Review: Many Stars Her Own Story The Great Plains
Many Stars Her Own Story The Great Plains by Georgetown Collection
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a sweet little story of Many Stars, a young Cheyenne girl, during a time when her people are having trouble locating the buffalo on which they depend for survival. At only 20 pages, there obviously isn’t a whole lot to it, but I think it would be nice and enjoyable for young girls, especially those who love horses or like the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.
Movie Review: The Raven
Last night I went with a bunch of my bookish friends to see The Raven, John Cusack’s new Poe film. The reviews I had read were mostly negative, and the RT score was abysmal, so I really wasn’t expecting much more than a few hours of John Cusack. In a sense, that is pretty much what I got.
Not to say it’s a bad film. It certainly isn’t anywhere near as bad as Rotten Tomatoes would have had me expect. The “Pit and the Pendulum” scene was a little beyond my gore tolerance, and I watched with my head down and my eyes half-closed, but anybody who has ever read the story should know to expect some serious violence. Poe may have invented the ratiocinative story, but he was definitely a horror writer. I think I was hoping for a little more ratiocination in this film, but it would have made for a much shorter film if the sleuths had figured it out as soon as I had. So I won’t complain about the mystery plot or the body count.
The only real disappointment was, ironically, in John Cusack’s performance. I got exactly what I wanted: a few hours of John Cusack. He played an awesome John Cusack. Edgar Allan Poe? Not so much. I wouldn’t call it a bad performance, I suppose. I just didn’t feel that Cusack was fully interpreting the character as it needed to be for this to be a really good Poe film rather than merely a John Cusack vehicle.
Review: Medicus
Medicus by Ruth Downie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this introduction to Gaius Petreius Ruso, his new slave Tilla, and all of his other woes. Ruso is an army medicus in Brittania, which is under Roman rule, and I liked that this put me in mind of a sort of ancient Roman M*A*S*H. The details of daily living are interesting, and the characters are great. I like Tilla, but I think Albanus, who is Ruso’s scribe, is my favorite. Everybody should have an Albanus.
The mystery plot itself was a little off in its pacing, but I was having too much fun for that to bother me much. I especially liked how Downie presented the culture clashes, often showing the same scene from both Ruso’s and Tilla’s perspectives to give the reader a fuller understanding of what motivated whom. And I am glad that Downie resisted making Ruso an enlightened progressive. He may be a better class of slave-owner, but he is a still a slave-owner, and he thinks like a slave-owner simply because it would not occur to him that there is any other way to think. So even though Downie had to make lots of educated guesses about life in Roman times, everything feels quite real for its setting, and this makes me want to keep reading.
Review: WWW: Wake
WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book #10 for 2012.
I haven’t read a whole lot of Robert J. Sawyer yet, but I am guessing that this is not an example of his best work. The non-Caitlin story lines were never integrated fully into the overall story, so they felt like tacked-on exposition, as do Caitlin’s occasional book reports as she studies the nature of consciousness. I gather from other reviews of this book that the other stories do get picked up again in the rest of the trilogy, but here in this first book, there is no sort of resolution, not even of a temporary nature, nor is there anything that qualifies as a cliffhanger. It’s more like Sawyer wanted to concentrate on Caitlin for the rest of the book and just couldn’t be bothered with the subplots anymore.
I was quite impressed with Sawyer’s voice for Caitlin. He managed to make her sound like a pretty normal teenage girl without her being incredibly annoying. Having once been a 15-year-old girl myself, and having recently re-read some of my journals from that era, I can assure you that making a 15-year-old girl not annoying as hell is an incredible feat.
And despite the occasional info dump, I did like Sawyer’s conceptualization of consciousness and self-awareness. I found it particularly appealing that the voice Sawyer used for the struggle for awareness put me in mind of Douglas Adams’ sperm whale. You know the one I mean. 
Review: Holmes on the Range
Holmes on the Range by Steve Hockensmith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this tale of cowboys playing detective in Montana. William Dufris does an excellent job of bringing Old Red and Big Red to life, along with all the people they encounter as Old Red sets to deducifyin’ à la Sherlock Holmes. And Hockensmith has a distinct knack for subtle misdirection. I will definitely have to continue with this series.
Review: Ready Player One
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book #9 for 2012
I’m not sure who coined the term “nostalgia porn,” but it fits this novel perfectly. I am a GenXer who misses the ’80s, and the sheer volume of ’80s trivia spewed forth in this book is nothing short of amazing. Not to mention a whole lot of fun at times. So why didn’t I give this book four or five stars? Because I liked it despite its many glaring flaws.
Most obviously jarring are the continuity errors. I spent entirely too much time and went through an entire sheet of Book Darts to work out the supposed timeline of this book, and the dates as presented just don’t work. I would like to give the author the benefit of the doubt, but the usual explanations for such inconsistencies (plot twists, unreliable narrator, etc) just don’t fit this story. I am forced to conclude that this was just plain old sloppiness.
I mentioned plot twists there. As in there aren’t any. Well, okay, there are a few surprises sprinkled throughout, more so near the book’s end. But nothing surreal and mind-blowing. The GoodReads site popped up a recommendation of a Neal Stephenson book with a somewhat similar concept, and I think I will find a copy and read that. That man knows how to do surreal and mind-blowing. Mr Cline still has much to learn. (I have nothing against African-American lesbians, but they hardly count as surreal.)
It’s more subtle, but I think my biggest complaint with the book is that Cline shows no imagination whatsoever in his real-world world-building beyond the introduction of Oasis in December 2012. My generation — even those of us who dig the ’80s enough to geek out to this level of nostalgia porn — is still going strong here in March 2012, and we are still finding cool stuff. I refuse to believe that our nerdculture ends with Firefly. Cline makes a lot of noise about our economy going from crappy to worse, but using that as an excuse not only demonstrates some fundamental misconceptions about cycles of creativity and catalysts of innovation, it’s downright lazy.
Wow, it sounds like I hated this book. Really, I didn’t. It was a fun, if not terribly suspenseful, ride down memory lane. Probably even more so if you can refrain from nitpicking like I have.
Review: Feed
Feed by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Book #6 for 2012
I’m really sorry I had to miss the Strange Worlds discussion for this book. Because this story is an excellent springboard for discussion of many topics and is frighteningly relevant to the here-and-now. This is marketed as teen fiction, but I would recommend that adults and teens alike read it and then engage in some inter-generational discussions. This book shows some of the pitfalls of the direction we seem to be headed, and those currently shaping our world and those who will soon be in a position to do so need to have some serious communication before it’s too late.
Yes, the teen-speak was a bit hard to take at times. But I think this was far and away better than Burgess’s invented slang in A Clockwork Orange, which I finally abandoned for good after reading the first five chapters three times and hating every second of it. And I really liked how Anderson demonstrated how language is ultimately the core of any society. For the society to remain vibrant, its people must be able to communicate effectively at every level. Anderson shows us what happens when that communication is so severely devalued.
