( D ) Books

The Marvel Encyclopedia

Daniel Wallace, Tom Brevoort, Andrew J. Darling, Tom DeFalco, Peter Sanderson, Michael Teitelbaum

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 76 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great Marvel's "All in one"edition 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book as a gift for my 14 years old son. He loves it. If you like comics, or if you are passionate fun of Marvel's best characters having this book IS A MUST.

Editorial Review:

Marvel Comics' character roster boasts some of the best known and most popular characters ever conceived-heroes that are international household names, both as comic book stars and movie stars, such as Spider-Man, the Hulk and Wolverine. This unique, one-volume encyclopedia contains more than 1000 of Marvel's greatest, with full details of their powers and their thrill-packed careers. The encyclopedia's range of spectacular art features eye-popping work by Marvel's finest artists, while the authoritative text is supplied by a team of top Marvel comic book writers. In addition, double-page features, illustrated with classic covers, trace the fascinating story of Marvel Comics through the decades. The Marvel Comics Encyclopedia is an essential book both for new fans and for those who grew up loving the excitement, heroism and humor of the Marvel Universe. Includes a foreword by Stan Lee.

The Gunslinger Born (The Dark Tower Graphic Novels, Book 1)

Peter David, Stephen King, Robin Furth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 71 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Brilliant Retelling of a Heart Touching Tale 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The Dark Tower, those three words have a great deal of power at least for me. My ears perk up, my heart beats slightly faster and a grin spreads across my face. Stephen King's Mid-World and all it encompasses has spread to comics, The Gunslinger Born is a retelling of the flashback Roland finally shares with his new ka-tet in "Wizard and Glass" (book 4) It is a tale of love, brother-hood, villiany, and of course a bit of gunslinging.

I would highly recommend this to fans of Stephen King's masterpiece, however I would advise readers that have not yet journeyed through all 7 Dark Tower epic novels to read those first. The talented creative team behind this comic book did a fantastic job however there is a lot of stuff you miss, some events don't have the gravity in the comic that is present within King's novel. Which is understandable, I feel this would have been a lot better had they fleshed things out more. Seven issues to cover Roland's journey from apprentice gunslinger to true love then to a possible breakdown. If it was 10 issues I strongly believe it would have been quite a bit better.

Although for the picky fan like myself there will always be something missing, something more the team could do to capture the full feel of the original material.

This is a comic so you get to not only read what transpires but also watch it unfold, the artwork is gorgeous and fits well with the story and world of the Dark Tower however (did you know that was coming? picky fan emerges once again) it removes your imagination from the equation. I had a very different image of Alain and Susan than what is seen here. Honestly I had a different image for everyone except maybe Steven Deschain. How many people read the Dark Tower series and envisioned this characters,? Countless. So is this a valid complaint? No I don't think it is.

I have to commend the creative team behind this book, they have captured the feel of King's series both visually and with the writing. Sure there is lines lifted right from W&G, it is an adaptation right? The aspect of this that grabbed me the most was the narrator bits. I won't say anymore because its better if you read it yourself.

Longtime Dark Tower and King vets will eat this up, I sure did. I think the problem I had with it is I read this right after reading W&G, a few months back I dived back into the books. So with W&G fresh in my mind I could pick out things that were off, there's one part in particular with good old Steven Deschain that really felt off. Read the end of W&G (after Roland's tale is done, right after the ka-tet reach the Green Palace) then this and you will know what I am talking about.

The best part of this book is the fact that it is only the first arc(story) in the Dark Tower series of comic books. The Long Road Home is the second, Treachery is the third. The fourth is yet to be announced. I hope this continues for a couple years.

Editorial Review:

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." With those words, millions of readers were introduced to Stephen King's Roland -- an implacable gunslinger in search of the enigmatic Dark Tower, powering his way through a dangerous land filled with ancient technology and deadly magic. Now, in a comic book personally overseen by King himself, Roland's past is revealed! Sumptuously drawn by Jae Lee and Richard Isanove, adapted by long-time Stephen King expert Robin Furth (author of Stephen King's The Dark Tower: A Concordance) and scripted by New York Times Best-seller Peter David, this series delves deep into Roland's origins -- the perfect introduction to this incredibly realized world, while long-time fans will thrill to adventures merely hinted at in the novels. Be there for the very beginning of a modern classic of fantasy literature!

