Sunidesus Reads

The Final Warning, by James Patterson

Fourth in the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson.

This one was kind of "eh" for me. Not that the previous three are great literature or anything, they're just fun easy reads. This one however, came off really preachy.

I think what worked before was that it was mostly about these kids who just wanted to be normal kids. That seemed to take a backseat to "The Message" this time. It ended up being a let's jump on the environmental/global warming band-wagon thing.

Not that the environment isn't important, it is. But it completely took over the book and in a very heavy handed way. It felt more like propaganda than a book one would read for enjoyment.

Art in the Blood, by P. N. Elrod

Fourth in the Vampire Files series by P.N. Elrod...

This'll be short I think since these are fun plot-driven books that so far haven't had a lot else going on. Which is ok, a person needs that now and then.

Jack ends up befriending an artist and then investigating when the artist's friend/almost love interest shows up dead. Said artist's wife having died of a suspicious suicide a while back making him the main suspect in the current murder.

Blindness, by Jose Saramago

Well, that was an incredibly strange book.

I first saw it a few months ago and thought it sounded interesting, but didn't get around to reading it right away. A few weeks ago I started seeing trailers for the movie adaptation and figured I should get around to reading the book. And assuming the movie is anything past mediocre it's going to be one of the very few exceptions to my normal "the book is always better" rule.

The author, Jose Saramago, is apparently a Nobel laureate, and he and his books are popular and critically acclaimed and all that. Which seems odd to me, I think it desperately needs a ruthless copy-editor.

One of the Amazon reviews said that they thought the lack of punctuation and run-on sentences and complete confusion of the writing was to keep the reader as confused as the characters. Which would be a good point, except that that seems to be the way the guy writes everything. So it wasn't a choice for effect.

Beyond the writing style (which can be dealt with even if it's incredibly annoying) the characters were weird and their actions just didn't make sense. Why would everyone stop using names? If you can't see to describe someone the most logical way to identify them is by their name. But instead everyone just wanders around and thinks names are useless for some reason.

They all seem to slide entirely too easily into behaving like animals. I realize that newly blinded people wouldn't be able to take care of themselves as easily as someone who has been blind for a longer amount of time, but none of them even try! They all just give up. And wouldn't it make sense to recruit actual blind people to help out? They can't "catch" whatever is blinding people so when it seems like it'll be a containable event, why not have blind people there to explain how to do things? To share their experiences?

I lost patience with "the doctor's wife" pretty early on. She gets more and more upset by the way everyone is living, and yet does nothing to help the situation. She's in the perfect position to help a ton of people and she does nothing. Because she's afraid she'll have to lead everyone around all the time? That's just silly! Blind people don't need to be led everywhere. Help them figure out how to take care of themselves, how to help themselves.

The whole thing just came off as very condescending and pretentious.

Foundations, by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Fifth dead tree Star Trek SCE book, collects ebooks #17-#19...

It's an SCE book that isn't a re-read. Yay! This one was really fun. There's a common story that threads around the three ebooks with the normal main characters, the three books themselves are about Scotty and the beginnings of the SCE.

The first one is set before ST:TOS, Scotty is on his way to join the Enterprise for the first time and ends up helping out with a problem at an outpost in the Neutral Zone.

Second is after a first season episode of TOS. The SCE gets sent to help clean up after Kirk et al find a planet being ruled by a computer (The Return of the Archons). This one was the most interesting to me I think. It's such an interesting idea, at the end of the episode everything seems solved and it's all going to be ok. But in reality what happens to those people once the Enterprise leaves? Their entire society and way of life has been turned upside down, so who cleans up the mess? Turns out the SCE does that.

I remember having a conversation on a Farscape message board a while back that was similar (what happens to that woman after Crichton leaves in "I, ET"?) and I find it a really fascinating thing to contemplate. I really think it goes back to high school and "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead", that idea that these people all have lives that continue after they exit stage left.

Anyway! The third one happens at some point after the second season TOS episode "By Any Other Name," since it involves the same aliens and Scotty reminisces about the experience.

1633, by Eric Flint & David Weber

Second in the 1632 series by Eric Flint & David Weber...

Seems I have been horribly neglectful of the books blog again, I'm writing this a good two months after reading the book. Very silly of me.

So... this continues the stories of the people sent back in time to 1632, they're starting to have a serious impact on world happenings (or at least the going's on in Europe). There's a lot going on with history books being essentially smuggled out to other countries and what those other leaders do with the information. Say you're Richelieu, or King Charles I and you get this information telling you what's going to happen. What do you do? Do you get rid of the people who are supposedly going to be your downfall? Or change what made them want to get rid of you in the first place?

Of course nothing will go according to the history books any more anyway because there's all kinds of change happening anyway. But can you learn from the mistakes you would have made in different circumstances? Try to change policies or stear things in a different direction? It matches well with the idea of predestination that was a big deal at the time. Calvin and all of that. Which is a really big idea for me to get my brain around anyway.

I'm liking this series a lot, but it does have me going to Wikipedia frequently. My 1600's European history knowledge isn't very good!