrote all the rest of the prequels when he needed money.

Dr Syn, a clergyman of all things, is also the Scarecrow, a leader of the smugglers in the Romney Marsh area. He’s smart, well organized and not above sending anyone who gets in his way to an early grave with a bullet in their heart. We also find out that he was an infamous pirate captain that roamed the seas pillaging and looting with the worst of them.

I kept waiting for the redemption arc, but it didn’t happen. Every revelation about Dr Syn just makes him out to be worse and worse and there is no repentance on his part at all. While he has embraced the lifestyle of a clergyman, he has in no way taken to heart anything he apparently preaches on. Complete and utter hypocrisy. I kept waiting for the curtain to come down and his good intentions to be revealed. And it just never happened. It actually shocked me at the end when he is captured and then killed by a harpoon, because he’s in full on pirate mode at that point.

I really wondered if I wanted to read more. I think I will though. I want to see how Syn got the point he’s shown at in this book. In many ways, Syn is a Vader without a Luke and I want to see if the downward trajectory was the same. Redemption, or the lack thereof, is something I’m always interested in when I’m reading a story.

★★★✬☆

From Wikipedia

Captain Collyer, a Royal Navy officer assigned to smash the local smuggling ring, uncovered the deception and Dr. Syn’s true identity, thanks in part to the tongueless mulatto (who had been rescued by Collyer years before and who had been serving Collyer as a “ferret” seeking out hidden contraband) who recognized Syn as Clegg. Syn evaded capture while at the same time making sure that Imogene and Squire Cobtree’s son Denis (who had fallen in love with Imogene) would have a happy life together (they were eventually married), but was murdered in revenge by the mulatto, who then mysteriously managed to escape, leaving Syn harpooned through the neck. As a last mark of respect, Collyer ordered that Syn be buried at sea, rather than have his body hung in chains.

Mipps escaped in the confusion of Syn’s death and disappeared from England, but it is said that a little man very much like him is living out his days in a Buddhist Monastery somewhere in the Malay Peninsula, delighting the monks with recounting the adventures of Doctor Syn and the eerie stories of the Romney Marsh and the mysterious Scarecrow and his Night Riders.

Friday, April 26, 2024

It's Over 5000!

Yes, yes, it’s supposed to be “9000”, but you get the idea

Wow, 2024 is the year of the Milestones for Sir Bookstooge. I had 60,000 Comments, I amassed A Huge Following, at the end of the year I will have done 10 years worth of “Bookstooge Reviews Year X” and will do my first “Decade in Review” and yesterday, with that lowly post about Groo, the silliest comic the world has ever seen, I passed the 5000 post mark.

I celebrated by buying this tshirt on Etsy:

When people ask me what I do for hobbies, I tell them that I read books and then blog about it. When they ask me what else, I tell them that’s it. They are usually skeptical at first. Then I tell them how many books I read a year on average and how much I write online and they begrudgingly admit that maybe I am correct 😉

So rejoice with me! This is another instance of finding the joy in blogging and I for one am taking it for the ride of a lifetime. Until I run out of gas or hit a brick wall, hahahahaha 😀

VRROOOOOOOOM!

Thursday, April 25, 2024

The Gourmet Kings (Groo the Wanderer #28) 3.5Stars

Title: The Gourmet Kings
Series: Groo the Wanderer #28
Author: Sergio Aragones
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Comics
Pages: 22
Words: 2K

I am getting a serious case of the “don’t want to writes”. It is kind of like writer’s block, except it’s not that I can’t write, it’s that I simply don’t want to! Big difference.

★★★✬☆

From Bookstooge.blog

Groo is hungry. He smells something tasty and tries to be a cook’s assistant. He quits when he finds out he won’t be eating the tasty food but only slop. He comes into contact with a King who is on the lookout for a new Head Chef. After several failures (cannibals, bat eating cave dwellers, etc) Groo remembers the Chef from the town where he quit. He kidnaps the Chef and the King prepares a vast feast for Another King, in advance of working on a peace treaty. Only, the Other King is the one who the Chef originally worked for and this display of kidnapping his own chef sets the two kingdoms warring, again. But at least Groo got fed this time.

All of My “Groo the Wanderer” Reviews

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

War Bodies (Polity #24) 3.5Stars

Title: War Bodies
Series: Polity #24
Author: Neal Asher
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 454
Words: 174K

Most of Asher’s books never grab me by the throat and choke me into enjoyment. It’s always on the re-read that I end up enjoying the story so much more. I still enjoy the initial read, but I’m not excited. War Bodies follows this pattern.

