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I enjoyed Toll's first book about the first year of the Pacific war, Pacific Crucible, but as my post noted, I couldn't figure out why he wrote a book on part of the war. Now I know - it was the beginning of a trilogy.
Well, the second book was pretty good. It's becoming more and more difficult to keep these books separate since I read so many on similar tactics, but I did like it, and it's probably state of the art on the Pacific War in general.
Oh boy, was this book awful. I love Stross' work, but this book was over the horizon. It is actually a series of connected short stories (which I did not know till reading the wiki entry) and it was just impossible to make heads or tails of. It was like reading a foreign language where you don't know enough of the words. Stross' creativity ran away with him, and sentence after sentence has more new nouns and concepts than are explained. It's either a crossword puzzle or Jabberwocky most of the time, and you just can't figure out what is going on. Again, terribly creative, but as a practical matter unintelligible.
Shame - because I've loved the other series. But this was just impossible to understand. But, having read the wiki entry, I now realize that I didn't have the structure I needed to follow it. Maybe that would have made a difference.
I've had a hardback dust-jacketed copy of Blatty's book for a while, and finally got a chance to read it. A little hard to read in the beginning - the author strings together a lot of adjectives and it's a bit opaque, but it gets better as it goes along. Not all that scary by current standards, and the main impression I got was how hard it is to actually conclude that a case is one of demonic possession, thus justifying an actual exorcism. Assuming the book has the standards right.
