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OK, I'm claiming amnesty here. Super short reviews.
#54: Pwned by Mark Vancil. Rating: 3. The Gamers, only in book form and for MMPORGS. Boy loses girl to RPG, boy joins RPG to win her back, complications ensue. Nothing groundbreaking, but sweet, and goes out of its way to side step some of the potential gender issues.
#55: Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants by Alison Maloney. Rating: 2. Author tried to ride the Downton Abbey wave by throwing together a bunch of factoids. This is mostly a series of references to other, better, books.
#56: Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World by Alison Weir. Rating: 3.5. Exhaustively researched, sometimes a little more exhaustive than necessary. Henry VIII's mother has a dramatic and fascinating early life, but after she marries his father, he sidelines her as much as possible. So the second half of her life is, while not necessarily uneventful, extremely passive and underdocumented. (Actually, a number of events in her life are underdocumented. Weir makes do in some places by acknowledging but still using some dubious information, or by overwhelming us with meaningless detail because that's all she's got to work with.) A good background for understanding the power plays of the various families of her son's wives, though.
#57: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman. Rating: 5. Another masterful collection of often incredibly creepy short stories and poems by Gaiman. Some of these only sort of stand on their own--"A Calendar of Tales" and "Diamonds and Pearls" are media experiments that probably worked better in context. But the inventive twist of "The Thing About Cassandra", the mixed fairy tale of "The Sleeper and the Spindle", the rather hilarious "Orange" and more all showcase Gaiman's skills as a world-builder.
#58: The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi. Rating: 2. I'd thought perhaps the movie was based on the book; instead, the movie inspired the grandson to write the book. I'm not sure it was really necessary. There are some interesting tidbits here and there, but it's not particularly insightful or exciting. And, as real lives generally do, it rather lacks a climax, mostly trailing off with a whimper. Logue did indeed accomplish something useful and important, but the book hardly lives up to the grandiose title.
#59: Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel. Rating: 3. Sobel clearly needed a hook for a generic Galileo biography, and latched onto Galileo's daughter, a nun who wrote her father an absurd number of letters. Unfortunately, we're talking about a girl cloistered in puberty with the Poor Clares. So...she doesn't actually have much of interest to add. She's not allowed out. So the book is mostly just about Galileo, which is interesting, but has certainly been covered before.
#60: Lock In by John Scalzi. Rating: 4.5. Look, all Scalzi books are written in basically the same voice, and most of his characters sound basically like him. But I really like his voice. In this case, we've got a murder mystery in a world where a sizable minority have been rendered completely paralyzed but aware by a flu variant, and drive around robot bodies instead. It lets him do some fun things with identity--it takes a fair amount of guesswork to even figure out the gender and ethnicity of the protagonist (and it really doesn't matter much). Brisk, clever, and witty, with a satisfying ending.
#54: Pwned by Mark Vancil. Rating: 3. The Gamers, only in book form and for MMPORGS. Boy loses girl to RPG, boy joins RPG to win her back, complications ensue. Nothing groundbreaking, but sweet, and goes out of its way to side step some of the potential gender issues.
#55: Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants by Alison Maloney. Rating: 2. Author tried to ride the Downton Abbey wave by throwing together a bunch of factoids. This is mostly a series of references to other, better, books.
#56: Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World by Alison Weir. Rating: 3.5. Exhaustively researched, sometimes a little more exhaustive than necessary. Henry VIII's mother has a dramatic and fascinating early life, but after she marries his father, he sidelines her as much as possible. So the second half of her life is, while not necessarily uneventful, extremely passive and underdocumented. (Actually, a number of events in her life are underdocumented. Weir makes do in some places by acknowledging but still using some dubious information, or by overwhelming us with meaningless detail because that's all she's got to work with.) A good background for understanding the power plays of the various families of her son's wives, though.
#57: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman. Rating: 5. Another masterful collection of often incredibly creepy short stories and poems by Gaiman. Some of these only sort of stand on their own--"A Calendar of Tales" and "Diamonds and Pearls" are media experiments that probably worked better in context. But the inventive twist of "The Thing About Cassandra", the mixed fairy tale of "The Sleeper and the Spindle", the rather hilarious "Orange" and more all showcase Gaiman's skills as a world-builder.
#58: The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi. Rating: 2. I'd thought perhaps the movie was based on the book; instead, the movie inspired the grandson to write the book. I'm not sure it was really necessary. There are some interesting tidbits here and there, but it's not particularly insightful or exciting. And, as real lives generally do, it rather lacks a climax, mostly trailing off with a whimper. Logue did indeed accomplish something useful and important, but the book hardly lives up to the grandiose title.
#59: Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel. Rating: 3. Sobel clearly needed a hook for a generic Galileo biography, and latched onto Galileo's daughter, a nun who wrote her father an absurd number of letters. Unfortunately, we're talking about a girl cloistered in puberty with the Poor Clares. So...she doesn't actually have much of interest to add. She's not allowed out. So the book is mostly just about Galileo, which is interesting, but has certainly been covered before.
#60: Lock In by John Scalzi. Rating: 4.5. Look, all Scalzi books are written in basically the same voice, and most of his characters sound basically like him. But I really like his voice. In this case, we've got a murder mystery in a world where a sizable minority have been rendered completely paralyzed but aware by a flu variant, and drive around robot bodies instead. It lets him do some fun things with identity--it takes a fair amount of guesswork to even figure out the gender and ethnicity of the protagonist (and it really doesn't matter much). Brisk, clever, and witty, with a satisfying ending.
