An old Year-end Review for 2004

While cleaning up my hard drive, I found files where I kept track of the books I read for a given year. Someone had given me the idea (back in the 90s, I believe) to open a text file, and add the name of the book I'd read. What follows below looks like an "end of the year" post made to a bulletin board somewhere. It's past my time on Usenet. Many of these may have appeared elsewhere in this blog, if not the entire post itself. I'll post these files one per month.

It looks like 2004 was a banner year for me, but given that many were Lemony Snicket books, it's a little less impressive.

2004: The Year in Review

2004 -- It was a year of catching up on a number of series books. And it was probably the most books I've read in a long time (even if 12 of them were Lemony Snicket)

The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Broken Blade, Ann Marston
The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket
The Reptile Room, Lemony Snicket
The Wide Window, Lemony Snicket
The Miserable Mill, Lemony Snicket
The Austere Academy, Lemony Snicket
Cloudbearer's Shadow, Ann Marston
Rogue Pirate, John Gregory Betancourt
The King of Shadows, Ann Marston
The Ersatz Elevator, Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village, Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital, Lemony Snicket
The Carniverous Carnerval, Lemony Snicket
Let Freedom Ring, Sean Hannity
Maybe (Maybe Not), Robert Fulgrum
The Slippery Slope, Lemony Snicket
The Unauthorized Autobiography of Lemony Snicket
Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, Lynne Truss
Tom Clancy's Net Force: Night Moves
Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point
The Kingdom of Infinite Numbers: A Field Guide, Bryan Bunch
X-Files: Whirlwind, (does it matter who it's by?)
Tom Clancy's Net Force: Point of Impact
The Grim Grotto, Lemony Snicket
Tom Clancy's Net Force: Cybernation (in this one, the title actually had something to do with the story)
Vulcan!, Kathleen Sky
Stars & Stripes Forever, Harry Harrison
Stars & Stripes In Peril, Harry Harrison
Stars & Stripes Triumphant, Harry Harrison


Also
Graphic Novels: (I don't normally get to read these, but I found a stack at the local library and went through them!)
Batman: Terror (good)
Tales of the Slayers (very good, it was worth picking rather than the Buffy books)
Batman: Child of Dreams (pretty good, but pretty long)
Spiderman: The Death of Gwen Stacey (excellent -- even for reprints)
Spyboy/Young Justice (ick)
Batman: The Arrow, the Ring & the Bat (good story, but the splash pages were annoying) The family had our own little book club, with the Snicket series (so far) divided up amongst family members to be passed around. The Net Force books were a series that I received as a gift, except that the first book in the series wasn't there. Oh well. I picked up one of Harrison books at a book sale, and a friend told me he had the other two.

Tom Clancy's Net Force: CyberNation (Perry)

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point, Steve Perry (2000)

This was the last in the pile of Net Force paperbacks I'd acquired. Unlike the others, this one had a title that actually had something to do with the plot. There was an online community called Cybernation, which wanted to be an independent entity among other nations. You can imagine what kind of Revolution would be required to bring that about.

Enter Net Force, which once again wins the day, but never entirely nor convincingly. Something always slips through their grasps.

Anyway, I thought enough about these books to pass the bunch of them on to another Tom Clancy reader, even if these aren't technically by Clancy

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Point of Impact

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point, Steve Perry (2000)

Another book in the series, which overall I enjoyed even though I can't remember much about the individual books other than I was started to get tired before I finished my stack of them. Again, I didn't have Perry's name written down, so I didn't know it from looking at the cover. This one had to do with drugs capable of inducing super-strength and intelligence being sold over the Internet. Drama ensues.

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Breaking Point, Steve Perry (2000)

Don't remember it much except the personal lives of all involved move forward. A little research tells me this one had something to do with Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) driving people mad.

This was the book that got me wondering -- not that it was going to stop me from reading the next two -- if this ragtag team was ever actually going to be successful at something. Oh, sure, things get resolved but no one is going to confuse these books with real life operations at the FBI, not even those ten years in the future (which is almost now). So if the evil scientist geniuses can make quantum computers and manipulate radio waves to control minds, why do these technologies always get lost forever and how come, with all these evil scientist geniuses running around, none can duplicate the results? And how dumb are the folks who run Net Force if they can't recruit some of these geniuses who always seem to outshine their geniuses?

It's science fiction, whether they want to admit it or not. So if they want to establish that the FBI's Net Force suddenly have super-duper super computers, what's the problem? They're trying to keep it realistic?

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Night Moves

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Night Moves, Steve Perry

The apostrophe-s lets you know that Tom Clancy didn't write the book although I would've been hard-pressed to tell you who did. It's not in my list. I had to look it up online.

I received the 2nd book in the series, "Hidden Agendas", as a stocking stuffer a few years earlier. It was an okay book, although it had a bit of filler, mostly dealing with a character that I assume was important in the first book, but was totally ancillary to this story. It takes place in a future that would probably be here about now and deals with a unit of the FBI that fights crime on the Internet, and since they use virtual reality, they really do fight crime on the Internet.

This book, which is the third in the series, brings the team to England after one of them has a stroke induced over the Net and they must find who it is that can break into what should be secure computers.

Quick read.

Executive Orders (Clancy)

Executive Orders, Tom Clancy, 1998

Ryan's the president and the other countries are taking advantage. Fun to read (although I listened to the book on tape a couple of years ago), but the end was a hard read because it was a long simulation of a wargame. The mountain men subplot went nowhere. Literally.

For such a HUGE book, I don't remember why I wrote such a small review. But some memories about reading it:

I picked it up at a library sale. It was the LARGE PRINT edition. Of a TOM CLANCY book. I was lucky I was able to lift the darned thing.

My wife was amused watching me read this monstrosity in bed ... moreso when I was tired and the thing started tipping over.

And I photocopied the pages about the spleen and mailed it to some friends. Private joke.

This one could've been a good movie, but Harrison Ford already made Air Force One. It would've been confusing as to which character he was playing. Plus, the ebola virus got overdone in Hollywood really fast.

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Hidden Agendas (Pieczenik)

Tom Clancy's Net Force: Hidden Agendas created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, 1999.
(technically, I never actually saw the name of the author in the book)

An elite government computer force with cool equipment set 10 years from now. Second in the Net Force series, but the characters were well-enough introduced if you weren't familiar with them. (I wasn't. I didn't read the first book.) Lots of "hidden agendas", lot of double-crossing, but borrows two much from Die Hard. Not overwritten like many of Clancy's books and I guess that "apostrophe s" is the reason. The romances were interesting: two couples get together, one broke up, and one never got together (and if they did, it would've been way too cliche). Only one subplot seemed to go nowhere. The boss's kid was having his heart broken by a girl -- big flippin' deal as far as the rest of the story is concerned. He only briefly interacted with his father in two key scenes, neither of them key. Overall, a good read. I'll pick up the first book sometime if I see it at the library. (Glad I broke the adaptation cycle.)

Just thinking: 10 years into the future would be this year.
I still haven't read book 1, but I did read the next few as I found them.

Red Storm Rising (Tom Clancy)

Loooong, especially for one of Clancy's earlier books. It took a while to get started and was much more involved than the audiobook. Took quite a while to get through.

That's the capsule summary from 2002(?). I remember reading a used paperback. The parts that I'd previously listened to were quick reading, but the technical details were a lot of slogging. Everything other than the stuff in Iceland seemed to induce sleep.

Overall, though, I did enjoy it, but not as much as some of Clancy's other early stuff.