The Tentacled Monkey

So with new baby Addison in house and doing well, I don’t think that I have read more than 40 pages of The Burrowers Beneath. Nothing against the book at all, I rather like it, but I might have to change titles to get my reading steady again, well novels at least.

The funny thing is that I have read no fewer than eight short stories over the last week and a half. I have found that I really don’t have the time to put in to reading a continued story line, but a story that is short and can be killed in a single sitting or two is prime. This is especially true with a newborn in house and a rather unexpected feeding schedule.

I will have to ponder which book to replace Titus Crowe with and possibly finish it later in the year.

On a separate note, I have been trying out Google Buzz and am actually liking it. It allows me to easily let friends know what is happening, ala Twitter,  from GMail, which is perpetually open anyway. It also lacks a lot of the other ridiculous features found in Facebook that do nothing more than annoy me to no ends.

Anyway, More later…

MurfMan Books, Personal 45 Books, Baby, Books, Short Story

On a strange whim, I read The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde this morning. I adore that play and wouldn’t mind the opportunity to see it live one day.

This is book 3 of the 45. Still reading the Atrocity Archives as well. Also, there is likely to be a new addition to the family in the next couple of days.

MurfMan Books 45 Books, Books

On Saturday I finished the vastly popular Pride Prejudice and Zombies from Quirk Press. The basic premise is that of a Victorian England story of misunderstood love that everyone is familiar with thanks to the forced reading of the novel in high school and from the excellent BBC productions that have been produced over the years. There is one major difference however, the addition of a strange plague that has afflicted England’s corpses reanimating them into the “unmentionables” (zombies) “denizens of Satan” with a penchant for brains.

At first, I wasn’t too sure about this book and therefore left it alone for the better part of a year, but my resolve and curiosity finally gave way and it was added to the Queue. This was a really fun book to read and honestly was hard to put down. It was fun and funny and really kept me interested even though I knew the main plotline almost as well as the back of my right hand.

It is campy with lots of innuendos about England’s “balls” and I was happy to see Mr. and Mrs. Bennett still are the primary humor for the story. I won’t go into the prime differences as they are far too numerous to list. But just know that if you LOVE the original you likely won’t enjoy this version. But, for those of us that are casual fans or totally unfamiliar with the story it will be a really funny read. I can say that reading this has actually made me want to read the original because you realize how very good it really is. So I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Now for the next on the reading list is Poison Sleep by T.A. Pratt, book 2 of the Marla  Mason  series, I’m already about half-way through so another post on it should follow this week.

This means that I am still on tract for the 45 books this year. Yippee to me, prematurely at least.

MurfMan Books, SciFi 45 Books, Books, review, TA Pratt, zombies

So at the end of 2009 I scoured through my Goodreads and Shelfari profiles to determine to number of books that I read last year. And to my surprise I didn’t even break through to the 30’s. This really surprised me at first but then the more I thought about it I realized that I had indeed gone weeks without touching a book and even more weeks reading the same damn thing.

It turns out that having a pregnant wife can really zap your time and energy when it comes to allotting the needed time for reading, well that and Wire in the Blood on Netflix. So this year around, I am challenging myself to read a novel a week for the rest of the year minus two proscribed 2 week breaks. Since it is already the  third week of the year and accounting for the 4 weeks off, that leaves me with 45 novels until victory.

Lending even more difficulty to this is the realization that I will have a newborn in the house here with me at any time now. Hopefully the odd feeding hours and early risings will give me the right amount of time to finish what I plan.

To be honest 45 novels in a year is not an unheard of proposition, but I am almost certain I can’t do it.  But on the other hand, it would be nice to read that much again in a year.

So for fuck’s sake if you see me watching too much Robson Green or Top Gear on the tellie please kick me in the ass and through me a Warhammer novel so I can get back on track.

MurfMan Books, Personal Books, Goodreads, Netflix, Personal, Shelfari, Top Gear, Wire in the Blood

I have finally finished Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky this morning. I will post more later on it. Now starting Pride Prejudice & Zombies, I can’t wait!

MurfMan Books Books, Stross

Well I finally finished Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. About three-quarters of the way through and I started getting really pissed with Mr. Abercrombie and the somewhat predictable nature to which he tends to place in his stories. But alas, he has redeemed himself and the ending of Best Served Cold was far far better than the so-called ending of the First Law Trilogy. He still tends to have an issue with leaving characters alive that probably should have died, but honestly this novel is filled with death. So characters not dying was against the grain. I have to say that I will read anything else that Mr. Abercrombie produces.

On a second note, I have started reading after much delay, Use of Weapons by the great Iain M. Banks. This marks the third in the Culture series, which has taken its place as being the best Sci-Fi series that I have read ever. I have only gotten about 50 pages deep into it, but I cannot tell you how nice it was to bridge the gap from epic fantasy to space opera in one day. It was like a long awaited homecoming. More on this novel later.

I have managed to finally come to terms with Windows Vista. I replaced the shell. Yes in the 90’s fashion of Win200 and XP I tried several old favorites (Litestep, BB4Win) and some new ones (Geo-Shell, Object Desktop) but it was SharpE that grabbed my attention. SharpE is a very polished and usable shell that can be used without heavy customization, although some tweaking won’t hurt at all. If anyone is fed up with the default Windows shell environment, the window manager for those in the know, then I highly recommend SharpE!

