Book Reviews

Up until two weeks ago, if someone had asked me if I’d heard of Faust, I would have nodded in the affirmative.  If pressed to provide more information, I would have said, “Some German guy who sold his soul to the Devil for fame and fortune.  Written by some other German guy, an author, to demonstrate that spirituality, not material goods, is the way to true happiness.”

Then, as I usually do when I want to find out about something about which I know very little or nothing, I would have gone home and solicited the wisdom of Wikipedia, which […]

Yes, this is a kid’s story, but it’s about a serious topic, Digital Rights Management, so I want to use this review to talk about DRM, which hasn’t yet been covered in great detail by the site.

The basic mood from more progressive thinkers is that DRM is a flawed principle. Proponents of DRM say that it helps curb duplication of material, which can lead to lost sales. Opponents, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say that it doesn’t achieve this and actually limits artists from reaching consumers. The main argument against DRM is that it is impossible to maintain […]

Brian Spaeth has possibly written the snarkiest book ever written. Normally I don’t like much snark because it seems to be unserious for fear of being sincere, but Prelude to a Super Airplane is actually laugh-out-loud funny. Another thing I don’t like is the phrase LOL because it’s so overused, but I really did LOL at this book, and it takes a lot to make that happen.

In a sense Brian Spaeth has tried to write the worst novel ever written. He probably won’t like that description, but PTSA is a “bad” novel in the same way that Spinal Tap […]

There’s no escaping the fact that vampires are a hot topic, and the recent success of the Twilight series has triggered a flood of new material featuring these sullen, fanged protagonists.

Virginia author Rebecca Rock has entered the fray with Daywalker, a novel about Jesse, a half-vampire raised by humans after the death of his parents. Now grown up, Jesse lives a double life – one part as a temperamental engineering student who lives with a pack of werewolves, and the other as a member of an elite psychic military team headed by his foster father.

Daywalker is something […]

Montana has always fascinated me for strange reasons.  Partly because there’s an alien quality to its physical beauty, as if a piece of Mars or Saturn had been towed in by some alien spacecraft millions of years ago.  Once it was dropped off, the shipping manifest got lost and the aliens forgot about it.  So there it sits.  Another part of Montana’s appeal is the people who live there.  For one, there aren’t many of them.  It’s what’s called “sparsely populated.”  For two, some of the people who do live there are…how shall I put it?…different from the rest of […]

Let it be said first that It May Be Forever: An Irish Rebel on the American Frontier is an excellent, very enjoyable book which would win the highest rating if we did that kind of thing at SPR.  The problem is that is resists classification.  Is it a history, a non-fiction novel, a biography, or historical fiction?  It works best as the latter, but one does not normally find photographs and other illustrations in such text, nor a bibliography.  A glossary of terms, sometimes, but any fictional text that fails to generate reader understanding of what these mean organically […]

Christopher Meeks is a self-publishing success story.  No, he hasn’t landed a huge publishing contract, but he’s establishing a very serious writing career via the self-publishing route – one that could be the model of how to do self-publishing right and how it can be the avenue for serious and entertaining fiction.

I’ve read every one of his books that he’s put out via Lulu: two short-story collections – The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Months and Seasons – and a play – Who Lives?  I’ve also seen a performance of Months and Seasons with stories read by […]

Wil Wheaton publishing a book via Lulu is one of the better developments in self-publishing.  It further helps to legitimize self-publishing for those who don’t have such quick name recognition, and could spark new interest in self-publishing among people who do.  Most celebrities wait out for their huge advance and write one major book, usually with another writer.  Given the huge interest in everything celebrities do, you could imagine well-known people releasing compilations of their writing periodically.  Publishing could become the new blogging – in which private thoughts are packaged for people to read.  That’s a possibility, at least.

But […]