Recent Recreational Reading

Every so often, I review the books I've read purely for amusement value. Most of them are science fiction and fantasy, those being my interests..



Recommended:



Flag In Exile, Ashes of Victory, and War of Honor by David Weber, three books in the Honor Harrington series. I was resistant to these for years, but when I finally tried one I was hooked. Modeled after the Horatio Hornblower books.



Interstellar Patrol by Christopher Anvil is a series of short to novella length stories about the Interstellar Patrol. Reads like kind of a cross between Eric Frank Russell and James Schmidt, except that the main characters are all male. The people are resourceful against everything from tremendous odds to situations intentionally stacked against them. Clever and amusingly written.



Dead Beat by Jim Butcher, the seventh novel in the Dresden Files. I highly recommend this entire series, having to do with the adventures of a real Wizard in modern day Chicago. This one has a climactic sequence not to be forgotten, but I can't say anything more without ruining it.



Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove, the continuation of the World War and Colonization series, this book largely dealing with our first interstellar voyage, to the home world of the Race.



WebMage by Kelly McCullough. The gods as programmers in a "many worlds" story. Amusing. I liked the way it turns some expectations on their heads.



Chernagor Pirates and The Scepter's Return by Harry Turltedove writing as Dan Chernenko. These are the second and third books in a series. The world set-up seems similar in broad to Eddings' Belgariad, but Turtledove's treatment is very different - things go wrong for the protagonists on a regular basis. The second book was kind of marginal, but I actually liked the third better.



Against the Tide by John Ringo is the third in its series. It didn't seem to be afflicted by the magic bullet solution that detracted from its predecessor, the Emerald Sea. The setup is that high technology earth of the millenia different future suddenly has almost all of its power taken away, so the survivors of the crash have to go back to dealing with things on a more primitive level.



Mixed



The Hidden Family by Charles Stross. Okay, we get into a bit of actual thought here, but too many characters change their minds too easily, or suddenly go against things they have previously done. It detracts from the story.



Ordermaster by L. E. Modessit is the new Recluce novel. I plowed through it but after I was done I couldn't get over how much it was almost the same story he's told before, just with an older protagonist.



The Shadow of Saganami by David Weber is set in the Honor Harrington universe, but deals with the trials of a new generation of Manticoran naval officers. Dragged a bit, and the ending was just a little too much for what the characters had done.



The Excalibur Alternative suffered just a little too much from convenient coincidences and the fact that it has a technological primitive defeating technology far more advanced than our own - which he just doesn't have the tools to beat. Kind of like a different twist on Poul Anderson's "The High Crusade", but I didn't like the execution nearly so well.



The Hero by John Ringo and Michael Z Williamson is in the future of Ringo's Posleen stories. It had some cute ideas and nice development of one of the alien races, but glossed over too much in the way of main points.





Don't Bother:



Bonds of Vengeance by David B. Coe: third in a series, and just takes too long to go where it's going.



Accelerando by Charles Stross. I figured out a few pages in that it was a Jerry Cornelius novel with the serial numbers filed off. I never did finish the second Cornelius novel, but I did finish this. I just don't know why I bothered.



Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. I just couldn't care about the characters - they were all problem personalities of different stripes. Isn't there supposed to be at least one sympathetic character somewhere in a novel?



Freedom and Necessity may have intended to be a Great Novel a la Dickens, but the beginnings of communism is not exactly my idea of a sympathetic plot. When the main characters are struggling to establish an ideology responsible for over 100 million dead, as well as enormous amounts of human misery, ecological damage, etcetera, etcetera, I can't help but hope the Redcoats shoot them all. The fact that there are other dastards out there in this world in no way alleviates this.



Smoke and Shadows by Tanya Huff. The most recent Henry Fitzroy book, and the last I'm planning to read.



Tong Lashing by Peter David is book three of Sir Apropos of Nothing. It's just not funny or amusing any more.



Phule's Errand by Robert Aspirin suffers the same problem.



Alector's Choice by L E Modesitt is the fourth Corus book. Prequels are tough to bring off, because you have to care about what's going on while already knowing the main points of what happened. The author doesn't manage this one.