Where the Bad Guys Take Your Breath Away. Literally.

Merchants of Disaster by Kenneth Robeson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As always with Doc Savage, the book was okay. Three stars.

For personal and biographical reasons, I have more affection for the series and the characters than the novels really warrant. The cool covers help, too. In truth, there's a little fun to be had reading these books--the "advanced" science from the 30's is kinda fun, and we usually have exotic settings (though not in this one), and there's an advantage to knowing the characters before you open the book. (Star Trek novels, for example, have the same advantage.) But you can tell these books are quickly written and barely edited. In a way, that's part of the charm. This is pulp fiction; that's how they're supposed to sound.

This particular novel has no supernatural trappings, no supposed werewolf or ghost or goblins. In fact none (almost none? not sure) of the books really do--they just tease something supernatural that ends up being explained another way, like Scooby Doo. But even that is skipped here. From the start, it's clear there's some sort of weapon being used by bad guys, and it's clear they're gonna sell it to other bad actors. That plot is not too different from many movies and tv shows out right now--just a straightforward action story with criminal arms dealers. It works fine, tbh.

They're short, moderately entertaining novels, and they give me a jolt of nostalgia when I read them, so even if I almost never give them a 4 (and never a 5) I keep picking one up from time to time. And I've got a couple more on the shelves, so eventually I'll get to those as well.

Just recommended for people who already read old pulp fiction. But anybody might try one, once.

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Where Alchemist Gangs Turn Everything into Trouble

Red City by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a birthday present, so I was already predisposed to liking the book. And I was glad to find it was a good read. :)

Sam and Ari are shy kids who become best friends in school without ever revealing anything personal about their lives and where they come from. Both are gifted in different ways and recruited by alchemist syndicates. There they are trained under pretty harsh conditions to be able to use alchemy to transform things into different states. There are many magic-type things they both learn to do, all in the service of the nefarious businesses their syndicates are involved in. But neither tells the other that they're in rival gangs.

The story tells about their childhood and their progress in alchemy and the business of organized crime, showing how they become useful and important in their separate organizations. This includes both of them being coached and pressured into committing some pretty horrible acts. It's all aimed at other gang members, rivals, career criminals, people we aren't supposed to care about all that much, but it's not awesome, and as a reader you start to wonder of either one is redeemable--because they're both still likable, in a way, and I was rooting for them. (Is this another Breaking Bad situation where the author is seeing how much we'll put up with and still root for the character? I'm not sure. Are we meant to pardon them their crimes because they've clearly been both coerced and groomed from an early age? Maybe.)

All through, you're hoping Sam and Ari get to break free of their rival gangs, and the ending has a sort of answer to that, though I'm sure the sequels will have a lot more to say about it.

It's a very compelling alternate world that Marie Lu has created. The rules governing the magic system (though it's something like a science in the book) make sense, and the societal impact adds up, too. Well thought out. I think there's a lot more to explore in future novels, maybe among the regular, non-alchemist population, and I hope we see more of that in whatever sequels she may write. I want to see more from the main characters, too, obviously, so I hope those are in the works.

Four stars. Recommended.

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Where Rodrigue and Chimène are Caught Between Honor and Love

Le Cid (06) by Corneille [Mass Market Paperback (2006)] by Corneile
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First thing I've read by this 17th century french playwright. I liked it more than I thought I would.

For good or bad, Corneille follows the old rule about the three unities--time, place, and action--and it helps to know he's doing that on purpose. There is pretty much just the main plot here; the subplots (if you can even call them that) are just branchings. Rodrigue (later El Cid) loves Chimène, and she loves him back, but her father insulted his elderly father. He has to challenge the man on his father's behalf, and kills Chimène's father. Now she still wants Rodrigue, still loves him, but she must demand justice for her father.

At the same time, Don Sancho loves her as well, and the Infanta loves Rodrigue. Those little complications are barely a blip in the plot. Almost everything is just the two lovers. (Unity of action.)

The story plays out quickly, with the insult, the duel, and a Moorish invasion driven back all in a day or so. (Unity of time.)

And almost the whole story occurs in Chimène's house or the palace. (Unity of place.)

These restrictions make the story a bit simple, in some ways, so that I was wishing for a real subplot, like you see so often in Shakespeare. But it also makes it more straightforward for a reader like me, reading it in translation in a whole 'nother country 400 years later. The conversations are sorta redundant, going over the same arguments about what justice and honor and love demand, but that is required by the conventions of the time, and I think it works fine even now. Of course, what I'm missing is the poetry that it was all clothed in, even though I think the translator did very well. Perhaps for Corneille's original audiences, the music of the language was a big draw. In English translation, I liked it well enough, and I'm just as glad the translator didn't put too much in rhyming couplets, though he couldn't entirely resist.

