OllieQ

What is it about nostalgia that makes folks pick up old pieces of work that should really be left alone? Not everything that we've enjoyed in the past, when our minds is not as grizzled or matured or tempered with experience the way it is now, is really as good as it was the first time we encountered it. This should be a universally known fact. However what is also universally true is people cannot resist the call at another go for that lost feeling of wonder. Corporate marketing is one of the first to know this, and is ruthless at exploiting this trait.

Almost every child my generation knows about He-Man, given the lack of choices we have in choosing which cartoons we had to watch. Good thing too, because He-Man wasn't horrible, but then now that I write this, I'd find it hard to admit which of the cartoons I did watch sucked. He-Man was entertaining, had a mythology that was easy to follow, has colourful characters that had plenty of adventures, and boy was it exciting. So it goes.

Literally 30 years later (minus several years, let's not worry about precision here), I find that DC has taken the He-Man property and, as it quite the trend nowadays, ‘given it new lease in life'. Dan Abnett, a writer of some reputation (although I can't really place him in my mind just this second), has been tasked to revamp the story, and give it the grit and veneer of complexity that characterizes a modern take of anything old school. And it worked.

This volume is actually a continuation from a series of stories started by Abnett earlier, where He-Man and all his allies lost their memories in an unexplained universal reboot apparently engineered by Skeletor. Apparently the harmless sidekick Orko, the floaty handkerchief with eyes, was the traitor that allowed this state to happen. The bad guys remembered the old days when the Masters of the Universe routinely kicked their butts, and during Adam's quest for recollection, they never fail to point out how low Adam has supposedly fallen from his earlier lofty positions. Also changed was She-Ra, who is now a general of evil fighting alongside the bad guys.

The Eternity War is the final cycle for this rebooted universe, and things have moved further along from Abnett's earlier stories. So in this arc, She-Ra now fights for good, the old Sorceress is dead and has been succeeded by Teela, who leads the army of Snake-Men, which was traditionally He-Man's foes (I don't know how this happened - I read the reboot arc, and now this one. I don't know how they got from that to this state). Hordak, the guy who supposedly pulled the strings in the back and the real bad guy behind Skeletor, dies and has been taken over by Skeletor. Through some mumbo-jumbo about the magic juice from Castle Grayskull, Skeletor is now embued with the power of Grayskull the same way as He-Man is, and meets his arch-enemy for a final showdown. No prizes for guessing who wins.

Which brings me to what I really want to say. After all the excitement of seeing my old friends again, the fond memories of characters that used to occupy my childhood fantasy adventures (and a character whose action figure I used to own! Actually I owned several He-Man action figures), after all the dust has settled, what have we got on our hands? That's the most powerful thought I had when I finished the entire Eternity War story arc. If you strip everything away, what do you have?

After the final analysis, the answer, for me, was really nothing at all. It wasn't even a competent story, because it was so convoluted especially the part about the magic of Grayskull somehow having the blood of the Adam's lineage somewhere in its bowels that can be transfused into anyone willing to receive it. The part about how Adam was actually devoured by Hsss and how that turned into a fight in Adam's consciousness to regain control of his body. It was an exercise to shoehorn what was already there into a story that made sense, and in my opinion didn't quite succeed.

It was good to see He-Man and the gang again. But I'm forty years old next year, and this work, more than anything else, made me realize just how silly it has been reading this work. There's a bit of magic, then, when people read Batman stories for 30 years and not be reminded how old they are, despite Batman being around since before they were born.

So then. What is it about nostalgia that makes folks pick up old pieces of work that should really be left alone?

(Finished earlier than recorded here)

Ok, a little something about their propensity for sex. Nothing too saucy though. Young chaps with testosterone on overdrive. And willing participants. Oh well.
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I like that Mr Footballer here is very self-aware about what's happening, and his observation of the environment in which these footballers spent most of their time changes their view of the world. Not everyone matures at the same rate, and some of these boys cannot recover from the praise that was heaped on them since young.

Anyway, a thoroughly entertaining book. I've read three of his books now. One more to go. It's not a competition or a checklist I have to go through. I like the insider bits he shows us as he paints the picture of a world I won't have access to otherwise.

Compared to his other books, this is average. I liked his Guide to the Modern Game a little more I think, because I learned a little more about the game from the perspective of how it's played, rather than learning about the dirty bits that go behind the scenes of the game.

(Finished this earlier than recorded date)

Lots of knights. A damsel in distress. Robin Hood. English King and the French invaders! A titular character who gets injured and was out of action for what I felt was a significant part of the book, but returns to kick bad guy's ass.

