The Walking Dead, Volume 14: No Way Out by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2011)

Oh hell yes. The Walking Dead, Volume 14: No Way Out by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2011) is the one I'd been waiting for. That whole "humans are the real monsters" thing was good for awhile, but it was about time that Kirkman got back to dancing with the ones what brung us to this spectacularly fucked up hoe down: THE ZOMBIES! And there are zombies a-plenty here when the Alexandria Safe-Zone is besieged by a zombie herd and the walls begin to fail. And besides all the zombie heads being axed, shot, and macheteed, there is plenty of time for all that juicy character development and moral quandries that we have come to love. Let's keep this up!

Horror Films of the 1990s by John Kenneth Muir (2011)

Oh, hi. Wonder where I've been? Mostly I've been simultaneously reading two gigantic books, and Horror Films of the 1990s by John Kenneth Muir (2011) is the one that I just finished! It may seem weird to read a reference book on 1990s horror movies cover-to-cover, but I got a copy through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I couldn't in good faith write a review of it without reading the whole thing.

The 1990s are generally known as being a rather weak period for horror movies, and while there are plenty of one star reviews in Muir's book (and, actually, those are pretty entertaining to read), there are a good crop of four star movies in there as well. It helps that Muir casts his net wide -- the usual suspects like Scream or The Blair Witch Project and standard series like Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th, and Child's Play are joined by movies like Lost Highway, Silence of the Lambs, Jurassic Park, and Eyes Wide Shut. I like that Muir has a broad definition of horror, and I also like that he watched and reviewed all of these hundreds of movies by himself. He has also written compendiums on horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s, so he presumably knew what he was getting into with this one.

While the book cover couldn't look more like a high school sociology textbook, the contents are nicely organized and well illustrated. Muir starts each year off with a timeline of events and then moves into an alphabetical listing of the films reviewed from that year. Each movie includes complete cast and crew information, and many movies also include quotes from external reviews (both contemporary and retrospective), some of which contradict Muir and each other. Enveloping all this detailed information is a well-written introductory essay on the 1990s and how current events influenced the horror movies of the decade, and some intriguing appendices, including common themes from the 1990s (the police procedural, the interloper, the "meta" horror movie, etc.), movie tag lines, and Muir's personal top ten.

That personal top ten goes a long way to explaining why I liked this book so much -- it is a personal look at a huge number of genre movies. I don't always agree with Muir (I didn't like Scream at all and he loved it), but even when I disagreed with him I was interested to see his reasoning. And he always has reasons!

The book loses steam as you get into the late 1990s -- reviews are shorter and sloppier -- and sometimes Muir's quirks can get a little annoying (he is a little nit-picky about plot details) -- but overall this is a coherent and very readable overview of a huge swath of film history. Definitely recommended for horror movie fans, and since I'm married to this guy, you know that I am one of those!

The Walking Dead, Volume 13: Too Far Gone by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

Ah yes, much as I expected, things are starting to get interesting again in The Walking Dead, Volume 13: Too Far Gone by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010). The Alexandria Safe Zone, a seemingly utopian community planned before the zombie crisis as a solar-powered mini-refuge, being filled as it was with those fallible humans, had some rifts and slime bubbling up under the surface. Naturally, our newly settled band of lovable survivors, particularly Rick, couldn't let things go unremarked (that's what we love about him!) and the big issues of justice, punishment, self-defense, and survival once again rise to the top.

The Walking Dead, Volume 12: Life Among Them by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

Well, I knew it had to happen sometime -- we couldn't just hang out with limited characters out in the open forever, but I'm a little skeptical of where things are going in The Walking Dead, Volume 12: Life Among Them by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010) now that our characters have found a somewhat-utopian community of Alexandria in which to life their "normal" lives. The character count just about quadruples in this volume, and that in itself was a little overwhelming. Of course I know that things are never what they seem, so I'm hoping for some disruptive action in the next volume.

[Also, I was totally right about that dude.]

The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett (1974)

I have gushed about how much I like Leigh Brackett before, so I won't go over all her awesome qualities again except to say that she never disappoints. When I saw this copy of Brackett's The Ginger Star (1974) at a second-hand store in Omaha earlier this year, I grabbed it (along with a ton of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books) right away.

Eric John Stark was born in a mining colony on Mercury. When his parents and the rest of the humans died in an accident, he was taken in and raised by the native inhabitants of the planet. Later more humans came and killed all the "savage beasts" and took Stark as a curiosity. He was caged and humiliated until being rescued and taught English and human ways by Simon Ashton. Now Ashton, a representative of the interplanetary alliance, has disappeared on a little-known planet called Skaith and Stark will do whatever it takes to find him.

