Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss


I apparently never wrote a review for this... I didn't realize just how long ago I read it. I had planned to not read it again until (now a forlorn hope) the 3rd book finally came out, but my local book club decided they wanted to torture themselves.

I have to say I didn't like it as much... perhaps my opinion is colored, but in alot of ways the book itself is like Kvothe. Unique, endearing, but annoyinging too clever by half. It leads you to a good place, then crashes down again out of nowhere just to ensure there is tension and drama for the next chapter.

I've always described this book as 'a better version of Harry Potter, written for adults'. But perhaps (and again, this is definitely colored by the status of the series) more correctly it is 'an evil version of Harry Potter for sadists'

I still like the framing sequence better than the main story... All I need to know really is how he lost himself, then move on. Alas, this will never happen... this is why I rarely will read a book that's not a finished series these days.

My mother-in-law absolutely loves the Cadfeal books. Myself, I can't say they've ever really appealed to me; something about Medieval crime whodunnits just doesn't do it for me, I'm afraid. But I'm quite prepared to believe that they are very well written books, as her other two literary loves are Agatha Christie's Poirot and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, both of which are obviously classics.

They Don't Dance Much by James Ross 

One of those "great lost" books that were praised by another great author (in this case Raymond Chandler) that largely disappeared from sight and was seldom reprinted.  This was Ross' first and only novel though he wrote a few short stories and was a reporter.  This would be an early example of "country noir" of the sort that would be popularized by Charles Williams being published by Fawcett Gold Medal.  Apparently this book was compared to James M. Cain at the time of publication which allegedly upset Ross.  I personally don't see it.  Cain is a much more succinct writer.  But I also can't see taking umbrage at being compared to Cain. 

Jack McDonald is a failed farmer just kind of floating through life at the tail end of the Depression.  What little he owns is mortgaged to the hilt and about to be repossessed and/or sold for taxes.  He takes a job with Smut Milligan, local bad-boy and small-time entrepreneur, who is starting up a roadhouse just outside town and on the road to Florida.  The place deals in bootleg liquor, dance music, and cabins that can rent by the hour.  And it's a surprise success.  But for all that success, Milligan still has money problems and the local political boss eyeing his little roadhouse for a hostile takeover.  Being a true noir there's a murder and a femme fatale.  And Jack McDonald definitely gets himself in over his head.  

Compared to most of his contemporaries, and certainly to the later Gold Medal authors, Ross takes this one at a pretty leisurely pace.  I was honestly not really feeling it for the first half of the book.  It was fine and it was well written, but I just wanted it to get to the point a little faster.  It does finish strong.  In fact the ultimate ending is incredibly satisfying.  Is it a lost masterpiece?  I don't think so.  But it definitely didn't deserve to be ignored.  If it's not the equivalent of Chandler (what is?) or the best of Cain, it's easily as good as or better than better known novels by other contemporaries like Horace McCoy or W.R. Burnett.  

Perry rhodan #28: Plague of Oblivion
by Clark Darlton


It seems the problem of the Springers is too much for the writers, too. Suddenly Perry and Co have access to a virus that erases your memory, but only for a little while, but really makes you smarter in the end?

Just a bit much, and where did such a thing come from? Combine that with the fact that Pucky seems to be an invincible juggernaut, and there's not alot of tension or drama here. Hopefully, they'll move on next book.

Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson

Popular history author Erik Larson takes on the Great Galveston hurricane of 1900 with a focus on Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist at the US Weather Bureau's Galveston office.  The hurricane remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history with at least an estimated 6,000 dead and over $34 million in property damage (well over $1.1 billion in current dollars).  

