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2011 Books 1-3
Jan. 2nd, 2011 10:00 am Trying to get back in the habit of this.
1) _Trail of Cthulhu_ by Kenneth Hite: This was very good - a clear but complex discussion of the Mythos, a solid setting shift from the 20's to the 30s to differentiate it from _Call_ and a nice introduction to the Gumshoe mechanic. I obviously need to run a one or two shot game in the near future to wrap my brain around the resource management aspects of the mechanics, but the Gumshoe system plays nicely into my genre-drive narrativist GMing style.
2) _Happy Every After_ by Nora Roberts: This is the 4th book in the 'bride quartet' and I'd read nos 1 and 3 last year in the pre-and-post baby haze. Romance isn't my favorite genre but I have to give Roberts props - she's been doing this for 30 years and she's got her craft down. The series as a whole avoids some of the insane aspects of the genre in that the manditory bumps in the road to true love all make sense within the characters she's crafted, and when people are acting stupid they generally either know it and are working to get over it or realize it and resolve it quickly. This book has an advantage in that the the couple did not include one character who had secretly been in love with the other for years - instead they'd met 10 months ago, hung out for a few months, dated for a few months and got engaged. a quick romance, but refreshingly normal.
3) _Naked Heat_ by "Richard Castle": Rachel and I are fans of the TV show _Castle_, which has the premise of bestselling crime novelist Richard Castle tagging along with NYPD detective Kate Beckett to get inspiration for his series of novels about his new heroine, 'Nikki Heat'. So naturally ABC is releasing some ghost written _Heat_ novels to capitalize on the show's success. In the _Heat_ novels Nikki is followed around by superstar journalist Jameson Rook for a series of articles on her. While this allows the dynamic of the book to match the dynamic of the show without actually being a novel about Castle and Beckett, it does make me wish that they'd release the Jameson Rook stories about Nikki heat so the writers could grab their own navels and yank themselves into the 11th dimension.
Alas, while the book is amusing it's also a muddled mess. _Naked Heat_ contains scenes/elements/characters of virtually every episode of _Castle_'s 2nd season, which plays nicely to the conceit of the show but makes the book too overstuffed with disparate elements. I don't mind the idea - it's cute and popcorny - but the execution is overdone in a way that other TV tie-in books aren't.
1) _Trail of Cthulhu_ by Kenneth Hite: This was very good - a clear but complex discussion of the Mythos, a solid setting shift from the 20's to the 30s to differentiate it from _Call_ and a nice introduction to the Gumshoe mechanic. I obviously need to run a one or two shot game in the near future to wrap my brain around the resource management aspects of the mechanics, but the Gumshoe system plays nicely into my genre-drive narrativist GMing style.
2) _Happy Every After_ by Nora Roberts: This is the 4th book in the 'bride quartet' and I'd read nos 1 and 3 last year in the pre-and-post baby haze. Romance isn't my favorite genre but I have to give Roberts props - she's been doing this for 30 years and she's got her craft down. The series as a whole avoids some of the insane aspects of the genre in that the manditory bumps in the road to true love all make sense within the characters she's crafted, and when people are acting stupid they generally either know it and are working to get over it or realize it and resolve it quickly. This book has an advantage in that the the couple did not include one character who had secretly been in love with the other for years - instead they'd met 10 months ago, hung out for a few months, dated for a few months and got engaged. a quick romance, but refreshingly normal.
3) _Naked Heat_ by "Richard Castle": Rachel and I are fans of the TV show _Castle_, which has the premise of bestselling crime novelist Richard Castle tagging along with NYPD detective Kate Beckett to get inspiration for his series of novels about his new heroine, 'Nikki Heat'. So naturally ABC is releasing some ghost written _Heat_ novels to capitalize on the show's success. In the _Heat_ novels Nikki is followed around by superstar journalist Jameson Rook for a series of articles on her. While this allows the dynamic of the book to match the dynamic of the show without actually being a novel about Castle and Beckett, it does make me wish that they'd release the Jameson Rook stories about Nikki heat so the writers could grab their own navels and yank themselves into the 11th dimension.
Alas, while the book is amusing it's also a muddled mess. _Naked Heat_ contains scenes/elements/characters of virtually every episode of _Castle_'s 2nd season, which plays nicely to the conceit of the show but makes the book too overstuffed with disparate elements. I don't mind the idea - it's cute and popcorny - but the execution is overdone in a way that other TV tie-in books aren't.
