Reviewing--Decisions, decisions.

I haven't done a proper book review in forever--but I got two interesting reads in the post today.

The Strain is the first in a promised trilogy from Chuck Hogan and the wonderfully creative director Guillermo Del Toro (whose work I love--if you are a Netflix junkie, you could do worse than see El Espinazo del Diablo, a totally brilliant ghost story/coming of age movie)involving vampires--yay. I need some sunny days and backyard time to get a nice grip on whether this is best take on vampires evah--or, you know, just a nice read. Victor Stenger's Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness is not going to be as much of a lounge chair read. But really, if its weightiness is a brick thrown at the overinflated nonsense of woo like What the Bleep do I Know? (which my husband, who can also stomach Fox News Sunday, actually saw in its entirety, and I couldn't sit through at all) then it is necessary and good and I must read it and comment.

But right now I'm plowing through Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series because I saw like, four of them in Farley's Bookstore up in New Hope, and totally realized I have to read them all. I love Richard and Kahlan from the tv version, "Legend of the Seeker". But the books are just insanely good reads. I'm not usually much for "sword and sorcerer" fantasy (I like rocket ships and future dystopias, thanks!) but Goodkind's SoT universe is very creative and his storylines are just densely-packed with character-and-narrative-driven goodness--I get all tangled up in it.

So it'll be maybe a couple weeks before I post a decent book review on one or both. It's what I consider the upside of my book-addiction.


Note: My quick post on Neiwert's The Eliminationists doesn't really count because it's not a proper book review. But really: it's almost impossible to read a book and not be impressed while eliminationist rhetoric and the actions that it leads to are actually major stories in the news while you are reading it. Take the recent story of how a murder tragedy links up with a) an anti-immigration group, the Minutemen, and b) mainstream politics. Now, the alleged perpetrator did not seem to be wrapped too tightly as a human being, and the Minutemen actually tossed Shawna Forde out for being too weird for them, and former US Rep. Tancredo sent his regrets regarding that one event (to get my "fairness" out of the way) but nonetheless--when I consider the Holocaust shooter and the muderer of Dr. Tiller, and the nonsense of stories that indicate that ammo has been flying off store shelves--and the weird possibility that even members of Congress might take the Obama "birther" nonsense seriously, it all just makes me sit back in wonder and sadness. Neiwert's book didn't help, but....well, he's totally described it correctly.