It's an adventure book, but not a particularly memorable one for me. The one scene that I liked was the one where (and watch closely how I do this) the bad knight (French!) was locked in his room by the old haggly woman who was a slave in the castle for decades. She turned out to be a nobleman's daughter (noble English!), tortured and used all this while in this castle as a captive from a siege long ago that also killed her family. She encounters an English knight in an escape attempt from the castle, revealed herself to him and was shocked to hear him denounce her as not living up to her noble lineage by sacrificing herself to kill those who dare destroy the English. She apparently wakes up from her desolate existence and decides to kill the main bad guy. Having locked him in his room, she proceeds to burn the tower, killing him and herself in the process.

I wonder what a wonderfully horrible job I did there, and if I deserve an applause.

I'm fascinated by North Korea, which is really an alternate reality on Earth. The Kims have a lot to answer for to the millions of North Koreans spanning generations lost since its founding.

The book adopts an incredulous tone throughout the narrative that I thought detracted from the book a little. Sweeney's feelings are understandable, and rightly so, but the way it seeps into the text makes the book more emotional than factual. I realize, of course, no text on any subject is free from emotional bias, but the constant name calling (Fat Boy Kim, Elvis impersonator Kim, etc) I feel weakens the text.

I have this on Audible, and I have literally stopped and restarted this book no less than 5 times, over a period of 3 years. I've gotten the furthest with this latest run, but I have to stop. Enough is enough.

I have no idea what this book is about. Maybe I have to actually read it, but usually Juliet Stevenson does an amazing narration. I hear her, but nothing's coming through at all. At least for Ulysses, which was also similarly difficult to listen to, had spells where I could actually understand what's happening.

I couldn't do that here. At all.

From a story perspective, this book is weaker than the original 7 books. It almost feels like a “greatest hits” collection, a sauntering lap of honour as the story brings the readers back to pivotal moments in the early books (yes, there's time-travel involved).

That's not to say that the story was poor. The originals had a purpose - an almighty quest that took 7 books to bring to closure. It was clear from the onset that this was an addendum, something that simultaneously brings an update to the fans on the state of affairs after 19 years in Potterverse (and 9 years since the publication of the last book), as well as to shoehorn a good story in there. So naturally the story needs to plumb the depths of the canon for familiarity' sake.

I enjoyed the story very much. As I mentioned the story itself was competently done, but what I really liked was the fact that this was a father and son story. And I'm truly a sucker for those, seeing that I'm also a father of a 9 year old. Being a father made me emotionally susceptible to blatant plot twists involving father-son relationships, threatening my long held reputation as a stone cold-hearted bastard who doesn't bat an eyelid at the supposedly tear-jerking moments in any book (which was first shattered, btw, by another father-son story). I see the challenges Harry has with his growing second child Albus as something that I have to brace myself facing. So this book actually gets three-stars, with a bonus one for being a father-son story.

This was a fun romp, and I highly recommend this to Harry Potter fans. If you've not read HP before, give this a miss for now. Do yourself a favour, set aside any preconceived notions and preconceptions you may have surrounding the originals, and read them.

[Forgot when I finished this]

Snippets of the thinkers in philosophy. Short chapters for each thinker, one leading to the next via a clever little setup.

Good introduction to the figures in philosophy.

(Can't remember when I started).

A monster of a book. It was sitting in my TBR (or more accurately, TBL (to be listened)) pile for years, and I've finally gotten around to it.

It's long, but it doesn't contain a huge cast of characters - almost like a locked room mystery. All the action takes place in a frontier town called Fount Royal, founded by a loud overachiever called Bitwell. The story is set in 1699, and it revolves around the trial of a supposed witch in Fount Royal, Rachel Howarth, said to be responsible for two grisly deaths, including that of her own husband. British Empire magistrate Isaac Woodward and his clerk Matthew Corbett was summoned to put the witch on trial, and sentence her.

As the story flows along, we find that all is not as it seems in Fount Royal, and young Matthew increasingly believes that there are forces at play here that seem intent on a larger plot beyond the sentencing of a witch. Doesn't help that Matthew is smitten by the beautiful widow whom he believes is framed for the murder. Running against time, Matthew attempts to uncover the clues that will exonerate Rachel and expose the truth.

I enjoyed the story more than I thought I would. I had expected a horror tale (and looked forward to it too!) given McCammon's reputation. As the tale wore on I found not only was it not a horror tale, but an incredibly interesting whodunnit.

Worth a read.

Longer review in book journal.

This was an amazing book. Haven't read it for reasons I need to get a psychologist to dissect, but ultimately got to it and it proved to be an hell of a read. Excellent story, excellent villain, great characters, great pacing. Writing a little sparse, but it worked.

