23 January 2010
mega book catch up post
Posted by Dirk under: books .
Joseph A. West – The Silver Arrowhead A mystery Western, of sorts, with a Chinese-American detective and his helpful sidekick. It wasn’t bad but something about it just didn’t click with me for some reason.
Larry Doyle – I Love You, Beth Cooper A comedy by a former writer for The Simpsons. I only read it because the girlfriend read it and thought it was hilarious. I didn’t think it was as funny as she did, but it’s not bad. Better than the movie.
Charles Willeford – New Hope For The Dead Another Hokey Moseley book by Willeford. A fun mystery with a neat character.
Chris Moriarty – Spin State Mystery/military science fiction about an elite female soldier that goes to a mining colony to find out who killed a famous scientist. Was pretty good. I think this is the author’s first book and I’ll keep an eye for his next one.
Richard Stark – The Outfit A Parker novel from Stark. That’s really enough said for me. Parker gets pissed at ‘The Outfit’ and goes about making em regret they ever heard his name.
Richard Stark – The Mourner And another Parker novel. This time he’s sort of hired to steal an old statue, but of course things aren’t nearly as easy as they sound.
Darwyn Cooke – Richard Stark’s Parker Book: One The Hunter This is a graphic novel based on the first Parker novel, the same one that has been made into a movie twice. I liked it.
Jeff Lindsay – Dexter in the Dark I’ve been digging the Dexter tv show so I thought I’d check out the books. Not bad, but the characters are quite a bit different than they are on the tv show, and I like em the way they are on the tv show. In other words, I think I prefer the tv version to the books at this point.
Jeff Lindsay – Darkly Dreaming Dexter I think this is actually the first in the series. Same as above.
Jeff Lindsay – Dearly Devoted Dexter Another one in the series.
Richard Kadrey – Sandman Slim Dude is involved with a magical group that ends up betraying him and sending him to Hell. While there he becomes an absolute badass, basically by fighting in Hell’s version of gladiator games. Then he escapes, along with a few items he picked up along the way and goes looking for revenge. I liked it.
Eleanor Davis – The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook A graphic novel for younger readers. I got it to give to my niece eventually. It’s got cool art and is about a nerdy kid who finds out two less nerdy kids are also really into science and they for The Secret Science Alliance and hang out in their secret workshop inventing stuff. I look forward to handing it over to the niece when she gets down to reading.
Jason Little – Shutterbug Follies Another graphic novel, but for an older audience. About a gal that works in a photo developing place who gets involved in a mystery when she develops some pictures of dead people. I liked it. You can check out some of Little’s work here.
Paul Pope – 100% And another graphic novel from one of my favorite comic book artist guys around. This one is a strange tale of the future that I’m not even going to try to describe. I really dig Pope’s art. Check him out here.
Joe Haldeman – The Accidental Time Machine Time travel story about a grad student that accidentally invents a time machine. It only goes forward in time though. And he doesn’t have much control over it. I liked it.
Jeff Somers – The Electric Church Set a bit into a future that really sucks. The rich have really cool lives and the poor have really shitty ones. The main character is one of the poor people. He makes his living as a Gunner, an assassin. Gritty action, I liked it.
Jeff Somers- The Digital Plague Sequel to the above book. I didn’t think it was quite as good as the first one, but it didn’t suck.
Rick Riordan – Big Red Tequila Private eye book, first in a series. Set in Texas, the main character is a master of some martial art and he has a cool cat. In this book he investigates his father’s death. Fun read, I’ll pick up the rest of the series over time, I’m sure.
Steve Perry – Matadora A sequel to The Man Who Never Missed. This book is about the training compound set up to train Matadors (super body guards) and one woman that goes through the training. I liked it and have a couple more books in the series waiting to be read.
Ed Gorman – Lawless Western about a dude trying to get his life together, but of course things don’t go as well as he might have hoped. Something about this book just didn’t appeal to me, though I did finish it.
C.J. Cherryh – The Paladin Though it’s never stated as such, the setting of this book is very much like Medieval Japan. The story is about a young girl who goes to a legendary Lord that lives in exile on a mountaintop and begs him to train her so she can avenge her family. Pretty good book.
Charlie Huston – Caught Stealing Bad dudes want something from the main character and he has no idea what. And then some other bad dudes want that something too. And then they all start doing bad things to the main character. Fairly gritty crime novel. I liked it.
Charlie Huston – Six Bad Things Same character as the above book. He’s managed to get out of the bad situation he was in and is living comfortably in Mexico, but then a Russian tourist stops by and starts asking questions. Oops. Shit hits the fan again.
Charlie Huston – A Dangerous Man Same character again. He’s doing what he has to to get by but soon he finds out he can’t anymore.
Charlie Huston – Already Dead A new series. The main character in this one is sort of a detective guy, but not exactly. Plus he’s a vampire. I read this entire series too (see below) and liked it well enough, my only problem was that some of the various groups of vampires seem a bit too stereotyped to me.
Charlie Huston – No Dominion Joe Pitt, the vampire from the above book, continues to cause trouble and get beat up, while also kicking ass himself.
Charlie Huston – Half the Blood of Brooklyn More Joe Pitt.
Charlie Huston – Every Last Drop And Joe Pitt again. You just can’t keep him down for long.
Charlie Huston – My Dead Body The final Joe Pitt book. He gets to ride off into the sunset. Sort of.
Jeff Carlson – Plague Zone Third book in this series about the world after a nanomachine plague has wiped out most of the life on earth. I liked the first one and the second was ok, but I just didn’t get into this one too much. Ended up skimming it a lot. The cool thing is, I won a contest and the author named a character in the book after me. Sweet.
Richard Sala – The Chuckling Whatsit Strange graphic novel about a serial killer, bizarre geegaws and a bunch of weirdos trying to figure out what is going on. I liked it.
Warren Ellis, Raulo Caceres – Crecy Graphic novel about the battle of Crecy in The Hundred Years War. I liked it.