Bah!
I’ve been playing around with Google’s rich snippets for the past few days, and I have to say, I’m a little frustrated. Take the Sausage and Guinness casserole. It should be working without a hitch. but it isn’t. It doesn’t show up correctly in the google rich snippet testing tool.
It’s just annoying me now, as it says ‘you need at least two of these’, when I have more than 2 set. Bah I say!
[rating=4]
If you go looking for this book, you’ll see three author names. Not entirely sure why amazon did this, but the other two are pen names for Bob Mayer. Probably because I think he reissued them under his own name, rather than the original pen name he used.
Anyway, I got the entire series as ebooks, because, mostly, they were cheap, and good enough at the price to be worthwhile. Not sure if I’d have done it if they’d all been paper. I probably wouldn’t have even started. But with the first book being 70p, I felt I had little to lose in at least trying them. As it went, I chomped my way through the entire six novels over the course of about 4 days or so.
There’ll be a few minor spoilers in the next coupld of paragraphs, but nothing major. And yes, I’m grading the series as a whole at the rating above.
First off, there isn’t a great deal of character development. You’re not going to really know the characters. On the other hand, there are enough that it’s not so glaring. People fall into roles that seem suited for them, so it doesn’t matter that they’re relatively one-dimensional. (Warrior that fights, though he doesn’t want to. Spy/mastermind that keeps secrets by habit.) It works well enough that it kept my interest. There’s also a degree of ‘so what’s the next bad thing that’ll happen’. I guess that’s kind of inevitable when you have a series. Some manage it with a little more finesse however.
As you might expect of a book with this name (and by extension the series), there’s a lot of myths built into this. Atlantis. The Bermuda Triangle (and all the other weird triangle places), crystal skulls, time travel (kinda), psychics, inter-dimensional travel and so on. It could have been a horrible mess. It wasn’t. It was neatly blended together, with a dash of particle physics and string theory, to give a fairly consistent whole. If you’ve read many of my reviews, you’ll probably have noted that consistency is a big thing for me. I’ll forgive a fair amount, if it’s at least internally consistent.
Is it a wonder of modern literature? No. Is it worth the time to read? If you read one book a year, no. If you read several a week, yes, I’d say so. Give the first book a chance (as an eBook) and go from there.
I have one complaint. I have to wait till next year to know what happens next. Someone invent a time machine.
[rating=5]
This is the second book in the newsflesh series. The first, FEED, I reviewed a while back.
Now, I’m about to slap this behind a more tag. Because it has spoilers for the first book. As for the second, I’ll keep away from the major story points.Read More »
[rating=5]
The first book I read by this author was Feed. Don’t let the name fool you, Mira Grant‘s a pen name for Seanan McGuire. In other new, woo! the second in the Newsflesh series comes out tomorrow!
Getting back on track, this is pretty classic urban fantasy, with the oddness hidden away from mortal eyes with a mix of trickery, magic, and good old fashioned common sense. That’s not to say I don’t like the style where it’s out in the open, like the Hollows series, by Kim Harrison; it’s just keeping it hidden is the more common choice.
In addition, we’re not dealing with more than one ‘type’ of supernatural. No twisted blend of mages, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons and fairies. It’s just the fairies, and their part human children (Changelings). Of course, that ‘just’ is a trifle misleading. The author has done more than cursory research here, with many different distinct types of Fae, all brought together into a nice salad bowl of a society; In the eyes of the full blooded fae, the changelings tend to be the unappetizing limp bits at the bottom. She’s stuck with the Celtic myths, which keeps a degree of consistency, and thankfully avoids the Tinkerbell stereotype. If you have the word of a fae, you’re probably good. On the other hand, Bottom’s fate might await you.
Getting to the plot of the book, again, the tried and tested PI route has been taken. I’m not complaining, as it gives the story a degree of internal consistency, as the character has a reason to have a clue about being an investigator. Sticking to my spoiler philosophy of if it’s on the back of the book, it’s not a spoiler’, it’s a murder mystery. A high up fae’s dead, and it’s up to the main character, October ‘Toby’ Daye, to get to the bottom of it. Or die trying. And to reconnect with the Changeling life she rejected. Which is good, as it gives a good reason for things to be explained, without needing large info dumps.