All in all--it's entertaining enough to read for no particular reason, but it's also interesting for its themes. In a society that regards honor highly, in the type of society where a son will kill the man who insulted his father and everyone nods like that makes sense, is there room for love? Can love be more important or even as important as honor? Poor Chimène loves Rodrigue and surely understands why he had to fight (and kill) her father, and she still wants to marry him--a feeling she is trying to suppress and keep secret--but honor demands she call for his death. Something has got to give.

Pretty interesting. Recommended for readers of drama.

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Where John Green Schools Us by Breaking Our Hearts

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Green does an amazing job with this topic. 5 stars.

The notion I thought was central to the book--how tuberculosis has affected society throughout history, in strange and unexpected ways--is present here, and interesting, and tragic, but the book really is about how systems work and the failure of the wealthy part of the world to solve a problem with pretty clearly-established solutions. It's not a college essay or bloodless recitation of facts. It's more like a jeremiad, a loud cry from a prophet trying to awaken the sleeping nations that could end this plague, showing where and how and why we should take action to save the million and a quarter people who die from this disease every year.

(He's humble. He keeps calling his celebrity a "megaphone" that he lucked into, and expresses his desire to use that megaphone well, drawing our attention to needs awaiting society's intervention, trying not to speak over other voices that are more deserving or informed or urgent than his own. That's okay. He can be humble--it suits. I'll still call this book prophetic in the most positive sense.)

Of course he does a good job giving us the numbers and explaining the standard therapies and costs and various acronyms pertinent to the discussion--but more significantly, he humanizes the disease with the true stories of sufferers, including those he personally knows or was related to. As he says, more than 100,000 people die each month of the disease, but that's hard to comprehend. "I've been in a stadium with a hundred thousand people," he writes, "but I didn't know each of their families. I didn't know about the people they've loved, the heartbreaks they've endured, their constraints and encouragements... But I can, just barely, fathom Henry."

Henry's story, woven through the book, illustrates much of what happens to TB sufferers in poorer countries, how they can do everything in their power and still fail, often still die, and might only survive through the actions of others (like you and me). Henry--with some others--puts a face on the illness. He personifies the resilience of many fighting the disease as well as the cruelty of our indifference--when little effort from us, from our government, from our thought leaders, could end the worst of the misery.

For me, looking as he does like any number of students I've taught over the years, Henry represents all the hope I felt when facing likely young people trying to make a future for themselves and the grief I felt when some of them were too weighed down by personal or systemic difficulties to finish their schooling. As important as education is, though, TB is literally life and death. How much more does it motivate and mobilize us to make these connections?

Sure, we should do everything we can for others without knowing their stories; that's what saints do. But most of us aren't saints. John Green recognizes that it's personal connection that puts most of us into motion, and this book creates that connection. I don't know if I am invested enough in TB, overall, to take much action. But I want to save Henry, and I want to lift the weight his mother has been carrying, and I want to see them live normal, happy lives.

That's what this book supplies, the human context necessary for us to feel what's happening. And that's why it's important to read and share it.

It's a quick, engaging read, worth a look for that reason alone. Additionally, it's an important book. Highly recommended.

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Where Marcelle Has the Wrong Boyfriend

The Miller of Angibault by George Sand
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like George Sand, and this is a very readable, pleasant novel, though it's probably more like a 3.5 to me.

The main character, Marcelle, is likable, and I'm rooting for her; and the title character, the miller, is pretty cool--though they don't end up together. And that's kinda the problem. Marcelle, a rich noblewoman who lost her husband and is finding their finances in a shambles, is in love with a man, Lemor, who despises money, like a good socialist (apparently) and she still has too much of it. He's so annoying and foolish and unbelievable that I thought sure the author would reveal that to Marcelle, but nope. She still likes him to the end. The notion that he couldn't marry her because she was too well off is just so... well, it's stupid. Just stupid. He's an idiot. The two of them are happier that all their money in the world burns up (oops--that's a spoiler) in a fire than if they'd been able to use it for anything at all.

Who thinks like this? Can you give some to charities and put some in an account for when your child grows up? Help out your neighbors, maybe? Can't you think of anything positive to do with money? Do you think it's the *money's* fault that France's upper class are out of touch?

