Dirty Machines (Olson)

Dirty Machines, by David Matthew Olson, 2014

Dirty Machines is a story that puts forward a lot of ideas and doesn't develop any of them, which is a shame because some of them could have been good. Starting from the beginning where the main character's name is omitted and references to it are jarring to say the least. (Seriously, it's "[Del]" or "[Del]'s" or similar and it wasn't until much later that I realized that it was supposed to be a reference to the "Delete" key.) Not that it matters what his name is because he'll change it when he goes into the future.

The plot centers on the head of the world's only Time Travel company (which replaces the letter "T" with stylized crosses everywhere!) personally comes back a few decades to convince our nameless protagonist to journey into the future. Here's the hook: if he doesn't, history says he's about to die from a stray bullet while minding his own business. However, they can replace him with some poor shlub from the past who is genetically similar and dressed up in a matching outfit. The doomed man, who would've died alone in the past and never have been found, gets a quick death and spares a life. The catch: now that he knows, he can't avoid his fate because they can hit a magic Reset button and he'll be back on the subway before the offer was made with no memory of the meeting and blindly unaware that he'll be on his way to his death.

Naturally, he agrees after considering if this is some kind of gag. And smoking some weed. And whining and complaining about stuff.

Never answered is why Jim Doors (a reference to things hidden behind doors or to Jim Morrison of the Doors?) is so interested in the protagonist. Yes, a reason is given, but it isn't a satisfactory one, so you figure that there must be more to it. The most important, most powerful man in the world takes a special interest in some random pothead, stand-up comedian because he thinks he can write click-bait articles to get the world reading more? What?

The time travel at the center of the story is even more confusing. Everyone is free to travel back in time to visit important events as spectators, but no one may change The Course because that would be bad. But with all these people going into the past (there are mandatory trips), where are they? Only a handful are ever present at an event, such as a bus filled with witnesses to a major milestone in time travel history could be seen by the people of that Era and yet it's always the same bus. Does the trip get Reset? But then why is it there to be seen in the Past.

The title "dirty machines" refers to unauthorized time travel machines and isn't referenced until at least three-quarters of the way through the book. It could have been a separate plot in itself (and probably should have). And then there's the ending, which I won't mention, except to say that that scene should have taken place a hundred pages sooner with the story going on from there.

I could go on nitpicking some pretty sizable nits, and not just the massive numbers of typos. The narrative is disjointed, randomly switching point-of-view characters. There are no chapters, just breaks in the text. An entire section is crossed out -- I guess to symbolize that it didn't take place. Details of the future are sketchy and are poorly delivered. The main character is lost without his iPhone but hesitates to use Current tech to the point that others have to keep filling him in. The book touches real life with a flyer for Stephen Hawking's party for time travelers and circles back to it with time travelers having a party across the street and observing Hawking through his window all alone. Hawking could never know the "truth" of the matter. Ultimately, he got the better end of that deal.

Final note: the book suffered from not having an editor or a copy editor.

Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder (Mauritsen)

Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder, by Roy A. Mauritsen, 2012 I was first drawn to this story by a series of paintings hanging in the Art Room at Lunacon (a long-running Northeastern science fiction convention, usually held in Rye, NY), each with its own vignette, giving a new twist on each of the fairy tale characters that were more in line with the original interpretations than the 20th-century incarnations. The artist was Roy A. Mauritsen, and his book uses these characters.

His incarnations flow together very nicely with a few odd twists among them, most of which are enjoyable. (I have a couple of quibbles about how some of the characters, and their relationships to each other, but they work within the story.)

I don't want to give anything away -- I'd rather let the characters reveal themselves as the story progresses, even if you think you know who's coming next, as you get caught up in the tales of those grim days after the Beanstalk War when Cinderella has to ascend to the throne. Fairy magic is on the wane and with it the power of witches, but is there another source of power that can be tapped into?

My only complaint was that the subplot was actually the build-up to the sequel, which I now have to find. (Like I wasn't going to get it anyway!)

365 Things I Learned the Hard Way (So You Don't Have To) (The Digital Writer, Jonathan Wondrusch)

365 Things I Learned the Hard Way (So You Don't Have To), by The Digital Writer (Jonathan Wondrusch), 2012

A free ebook on the writing business by a writer. Quick! What's he trying to sell me? Actually, he isn't selling me one thing -- he's selling me on a lifestyle, a workstyle, a way to make it all click, if that's what I want. And that should be what I want.