I’m a fan. I’ll admit this now. The only reason I’ve not read my way through the entire series (yet) is that they’re not available as eBooks (at least in the UK). So I had to wait for delivery. There are, so far, three other books in the series, with more on the way. I’ve read three, and the fourth is waiting. I may or may not review them, but so far? Damn good. Classic Urban fantasy, with a strong female lead. If you like the Dresden files, you’ll probably like these. So give the first book a chance 🙂
| Sausage and Guinness casserole |
Baby new potatoes would do just as well, or a waxy potato that you’ve chopped up into similar sized pieces.
You could substitute beef stock for half the Guinness.
Run a peeler over the length of the celery to remove the strandy bits that get stuck in your teeth.
If you want to make sure you don’t get lumps of flour, get a little warm butter (not melted, but malleable), and rub the flour into it, before melting that into the liquid.
| Sausage and Cider Casserole |
Serve with mashed potato, and something else. I used green beans, with a light coating of tomato and paprika. The beans didn’t work out quite right, so I’m still honing that.
I’d recommend getting a ricer for the potato, as it makes life a lot easier, with a smooth mash at the end. And means if you don’t get all the potato cooked fully, the hard bits tend not to go through, so can be discarded. A little butter (salted) and a little pepper goes well with it, add the butter at the ricing stage, the pepper when you then mix it together with a spoon.
[rating=4]
Not the longest of DLC, but you’ll get a few hours of enjoyment out of it. And you can only complain so much, if, say, you ever go to the cinema. It’s not like it’s that expensive. Probably possible to blitz through it in under 4 hours. But that’s missing stuff. Like the story of the Father. Trust me. Go looking in the caves for hidden doors (Well, kinda hidden. behind brushwood).
Anyway, Honest Hearts, the continuing story of Joshua Graham, the Burned Man. This is, like Dead Money, a story driven DLC. While you can bumble round Zion National Park, it’s not that large. You’re there for the story. It’s not like, say, Point Lookout. If you don’t know who the Burned Man is, go back and play through New Vegas again. Ask around at the Legion camp. This DLC is fairly linear, though most of the quests have a few ways through them. Probably fits an altruistic character better.
I can’t wait for the next installment. Thankfully, it looks like it’s not that far away.
[rating=5]
As I said with my review of Fast 5, this isn’t a general rating. This is a rating within its genre. To put it in simple terms, if you liked the first film, you should like this one.
If you’ve not seen any of the preceding films, I guess you could watch it and still enjoy it. It doesn’t have too many dependencies. You won’t know any of the major films, and the compass will make no sense. Other than that, it’ll work. It doesn’t depend on the plot of any of the preceding films. Which is good, really. Thankfully, Sparrow’s , sorry, Captain Jack Sparrow’s ‘weirdness’ hasn’t been played up as much as it was in what I remember of the third film. He’s still a bit fey, but it’s not being played for laughs in the same way. Still, it’s a ham and cheese sandwich. But it works. The characters are meant to be larger than life, and that’s the way they’re being portrayed. McShane was really chewing the scenery. And it worked perfectly.
I saw it in 3D, at my local cinema. And to be fair to it, it was good. No headache, no bits that seemed out of focus. There were a few ‘stick something in your face’ moments, but they worked. Not like the yo-yo in Journey to the center of the earth. If you’ve seen the trailer, there’s a bit where a blade is stuck through a door. That’s in your face. Which is fine.
I thought I’d try something a little different, and this is the result. It owes its existence to a few recipes seen on the net, along with what ingredients I had to hand.
| Slow cooked Pork and Cider stew |
Serve with mashed potatoes, or whatever else you think it’d go with.
[rating=4]
While I know Dan Abnett’s work primarily through his Warhammer 40K novels, published through the Black Library (Other people might know him from 2000AD), I found this one through Amazon’s recommendation system. It’s nothing to do with Warhammer, so just put that from your mind.
Lex Falk is an award-winning journalist, having gone from planet to planet, looking for a story. Now he’s on Eighty-Six, burnt out and just passing time. An experimental procedure sticks him in the head of a soldier, just an embedded observer, along for the ride. When the shit hits the fan, and the soldier is injured, Falk has to take over, and get them out of there.
It’s a very careworn feeling universe, many of the characters either raging against what they see, or already smashed down, resigned to the way things are. It works well, not the grimdark of 40K, but a definite feeling of ‘one man can’t make a difference’. Once Falk’s in the soldier’s head, there’s a strong feeling of him being out of his depth, which is nice to see.
While it’s definitely military sci-fi, that aspect isn’t the primary one. The thriller aspect is. There’s something going on, where the character has to survive to discover the end of it.
It’s not what I was expecting, but I don’t regret buying it at all. I enjoyed it a lot.
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