Category: reviews

Covet by J.R. Ward – Cannonball Read #12

Covet by J.R. Ward. First in her Fallen Angels series. High quality paranormal smut.

Covet is the first book the J.R.Ward’s new Fallen Angels series. Each novel follows Jim Heron, a man with a mysterious and troubled past who is approached by heavenly agents. They recruit him to be their agent in the final contest between heaven and hell. Seven souls are at stake, each one afflicted with one of the seven deadly sins.  In Covet, Vin DiPietro is afflicted with greed. He is a rapacious land developer in the process of buying up and developing pristine tracks of wilderness. Jim must intervene in Vin’s life to save him from damnation.

Jim is opposed by a demon and assisted by two Harley-riding, leather-jacket-wearing fallen angels. He gets additional help from Marie Therese, the romantic heroine. She and Vin share a meaningful look early in the book. and it’s off to the races! Their relationship helps keep the book firmly in the romance vein. We all know how the book is going to end, Vin and Marie Therese get their Happily Ever After. As she is a prostitute, this takes a bit of doing, but what is love without trials and tribulations. The suspense in the book comes on Jim’s side of things. His story and its resolution are far from certain and I will definitely be keeping up with his further adventures.

As this is the first book in the series a fair amount of of the book is concerned with setting up the series. I like the high concept for the novels. Instead of the standard girl meets vampire, vampire gets girl, vampire loses girl, girl gets vampire back and they live sexily ever after plots of her first series the Black Dagger Brotherhood Ward is branching out.  I like that she is trying to change up her game and try a different tack. At the same time, the novel is still set in fictional Caldwell, NY, the setting of the the Brotherhood novels. There is significant fan service in the book, with several Brotherhood characters making cameos. As an artist, she is seeking creativity through constraint. I am interested to see how she resolves the series as the purported resolution of the contest that Jim is acting in is the end of humanity’s tenure on the Earth.

-fh

P.S. In a lovely and realistic touch, Jim and Marie Therese only ever have safe sex. They are both cognizant of the fact that unprotected sex with someone you’ve known for two days is a bad idea, especially when one of you is a sex worker.

Cannonball Read – The New Math

Period of challenge – 11/1/09 – 10/31/10

Number of books to read and review – 52

As of 5/28/10 number of weeks remaining – 22 (~154 days)

Books read – 21

Reviews completed- 13

Number of books remaining to be read- 31 – 1.41 books per week or one book per 4.97 days

Number of reviews remaining to be written and posted – 39 – 1.77 per week or one review per 3.95 days

Any bets? Will I finish? If I do, on what day?

-fh

Beloved – Cannonball Read #21

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Beloved is the story of Sethe, an ex-slave. She has escaped slavery and settled down in her mother in law’s house. The house is haunted and we find over the course of the novel that the poltergeist is the spirit of her daughter Beloved, whom Sethe killed when she though they would be taken back to a life of slavery. Beloved shows up at Sethe’s house one day. The novel is an emotional portrait of Sethe who is scarred by the horrific acts that the deep love for her children drove her to.

I was unimpressed with the book.  The prose was almost indecipherable for the first couple of chapters. I could barely make out the plot. I couldn’t tell if Morrison was deliberately trying to confuse the reader or if she just lacked the skill to carry off the writing style she was attempting. After the opening chapters the prose became easier to comprehend but the narrative was completely predictable. The method of Beloved’s death is hinted at for two thirds of the book but I knew immediately what had happened.

My experience of Beloved was tainted by the seminal  nature of the book. Before it was published there was no widely available, critically acclaimed novel illustrating the psychological impact of slavery. Because Beloved was so widely acclaimed it has entered the public subconscious. It had nothing new to tell me because its message has so permeated the culture I inhabit.  Beloved gets credit for paving the way for serious novels about slavery, for making a huge impact on modern American thought about the experience of slavery for black women.  It just doesn’t get credit for being an enjoyable read.

-fh

Assassin’s Creed II – Downloadable Mal-Content

Yesterday, after getting all of the trophies for Assassin’s Creed II I had a hankering to stab some more people in the throat and run over rooftops. I downloaded the DLC currently available: The Battle of Forli and The Bonfire of the Vanities: Black Edition with 3 Templar Lairs. All of this cost me $10.98.

The DLC  was not all that.

Continue reading Assassin’s Creed II – Downloadable Mal-Content

New Moon, Eclipse & Breaking Dawn- Cannonball Read #6, #7 & #9

New Moon,  Eclipse &  Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer, the second, third and fourth books of the Twilight Series.

