Posts Tagged ‘ Books-Archived ’

It’s not all comics, comics, comics, you know. I do actually read real books too – although admittedly, I seem to be going a tad slow on those recently.

Anyway, there’s a bunch of books that look like they might be right up my street if I had the time to read them and since you might be looking to scratch a zombie itch now that The Walking Dead if off the air for a while.

You could even buy them for me if you like. Or not…

Feed - I’m a sucker for new, fresh, or simply good takes on zombies (I loved Stephen King’s Cell a few years back) and this sounds promising, especially given it starts in a society rebuilt after a zombie-like breakdown 25 years previously. Mix in social media, presidential shenanigans, and a cover design that I love, and this is on the list.

Play Dead – while I’m on the subject of zombies, I like the sound of this too. In a Texas town, an entire football team save the coach and the quarterback when their bus crashes – apparently due to another team. How are you going to win a championship with a dead team? Turn to a witch doctor, apparently. In my head, this is Friday Night Lights meets Dawn of the Dead.

Death Troopers – rounding out the zombie-type books that I quite like the sound of is this – and as it’s Star Wars Zombies, I really shouldn’t have to explain why it sounds good.

The trailer for Danny Boyle’s next movie, 127 Hours, has been released, and it’s not shy about touting the Oscar-winner’s previous successes.

For the sake of movie spoilers, I’m putting the rest of this post behind a jump…

I know, I know – I’m late to the party on the Scalzi-love. That’s what I get for reading too many comics, probably…

John Perry joins the army on his 75th birthday after a quiet life as an advertising copy writer in middle America. He and his wife had both signed the Intent to Join ten years previously and had a few standard medical tests but it wasn’t binding. Now, with Kathy long dead and an adult son who no longer needs him, Perry feels like joining the army is a pretty good idea. They’ll make him younger, able to fight – and when your body’s failing you that sounds pretty damn tempting – and after five years, maybe ten, he’ll be cut loose, still young, and with a whole new life to lead.

All he has to do is accept he’ll never see Earth again.

The army in question is the Colonial Defense Force, mankind’s only front in an ongoing interstellar game of tug with hundreds of other alien races. It seems that there are only limited number of planets available for colonization out there, and there aren’t many races inclined to share.

Old Man’s War follows Perry as he receives a fantastic new body grown from the DNA taken from him ten years before, goes through basic training, and is thrown into combat. Anchored by Perry’s dry wit, the book is by turns funny, sad and horrific as he discovers that going to war against aliens isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when you and your friends have a survival rate of less than 25%. And as Perry progresses through the ranks, he comes to question the wisdom of the CDF’s strategy – especially when he encounters a Special Forces soldier who bears a striking resemblance to his late wife; just who are the Ghost Brigade anyway?

John Scalzi’s first entry into his popular series of books is, to put it bluntly, great. I don’t want to say it’s rip-roaring because that sounds a little hyperbolic, but it is rip-roaring. It’s fast paced, well-written with sharp characterization, an engaging narrative and plenty of twists. It’s got enough SCIENCE! to keep harder sci-fi readers interested without overwhelming more casual sci-fi readers like me.

Plus, it has a scene with a battle between humans and tiny Lilliputian-type aliens which involves lots of stomping – and while that sounds inherently funny, it’s actually a scene where the futility of it all really hits Perry.

For people who enjoy science-fiction, even casually, I really can’t recommend this enough.

Old Man’s War is available on Amazon, and also at all good bookstores, but I don’t get a commission from them so, you know…

I’m trying to catch up on my reading at the moment (although there are three Stephen Fry books, of which I’ve only started one, which mock me from the book shelf every time I see it) and, because I used to read a lot of fantasy as a kid I thought I’d try to get back into it.

Then again, what I read wasn’t really fantasy, it was mainly licensed fantasy. When I was younger I didn’t really know the difference. I mean, yes, I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I enjoyed the Shannara trilogy. My poison, though, was Dragonlance.

I’d inherited some Advanced D&D books (from my at that time soon-to-be-brother-in-law) and somehow managed to fall in with a small gaming group at school, and every Friday or Saturday we’d get together and game. Not always D&D – we stretched out a bit. I vaguely recall Champions games, Marvel RPG games, possibly Top Secret, some Warhammer 40K style thing set in space – but for me, it was always D&D that I loved.

The group fell apart after a couple of years and I was left with nobody to game with (aw) but I did continue reading the manuals and handbooks and the like, and designing campaigns. Yes, I was that nerdy.

Anyway, I loved the Dragonlance campaign world. I loved the mythology, the work that had been put into it, the character types and races, everything – and I devoured the books for a long time. I liked the Forgotten Realms campaign setting too, but for some reason never read the novels.

Lately as I was looking at getting back into fantasy reading, I considered re-reading the Dragonlance Chronicles, the three volume set that started the world – but I had the sneaking suspicion that they wouldn’t be as good as my fourteen year old self remembered them.

Instead, I decided to go with First King of Shannara. As I mentioned I’d read the original Shannara trilogy (Sword, Elfstones and Wishsong) before – more than once – and remembered them fondly if through the haze of memory. The fact that author Terry Brooks had turned out a few more in the series, including the First King prequel book, made me quietly confident that the series would hold up.

But man, this is hard work.

I’m only 80 or so pages in right now, but there’s very little original about it. There’s a mounting threat in some corner of the world; only a select few know about it; nobody listens to them so they decide to do the best they can on their own; a small group forms then splits into subsets to pursue individual quests; the threat attacks, wreaking havoc on one of the only forces that could oppose them, meaning that our heroes now have to save the world as we know it.

If any of that sounds familiar at all, like – oh, I don’t know – any fantasy book you’ve ever read – then you’ll understand where I’m coming from. It’s predictable, trite and not particularly engaging.

I think this only serves to underscore that you can’t go home again – unless anyone wants to recommend me some fantasy that I might like?