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Parker likes the Meng Kids' versions of heavy bombers (he finds them, in his favorite word, "adorable"). He's already built a RAF Lancaster, and yesterday we put together their B-17, which is of course his favorite plane.
But around the time we finished, the markings started looking awfully familiar, and we finally realized why - they're the "Nine O Nine" plane that we saw and took a ride on in Longview a few years ago.
I'm not quite sure how Stross came out with two Laundry novels only a few months apart, but I'm glad that he did. This book follows Alex the vampire, who I found was pretty dull and annoying in The Rhesus Chart, and turned him into a much more interesting character by having an elven princess take an interest in him. Stross' strategy lately seems to be to pick up a different genre for each book, with the last three going into spycraft, vampires, and superheroes. This one goes into fantasy, with an elven kingdom invading small-town England. Throw in vampires, Nazi personnel carriers and the usual magic and sorcery, and you have another solid installment in the Laundry series.
Four years ago I enjoyed O'Malley's first book, The Rook, and have been looking forward to the follow-up ever since. Fortunately, I decided to reread the first book before this one, which was a very good move, because it turned out that I remembered almost nothing about the original book. I am sure I finished it, but I literally didn't remember anything after the middle of the book. So I really enjoyed rereading the first, and then going directly into the second book. The second is perhaps a little less "Bridget Jones’ Diary"-ish - not that that is a bad thing, because that is one of the best parts of the book - and turns a little darker, but it is still one of my favorites of the current crop of urban fantasy novels.
Every so often I fall back in love with paper books, and have to read something about books or libraries or shelving. This was a small book that didn't contribute a lot to my understanding, but it did have a few interesting observations on libraries, and the people that create them.
I have known about Steve Perkins' contribution to the Dallas Cowboys since 1974, when my cousin Jimmy had a copy of Next Year's Champions on the bookshelf in the bedroom I used when I was going to school in Irving. That book details the Cowboy’s 1968 season, beginning with the Ice Bowl in Green Bay, and ending with the unexpected divisional playoff loss to Cleveland. What I didn't know was that Perkins had followed the book up three years later with an account of the 1971 season, which culminated in the Cowboys winning the Super Bowl finally.
As I noted when posting a review on another book dedicated to the 1971 season, http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2012/02/breakthrough-boys-the-story-of-the-1971-super-bowl-champion-dallas-cowboys-jaime-aron.html, that season is something of a Holy Grail for me, so unexpectedly finding this book was a big deal.
Oddly, the book itself was a bit of a letdown. The Cowboys had become less fun after Don Meredith left, and it was odd to see Perkins actually blaming Meredith for not getting them over the hump. And the drama of the 1971 season that is played up in the NFL films episode about the season is missing from the book, which instead plays up the similarities between the 1970 and 1971 seasons, rather than their eventual difference at the end. But for a Cowboys completist like me, it was a good find.
This 1978 British TV documentary series made such an impression on me that I got the DVD set, and Grayson and I watched it over the past few weeks. It is still a great deal of fun to watch as it explores the history of a number of inventions that make up the modern world. Most of what it has to say is still relevant, and the chapter that culminates in "the computer" does so – hysterically – by providing a long string of events that led not to electronic computing machines, but to punch cards. I had forgotten that that was still the state of computer input at the time, and Grayson's jaw hit the floor when he realized that that was what they considered a computer to be.
But still, a terrific series, and a very educational experience for both of us.
This was a very good book that dealt with the modern Pacific Ocean by looking at multiple aspects of its postwar history, beginning with the atomic bomb and continuing through North Korea, China, technology, and numerous other disquieting topics. I really enjoyed it, although unfortunately the audiobook got confused on where I was and I may have missed parts of a chapter or two.
This is an urban fantasy along the lines of the Laundry or Rivers of London books in which the supernatural angle is a police department that has to deal with odd occurrences. Unlike the others, it is dark and fairly bloody, and I had a great deal of trouble keeping the characters straight. It also didn't do a very good job of separating the supernatural from the normal, which most books of this type do.
