Past Crimes by Glen Erik Hamilton

Meh... C.  

Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) by Jeff VanderMeer

Well now I'll have to read the entire series... I enjoyed Annihilation but by the end there aren't really any answers to the tons of questions presented. So I'm giving the book an A- but almost want to give it an "incomplete". Hopefully the next book will shed some light on what's really going on in Area X.

Horror Book # 42 - The Bachman Books by Stephen King - Book 2: The Long Walk by Richard Bachman

To my great surprise, The Long Walk is one of the better Stephen King books I've read...  It is a bit hard to believe that he wrote most of it while in college. How has this book not been made into a movie yet? The premise is simple... sometime in the near future there is a competition where 100 teenage boys see who can walk the furthest. The catch... the competition is to the death. So that motivates them to walk pretty far. Maybe there aren't any specifically scary scenes but there is a growing sense of dread as the walkers all realize they've made a huge mistake. I'll give it an A. Also it mentions Alice in Wonderland.

Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier by Mark Frost

Well Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier is quite the turnaround from The Secret History of Twin Peaks. Whereas that first book was kind of a slog and provided almost no concrete answers to pretty much anything, The Final Dossier is a fast read that fills in some the narrative gaps from the television show (both the original and The Return). It is presented as a final report compiled by Agent Preston about Twin Peaks in the wake of the series finale. Some of the questions we gets answers to... How's Annie? Who was the young girl from New Mexico? Who was funding the glass box experiment? Whatever happened to Donna? To Audrey? The book also provides a convincing reason for the inconsistencies in the previous book concerning Norma's family. So it was fun to get these answers but in a sense part of the fun of Twin Peaks is not about getting answers but over-examining small details in a fruitless attempt at making sense of the mysterious and unanswerable. B+

Also it mentions One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Horror Book # 34 - The Fog by James Herbert

Yeah I'm not sure if The Fog really belongs in this top 50 list... It wasn't bad but besides for a handful of scenes it wasn't very memorable. And the main character isn't that well drawn out. Basically the story is that a mysterious fog gets unleashed on London that causes people to go crazy. The more I think about it the less I can recommend it when there's so much better stuff out there. One positive note - I got the electronic version through the LAPL after I did the whole "suggest this book to your library" thing. So they actually do look at user suggestions... good for them. B-

Book # 25 - Beloved by Toni Morrison

I'm always a bit excited to read a book that I know absolutely nothing about, and that was the case with Beloved by Toni Morrison. It turns out that it is actually a bit of a ghost story... The story is about Sethe, a former runaway slave, and her daughter Denver. One day a young woman shows up on their doorstep and all evidence makes it seem as if this woman is actually Sethe's other daughter that she killed as a young child. The whole story is tragic and has multiple layers... so I can see why it gets assigned in English Literature classes. Overall I enjoyed it, A-. 

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

Well to get through The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla I had to check it out FIVE times! I'm not sure why it took me so long. I mean I think I finished Infinite Jest in less time. Probably a combination of a bunch of factors... needing to take a break from reading, being burnt out on Dark Tower books, moving, etc. Also it doesn't help that it is a really long book in which not much happens.

So in this volume Roland and his ka-tet get sidetracked on their quest into a Seven Samurai type situation. Now this takes up most of the space in the book and is incredibly boring... mostly because the people they're trying to protect aren't that interesting and most of the time is spent just waiting until the end for the bad guys show up. And once they do show up Roland and company have no problem dispatching them. There's no suspense here. There are a couple of subplots that advance the story but they're left unresolved for the next book.

Also, check out this cover... the bad guys look like Doctor Doom with a lightsaber... and that's exactly how a character describes them. Which in theory should be cool but here it really isn't. They end up being so lame.

Now if I remember correctly, the following list books are mentioned: Tess of the D'Ubervilles, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Ulysses, Harry Potter and Invisible Man. C+