MurfMan Books, Tech Books, Culture, Iain Banks, Joe Abercrombie, SharpE, shell, Tech

So it has been awhile since the last post and some interesting developments have occurred. I am now officially back running a dedicated Linux server 24/7 and I absolutely love it! I installed the Ubuntu Minimum release (about 9MB ISO file) and have slowly been adding the packages that I want. Of course it is running headless and my main interface is through a Putty SSH connection from my Vista work machine. My .screenrc file is working good and I am testing out the dvtm window manager used in conjunction with screen to split the screen up into several different dedicated boxes.

I have also been adopted by a sweet, and somewhat giant, stray dog that we have started calling “Marmaduke” or just Duke for short. She has been neglected for a while and was very thin and flea infested when she started showing up, so after a bath a flea pill and some food, she now guards the property outside. The kids also love her and she is content to simply sleep in the garage and do virtually nothing. Definitely my kind of dog. So on Monday Duke and I will be off to the vet for a checkup and a rabies vaccine. Then I imagine she will have a much needed thorough scrubbing and cleaning. Oh, and Maggie, the little beagle, is actually a better dog with her around. Duke will bark and Maggie will come flying out of no where and will actually stay near the house instead of running away for hours on end. All in all a wonderful dog.

I finished Joe Abercrombie’s altogether awesome First Law Trilogy and have started on the stand alone book from the same universe, Best Served Cold. So far I have not been disappointed. I hope to have it finished as well within the next week or so. And why so long you ask? Well, keep reading.

Along with everything else, Steven decided he wants to be a Jawa for Halloween, so Courtney has sewn up the cloak and been working on the gloves while I have to solder up some orange LEDs to mount into a mask for the eyes, and figure out how to make that little gun from the first movie. I think I have it figured out at least.

So that is pretty much it! Oh, and I am writing this with a CLI python based blog editor for Linux called charm. So if it comes out a little bit wonky, that’s why.

MurfMan News Books, Dogs, Jawa, Joe Abercrombie

I am not a fan of fantasy novels, I never really have been. I played the hell out of Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger though so good fantasy still has a rough little spot in my heart. Well, at least that is what I used to think. But as of late with the quality of the fantasy novels I have read, referring to Rothfuss’s amazing The Name of the Wind and now this latest book I finished, The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, fantasy is making a significant comeback into my reading list.

I first heard about Abercrombie only a few scant weeks ago during the release of his latest novel Best Served Cold. And what I heard intrigued me,

"If you’re fond of bloodless, turgid fantasy with characters as thin as newspaper and as boring as plaster saints, Joe Abercrombie is really going to ruin your day. A long career for this guy would be a gift to our genre."
Scott Lynch, author of The Lies of Locke Lamora

“The books are good, really good. They pulled me in. Well-developed world. Unique, compelling characters. I like them so much that when I got to the end of the second book and found out the third book wasn’t going to be out in the US for another three months, I experienced a fit of rage, then a fit of depression, then I ate some lunch and had a bit of a lay down.”
—Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind

So essentially I was told by word of mouth that it is akin to George R. R. Martin but with great characters, and since I don’t really like Martin this seemed grand.

The story follows a number of major characters, “The Bloody-Nine” (aka Logen) being primary among them. Logen is a great battle hardened Northerner that evidently has a little psychotic break when he gets angry and kills people in a most violent manner. Aside from that he is a thoughtful, considerate, and even compassionate at times.

Captain Jezal Luthar is a pompous young member of the nobility hell bent on making it big. His commanding officer Major West is a commoner and reviled by the officers because of it, and plauged by his drunken sister, Ardee. And there are countless others.

But for some reason the one character that really sticks with me more than any other is Inquisitor Sand dan Glokta. Glokta was in the Ghurkish War years prior and was Major West’s commanding officer then. He led a fool hardy attack that eventually won the war and cost him two years of torture in the prisons of Ghurka. When we find Glokta he his a crippled shell of a man that is hobbled with pain and has had alternating sets of his top and bottom teeth removed by hammer and chisel giving him a sickening smile. Oh and as an Inquisitor, Glokta gets to torture people. Something he is rather good at given  his own experiences.

If you haven’t guessed already, this novel is amazing. Full of intelligent characters that are so damn believable it is hard to grasp that one guy could write them all. I was sucked in within pages and was hard pressed to put it down.

I give it 5 out of 5 and recommend it for everyone out there. Next on the reading list is Before They Are Hanged Book 2 of the First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie.

MurfMan Books Books, Fantasy, Joe Abercrombie

Analee Newitz has a pretty good rant about the uber-human singularity/post-singularity sci-fi that is abounding these days. I have to admit that I am a fan of the sub-genre and have read guys like Stross and Rucker who have had some heavy singularity books in the past. But I also read Neal Stephenson’s amazing Anathem, which Newitz marks as part of the anti-singularity trend.

Either way I am happy there are still trends within scifi for us all to get all pissy about. Honestly I tend to like a good singularity / uber-human story. Especially if my other choice is steampunk. To clarify, I am an amazing fan of the steampunk genre and movement, I have just not found a decent steampunk book as of yet. But I am still looking! So if there is a really good one out there please let me know, and don’t mention Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine please.

MurfMan Books, News, Personal Analee, Anathem, Books, Charles Stross, Rudy Rucker, singularity, steampunk, William Gibson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was an interesting twist on the common urban fantasy story. I will be looking forward to further books in this series! I really liked the Norse connection here, being a big fan of Norse mythology and Rune lore in general this was a very enjoyable romp through a modern re-visioning of of Norse gods and monsters.

View all my reviews.

This was made using the GoodReads Review widget that will export to HMTL. I like it since it has the image link and everything in it already.

MurfMan Books, SciFi Books, Norse, review, SciFi, Urban Fantasy