Horror Book # 23 - At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

I really wanted to love At the Mountains of Madness... but I ended up just really liking it instead. Previously I had read a collection of Lovecraft's short stories and absolutely loved it, so I was eager to read some more of his work. The premise here is great... a team of Antarctic explorers discover a huge mountain range that shows evidence of being inhabited by a weird alien race millions of years ago. The whole book is eerie and has a great dark and foreboding tone. Just a few qualms... for the amount of plot the book is a bit stretched out (and it is already a fairly short book so maybe it should have just been a short story), the story also follows the usual Lovecraft plot structure of someone surviving a horrible ordeal and relating it to us with the hopes that we believe him, and the whole sequence in which the narrator is able to tell the entire history (including names) of this previous civilization from a series of sculptures seems a bit unlikely. I'd still recommend it though but I'd go with one of his short story collections first. A-

Horror Book # 37 - Midnight by Dean Koontz

Wikipedia gives a pretty accurate summary of Midnight by Dean Koontz by saying that it is a combination of The Island of Doctor Moreau and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Set in a secluded California coastal town, the story is about a tech company that is experimenting with the residents of the town and inadvertently giving them the ability to transform their bodies. This was the first Koontz book I had read and I enjoyed it. It wasn't the most memorable or original book out there but it did have some good scary scenes and it was fun following the main characters as they tried to avoid any of the transformed citizens and escape the town. I'll give it a B+.

Also it mentions Frankenstein.

Star Trek: New Frontier - The Returned

Sometime around ninth grade I really got into Star Trek and started reading a ton of the books that they put out... like maybe one hundred of them. One of my favorite sub-series was the New Frontier series that was mostly written by Peter David, my favorite of the Star Trek authors. In this series he introduced a new main character, Captain Calhoun, and added a bunch of minor characters from The Next Generation to a crew that takes the Starship Excalibur on crazy adventures. While I stopped reading other Star Trek books I've always kept up on the New Frontier series and was pretty excited when I saw that the LAPL had the newest volume which was released only as an e-book. This volume didn't disappoint... Calhoun goes on a quest to get revenge against an alien species that wiped out his planet and ends up encountering an even worse alien race... and then Q shows up. I'll give this one an
A-.

Also, it mentions Alice in Wonderland.

Book # 150 - The Iliad by Homer

I'm pretty sure that The Iliad is the oldest book on any of my lists. Its age makes it a bit hard to really judge. Basically the whole book is just battle scene after battle scene. And it is surprisingly super violent too. There are tons of stabbings and beheadings and dead bodies being mutilated. And after seven hundred pages I feel like I still don't know everything that I should about the Trojan War. Overall it was a bit of a chore reading it but it had some interesting stuff in there like the interactions on both sides with their gods. I guess I'll give it a B+.

Mystery Book # 1 The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Book 4 of 9)

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is the second collection of short stories that feature Sherlock and Watson solving the usual mysteries. It wasn't quite as good as the first collection but I still enjoyed it overall. The most notable story is The Final Problem which introduces Moriarty and was originally intended to be the final Sherlock story since he seemingly dies in the end. For a story that was supposedly genuinely going to be the end the whole final sequence leaves lots of wiggle room to find a way to bring Sherlock back to life.I'll give this one an A-.