Despite that annoying aspect to the story, it's mostly pretty entertaining, a decent read, with several other interesting and strange characters. Marcelle is inspecting her remaining property, trying to figure out a new life as a regular, semi-poor person, and because she's so kind she makes lots of good friends who look out for her. I enjoyed that aspect.

I felt 3.5 about the whole novel, but I like the author and want to do her a solid--so it's a 4 from me, dawg.

Modestly recommended.

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Where the Reformers Aren't All That Nice

Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Such a great series. I knew before I opened it I'd love this book--they've all been good, and only getting better.

Sebastian St. Cyr is a great MC, and the only character I like as much as him is his wife, Hero, who I'd really like to see played by Anna Maxwell or someone as nearly like her as possible. She's tough and smart and unafraid, but also kind and energetic and hopeful. They make a great pair in every sense, including crime-solving.

The setting, as always, is well used here. 1815, the year without a summer, is where we find Sebastian trying to solve the strange murder of a nobleman left hanging upside down in the ruins of an old church. It's raining all the time, as it did that summer, almost certainly because of a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Important scenes also take place in another ruins, an old palatial residence along the Thames. This is the time period when soldiers are returning from the war with Napoleon, many of them wounded, and trying to find a place in a society--a job, a family, a way to survive. (Hero is interviewing some of these veterans to write a story about the difficulties fighting men faced in that era.) The author is very good at using genuine details like these to establish a real sense of place and time to give the story an added level of gritty realness.

It's a great mystery with lots of clues and misdirection, but it's also an action story. There is genuine danger for Sebastian and Hero and a few others, and they have to act and react to survive; it's not cerebral effort alone, and I like that mix. A few of the novels in this long-running series lean pretty far toward the side of high stakes and high anxiety, giving the reader a lot of tension, and all of them (IMO) tend toward that side of the scale, more tense than cozy, but I'd put this one and quite a few of them pretty nearly in the center of that scale. (Not sure I'm making my thoughts clear. Hope so.)

These books are always fun. I read a lot of books (a little at a time) all at once, and this one stayed at the top of the the pile every day. Or I'd read a chunk of a book I'm only kinda enjoying with the promise that I'd read this one next. Which is to say--this is good fun.

Recommended.

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Where Humans Kinda Fade Away

Space by Stephen Baxter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this a hard read.

Almost DNF'ed a bunch of times.

I'm glad I finished it--but now I'm done. It wasn't much fun to read and I won't look for others by this author. I will give him credit, though, for very big ideas, for creating something worth thinking about. Is that a fair trade for my time and effort? Some people would probably say yes. I'm not sold.

This story, as entertainment, is disappointing, despite its constant promise to get good and be really cool. I'd say the last 45 pages do that. I liked that part. The first 400+ were frustrating. And here's my main objection: the main characters do almost nothing. There's an alien invasion and nobody mobilizes; nobody plans; nobody fights back. The whole book reads like a dream where you try to run and can't, and though you keep finding yourself in a new setting it's the same problem--you're passing through like a wraith, having no effect on the story. The characters are sleepwalking through Armageddon.

Nemoto does some stuff, and on page 444 she accomplishes something important on the planet Mercury. That's enough of a spoiler, and I won't give more, but that was the first time for me, the reader, that I thought "Yay! They're doing something!" For all of the rest of the book, until the very end, the main characters are just observers, looking at a small part of history, reporting an incomprehensible piece of the galactic tale. The author lays them out for us like sticks on the beach, and for most of the story it doesn't add up to anything. You (I) think that maybe you're getting the big picture, but nope. That's not it. It's not until the last handful of pages that anything is made clear.

(Have you ever heard one of those jokes that is spun out to ten or fifteen minutes before you finally get the punch line, and it's a joke that could have been told in about a minute? That's how the story and its much-delayed ending felt here--there's a little burst of sense after hundreds of frustrating pages of random weirdness. And in those jokes, remember, the punchline isn't the point. The joke is on the listener.)

In my opinion.

Malenfant and Madeline and others travel here and there, hitching a ride with the incommunicative Gaijin robots, surviving improbably long, pushed into the future by thousands of years by their interstellar travel, seeing the dwindling and scattering human race stumbling into oblivion. Why they're dwindling is just hinted at. There is no story about how nations tried to push back against alien invasion. There is no organized effort to survive. Minor actions are taken on earth's moon, on other moons, on Mercury, where humans are trying to hang on, but these are all chaotic fragments of stories that don't add up to anything. And the Gaijin robots won't talk, won't explain anything, won't interact in any way that matters until the very end of the novel.

I found it frustrating and unsatisfying.

Five for big ideas. Two for being a slog to read. Let's call it a 3.

YMMV

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