Skaith is an ancient and dying planet. Many thousands of years ago it had a vibrant artistic and scientific culture. Then planetary climate changes forced people to abandon the northern cities and resettle in the South. Much of their culture was lost in the struggle for survival and over the centuries pockets of people evolved into very different beings with very different ways of life. Over it all sit the Lords Protector -- unseen and ever present -- represented throughout the planet by their Wandsmen, wizards who maintain order and punish wrongdoing. Most of the planet scrapes by to support the lifestyle of the Wandsmen and the Farers, children of the Wandsmen who never work and only seek out pleasure in sex and drugs. But the sun that Skaith orbits is dying and the planet is gradually becoming more and more uninhabitable. A group of Iranese reach out to the interplanetary alliance and ask to be transported off the planet and resettled elsewhere. This threatens to destroy the world of the Wandsmen and the Farers and they fight back against Ashton and Stark.

Brackett is like a combination of Burroughs and Bradbury -- this is inventive, classic science fiction with an exciting action/adventure bent. As Stark traverses the planet looking for Ashton, we touch on the various inhabitants -- mer-people who had their genes altered centuries ago so they could survive the planetary changes by living under the ocean, people who join together in hypnotized religious pods before killing themselves as a group, Northern miners who harvest metal from long-abandoned ancient cities, and many more. Brackett gives each character a full description and a solid purpose but doesn't dwell on any one group, sticking instead with Stark, the ultimate instinctual outsider, as he works through his single-purposed quest.

This is the first book in a trilogy, and I liked it so much that I've already bought the other two. If you come across anything by Brackett at the used bookstore, pick it up right away -- you will not be disappointed.

***
P.S. I'm working on a theory that George R.R. Martin read and liked these Skaith novels because there are so many parallels with the Game of Thrones: a hero named Stark, a modern world reacting to an ancient and partially-forgotten past, a North/South divide, tiny mystical people called the Children who live in the far north, freaky giant wolves, an abundant use of the word Southron -- definitely something to think about!

The Walking Dead, Volume 11: Fear the Hunters by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

This volume maintains the tight pacing and close observation of characters that we've had since leaving the prison. At this point, we are so deep in a morass of complicated human failure and moral conundrums that it almost doesn't matter that there are herds of zombies out there just waiting to eat our brains. If you put those herds up against fratricide, the death penalty for children, and very very talkative cannibals, it is hard to say which way of life is really the more rewarding. This volume also features the death of one of my favorite characters, but it was done with such care that I almost don't mind at all.

Gathering of Waters by Bernice McFadden (2012)

I got this copy of Gathering of Waters by Bernice McFadden (2012) through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program early in 2012 and I'm sad it took me so long to read it. Luckily, it got its chance when the book I'd just started was way too big to take with me in my carry-on bag on a recent plane trip, and Gathering of Waters was just the right size. I started the book at 4:30 in the morning at the Austin airport and finished it at two in the afternoon in the plane on the way to my final destination.

Gathering of Waters centers on the infamous 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi by two white men after they say he whistled a white woman at the grocery. Instead of being weighed down by the heavy history of her centerpoint, McFadden's novel creates a structure that is epic and small, spiritual and humorous, and that acknowledges the evil that exists in humanity while resolutely turning away from it.

The book starts in the early 1900s where a young girl in Oklahoma named Doll is possessed by the spirit of a murdered prostitute. Her mother unsuccessfully tries to exorcise the spirit and gives her daughter to the local pastor to raise as part of his family. Things are fine for several years, but when the spirit awakens in Doll, she seduces the pastor, breaks up the home, and the new family ends up moving to Money, Mississippi. We then follow Doll, her daughter Hemmingway, and her husband and son (along with the parallel story of a white family in the same town whose fate is intertwined with Doll's) through a rocky life leading up to the deadly flood of 1927. Eventually we make it to the 1950s where Hemmingway's daughter, Tass, has a crush on Emmett Till, the outspoken boy from Chicago who is in Mississippi visiting his uncle. And we even move further along to the present day as Tass marries, has a family, and ages and the spirit of Emmett finds her again.

This isn't a book that I feel I can do justice with a simple plot description since there is so much more to it than what happens. McFadden's writing style is the perfect mix of plain and poetic, and the easy incorporation of spiritual and magical elements into everyday life is reminiscent of Toni Morrison in all the best ways. I really liked this one.