Lots of ultra violence and killing Prador (the giant xenophobic alien crabs that want to kill all humans) and techno-babble about the techno-scyenze inside Piper’s bones (Piper is the main character). We’re talking massive amounts of technobabble. Planck level of technobabble in fact.

This wasn’t as enjoyable as Weaponized because Piper had so much internal angst/emotions/thoughts all on display all of the time. There is a reason for it and it plays directly into the story but I didn’t want to read it. In some ways, it felt like reading someone else’s journal or private correspondence. You ever done that? If you have, you know the feeling I’m talking about. If you have done that and you don’t know that feeling, you’re probably a psychopath with no feelings or sense of shame and guilt.

I know I’m waffling a lot here. I can’t help it. I love the Polity books in their entirety but sometimes the specific books leave me less than 1000% enthused.

Changing subjects here. Reading order. Some people have asked what is the best place to start with the Polity, now that it is over 20 books long and broken up into sub-series and standalone novels. I always recommend Publication Order, just because. Read as Asher wrote them. But I stumbled across an internal chronological list and so wanted to give that out because I know that sometimes people like to read things in that order.

Weaponized (2300 AD)
Prador Moon (2310 AD)
Shadow of the Scorpion (2339 AD)
Gridlinked (2434 AD)
The Line of Polity (2437 AD)
Brass Man (2441 AD)
Polity Agent (2443 AD)
Line War (2444 AD)
The Technician (2457 AD)
Dark Intelligence (Circa. 2500 AD)[9]
War Factory (Circa. 2500 AD)
Infinity Engine (Circa. 2500 AD)
The Soldier (Circa. 2750 AD)[10]
The Warship (Circa. 2750 AD)
The Human (Circa. 2750 AD)
The Skinner (3056 AD)
The Voyage of the Sable Keech (3078 AD)
Orbus (3079 AD)
Jack Four
Hilldiggers (3230 AD)

You might notice there are only 20 books and that this reviewer calls this book the 24^th Polity book. That is because Asher didn’t include the various short story collections that I do include. Because I’m just that awesome. And I didn’t even charge you anything for it either. You are welcome.

★★★✬☆

From the Publisher & Bookstooge.blog

Long ago, the Cyberat left Earth to co-evolve with machines. Now, led by the powerful dictator Castron, their Old Guard believe that machines should replace the physical body. But these beliefs are upended with the arrival of the human Polity – and their presence ignites rebellion.

Piper was raised as a weapon against the Cyberat, implanted with secretive hardware. When his parents are captured by the Old Guard, the Polity offer him unexpected aid. Piper knows the Polity want more from him, but at what cost? The rebellion also attracts the deadly prador, placing an entire world in peril.

As war rages across the planet, Piper must battle with the unknown technology implanted in his bones. It may be the Polity’s answer to their relentless fight against the prador. It could also be civilization-ending Jain tech – or something far more extraordinaryl.

After the surrender of the Prador, Piper returns home, a war seasoned general with millions of loyal troops at his command. Castron has fully taken over the planet and subjected the cyberat to prador thralling techniques. With the help of an Agent and a sparkind unit, it will be up to Piper to set himself free from the entity inhabiting his bones and in the process destroy Castron and set the Cyberat free.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

The Warriors of Spider (Spider #1) 3.5Stars

Title: The Warriors of Spider
Series: Spider #1
Author: William Gear
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 326
Words: 125K

William Gear is publicly known as “W. Michael Gear”, an author recently known for his “Donovan” series. But he’s been around for quite some time. I hate “public names”, so I’ll be giving the author as “William Gear” because that’s his name.

I read this originally back in middleschool or highschool, because the cover on the paperback at the library looked wicked cool. I have also recently decided to dive into the Donovan series but wanted to read some of Gear’s older stuff so I have a decent comparison for his writing style changes. I believe his wife Kathleen is credited on many of their books (they’ve written something like 90) and I could see her finger prints all over this. The descriptions of the clothing alone would have told me that.

They are also very native american in their theology and beliefs and that aspect comes through loud and clear. Sadly, it’s just the “God is everything and whatever you call god is god” kind of feel-good bullshit. Nothing with actual epistemology. No bones to support things as it were.

The story itself was decent. Cowboys and Indians fighting off space marines and winning. Tragic losses, heroic sacrifices, battles, this story has it all.

