Old Man’s War Boxed Set 1 by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have rapidly become a Scalzi fanboy. I’m proof of the sentiment behind Scalzi’s new $3 million deal - when someone reads one Scalzi book, they read them all. I don’t believe it discounts what I’m going to say, but it’s worth noting up front. Starting with The God Engines and going through Red Shirts, I’ve built up a huge enjoyment for Scalzi’s style. What style is that? I’ve had a hard time articulating it to friends and family. Here’s my best shot - Old Man’s War is not a comedy, but it’s funny. It’s an like action movie, but it’s not dumb. The humor mostly comes from witty or sarcastic responses by the main characters. Even though it’s framed as a military action book, it’s mostly a series of character studies. I also enjoy that both within a book and within the series, Scalzi only doles out information as needed. This has two good effects. First, there are no info dumps - or if there’s more than one paragraph of explanation, it’s the only way Scalzi has of conveying it Second, as we learn more of the universe - either through our POV characters learning more or by going from regular army to special forces, it forces us to re-evaluate what we learned before in a new light. Most apt in that comparison is the scientist telling our main character early in the first book about how the space elevator is designed in such a way as to be a symbol of how much more advanced the Colonial Union is than Earth without revealing just how advanced. With all that’s learned (mostly in the second two books), the scale of that deception is truly realized.

The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven’t read a lot of autobiographical books, but this is one of the more entertaining ones I’ve ever read. I think part of that has to do with Wil Wheaton’s writing style - I particularly enjoyed his teen-to-adult filters. I think it also is partially due to the fact that many of these stories originally came from his blog. While I’m sure his editor helped him clean it up a bit and make it slightly more bookish, it still retains a lot of that conversational style.

How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That was an unexpected short story. For one thing I went into it thinking it was the story of how Scalzi proposed. But once it was clear it was fiction, it still took me by surprise and the ending was unexpected. Scalzi continues to be my favorite source for funny (non-slapstick) science fiction. This story made the collection it came from worth getting.

Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like other Boss Fight Books, it’s a great look back at a classic game. What was most interesting to me is that Doki Doki Panic actually started off as a prototype of Super Mario Bros 2. Since as all gamers my age or older know, that game was reskinned for USA SMB2.

Big Pulp: Ted Bundy’s Beetle by Various

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I bought this anthology last year at Baltimore Comic-Con because Dynamite had awakened within me the idea of enjoying modern pulp fiction. Whether the collection succeeds as pulp depends on how strictly one hews to the definition of pulp. However, I did enjoy more stories than I didn’t. Even many of the romance stories were enjoyable to someone who doesn’t read within that genre. As I do with story collections, below are my thoughts on the individual stories.

With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was an experiment in funding and creating a book that I’m pretty sure came out before Kickstarter was as big as it is today. You have to hand it to Cory Doctorow, he lives what he preaches. He’s been releasing books that are not only DRM-free, but are also Creative Commons licensed. Even though this means it’s legal to get the book for free and share it for free, he’s been able to make a living on his writing. (Probably helped by living in Canada and England where healthcare costs are not the same concern as here) Still, all those books were released via a publisher. He wanted to try out the self-publishing model to see if it would work. I listened to the audiobook and he has a bunch of his friends each read one of the short stories in this book. I recognized some of them from other short story podcasts I listen to.

The Beautiful & the Damned by Jonathon Wolfer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was an improvement over the first. First of all, there were less missing apostrophes. But, second, the plot moved along a lot better. I’m not sure if it’s because of the changes in the plot structure (which we’ll get to) or Mr Wolfer had yet another novel under his belt, improving his prose, but I enjoyed it more.

The Pen & the Sword by Jonathon Wolfer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think all the problems I have with this book can be summed up with one sentence. This book needed an editor. If it had an editor, it needed a more experienced one. I am not going to fault someone for small spelling errors and grammar mistakes -I make them all the time in reviews and blog posts. But there were a lot of grammar issues, especially apostrophe use. Still, what an editor would have done is tighten up the story a bit.

Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1) by Hugh Howey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hugh Howey does a masterful job in this book. It is definitely a contender for my favorite book of 2015. So much of what makes this book great is how Howey subverts all of our expectations. It is technically a dystopian book, but it is unlike any I’ve read before. One of the ways in which it’s unique, for example, is how the dystopian element is almost irrelevant to the story. I found early on that it reminded me of the video games Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus with many of its elements. The video games take place on a generation ship that’s had so many generations removed from its initial launch that some of its early history is viewed as perhaps just stories. Additionally, there’s the erasure of a previous uprising from the computers. There’s also a dictator-like government masquerading as a democracy. That’s not to say that it’s entirely irrelevant to the story. After all, it is essentially the MacGuffin, in a way, setting the story into motion. But the story is more a character study than a treatise on the dystopia.

A mixture of a growing Ebook library, tracking my goals in Goodreads, and Calibre’s ability to generate a catalog have made me decide to start tracking things quarterly in the book dimension as well. I’ll start off with a simple set of stats and we’ll see what comes to me as time goes by. (Ebook will include both books and Magazines such as SF&F anthologies)

Total Ebooks: 363