The Walking Dead, Volume 10: What We Become by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2009)

As the journey to Washington, D.C. begins in The Walking Dead, Volume 10: What We Become by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2009), Rick, who has been doubting his ability to lead, butts heads big time with Abraham, the ultimate alpha-male. And somehow, in the course of this conflict, Rick starts making good decisions and the two men come clean about how broken their strength has made them. I am very into this move away from the character-heavy prison into a stripped down, more focused look at individual personalities in a moving group. Rick and his son Carl (and their relationship) are some super interesting characters. Let's do more of this in Volume 11!

[Also, I may be wrong, but I think the "scientist" in the group is full of shit. Still, I'm glad they have a purpose, even if it seems far-fetched.]

The Modigliani Scandal by Ken Follett (1976)

I got this copy of The Modigliani Scandal by Ken Follett (1976) from the free bin at my library, and I'd say it was worth just about that much.

The story focuses on a group of people who have all been put on the trail of a lost Modigliani painting. Our first protagonist, Dee Sleign, is looking for a topic for her thesis while she is vacationing in France with her rich older boyfriend. Her topic of interest is drug use and art. She goes to talk to an old man who used to know all the painters, and he clues her in to the surviving painting, although he doesn't really know where it is now and can only provide the vague clue of the name of a town in Italy. The thing that makes this particular painting even more exciting to the art world is that Modigliani painted it while he was high! On hashish!

Dee is so excited about this that she sends her uncle, the owner of an art gallery, a postcard with one sentence about her possible find. He gets so excited that he naturally puts a private detective on the case to get the painting before his niece does. Then, after finding another clue, Dee sends a postcard to her friend Samantha Winacre, a popular actress. She should really stop communicating through impulsive postcards. Julian Black, a failed artist and failing gallery owner who is emasculated by his wife and her family money, sees the postcard, and goes to Italy to try and get the painting for his gallery. Plus art forgery! Sex! Drugs! Sex! Money! Europe! Art!

Follett makes the mystery of the painting secondary to the machinations of all these shallow and unlikable characters who dance around each other in predictable and uninteresting ways. His commentary on the art world is very heavy-handed, and the sex and drugs, as well as the way the women are written, really date the book. This gave me a definite Jacqueline Susann feeling, but with all the fun and tawdriness taken out.

This is the only novel by Follett that I've read, and it was one of his first. He turned into a bestselling writer of thrillers, so this obviously isn't the one to judge him on. Follett himself says as much in the preface to this edition and on his website (which you should go to just to see the author picture in the banner).

The Walking Dead, Volume 9: Here We Remain by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

In The Walking Dead, Volume 9: Here We Remain by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010), the bloodbath of Volume 8 really pays off. After their escape from the fighting at the prison, Rick and his son Carl spend an unusually long time as the only characters in the comic. This section of the book, with Rick getting sick and Carl coming into his own, has been one of my favorite parts of the series so far, and the heartbreaking surprise of the dead telephone topped it off perfectly. Eventually they rejoin some of our old friends, but the character list has been greatly reduced from the community at the prison. The arrival at the end of the book of three new characters with an intriguingly hard-to-believe proposition points to the possibility of some interesting doings a'transpiring in Volume 10.

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (2011)

The always amazing J.Lowe kindly loaned me A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (2011), the fifth (and last published) book in the Song of Ice and Fire series and even though it took me a while to attack this monster of a novel, I'm so glad he did.

You might remember that in the fourth book, Martin cut his cast of characters in half and only focused on part of the world of the novel. This fifth book picks up what the other half of our characters were doing and runs concurrently to the fourth book for the first two thirds or so of the novel and then brings everything together and moves into the future. Since Martin added several new important characters this time around and only killed off (or did he?) a few of our old buddies, he is going to have quite the menagerie to deal with in book six.

Like many others, I enjoyed this book more than the one before (although that one had its moments) not the least because my favorite character, Tyrion, is back in the spotlight in this volume. I can't get enough of that guy. And, without busting out any spoilers, I think that is about as far as I can get with this review. [This series and the Walking Dead comics are really stretching my ability to talk about something without talking about it in detail...]

Now that I'm caught up with Martin, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with myself while I wait for the 6th book to be release. Watch the TV series, I guess?

The Walking Dead, Volume 8: Made to Suffer by Robert Kirkman, Charlies Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

The promise of rough chuckles for Volume 8 after the calm of Volume 7 was no joke: in The Walking Dead, Volume 8: Made to Suffer by Robert Kirkman, Charlies Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010) things get pretty real pretty fast. The Governor, the most uncomplicatedly evil creation in the entire book, has set his eyes (well, eye) on our heroes who are trying to build a community behind the safety of their prison walls. That community is blasted apart quickly, although the group is much more of a match for The Governor and his crew of duped townlings than they expected. Heroes die. Attackers die. A bunch of zombies die. In fact, only a handful of our named characters appear to survive to walk the pages of Volume 9. I get the feeling that Kirkman had played out the prison scenario and needed to inject some excitement into his narrative, so he went all Game of Thrones, killed off some unexpectedly major characters, and waited to see what would happen next. And it got my attention, I'm definitely ready to follow him into the next volume.