Brimstone Kiss (Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator)

Carole Nelson Douglas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Left Hanging! AGAIN! 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I absolutely love the character of Delilah Street. For such a rough beginning in life she is a delightfully well rounded young lady. The story line is wonderful, and I think it's fine that an author gives you hints as to the line the next book in a series might take. But WHY do authors feel they must leave you hanging? If I wanted a soap opera cliffhanger... I would just watch soap operas. If the book is GOOD we will buy the next in the series. Please, get a clue, end the book, and pick it up again where we left our hero!

All Over the Place 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I like Delilah a good bit. She has a very engaging "voice" and is fun to spend time with. That said, her adventures are kind of all over the map. Rather than a logical progression of the plot, it seems that she has meetings with people kind of at random until finally she gets a big idea, also kind of at random. I particularly didn't believe she figured out who the new bad guys were, what their plan was, and who they must be holding captive at a computer in her semi-enemy's office -- especially since it didn't make much sense in the first place. (For that matter, Nightwine's motivation for giving her a place to live is very thin as well).

Also, usually in an urban fantasy setting, you gradually get a feeling for the rules of the world, and what is possible and what is not possible. I have the feeling that in Delilah's Las Vegas, anything is possible if the author needs it.

As I said, I like Delilah. I'll probably buy the next book too, but they could hang together better.

Editorial Review:

Delilah and her partner - tall, dark, handsome, and Hispanic ex-FBI guy Ric Montoya - are busy solving a "Romeo and Juliet" double-murder and she's got plenty more to deal with: vampires, werewolves, and tigers, oh my!

Fatal Revenant: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

Stephen R. Donaldson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Unexpected Present 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

When I found out that Stephen Donaldson was writing another Thomas Covenant chronicle, I felt like I had been given an unexpected gift. Something I really wanted but never thought would be given. The second book of the last chronicle is a wonder.

Donaldson unfolds his tale with all the loving care of a Giant. And this latest installment is another shining example of his craft. Sometimes heart wrenching, sometimes uplifting but always lyrical.

Anyone who has read Donaldson before should have already read this book; anyone who hasn't read Donaldson, but enjoys fantasy should buy a copy of Lord Foul's Bane, today. And pick up a good dictionary at the same time. The wordsmithing in these novels adds another dimension to the tale for those who take the time to understand.

This book is a winner and guides us deeper into the mystery that is the Land and the human heart.

Editorial Review:

The instant New York Times bestseller, and the return of the Thomas Covenant series— “a landmark fantasy saga.”(Entertainment Weekly)

In the most eagerly-awaited literary sequel in years, Linden Avery, who loved Thomas Covenant and watched him die at the end of Book Six, has returned to the Land in search of her kidnapped son, Jeremiah. As Fatal Revenant begins, Linden watches from the battlements of Revelstone while the impossible happens—riding ahead of the hordes attacking Revelstone are Jeremiah and Covenant himself, apparently very much alive. But Covenant is strangely changed…

The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You

Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, George Pratt, Stan Woch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

You may have heard somewhere that Neil Gaiman's Sandman series consisted of cool, hip, edgy, smart comic books. And you may have thought, "What the hell does that mean?" Enter A Game of You to confound the issue even more, while at the same time standing as a fine example of such a description. This is not an easy book. The characters are dense and unique, while their observations are, as always with Gaiman, refreshingly familiar. Then there's the plot, which grinds along like a coffee mill, in the process breaking down the two worlds of this series, that of the dream and that of the dreamer. Gaiman pushes these worlds to their very extremes--one is a fantasy world with talking animals, a missing princess, and a mysterious villain called the Cuckoo; the other is an urban microcosm inhabited by a drag queen, a punk lesbian couple, and a New York doll named Barbie. In almost every way this book sits at 180 degrees from the earlier four volumes of the Sandman series--although the less it seems to belong to the series, the more it shows its heart. --Jim Pascoe

Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik

Philip K. Dick

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's words, "wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him." Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works-fantastic and weird yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation-that are startlingly prescient imaginative responses to 21st-century quandaries.