Larson tries to strip away the myths surrounding the storm.  Cline's heroic tales of his exploits seem to have little basis in fact.  While the storm would have been an utter disaster under any circumstances, its effects were exacerbated by the hubris of the institutions and individuals involved.  Hurricanes, still the subject of a lot of scientific mystery, were barely understood at all at the time.  But it didn't help that the U.S. Weather Bureau would go to almost any lengths at the time to avoid the words hurricane or tornado to keep from panicking the frightened masses.  It also didn't help that they were in a pissing contest with the Belen College Observatory in Havana, which had significantly more experience studying and tracking hurricanes because they were just Cubans and were being occupied by the U.S. following the Spanish-American War.  The Weather Service also declared that the storm had turned and was headed up the west Florida coast based on absolutely nothing other than the belief that that is what storms did.  

Beyond the institutional hubris there was individual hubris.  Cline had declared that is was "impossible" that Galveston could ever be significantly damaged by a storm (though Indiola, Texas had been hammered 25 years before) and talked the city out of building seawalls.  All of this was, of course, hushed up and there was a significant release of "alternative facts" to indicate that the Weather Bureau had provided ample warning and that Cline had heroically gone door to door warning people of the storm like a latter-day Paul Revere.  

And yet for all that this is an interesting and exciting story, Larson tries super hard to make it a snoozer.  Maybe I just wasn't in the mood or was reading at the wrong times, but this one didn't flow very well.  And I remember that the previous book that I'd read by Larson "Devil in the White City" was about a half an interesting book, grafted on to about half a marginally interesting book.  So maybe it's just that Larson's writing doesn't quite work for me.  Still, it's a decent read and it's actually pretty timely as we see hurricanes becoming increasingly destructive.  

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard.





First published in 1885, King Soloman's Mines is regarded as a classic of English Victorian adventure literature and one of the first "lost world" novels. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the plot follows white hunter Allan Quatermain as he takes on a quest for two Englishmen, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, to find Curtis's brother, who went missing searching for the fabled mines of King Soloman in the unexplored interior of southern Africa.

Though it might be widely considered a classic, I don't think King Soloman's Mines has aged particularly well. For one thing, the book is chock full of the colonial attitudes of its era, with the white heroes gleefully exploiting the native African population for treasure. Of course, this isn't too surprising, given the era in which the book was written, but even though I have a very high tolerance of archaic values and attitudes in old literature, the thinly and not-so-thinly-veiled racism on display here is pretty unrelenting. The three central protagonists all regard the Africans with an extremely patronising air of superiority, becoming disgusted if a Zulu man dares to address them as equals, for instance. Interestingly, Quatermain considers himself to not be particularly prejudiced against the Africans, noting early on in the book that he will never resort to using the "n-word", but he also clearly regards them as little more than ignorant, superstitious children.

Then there's the appalling attitude our heroes display towards the African fauna. Only a day or two into their expedition, Quatermain and his cohorts are only too happy to kill a herd of elephants for their ivory, slaughter a few lions for kicks, and shoot a random giraffe through the neck in the name of sportsmanship. Like I say, I realise that inflicting such carnage on innocent wildlife was considered fair game in the Victorian era, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read about in the 21st century or particularly engender sympathy from the reader towards the book's protagonists.

A far more serious problem for the book, however, is Haggard's stodgy and unnecessarily verbose prose, which made it a bit of a slog to finish. I think that this may just be a symptom of the writing style of the Victorian/Edwardian era, as I've noticed similar problems with the writing of Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. P. Lovecraft, to name just three contemporary authors. It's also very much written for men and boys: there are no women of any consequence in the story at all and any that do appear are treated as eye-candy for the men.

On the plus side, the central adventure narrative itself is pretty enjoyable and the witch, Gagool, is a very creepy character and perhaps the most memorable in the book for that precise reason. But my God, the pace of this thing is painfully slow!

Clearly King Soloman's Mines is an extremely influential novel – it's easy to see the template for Indiana Jones in Quatermain, for example – but I can't honestly see the turgid pace and unpalatable colonial attitudes herein going down well with the majority of modern readers. This really wasn't a particularly enjoyable book for me, which is a shame because I've wanted to read it for ages.