Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

I've always been a bit curious about Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. There are just so many of them though that it makes it look kind of intimidating to dive into. So after reading a couple of interesting articles on the Onion's AV Club (one of which served as a handy guide on where to start and the other comparing the author to Kurt Vonnegut) I figured I'd give one a shot.... And you know I liked it. The series is set in this fantasy world called Discworld but the books follow several different characters. This particular book, Guards! Guards!, is about the City Watch of Discworld. Basically they are the bumbling police of the city that nobody pays any attention. In an attempt at a political coup someone magically summons a dragon so that it can be slayed by someone pretending to be a descendant of an old lineage of kings who would then act as a puppet king for the person that summoned the dragon. However things go wrong and the City Watch has to figure out a way to save the city. I laughed several times which must mean that I liked it. Sometime soon I'll have to try reading another book from the series... this one gets a B+.

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

This is the second time I've read Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert and my opinion pretty much remains the  same. It is a bit of a weird book in that the first Dune book is full of action as it follows Paul Atreides from a teenage boy to leader of the Fremen people to inter-galactic emperor, while in the second book Paul does very little even though he is the ruler of pretty much everything and has led a jihad across the galaxy that has killed billions of people. The book starts out twelve years after the previous book and follows a plot that attempts to get rid of Paul by various factions that have it in for him. It actually seems like a bit of a bummer since it mostly shows how the ending of the first book wasn't really all that happy after all and now Paul has to deal with remaining emperor and his life really doesn't turn out all that great. Still I enjoyed it even though it is nowhere close to being as awesome as the first book. At least this time while reading it I knew that much of the book is really just setup for what follows in the series. B+

Book # 22 - To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Much like Mrs. Dalloway, I don't really know what to make of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The book is written in a stream of consciousness that flows between the emotions and actions of various characters as they go about their day. There is some lovely writing here but I couldn't really get that into it... mostly because I can't really figure out what it is about. Plot-wise very little goes on, a kid bugs his parents about wanting to visit a lighthouse, his dad is kind of mean about it and they have some guests over and have dinner, then years later they actually make a trip out to the lighthouse and nothing else really happens except someone paints a picture. Maybe I need to do some in-depth studying of it to figure it out but it just doesn't appeal to me enough to make that effort. I'll say it is a B-.

Oh yeah, the book also mentions Middlemarch and Anna Karenina.

Horror Book # 5 - 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

I hadn't been planning on reading 'Salem's Lot anytime soon, but the other day I was playing around with the LAPL website and discovered how easy it was to check out books for the Kindle... so I figured I should try one out to see how well it worked.

'Salem's Lot is Stephen King's second book and has all of the usual tropes that show up in his later works... the protagonist is a writer, it is set in a small Maine town, characters have psychic flashes, a child plays an important role, etc... This time the story centers on vampires and how they are able to take over a remote town in just a few days. And these aren't the romanticized type of vampires, these are the violent bloodthirsty kind. There are quite a few scary scenes and I was surprised at how willing King was at killing off characters throughout. He also builds tension up very well in the first half of the book when the town suffers a rash of disappearances and accidents and no one yet suspects that it may be the work of something evil.  I enjoyed the book overall but I could have used a bit more characterization of the main vampire. I feel like King didn't really explore his motivations very much or try to give his actions any justification.

While reading it I couldn't quit thinking of the book as a small town version of They Thirst by Robert McCammon which came out a few years later. Maybe because that book was set in Los Angeles I liked it a bit more... I'll give 'Salem's Lot a B+.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars by Ian Doescher

William Shakespeare's Star Wars by Ian Doescher is pretty much exactly what you'd think it would be.. The story of Star Wars as if it were written in iambic pentameter by William Shakespeare. It was interesting but for a short read I started to get tired of the gimmick about half way through. It doesn't really add much new insight into Star Wars either and doesn't stray much from the scenes from the film. Not surprisingly the best parts are the few times that the author adds scenes or commentary not found in the movie such as the discussion between the two guys guarding the Millennium Falcon on the Death Star and the frequent asides to the audience that R2-D2 uses to voice what he is really saying. I'll give this a B-.

Book # 65 & Sci-Fi Book # 1- Dune by Frank Herbert

Dune is one of may favorite books, so even though this was the third time I've read it I still greatly enjoyed it. I'd have to agree that it is easily one of the greatest science fiction books of all time.

Explaining the plot succinctly is a bit problematic. The book centers on the desert planet Arrakis which is the only source for the spice melange, a drug like substance that can improve someones health and for some give extrasensory perception (which is necessary for someone to pilot a spacecraft). The political system is a sort of intergalactic feudalism and the Emperor has awarded the working of Arrakis to the House Atreides after removing the House Harkonnen from the planet. But really the whole thing is a set up to get rid of Atreides because the Emperor fears that they are becoming too powerful. When the Harkonnens make their play to invade Arrakis and remove the Duke Leto Atreides from power, his son Paul Atreides is able to escape into the desert and take refuge with the native population of the planet, the Fremen. Paul is seen as someone who fulfills a prophecy to lead the Fremen and he sets out to regain control of the planet from the Harkonnens. And I should mention that there are giant worms that roam the deserts of Arrakis.

The whole world that Herbert describes is very well thought out and everything has a back-story that is only hinted at. The book even has a fairly lengthy glossary of terms that are unique to the book. Given the massive amount of world building that goes on in the first half of the book, the book almost feels short even though it is over 500 pages long since the story continues zipping along and never really lets up. I could easily imagine the same story taking up twice the number of pages. Thankfully there is a whole series of books that follow. I had read most of the original Dune books by Herbert before, but now I feel like I need to reread them all and actually get to the end of the series this time. This is one of those books that you can't recommend highly enough to someone that loves science fiction - A+.

Horror Book # 22 Books of Blood Clive Barker Volume 3 of 6

Volume 3 of Clive Barker's Books of Blood is pretty much more of the same... but in a good way. I definitely liked it more than volume 2. Each of the five stories was unique and most of them had unexpected twists and turns and all of them had some extremely gory parts. Rawhead Rex was a straightforward monster roaming the countryside story that still had some nice twists. Human Remains had an unexpected twist about a statue slowly coming to life and taking over someones identity. And Son of Celluloid was a great story about a haunted movie theater. There were also good stories about a possessed white sheet (which is kinda funny since it looks like a cheap "ghost") and another one about a mysterious island of dead bodies. I'll give this collection an A-.