This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 212 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world."
--John Brunner
THE INSPIRATION FOR BLADERUNNER. . .
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time.
By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . .
They even built humans.
Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.
Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.
"[Dick] sees all the sparkling and terrifying possibilities. . . that other authors shy away from."
--Paul Williams
Rolling Stone

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (Year's Best Science Fiction)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Worth the price of admission 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I have several of Dozois' collections, and this one is--as reviewer Brad Schorr also said--above average. I didn't love every one of its thirty-two stories, and I couldn't even bring myself to finish two of them, but that's par for the course. In my experience, about 25 percent of a decent edited volume is really enjoyable, 25 percent is a chore to read, and the middle fifty percent falls between "blah" and "not bad." In this collection, I'd say that only the two aforementioned stories were really a chore to read, and though several stories were "blah," most fell between "not bad" and "pretty good". That's not too shabby if you subscribe to Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of everything is crap").

I'm not going to run down all of the stories since Brad Schorr's done that for us already, but I do want to point out that there's plenty of room for disagreement with his take on them. Two stories that Schorr graded "A" -- "Roxie" and "The Skysailor's Tale" -- were the two that I couldn't read, the former because it was so drippingly sentimental, and the latter because it was so mannered and slow. Most of the stories he graded "C" fall into my "not bad" category, including Ken McLeod's "Lighting Out", which is a decent if pretty standard McLeod/Stross "singularity" tale, and McDonald's "Sanjeev and Robotwallah," which is a craftsmanlike near-future piece about how new technologies disrupt traditional life in the underdeveloped world. On the other hand, we agreed about several of the stories, including Chris Roberson's "The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small," a subtle alternate history piece that appears to be the most anthologized story of the year.

Bottom line: If you're in the mood for some stories and you don't need them all to be absolutely amazing, this collection is a good deal.

P.S. If you've read Dozois' THE NEW SPACE OPERA anthology, you should be aware that three of the stories collected here are drawn from there ("Saving Tiaamat," "Verthandi's Ring," and "Glory"). On the other hand, if you haven't read that anthology, I recommend it. Don't judge the book by the quality of those three stories -- they are NOT the best of the bunch.

Editorial Review:

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world.

This venerable collection brings together award winning authors and masters of the field such as Robert Reed, Ian McDonald, Stephen Baxter, Michael Swanwick, Paolo Bacigalupi, Kage Baker, Walter Jon Williams, Alastair Reynolds, and Charles Stross . And with an extensive recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction, this annual compilation has become the definitive must read anthology for all science fiction fans and readers interested in breaking into the genre.

Invincible (Star Wars: Legacy of the Force, Book 9)

Troy Denning

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 94 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

No war can last forever. Now, in the long and punishing battle between the defiant champions of the New Jedi Order and the juggernaut that is the Galactic Alliance, the endgame is finally at hand. With so much lost–and nothing less than the course of the future still at stake–there can be no turning back. No matter the consequences.

The rebel cause is losing ground under the twin blows of Admiral Gilad Pellaeon’s assassination and the death of Mara Jade Skywalker. At the same time, having gained the support of the Imperial Remnant and its ruthlessly efficient forces, the Galactic Alliance, with the extraordinary power and dark brilliance of newly ascendant Sith Lord Darth Caedus at its helm, may be unstoppable. Tormented and torn between the call of duty and the thirst for vengeance, Luke has searched the Force and beheld an unspeakable vision of the galaxy enslaved under tyranny more monstrous than even Palpatine’s. Now it seems that the last, best hope lies in mobilizing the scattered Jedi for one decisive search-and-destroy mission. The objective: eliminate Darth Caedus.