Back in the 90’s the library only had this one book and it ended satisfactorily enough that my young self never felt the need to go out to a Barnes & Noble and search out the rest of the trilogy. To be perfectly honest, I could stop right now and call this a standalone and it would be A-OK. But I do have the rest of the trilogy and so I’ll be reading them. Of course, if the empty mumbo-jumbo shamanism gets too heavy, I might just call it a day. But I suspect Gear is a good writer and a story teller first and a preacher second. As it should be for fiction books.

★★★✬☆

From Wikipedia & Bookstooge.blog

Synopsis – Click to Open

The human race consists of billions of people spread throughout a relatively small area of space containing Earth and several other inhabited planets. The majority of the population lives on giant space stations, either in orbit or moving like giant ships. A change occurred over the generations that was caused by zero-gravity conditions and exposure to different radiations. Most are pale-skinned, thin and frail-boned; some would die if they experienced gravity. The human race is ruled over by the Directorate, a group of three genetically modified humans, through whom all information must pass before it is released; this has given the Directorate complete control over information for the last 600 years. They stopped all war and religion and caused humanity to be composed of mostly obedient cowards.

Before this 600-year period, the Soviets ruled humanity after conquering North America. The Native American tribes, angered that the position of reservations had not changed, fought back against the Soviets and succeeded, to the point that they were all loaded onto a giant prison ship and deported to deep space along with other rebels of Latino and Caucasian descent—a population of over 5,000 consisting entirely of people with the will and heritage to survive. The ship crashes onto a planet that they name World. 600 years later the survivors have mixed into many different clans that comprise two distinctly different and opposing peoples, the Spiders and the Santos. Their culture is mainly Native American with the addition of large bore rifles, hand-forged from metal of the wrecked prison ship and used to deal with beings they call “bears,” natural predators existing on World. The World bear is similar to a dragon-squid combination, having two spines that connect at the base and a tentacle on each side with suction cups on it that it shoots toward its prey.

The Directorate accidentally picks up a bit of radio chatter from World, as the warriors use hand radios. They send out the Patrol, a combination military/police force that, under the guidance of the Directorate, has had no violence or wars to quell in over 200 years. They arrive at World expecting to find civilized people barely surviving, as with most other lost stations or colonies. On the contrary, the native warriors are savage fighters following the Native American tradition of “coup” taking, or scalping killed enemies as a method of showing how many they had killed.

They then try to conquer the Romanans, as they take to calling the descendants of the crashed star ship the natives arrived in, the Nicholai Romanan, but find that these natives aren’t going down without a fight, as the Spiders, who believe Spider is the name of God and the Santos, a mix of Christian and Mexican beliefs, who call God Haysoos, are all about warfare and following what they interpret God is telling them what to do.

The Spiders and the Santos form an uneasy alliance and subvert the soldiers. They eventually take over a warship, and the prophet of the Spiders convinces the Top Directorate not to destroy their world. The Romanans survive but are irrevocably changed socially and culturally. The Directorate hires the Romanans as the last real warriors to fight a rebellion starting up in another star system.

Monday, April 22, 2024

Drain Power - MTG 4E

Sunday, April 21, 2024

The Diary of a Superfluous Man (The Russians) 4Stars

Title: The Diary of a Superfluous Man
Series: (The Russians)
Author: Ivan Turgenev
Translator: Garnett
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 88
Words: 21K

I was fully expecting to straight up hate this novella by Turgenev. With a title like that, I figured I was in for some sort of complete existential crisis. Instead, I got an Alpha Edge Lord who doesn’t know how to interact with people socially and blames everybody but himself for his social inadequacies. So I was STILL expecting to hate read.

Instead, I pretty much just laughed my way through the book. The narrator is a Special Snowflake and reminded me of 90% of the young people I meet today. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. The absolute incongruity of it all is that it is funny. You have a guy who knows he only has days to live and the one thing he fixates on is a failed love interest from years ago. And the old servant woman. He rants on and on about her drinking too much tea. It was truly from the fevered mind of a dying, irrational man. And it made me laugh 😀

Nothing makes me happier than when someone is utterly miserable. If that misery is self-inflicted, so much the better. If they deserve that misery, that is the best of all! This is why I like Russian literature so much. They are miserable son of a guns, who make themselves miserable and they know they deserve it. How can you not love that? Hhahahahaha.

★★★★☆

From Bookstooge.blog

A young man is dying and he sets out to tell his life’s story in the few days he has remaining. He ends up getting hung up on a failed romantic incident years ago and whines and whines and whines. Then he dies.