Looking forward to watching the movie now! Ok, not like now, now, but soon.

(Didn't track actual Finished Reading Date)

Very informative. I learned a lot here.

(Review in book journal)

(It was read and finished sometime in June 2016)

Another excellent book, tangentially related to World War II. Again, I found myself liking it. All those things I used to mention about not liking books related to historical military wars, especially revolving around the wars in the 20th century, is turning out to be pretty rubbish.

I learned a lot about Jo Walton on this book, and it opened my eyes about the relationship (or rather, the market perception) about genre writers and their writing prowess is woefully misrepresented. Walton is an excellent writer, and by that I don't mean story-wise (although that too wasn't bad, in fact I wasn't expecting a murder mystery. But then, I didn't expect anything at all, not knowing much about the book beyond the back cover blurb). No, what I mean about Walton being an excellent writer is her prose is excellent. None of that Cassandra Clare, Veronica Roth level writing (although they are both published and deserve all their fame and success, because they put their work out there, unlike me, your typical armchair amateur book internet commenter).

I actually wrote quite a lot about the book in my book journal, and I'm not about to rehash or reproduce it here. Suffice it to say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing, and the story.

Moralistic. Read it.

(Didn't track actual Finished Reading Date)

Fun! I wanted to read about the naughty wives of famous footballers, but he doesn't explain it here. The stories he does tell was fun.

He makes it clear that not all footballers are dumb oafs. Well, that's obvious, not every footballer's idea of a good time is getting drunk and laid all the time, at the same time, and several times at once. At least, not all the time. But to see it articulated in such a manner, with such a sense of self-awareness is refreshing.

From an education perspective, however, I do prefer The Secret Footballer's Guide to the Modern Game, which isn't all textbook, but explains a little more behind some of the things that are happening on the screen.

This is an audiobook, provided for free by Ferriss himself. It's clearly a promotional tool, and he leaves out all the recipes and sidebar notes and stuff, so a good portion of the book is not covered here.

I'm aware I'm on shaky ground here if I portray myself as having ‘finished' this book, but this isn't about you. I'm writing my impressions here, so an old man like myself doesn't forget. Technicalities be damned.

This book isn't about cooking alone, although it does feature quite a lot of that. It's really about how you can learn a skill quickly, in the shortest possible time. Ferriss covers things like learning a new language, competition level dancing or whatever, about how it's important to do something that isn't ‘conventional' to get to the heart of the matter in learning - something that isn't learning by rote. There's an optimized path to learning things, and he lays the framework for doing exactly that.

And he applies that to cooking. There are recipes that accompany pretty interesting stories, so it isn't outside the realms of possibility that I pick up the actual book to see how things are done. Which is brilliant marketing on Ferriss's part.

I enjoyed the parts that aren't hardcore cooking. The anecdotes and the non-cooking stuff had knowledge that I'd like to remember and incorporate in my life. Language learning is something I'd like to do in a couple of years, so the principles should apply.

Now if only I have that damn book to refer to...

(can't remember when I read and finished this, but definitely within the timeframe I put up here)

This was forgettable. I mean literally. I forgot what this collection of stories was about. I think I remember the description of a horse's genitals, and one of the character's apparently embarrassment over seeing it. That's it.

Careless of me, really. I should look of the synopsis and redo this bloody review, because this defeats the purpose of me tracking the bloody books in the first place.

Wonderful. I'm one of those fans described exactly in the book - love to watch the game, has opinions but have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

This book obviously didn't change me in a major way, yet at the same time it did. I now know a little more about the tactics employed by managers, and truly, it cements the fact that there's simply no way for someone to truly understand what happens on the pitch when the only way you're seeing it is via the telly (I'm going British now). So much of the nuance appears outside the area where the ball is being played, and as the Secret Footballer points out, the only way one would know something is taking place tactically is when you know the secret nods and signals, or ‘triggers', that the players use among themselves.

Anyhow, it's an entertaining read, and I got the ‘I am the Secret Footballer' as a result.

Looking forward to it.

Excellent book. I prefer Far from the Madding Crowd, but I think that's possibly because it had a different ending (I'm almost tempted to say a happier ending, but then that was never a ready I preferred one book to another, was it? Right?).

It was a book simply filled with tension, because it was just so... unfair, for Tess. And I found myself getting angry several times during the book, and not the least of which was the scene where the secrets where laid bare between Tess and Angel. This was bait and switch, baby!

