{"id":873,"date":"2015-07-25T21:00:37","date_gmt":"2015-07-26T04:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mossor.org\/blog\/?p=873"},"modified":"2015-12-26T10:06:11","modified_gmt":"2015-12-26T18:06:11","slug":"book-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/book-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"I<\/span> recently finished a book which made me want to do a quick review. Then I wanted to contrast that with a different book. Then maybe toss in a third book, just for contrast. Finally, I thought I\u2019d mention a book I\u2019m looking forward to. I think I\u2019m doing some book reviews!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Martian: A Novel<\/strong> by Andy Weir<\/p>\n

\"TheMartian_Cover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When this book came out, I originally gave it a pass. For reasons I don\u2019t recall, I somehow thought of this movie as Castaway on Mars<\/strong>. I had visions of a Space Wilson and Tom Hanks, all on Mars. Maybe some kind of Robinson Crusoe on Mars.<\/p>\n

Tangent Alert<\/strong> Did you know that there was a movie in 1964 called Robinson Crusoe on Mars<\/strong>?! Apparently he is stranded on Mars with his monkey. There is an alien man Friday, slaver-aliens, air pills and explosions!<\/p>\n

Back to our novel. Eventually I read a couple of reviews which, again, raved about The Martian and I started to think I needed to give it another look. About that time I heard that the book had been optioned to be made in to a movie (With Matt Damon, squee!!) There\u2019s little I like less than having a good book spoiled by a bad movie so that added to the pressure to give it a read before I started to see images from the movie.<\/p>\n

I absolutely loved<\/strong> this book! It\u2019s probably one of the most fun and enjoyable books I\u2019ve read in a very long time. I enjoyed the main character very much. He is a NASA astronaut (mission specialist), so he\u2019s smart and he knows his science! He can think on his feet and he can think his way out of whatever sort of problem he\u2019s faced with. Sure, he occasionally gets emotional, but he was always able to bounce back and come back positive.<\/p>\n

One criticism I read said they were turned off by the cycle of \u201cDisaster-Panic-Recovery, rinse, repeat\u201d. I didn\u2019t feel that at all. I and the story were propelled from one event to the next very fast and with what felt like real momentum. I cared about the guy. I wanted him to survive! It was, in the old parlance, a page turner despite the fact that I was reading it on my iPad.<\/p>\n

One of the things I really liked about it was that it was pro-Science and pro-Math and pro- being smart. The main character was intelligent and he was resourceful and that was constantly fun to read about and feel a part of.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, that\u2019s one of the things I liked best about it: I really enjoyed my time with that adventure and really sad to have it come to a close.<\/p>\n

On a related note: I\u2019ve seen the official trailer for the movie (YouTube Link<\/a>) and it looks really, really good. Favorite line from the trailer: \u201cIn the face of overwhelming odds, I\u2019m faced with only one option: I\u2019m going to have to Science the shit out of this\u201d. Not a line in the book, but very much in line with the character from the book. I\u2019m looking forward to this movie, too.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m going to move on to a book that I wanted to enjoy but did not.<\/p>\n

Seveneves<\/strong> by Neal Stephenson<\/p>\n

\"Seveneves_Cover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Stephenson wrote a couple of books that I enjoyed a great deal: Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. Both of these were about Big Ideas and playing out the consequences of those big ideas. I enjoyed them both a great deal for those Big Ideas, for the characterizations and for the story that was told.<\/p>\n

Some time after those came Cryptonomicon, which was the first of what was to be a \u201cepoch making masterpiece\u201d in the words of one reviewer. Personally, I found the book to be very, very long. And very self-involved and while I did make it through the book, I totally lost interest in anything that followed in that world or from Stephenson.<\/p>\n

Recently, however, he released Seveneves which was reviewed well by some folks whose opinions I value. Additionally, it had what seemed to be a killer hook that asks the basic question: What would happen if the world were ending. Stephenson proposes a huge, cataclysmic disaster and them proposes to follow it through. Even better, the story was going to come back much later in the future to see how the world was impacted and how mankind recovered and was changed by the event.<\/p>\n

It was enough to bring me back on board and give it a try.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the book was simply not enjoyable to read. I did manage to suffer through, but I didn\u2019t enjoy it. In the end, I finished it out of perversity and stubbornness as much as anything else.<\/p>\n

The big disaster which drives things starts off very unemotionally. It just happens. Which is just fine. Sometimes things just happen and the interesting story is in watching how it affects the characters.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for me, the characters, with the exception of one, were largely uninteresting or unpalatable. The felt one-dimensional and I was unable to engage with them as people. In contrast to how I felt about the main character in the previous book, I just really didn\u2019t care what happened to any of them.<\/p>\n