The Digital Writer puts together and presents information in a usable way, heavy on the discipline, easy on the hard sell. He recommends ways to establish your presence, your brand, online in social media, and the ways to monetize it. Because if you aren't monetizing, then what are you doing? He also tells you when to pay for others to do the work for you -- specifically, hiring an editor and paying for good cover design.

A good chunk of the book is dedicated to writing copy, which is a promising field to get into that pays well when jobs are available, as well as making ebooks starting with information that's readily available by consolidated so that the reader doesn't have to research it, and search engine optimization, because you want users to find you when you know that they aren't going to look at that second page on Google.

Ebooks, by the way, are a great source of steady income once you build a following. There's a good discussion on pricing, which has recently changed as Amazon has changed its terms.

The final part of the book is a Q & A from letters he received on his Digital Writer blog. They get a little repetitive with the rest of the book and with other questions, but it's definitely worth skimming. One thing that impressed me was that he recommends two great books to learn how to write copy -- and they aren't his. They're the ones that he learned from and he recommends them. You have to admire that. If nothing else, it definitely improves his brand.

The God in the Clear Rock (Randolph)

The God in the Clear Rock, by Lucian Randolph, 2011

I "purchased" The God in the Clear Rock as a free download after seeing it promoted on Reddit or, perhaps, some other site listing free ebooks. I'm glad I didn't waste any money on it, and I'm certainly not going to spend a dime on any of the sequels.

Full disclosure: I didn't get far beyond Chapter 1, but had I kept trying, I'd still be reading this book weeks later. I'm stunned by how poorly it's written. This isn't a case of misspellings and glaring typos. The prose itself, the descriptions, the dialogues, the analogies used in the exposition need serious work. The writing is terrible. The dialogue is terrible. The odd metaphors describing actions and objects are more distracting than helpful.

One of the dangers of self-publishing is that you try to do everything yourself and don't get good feedback. One piece of advice I've seen repeated is spend the money you need to on an editor and good cover art. The cover art is decent. The absence of an editor is obvious.

The writing was so distracting that I couldn't stay with it long enough to discover if the story (which the author states in the Foreward would be a cliffhanger in each part) was worth trying to follow. The other reviews I saw on sites such as GoodReads tell me that I made the correct choice.

The one bright side of this: I'm curious how many of these books his put out and what his sales are like. If this guy can make enough money on ebooks to write six novels, then anybody can.

Realm of Measure (Asimov)

Realm of Measure From the yardstick to the Theory of Relativity, by Isaac Asimov, 1960 Removed from circulation from my school library and regulated to the trash pile before I spotted the circa-1960 photo of Isaac Asimov on the back cover (looking younger than I've ever seen him before, so I surprised myself by recognizing him), serendipity brought Realm of Measure: From the yardstick to the Theory of Relativity into my possession.

I'm happy that it did. Though billed as an exploration of mathematics, he veers off a bit into scientific measurements, but I'll still count this toward my goal of reading one interesting book on math each summer, and this one does it without spinning out of control with endless, overly-complicated and overly-ridiculous equations.

Asimov goes into the history of measurements and how certain units came about and how the different units relate to one another. Not only did lengths like palms and feet have to be standardized from person to person and town to town, but also in relation to each so that they could be divided more evenly among people without formal education but who could count and compute the basic operations.

Asimov pushes for the metric system often throughout the book, as it's used a lot in science (where he was quite at home), not to mention in most of the non-English-speaking world. (He doesn't actually mention the measure of the English-speaking world using British units.)

The biggest problem with his arguments is that he presented the beauty of American/British system in its origins. If you were a wordsmith, you might be interested in the etymology of words, where they came from and how they came to be. You wouldn't stand for simplified spellings that are attempted from time to time. (Benjamin Franklin had a serious plan to change the language and simplify spelling, for instance.) When you read the origin of who's foot we use and who's armlength, and why a furlong is 1/8 of a mile, there is a wonder to it that goes beyond, "You see, there's this stick, and it has these two marks in it...."