Householder's Survival Manual: How to Take Care of Everything in Your Home, edited by Nancy Shuker (1999)

I bought this copy of the Reader's Digest Householder's Survival Manual: How to Take Care of Everything in Your Home, edited by Nancy Shuker (1999) at Half Price Books as an impulse buy shortly after we bought our new house. There are a few drawbacks: since it was written in 1999, it is pretty dated (particularly the section on buying electronics and anything that mentions computers); it is geared towards a Reader's Digest audience that I am not a part of (old people?); and the writing style is often clunky and choppy (and sometimes just odd: "The choices available in home flooring today are wide and wonderful.") Still, I am a huge pushover for helpful hints and basic reference, and this book covers everything from electricity and plumbing to stain removal and major appliance selection. Much of the information here can be found with a quick internet search, but when you want a simple explanation it is often more satisfying to consult an index. At least for me! I think I'll hang on to this one until a better general house repair reference book comes along...

The Walking Dead, Volume 7: The Calm Before by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

As you might guess from the title of The Walking Dead, Volume 7: The Calm Before by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010), things are relatively calm in this volume and look to get rather hairy in volume 8. At the beginning of the volume, everyone is reunited at the prison and Lori is ready to give birth to her baby any day. Luckily they brought a woman with some medical training back from Woodbury, and she gets to setting up the prison infirmary as a birthing center. To make things even more calm and happy, the crops are coming in, they get a bunch of food from an abandoned Walmart (not without some trouble, though), and Glen and Maggie are married by Maggie's father in the prison cafeteria. All so happy! And even though some rough things come (zombie attack, amputation, suicide by zombie), we are reminded of how calm things are by the characters constantly remarking on how nice things have been lately. It is no surprise that after all this niceness and treading of water, a big bucket of evil shows up on their doorstep at the end of the volume. To be continued....

Neil Sperry's Complete Guide to Texas Gardening by Neil Sperry (1991)

This is one I actually finished quite a while ago, but since it took me so long to read it I completely forgot to write up a post. My long reading time has nothing to do with the quality or usefulness of Neil Sperry's Complete Guide to Texas Gardening by Neil Sperry (1991), but more to do with the fact that I checked it out from the library twice, renewed it twice, and mostly read it while I was eating my cereal in the morning.

This is a good basic reference to Texas gardening -- particularly the extensive encyclopedias of flowers, plants, shrubs, and trees, complete with photographs, identifying traits, and general care. This second edition was published in 1991 and could probably stand an update to incorporate some more organic and water-conscious gardening techniques. Still, there is a lot to love here and I could see myself buying a reference copy of this book someday as my gardening aspirations grow.

Oh yes, I have gardening aspirations! Right now they are very small and mostly contained in a small metal tub that I've been using to grow a winter garden of lettuce, cilantro, and parsley. Check out my first mini-harvest! Everything I know I learned from my awesome friend Joolie, and beyond her tutelage, most of my techniques have been trial and error. Still, I have managed to grow edible food from seeds in dirt I put into a container by myself and I'm pretty excited to have gotten this far. Maybe in the spring I'll go crazy and try some herbs!

The Walking Dead, Volume 6: This Sorrowful Life by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

I had to take a brief break from The Walking Dead series after the last volume, but I couldn't stay away from those crazy zombies for long, so I'm back with The Walking Dead, Volume 6: This Sorrowful Life by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010). I'm in too deep for plot summaries, and you wouldn't want me to spoil it for you anyway, so instead I'll work with some broad themes. Revenge. Reunion. Hope. Murder. Morality. And honestly, almost zero zombies in this one. I'm not always the biggest fan of revenge as motivation, but after the horribleness of the last volume, this was pretty darn tolerable (even though equally as horrible). Read on, friends, read on!

The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal (1948)

My book club (go DAFFODILS!) had the smart idea of reading a book from a decade that we hadn't read anything from yet as a group. Happily for me we ended up with the 1940s, one of my favorite literary periods. Many many many books were suggested, but the final scientifically voted in winner was The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal (1948).