I've a work document to prepare before I head to bed, and this sentence has no business doing in a book review, but it speaks to my state of mind as I write this. The writing is brilliant, and the plot moved along well enough. It's the ladies, I tell you. In this time period what happens to the ladies and how they are treated and how they feel like there's literally nowhere else to turn to when things go sour is so unfair.

The ending was almost shoddy, in my opinion. Tess's act at the end there was almost clumsy and if I didn't know any better Hardy himself didn't know how to get her out of the quandary and decided to just fast track everyone to the ending. After what happened it was clear what was to come, so no surprises there, but everyone was frankly an ass to her, and what happened to her again smacks of total injustice.

Bah.

It's a great book. Read it. Despite my bah.

[Finished in March 2016 - exact date unknown]

Nothing like a long road trip to give me the time I need to finish this long overdue book. Highly recommended, so naturally I approached this with trepidation. Nothing like heightened expectations to completely screw up a perfectly good book.

I admit I was a little tentative with this book because I didn't know what to expect. I did know what I didn't want though, and that's having the book preach at me, clumsily painting the injustices of being in a minority, and thinly veiled attempts to persuade me to one side or another.

But no, thankfully. Nothing preachy about the book at all, just the day in the life of an ordinary middle aged man who just happens to be gay. George is still grieving over the loss of his partner, and grapples with thoughts of life, death, and the general challenge to continue living as he approaches the latter part of life. It's not a book about a gay man, but a book about a lonely man. It's heart-wrenching, hopeful and depending on how you feel towards the end, a little tragic.

I loved how Isherwood explored George's feelings, and absolutely adored the dialogue. Wonderful wordcraft here on full display.

The overwhelming feeling I had upon finishing this work was this is how a day in a life novel is supposed to be written: succinct yet full of meaning. It's almost everything Ulysses isn't. A Single Man is wise, even-tempered, humane, touching, and something you'd finish reading feeling completely satisfied knowing you've been changed that little bit as a result. Importantly, it felt like it was written just so, to finish at the perfect length.

Thoroughly recommended.

I don't know if this is the start of a trend. Another great classic that grew on me. I loved the build-up to the finale, which you sorta know was coming, but for a while there you are thinking “could this be one of those really tragic novels that you could not imagine classic stories usually go?” As it turns out the novel holds the tension pretty tautly throughout.

I use the word ‘tension' here pretty loosely, because this isn't exactly an action thriller. But I find there's a huge feeling of satisfaction at the end of these types of novels where everything resolves itself.

It's pretty good love story. Not GGM's Love in the Time of Cholera level exactly, but a pretty decent one. I'm almost afraid I'm losing my edge here, falling for these types of stories.

Writing-wise it's pretty standard classic English prose. Those with literature degrees please refrain from strafing me with bullets, because I'm obviously generalizing here. I'm not elite enough to distinguish the difference in prose between Austen, Eliot or Conan Doyle with Hardy, merely by the emotion they evoke. And Hardy is, in my highly technical and considered professional opinion, pretty good.

A quick note is I thought Francis Troy is one of the awesomest (another highly technical term - you can tell I put in a lot of effort in these reviews), smoothest, most dastardly playboy/badboy in literature. My favourite character in the novel, hands-down, and one of best I've read. In the spirit of the recent Star Wars fever, let's just say Han Solo has nothing on this chap. He has the best lines, and I particularly like this passage, which, of course, is resonates with universal truth.

Why, Miss Everdene, it is in this manner that your good looks may do more harm than good in the world.” The sergeant looked down the mead in critical abstraction. “Probably some one man on an average falls in love with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet—your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you—you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to drown the bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more—the susceptible person myself possibly among them—will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.”

Read this some time back, now catching up on reviews.

This was a quick read. I expected a non-fiction treatise on the principles of success, but instead it's a fable - a tale of hardwork and enterprise to seek success, and not be seduced by short-term gains and temptations.

It was fun, but the bloody book stops just when he starts work in a publishing house. It would be good, you know, if the book ACTUALLY ENDS PROPERLY.

Another one of those classics where I have absolutely no idea what I'm getting myself into. The first impression I got, and it stuck throughout the book: Faulkner writes brilliantly. Excellent prose. Not a classic that I'm crazy about, I have to say, but it's better than Ragtime for me.

Finished this sometime back and a lot of impressions have disappeared, but I remembered that the book wasn't bad - an unwed pregnant girl travels alone to find the father of her child, only to find that he's (surprise) a no-good small time naughty boy, but not before catching the eye of the local good boy. The story then veers its focus towards the said bad boy's ‘friend', Joe Christmas, which takes up the majority of the book, up until the point Christmas got lynched (well, didn't those choice of words controversial).