Further, the system of divisions make sense. Think of the times. Think of the people and how they lived. If they split things, they likely halved them. If they had to quarter something, they halved it again. How often did someone come along with nine of his friends and need things sorted out evenly among them. And for all those divisions, 10 isn't a great number to work with: you can only divide it by 2 and 5, but not 3 nor 4. Dividing 12 by 2, 3, 4 and 6 proved more convenient, if it you lose 5. Moreover, metric conversion is easy in that you can switch units simply by moving the decimal point, but first you had to invent the decimal point! And that didn't happen to, what, the sixteenth century?

Oddly enough, I can sit here and argue that the time for the metric system has passed. We're living in a computer age, ruled by binary and hexidecimal. The number 10 really doesn't fit well into that scheme. And once you get passed 11th year math, base 10 goes out the window in favor of natural logs and e.

Not that any of this took away from my enjoyment of his book, which I heartily recommend to all with the proviso, "Don't try to read it in bed when you're really tired."

And I'll close by considering how close NYC came to allowing 16-ounce soft drinks while banning 500 milliliters. Metric: not even once.

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Apparently, this is the first Asimov book I've reviewed, as his name was not one of the tags, which is odd because I have read some of his books since I started this blog, or at least since I kept track of the books in my paper journal. The most recent Asimov book I read which comes to mind was The Currents of Space. It's an Empire book and I remember wondering when the Robots would show up because I had Caves of Steel on my mind.

Guilty Pleasures (Hamilton)

Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #1), by Laurell K. Hamilton, 1993

Before Buffy was slaying vampires on television, Anita Blake was executing them in a series of novels.

Anita is an Animator, she has the ability to raise the dead, creating zombies who can, briefly, retain their memories and personalities. She also kills vampires, but there's a catch. Vampires have are people, too, you know. They have rights, and they can only be put down by court order. Otherwise, they stay and operate in their own districts of the city. Guilty Pleasures is just your typical vampire nightclub. It isn't hiding anything nefarious. Of course, it's not.

As the story opens, Anita is being hired by a vampire whom she recently knew as a person. They want her to look into a series of unsanctioned vampire killings. She's not a private detective, but they think that she knows her stuff. Who better than someone who kills vampires to deal with another vampire killer.

Oddly enough, even though she isn't a private detective, that didn't stop me from reading the book if, in fact, she were. Actually, in my mind, the narrator had the same voice as the woman who reads the Sue Grafton, "Kinsey Millhone" audiobooks. It made for an interesting but unintended mash-up. I enjoyed the book, although I wasn't riveted. I took my time, mostly reading it on the trains, and occasionally before sleeping. I would recommend it if you like your vampires straight-up evil, manipulative and oozing with power. They may have the rights of humans, but they aren't trying to be human.

I found the first five books in the series on a shelf at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. Unfortunately, I only picked out the first book because I didn't want to spent that much money upfront on a series that I knew nothing about, hadn't heard of before. For all I knew, I was buying "chick lit". You may like that sort of thing, but it's not high on my summer reading list (even if I did buy it in the springtime). It's probably better this way because buying the first book forced me to read it sooner so I could decide to go back for the others before it was too late. A good plan, but I didn't move quickly enough -- someone picked up the rest of them before me.

By the way, had I bought all of them, they could still be sitting there on my shelf. I have bought quartets of books only to return them a year or two later, unread.

Two notes about the series:

First, they seem to have been popular, despite my not having heard of them. I asked online if anyone nearby had copies of the books. I got quite a few responses. Two guys I might've expected had had them, but they're too far away to borrow the books (the tolls just to Jersey are over $20, and let's not forget the gas!). And two women who I wouldn't have suspected both told me that they had read them when they came out, but neither had them any more.

Second, be warned that the series changes after the fifth or sixth books. Fans debate whether or not the change was for the better. What was the change? I don't know, but I could guess. And if I couldn't, my sister's response of "LOL! Oh, yeah, they changed!" tells me that it's probably not in a direction I'm wanting to follow.

That said, if I can find these books, I might have 4 or 5 more good reads this summer.

Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1746-47 (Chesterfield)

Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1746-47, by Earl of Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, 1747

I am not kidding about either the title of the book by the Earl of Chesterfield or the fact that I read his letters. There were quite interesting, illuminating even, although I wish I'd had the Internet handy more often when reading it to look up some archaic words or translate some French, German or Latin phrases.