On the upside, this may well be a book for someone interested in the science of a disaster like this. It might also be interesting to someone who follows the space program, enjoys physics (in the abstract) and is fascinated by astronauts as they are, really, the heroes of the story and that\u2019s laudable.<\/p>\n

Eventually, about two thirds of the way through the book, the first portion with all the characters we\u2019ve been following winds down and there\u2019s a giant flash-forward in time to see how the mankind fared in the interim and how, or if, the Earth recovered.
\nAgain, I found the story cold, unengaging and, ultimately, uninteresting. I was, sad to say, bored.<\/p>\n

It may simply be that Stephenson\u2019s prose and story telling are not engaging to me and that\u2019s okay. But at this point I suspect it would take a very large truck to pull me back in to trying another story from him.<\/p>\n

Now, in fairness, I\u2019m bashing a book that\u2019s currently a bestseller from an author who has received multiple awards, all of which may simply indicate that I don\u2019t know what the hell I\u2019m talking about, but it remains my opinion.<\/p>\n

From that, I wanted something to clear my palate, so I read a book in a series which I\u2019ve been enjoying. It\u2019s a book in the Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey<\/p>\n

The Getaway God<\/strong> by Richard Kadrey<\/p>\n

\"TheGetawayGod_Cover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I enjoy this series. It\u2019s a mashup of a very noir L.A. coupled with a fantasy series involving monsters of various stripes, demons and angels as well as Lucifer and a God that\u2019s got a bit of multiple personality disorder (literally!). And our main protagonist, Stark, known to many as Sandman Slim.<\/p>\n

The world is, quite literally, going to hell and Stark, often reluctantly, is the one who stands between the forces trying to tear it all apart and the rest of us, obliviously living our lives.<\/p>\n

I like how L.A. is where (at least on Earth) we spend most of our time in the books because the glitz and glitter of L.A. is reflected in a Hell that looks and feels much the same.<\/p>\n

Stark is a hard-drinking, hard-living man who is always ready with a quip or a fight. As with the best of noir characters, on the face of things, he\u2019s not all that likable, but he\u2019s always fun to watch. And, really, at the end of the night, all he wants is a drink, good takeout and good movie to watch.<\/p>\n

Our world sits on the edge of annihilation and all that stands between us and the end of all things is Sandman Slim.<\/p>\n

This is the sixth book and in each, Kadrey has managed to ramp up the suspense and the stakes. I\u2019m not sure how long he can keep doing that, but as long as they\u2019re fun to read, and they are, I\u2019ll likely come back every year or so for another.<\/p>\n

Finally, I\u2019ll mention a book I\u2019m looking forward to.<\/p>\n

The End of All Things<\/strong> by John Scalzi<\/p>\n

\"TheEndOfAllThings_Cover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the last (for now!) book in the Old Man\u2019s War<\/strong> series. It takes place in a universe where humans are out and about interacting with a variety of other space-faring intelligences, many of which are bigger, badder and more capable of killing than humans. We are not, by any stretch, the big kid on the block.<\/p>\n

I find the Old Man\u2019s War<\/strong> universe to be very enjoyable and a fun, easy read. Scalzi was answering the question recently on reddit whether his writing can be compared to eating popcorn. I suspect it was implied that somehow being compared to eating popcorn was a bad thing. On the contrary, if you\u2019re in the mood, a snack is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it\u2019s exactly<\/em> what you\u2019re looking for. In a fairly self-aware response, Scalzi notes that his goal is to write books that sell – he has a family to support, after all. And sell books, he does! And, I like popcorn.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not buying the book (and, to be clear, I will be buying the book) because it\u2019s necessarily the best piece of literature ever, I\u2019m buying it because he writes books that I\u2019ve enjoyed, tells stories that I want to read and I have a pretty high degree of confidence, based on his track record, that I\u2019ll enjoy this book as well.<\/p>\n

The End of All Things<\/strong> comes out August 11, 2015. Now, Mr. Scalzi, TAKE MY MONEY! And let me know when you write something else. There\u2019s a pretty good chance I\u2019ll buy that, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

recently finished a book which made me want to do a quick review. Then I wanted to contrast that with a different book. Then maybe toss in a third book, just for contrast. Finally, I thought I\u2019d mention a book I\u2019m looking forward to. I think I\u2019m doing some book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":882,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/BookStack_300x300.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"darrin","author_link":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/author\/darrin\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/BookStack_300x300.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mossor.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}