It’s a plan that will be as difficult and dangerous to execute as it is daring. For Caedus is a scion of both the Skywalker and Solo bloodlines whose command of the Force surpasses even that of his grandfather

Darth Vader. There is only one who is bound by destiny to stand against him in what will surely be a duel to the death, only one with an outside chance of bringing down the dark lord who was once Jacen Solo.

Failure is not an option. The furious final moments between power and peace are here, and whoever confronts Darth Caedus will decide the outcome–and the fate of those left standing.

Inferno (Star Wars: Legacy of the Force, Book 6)

Troy Denning

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Legacy of the Force: Inferno 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have come in during the middle of this series and, despite having only a partial view, this book is the best in the series.

The book opens with Jacen manipulating Tahiri, who apparently is still swimming in grief over Anakin. A rather sorry state of affairs for a Jedi, if you ask me.

Luke is in shock about Mara's death and his killing the wrong person in retaliation. Totally understandable. I mean, this guy has had it rough throughout his entrie life and had finally found some happiness. I would have perferred that Luke and Mara died together, but we can't always get our wishes.

Han and Leia are front and center in much of this book and that is a good thing.

Jacen/Caedus is becoming very dark in this book. He punishes the home world of his father's best friend just because the planet's inhabitants weren't immediately turning over their ships to him. And it is just typical Sith stupidity is that he doesn't realize that his actions are causing more harm than good.

Tenel Ka gets hit between the eyes with just how evil Jacen really is. She trys to make him reconcile with Luke and the Jedi, but Jacen just deceives her and then trys to blow smoke over his trail.

Ben is about to get hit with the fact that Jacen is trying to make him into a Sith, too.

A character that I really liked in the New Jedi Order series and absolutely despised in the Swarm War Trilogy gets slaughtered to deceive another character.

Jaina, Jag, and Zekk are busy hunting for Alema Rar and get side tracked when they arrive at the Jedi Academy on Ossus. The idea of Jacen posting GAG soldiers at the academy to enforce the continuing "friendship" between the government and the Jedi is just plain sick. The commander of the GAG soldiers is totally insane and proved it near the end of the book.

The subplot about Alema Rar was rather interesting. A Dark Jedi with a Sith ship who is trying to murder Leia and is currently being hunted by two Jedi and a bounty hunter (I don't like that description of Jag, but I don't write the character titles). Alema goes to the Sith homeworld to try to enlist their help and she hopes to become Jacen's new mentor. Highly unlikly, if you ask me.

There are some pretty good space battles in this book.

You get a scare in the last 150 pages of the book when Luke and Jaina make a run at Jacen's flag ship. I almost had a heart attack when I read that passage.

The lightsaber duel between Luke and Jacen was very well written. I could almost hear John Williams 'Battle of the Heroes' track from Episode III while I was reading it. (Hey, George Lucas! You've got a great possibilty for a new movie in this book, if you ask me!!!)

The scene is Jacen's secret chamber on the 'Anakin Solo', just before the lightsaber duel, was pretty hair raising. *READ AT YOUR OWN RISK*

Jacen clearly is deceiving himself if he thinks that what he is doing is good for the galaxy. We will see how Mr. Denning writes the final book of this series. I can't wait!!

May the Force be with us!!!

Editorial Review:

Luke Skywalker wanted to unify the Jedi order and bring peace to the universe. Instead his wife Mara lies dead at the hands of an unknown assassin, his wayward nephew Jacen has seized control of the Galactic Alliance, and the galaxy has exploded in all-out civil war.

With Luke consumed by grief, Jacen Solo works quickly to consolidate his power and jumpstart his plan to take over the Jedi. Convinced he’s the only one who can save the galaxy, Jacen will do whatever it takes, even ambush his own parents.

With the Rebel confederacy driving deep into the Core to attack Coruscant and the Jedi under siege, Luke must reassert his position. Only he can lead the Jedi through this crisis, but it means solving the toughest problem Luke’s ever faced. Does he fight alongside his nephew Jacen, a tyrant who’s illegally taken over the GA, or does he join the rebels to smash the Galactic Alliance he helped create?