If you call it a saga, I will cut you.  Spoilers abound. Continue reading New Moon, Eclipse & Breaking Dawn- Cannonball Read #6, #7 & #9

How to Knit a Love Song – Cannonball Read #11

How to Knit a Love Song by Rachael Herron. A fantastic, smart romance. Lots of super accurate knitting and fiber detail.

Full disclosure.  I have been reading Rachael’s blog for several years. This in no way obliges me to like her book. The fact that her book was awesome obliges me to like it.

Continue reading How to Knit a Love Song – Cannonball Read #11

Sinful

It’s been noted elsewhere that I have a bit of a knack for picking out video games that my sister will enjoy. Honestly, it’s not that hard; she likes games that star remorseless murderers with firm butts. Fyre tries to reciprocate, bless her flame-wreathed little soul, and that’s how I came to own a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire, which is the most infuriating game I’ve played in probably the last five years.

I should have loved this game. I cannot front: I find the design appealing, the graphics are handsome, and the course of play is stimulating. There’s a lot that Sins gets just right, which makes it a damned shame that the few problems it has are total bunny-boilers for me.

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Make Me Play Video Games #1: Far Cry 2

First off, holy crap. I’m sorry this took so long to get posted, but playing this game for such a long time left me with a lot to say and it was murderously hard to pick what to put in and what to leave out of the review. Once again, we find that a long review is way easier than a short one. I promise to try and trim things down next time. For the meantime, however, I give you:

Far Cry 2

Source: Steam Store
Paid: $10 for the retail game including “Fortunes” DLC pack
Play time: 41.8 hours

The vast majority of first-person shooters are roller coasters: they whisk you through a set path, popping up targets and obstacles as you go to keep things exciting and surprising. Far Cry 2 wants to be the entire amusement park, letting you run from ride to ride as you choose.

The result is, to put it mildly, an immense game. I spent almost 42 hours playing it, and that was after I quit playing all the side missions to completion at around the 50% mark and started barreling through the story as fast as I could. The world is huge by first-person standards, fantastically detailed with sun-dappled savannahs and glittering jungle waterfalls. There are newly-abandoned shacks and lost weapons caches tucked away in every corner of the map. You stumble across crashed escape planes and the aftermaths of gunfights over diamonds. But then you see a car patrolling 50 yards down a road, turning around, and then patrolling the same 50 yards in the other direction. Forever.

Far Cry’s story is sketched in broad strokes: you are a member of the mercenary and war profiteer community that seems to have descended en masse on the war-torn country of Nowhere-In-Particular, Africa. A client or clients never-to-be-named have tasked you with killing the Jackal, an arms dealer flooding the country with cheap guns that he sells indiscriminately to everyone with a trigger finger. The Jackal himself, a gravel-voiced Nietzsche fan, shows up almost immediately to taunt you for succumbing just as immediately to malaria; he (naturally) gives you your first gun, then pulls a Gandalf, inexplicably disappearing in the middle of the opening gunfight of a war between the two factions who have been arming to fight over the country. While the Jackal’s motivation is more complex than mere profit, his philosophy, articulated in a series of collectible interview recordings and a few more chance meetings, is also more ethically (and logically) murky than just making money off of war.

Your fellow mercs don’t fare much better. You select one of nine characters at the start of the story. All of them play exactly the same; the only effect of the choice is that the unchosen characters can be met in the game, waiting to be rescued by the player and then putzing around in Mike’s Bar waiting for a chance to hand out missions. One buddy asks you to murder a pair of drug dealers setting up shop in the boondocks of the bush. Another has VD and wants you to gun down the clinician who sold him an unsatisfactory ointment. Yet another suggests stealing an impossibly toxic defoliant, while yet another suggests actually spraying the countryside with it so that it will be easier to kill everyone.

If you demand a story with morality that ranges between gray and black, Far Cry 2 ought to be right up your alley. Games don’t come any grittier. The awful part is that you aren’t any better than the other assholes trying to make a buck in the war.

Continue reading Make Me Play Video Games #1: Far Cry 2

Shade’s Children – Cannonball Read #8

Shade’s Children by Garth Nix. Sci-fi dystopian young adult thriller.

In Shade’s Children the planet has been taken over by mysterious beings. Every person over the age of 14 at the time of the takeover disappeared and humans are bred, aged 14 years and then become “meat.” The book follows a groups of young rebels who manage to escape captivity and are led by Shade, the last adult human on the planet.

Onward – to spoilers.

Continue reading Shade’s Children – Cannonball Read #8