Vidal's third novel is infamous for being one of the first mainstream novels to portray a sympathetic gay man who was a regular "All-American" guy. Jim Willard and Bob Ford are one year apart in high school, both athletes, and best friends. Bob goes with a lot of girls, but Jim is more attracted to Bob. One night after Bob's graduation, and just before he goes off to join the Merchant Marine, Jim and Bob go camping at an isolated cabin and after a day of skinny dipping and a night of wrestling by the fire, the two of them have sex. Bob leaves, promising that he will write and that Jim will join him at sea after he graduates the next year, but after a couple of letters the notes from sea dry up.

Jim graduates and disappoints his parents by ditching his college plans and heading to New York to join the Merchant Marine and find Bob. He doesn't find his friend, but he does find a position on a ship, which he later abandons for California. He has a lot of casual sex and a few more serious relationships (one with a famous actor, and one with a semi-famous writer), but in the back of his mind he is always waiting for Bob. When, at the end of the book, he finally gets to spend another night alone with his best friend, things do not turn out the way he planned.

I liked this book. The straightforward prose is misleadingly simple, and hides a interesting structure and some good character development. Although Jim is our protagonist, we never get a really good sense of him as a character, and I think that is deliberate. Instead, the side characters are filled with details and dimensions that end up teaching us about Jim.

Vidal revised this novel in the mid-1960s and his biggest change was altering the climactic last chapter. It is still dark and dramatic, but different. I'll be interested to talk that out with my fellow DAFFODILS...

[You can read a bit about the reception of the book and Vidal's views on writing it here.]

The Walking Dead, Volume 5: The Best Defense by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

Whew. The Walking Dead, Volume 5: The Best Defense by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010) is a fast read, but not an easy one. A subset of our heroes watch a helicopter fly over them and then crash, and things to real bad real fast when they go explore the crash site. Once again zombies aren't really the problem, humans are. I can take a little violence and cruelty, but this one was about at my limit. I shall power through, guys.

Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1964)

Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs was published in 1964 by his estate, fourteen years after his death. It consists of two related novellas -- the first, "Adventure on Poloda" had been published in a magazine in 1942, but while the second, "Tangor Returns," was probably written at about the same time, it wasn't published until it was found in Burroughs papers. It seems likely that Burroughs intended this story to take off into a series, and it has the same hallmarks as the John Carter or Pellucidar novels (through extraordinary circumstances, an all-American guy finds himself in a strange world and is initially threatened but ends up taking care of business).

In Beyond the Farthest Star, our American hero is shot down over Germany during WWII, feels himself dying, and then wakes up on another planet, completely naked. He stands up and sees a beautiful woman in a crazy glittery jumpsuit. She screams and runs and then five men run out from under a small hill and take him captive. He has somehow been transported to Poloda, a planet so far away from Earth that it really is "beyond the farthest star," and a planet that has been at war for over 100 years.

Our hero had the good luck to magically appear in the country of Unis, the good guys in the war, and the Unisians give him the name of Tangor. The Unisians would love to have peace, but they are stuck defending themselves against the ever-more-aggressive Kapars who have subjugated the rest of the planet. Over the last century of warfare, the Unisians have dug out underground cities with buildings that can be raised up to the surface and then lowered when there is a raid by the Kapars. Lucky for Unis, Tangor was a good soldier and excellent pilot back on Earth and he quickly joins the forces defending Unis from the air, and proves himself a mega-hero.

In the second novella, Tangor is approached by a Unisian woman who sympathizes with the Kapars and wants to defect to their country and double-cross the Unisians. Tangor tells his superiors, who have him go along with her plan and work as a double-agent in Kapar. Kapar is an extremely repressive society, ruled by a secret police and torn apart by fear with neighbors and family informing on one another. Naturally, Tangor gets into some tough spots in Kapar, but ultimately gets the job done.

These aren't the most polished Burroughs stories, but they are an interesting product of the war years and come off as more political than much of his other work. The anti-war sentiments and the theme of fighting against a Stalinesque dictatorship are hard to miss. You should definitely read these if you are a Burroughs completest, or if you just like old science fiction novels with naked men on the cover.

The Walking Dead, Volume 4: The Heart's Desire by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

Things are still hopping in The Walking Dead, Volume 4: The Heart's Desire by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn (2010). After narrowly escaping a mutiny that would have kicked them out of their prison sanctuary, the group settles in and begins planting crops to help supplement their diet of canned food and peanut butter. A new woman enters the scene, having fought her way alone through zombies for much longer than anyone else, and she quickly shakes things up by bypassing Carol and making moves on Tyreese. In a small group like this, little conflicts quickly explode and by the end it is hard to tell who is actually more dangerous: the humans or the zombies. Some nice moral quandaries in this one as well -- this is great stuff!