Unlikely to revisit, but the writing. Whew. I've been known to do some crazy things, and one of them might just be picking up Absalom, Absalom!

It was ok. I was never a console player, so Mario didn't really evoke much nostalgia in me. I wanted to find out what made Nintendo tick as a company, and I thought this book went into that somewhat, but not in any particular detail. Largely driven by personalities with whims that the market responded to, it seems like. Talked about the upstart challenge from Sega, and how Nintendo inadvertently helped create the astronomical rise of the PlayStation (has to do with how they rejected the use of the CD in their consoles).

At the moment Nintendo isn't exactly winning the console wars, and their previous big successes on the handheld gaming market is well and truly trounced by the rise in casual gaming in smartphones. So it'll be interesting to see where they go from here. Their legacy, though, as detailed in this book, is enormous, and it'll be interesting to see how Mario can fix their pipes (groan).

(Don't remember when I started and finished this book. Didn't take a month to finish, though)

The first book was brilliant. It was fun and unexpected (I mean, it's ninjas with vampires. This could go wrong in so many ways). I didn't expect to much on this sophomore volume, and I suppose it did well enough.

We find early on that the hero's teacher, the vampire Whatshisname, didn't die after all after the huge fight at the end of the first book. I thought that was a mistake. Apparently I'm more bloodthirsty than the vampires in the book.

The hero reunites with his mother, only to see her die at the hands of a confused ex-companion who mistakenly believes the hero murdered her sister. This was interesting, I thought, and a move in the right direction from a plot perspective. What I didn't expect, however, is the ghost of the mother haunting her son. A sad, passive-aggressive ghost following the son, draining him of his life energies, and periodically appearing before him in leaving frustratingly undecipherable clues - apparently she forgets that as a ghost her instructions/warnings/apologies don't come through living world, so the hero sees her mouthing... something... and he can't for the life of him figure out what the heck she's saying.

This is, literally, an unhealthy basis for a mother-son relationship. He finally figures out what he needs to do on the cusp of dying (I think I face-palmed myself here), dies and meets his mother finally in hell who (finally!) can communicate! Luckily she doesn't say, “I just wanted to tell you all this while that you didn't tie your shoelaces.”

He gets the vital clue he needs to uncover the treasure of the plot, which is something I feel is the wrongly named Buddha Ball. There didn't seem to be anything vaguely Buddhist about this weapon of mass destruction. Anyway, he gets this, and proceeds to destroy the same guy he supposedly killed in the last book. The bad guy got his guts sliced open at the end of the last book, but because the hero was bleeding, some of his blood flowed into the open mouth of the fallen bad guy, turning him into a vampire (because the hero is a vampire ninja - I had forgotten to mention this bit. You know, just in case you didn't realize from the title of the book).

The love interest is the daughter of the said bad guy, and I'd imagine he'd have a hard time courting her now, having killed her father not once, but twice. In fact, he'd have such a hard time of it I suspect he'll spend a big portion of the third book doing just that. I have that very book, and I'm looking forward to seeing how he accomplishes this.

I'm slightly cheeky with this review, but I have to say I did enjoy this book, though admittedly not nearly as much as the first one. There wasn't an expectation with the first book, and the second has to be coloured somewhat with some kind of expectation.

I seriously look forward to the concluding volume of this story.

[No idea when I finished this]

Vampires and ninjas. This is a fun book. I have to admit that my expectations weren't fantastically high to begin with, but this was better than Jet Black and the Ninja Wind, another of those ninja YA fiction.

(Flipping through the CIP Block on the page, this particular book is curiously not catagorized as YA).

I've gotten to this book too late. This book is so much part of the popular culture that you didn't even know you knew spoilers.

In my case, I truly didn't know much beyond Janet Leigh's infamous shower scene (no, I've not seen the movie either), and for the longest time I didn't know if she lived or died. Eventually I did sort of ‘know', not because I knew the fact, but I guessed it must have been inevitable.

Which brings me to this. Finally I've managed to get to this book, and if I had been living under a rock this would have been a 4.5 star book (as it stands, I'm living under a giant mushroom. Almost like a rock, but not entirely). By the first quarter of the book I guessed the twist, and while the book still managed to hold my attention throughout, the punch in the gut feeling the book would have delivered was gone.

Bloch put in clues all throughout the narrative that hinted at the final discovery. If you ever want to experience everything Bloch had intended for his audience, in what is undoubtedly one of the finest horror stories ever, you should stay away from all reviews. Including this one. Oops.

p.s. No, I was not scared reading this book. Sigh. Where is the book that will genuinely scare me? Fiction, please, not real-life stories - I'm a wuss.