The Readin Roos

Cursor's Fury is the third installment in the Codex Alera. This one didn't stand out as much to me as the first two. It had some really good & exciting moments, but I found it a little thinner in character development. I'm definitely going to continue reading this series, but it took me bit longer than usual to read this particular novel. I have been told by others who have read the series that there will be more zombies. They dropped out for this book and I think that their return is what will get me uber-excited again about reading the Alera series.

This is a wonderfully-engaging survey of the sciences. Starting out the the Big Bang, Bryson proceeds to explore the founding of the modern sciences by describing not only the intellectual ideas and debates (and the occasional feud) but also the men and women behind those ideas. In fact, some of the more fascinating parts involve those more eccentric characters of 19th century science. Take, for example, the Reverend William Buckland. He wasn't simply an English geologist and founding father of paleontology.

Lynd Ward is known more as an illustrator of various editions of the classics, but during the 1930s he also fashioned six "graphic novels" illustrated by woodcuts.

"When the peoples of this Earth first started to explore the waters of the seas, they did not start with some great battlewagon; but, they simply put a log in the water and floated down stream." Thus begins Warren R. Cozby, Jr's book, Nuts and Bolts of Space Colonization (Davis Brothers; paperback) a simple treatise for and on the colonization of space. One day Mr. Cozby had a realization and that realization was reached after reading "many books about science fiction… watching countless hours of TV and movies about the future colonization of man in space."

I Need My Monster is the story of Ethan, a little boy who just can't get to sleep without a monster under his bed.

Is it murder when you kill someone who's already dead?

Anita Blake doesn't think so. Anita lives in an alternate reality where vampires have come out of the closet - er, coffin, so to speak - and are living large in mainstream society. The trouble is that someone is killing them. Anita finds herself on the other side of the stake when she is coerced into assisting Nikolaos, the master vampire of the city, track down whoever is murdering her minions.

This sixth installment in the Kay Scarpetta series is no less gripping than the first five. Kay and her niece Lucy, now an employee of the FBI, team up to find the serial killer whose had Kay in his sights since the fourth novel in the series, Cruel and Unusual.

As always, Patricia Cornwell weaves a strong, fast-paced story complete with personal complications and moral quandaries. It's another excellent chapter in the ongoing saga.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I've already finished the second book in the Codex Alera. The second book follows the further adventures of the first set of protagonists, but ramps up the intrigue. There are lots more enemies, both political and monstrous. Oh, and it has zombies. I <3 zombies. F(x_x)F

If you want to get technical and argue with me on the point, I might concede that they're not "true" zombies.

Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, explores the history of the Civil War and its aftermath on South over 100 years later. He examines both the original battlefields and the modern battles played out in communities across the South due to the lasting effects of the Civil War on the region.

Horwitz visits each Confederate state and writes about the people and places he encounters.

Since I've read all of the Dresden Files that are currently available (I have to wait until spring for Ghost Stories!?!?), I thought I'd take the author's other series out for a spin. The first book in the Codex Alera certainly didn't disappoint me (though I've already read the second one, Academ's Fury, too and I think it gets a little bit better) and has many of the elements that I like so much about the Dresden Files. Jim Butcher is really good at putting his protagonists into impossible situations and somehow getting (most of) them out alive.