I saw the e-book while perusing the freebies on Amazon.com. This one caught my attention, and I'm glad it did -- so glad, in fact, that I don't mind posting that website, which I usually shy away from doing.

Two reasons to read it: first, a little historical lesson couldn't hurt (and it didn't); second, what better way to write the part of a gentleman than to have one explain to his son how to become one (this worked for me). A couple of the chapters were boring, but others were instructive or downright amusing (and not always intentionally).

It's a short, free book, and I recommend it.

The Giving Plague (Brin)

The Giving Plague, by David Brin, 1987

I don't usually review short stories, but I downloaded this for free onto my iPad and read it with my Kindle app in the same way that I read a lot of books. And since I re-launching my reading list blog, it doesn't hurt to start a little smaller.

First off, if I hadn't read the afterword, I wouldn't have realized that this story was written over 25 years ago. It hasn't dated. What makes that notable is the fact that it was written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when the public was finally aware of what the disease was and what it was capable of doing. It's not an "AIDS story", but you can see how a plague of that kind influenced it. (Another way of putting that: if it had been written a few years later, it might have been inspired by, say, the ebola virus.)

The story is narrated by a biologist who makes a discovery about a new virus spreading through the population with an unusual property: it makes people more altruistic, starting with a desire to donate blood, which is how the virus seems to spread. Research and ethical questions follow and do consequences and possibilities of accolades and Nobel prizes.

An interesting little story, which isn't dated at all. If anything, now that AIDS is being tamed, it has to make you wonder what could come next that AIDS seem like a case of chicken pox.

"The Giving Plague" should be available for free for ereaders. The story can be found in its entirety on Brin's website in HTML form, usable by any browser.

My Reading List Is Coming Back Online

I've been away from the blog, but not away from reading. Granted, I still don't read as much as I'd like, but mostly because I don't allow myself the time. Moreover, there are too many things sucking time away -- most of them online, but some just on TV.

I will NOT write reviews for the things I've read over the past four years, except for the things I've read more recently. This may tend to get boring, seeing that I'm reading the next book in a popular series, followed by the one after that, but I'd rather write about something from recent memory.

I've noticed that people have stumbled across entries for specific books through online searches. I looked at those entries, and some of them are pretty sad. They date from the time after I wrote little reviews in my little notebook but before I stopped keeping track of the books. After a while, the details fade. Now, you may think that with good books, the details shouldn't fade that much, but if you've read a dozen books since then, it's not hard to imagine that names and details might get muddied or confused.

Right now, I've tracked my most recent books on GoodReads, but I usually just give a star rating, without comments. The reviews there tend toward "it was good/bad" amd what was good/bad about it, and not capsule summaries, which is a good thing, really, because who needs 50 or 500 capsule summaries of the same book. Would anyone read them? It would be quicker to read the book! (That reminds me of the time I discovered that the Cliffs Notes for some book in high school was actually longer than the book itself.)

I'll probably go in reverse order, except for series, until I go back far enough that I don't remember anything. New books as I finish them.

And for those you who found this page because of my comics blog, welcome.
Those of you who didn't know I had a comics blog (where I make math comics, I don't write about other people's comics), check out (x, why?).

Tales of the Slayers (graphic novel)

Tales of the Slayers (graphic novel)

As previously mentioned, I don't usually read graphic novels, but the library had a bunch of them and I had time during the summer. I picked up a few of them.

There were a few Buffy, the Vampire Slayer comics, almost all featuring the characters from the show. Casually flipping through them, I wasn't interested. However, Tales of the Slayers was different. It was a bunch of short stories featuring Slayers from the past and the future, filling in more of the mythos rather than simply supplementing the series. I enjoyed it.

Batman: Terror (graphic novel)

Batman: Terror (graphic novel)

I don't usually read graphic novels, but the library had a bunch of them and I had time during the summer. I picked up a few of them.

This one was quite good featuring Batman squaring off against both Hugo Strange and Scarecrow (who has plans of his own that Strange is unaware of). Catwoman also puts in an appearance. Worth reading.

I'm glad this was the first one I picked up. Otherwise, I might not have read any more.

Star & Stripes Triumphant (Harrison)

Star & Stripes Triumphant, Harry Harrison (2001)

The satisfying conclusion to an excellent trilogy finds the United States at war with Great Britain, with Ireland playing an important role. The rules of engagement have changed as warfare has moved into a new age.