xD :D Glad you liked it. Did you read the entire Paks Trilogy?

The Lady in the Lake - Raymond Chandler

I liked this one more than Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely”. I found it to be more interesting in plot, mystery and characters. A good detective novel.

Mister Slaughter by Robert McCammon. #3 in the Matthew Corbett series. In the last book, we were briefly introduced to an asylum inmate named Tyranthus Slaughter. In this one, Matthew and his partner Hudson Greathouse are tasked with escorting Slaughter from the asylum to New York so he can be shipped off to England for trial and execution. It's not a spoiler to mention that Slaughter escapes and goes on a killing spree and the heroes have to track him down.

I enjoyed this but it's definitely the least of the series so far. The main reason for this is that it's obvious Slaughter is going to escape, so the issue is when and how it happens and it just takes a bit for it to go down. I think McCammon wanted to instill a sense of mounting dread in the reader, but after a certain point I thought "Eh, just get on with it." It's also a bit of a ballsy move to have the hero of the story be indirectly responsible, through his foolishness and greed, for getting several innocent people brutally murdered. Once it does happen, the book gradually picks up momentum until it comes to a nice finish, even if the shift to a wilderness setting for a while robs the story of some of the period details that help it stand out.

As I was reading, something about Slaughter's depiction kept tugging at my mind, such as the implication that he might have been Sweeney Todd before he moved to the colonies, and McCammon confirmed in the book's afterword that he and many of his actions were indeed inspired by the classic horror actor Todd Slaughter and several of his roles. There's also a bit of a cute James Bond reference in the story, which helps underline the series' transition from relatively straight historical fiction to more of a pulpy adventure/horror concept.

GOG seems to be censoring something from my quick review of Scenes from the Heart and I'm not going to try to figure out what and definitely won't change it to get around the censorship, so it's available on Goodreads, The StoryGraph and blog.

Rating: 4/5

Lightfoot books 1 & 2 by Joe Kuster. I enjoy LitRPGs, though the bedroom aspects in these two were a bit much for my tastes. Lightfoot 2 was more PG, which was nice. Looking forward to more. 4/5 for them both.

The Tower of Swallows, by Sapkowski. One more book left in the Witcher novels (well, I guess there is another he wrote a few years back). I found the beginning and the end of the book, basically the parts dealing with Ciri and her entanglement with Bonhart the bounty hunter, to be pretty involving, while the stuff in between felt like a lot of aimless running around by the rest of the characters. Geralt in particular seems almost pathetic, constantly hindered by his leg injury and not having any idea where he's really going but just feeling compelled to keep moving anyway. I'm not convinced Sapkowski had any idea where he was going with the plotting of these novels and was just sort of winging it as he went along, hoping an ending would present itself eventually. I'm increasingly of the mind that the video games are a genuine, and actually pretty sizable, improvement on their source material/inspiration. At least they have a better focus and sense of momentum in their storytelling.

Yeah, that one was the low point of the series, and Lady of the Lake also suffers from confusing presentation and direction, but it also has much better moments than ToS.
About the rest though, imho the series just got better between BoE, ToC and BoF, before tripping quite seriously, going straight from the high to the low. Maybe getting bored, maybe out of ideas, maybe wanting too much and having it fall apart on him, I don't know. But then SoS was good as well.
And does seem to me that the games rely more on those first books, and the short stories. Maybe less so the 3rd, but managed to keep myself from knowing most details of that one to be able to really say.

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes - Suzanne Collins

Jáchymovské peklo (Jachymov Hell) – Rudolf Tibenský

The retelling of the incarceration of Tomáš Limbora (Inmate 09693) in the Jáchymov correctional camp (often compared to concentration camps or Soviet Gulags), in the name of “the most humane of all political systems” – Communism.
It describes the hard work in the uranium-ore mines, frequent mortification from the guards, year-long starvation of inmates and multiple attempts on his life.
The story ends with his release after the Czechoslovakian leader Klement Gottwald dies under strange circumstances in Moscow after Stalin’s funeral, only to be told he was released ‘by mistake’ and has to return to Jáchymov. Fortunately, his pardon will be ultimately accepted after intervention from a lawyer, a friend of the family.

Finally finished the Serrano Series (books 1-7). Wow. Very good overall, though there were some parts that were difficult to read.

Then, I read Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books in June: Arrows of the Queen, Arrows Flight, Arrows Fall. All three were very good, and 8-9/10 overall.

Read: Take a Thief (Mercedes Lackey)
The cant was a bit difficult to read, but a good enough story.

Reading:
David Weber's Excalibur Alternative.

City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit by Elmore Leonard. Clement Mansell is a psycho who murders a judge and his girlfriend basically because they got in his way while he was pursuing a job to rob an Albanian mobster. Raymond Cruz is the homicide detective who takes up the case and gets a bit too personally invested because Mansell wasn't convicted in an earlier murder case he worked. It appears they're making a new season of Justified based on this book, with Timothy Olyphant replacing Cruz in the story.

The High Noon subtitle is maybe deceptive or ironic because the story is really about how you have these two guys who in the Old West would have settled their issue with a gun duel the next day but in the modern world (1982 or so) things work differently. Mansell doesn't really hide that he enjoys killing people, but he knows how to work the system so he can't be convicted of anything serious and the cops are powerless against this even though they know the guy's a killer and they know that he knows that they know this. If they had made this into a movie in the 80s, the trailer would have had the narrator saying something like "A wildman killer and a tough city cop...in a deadly game...of cat and mouse!"

This is one of Elmore Leonard's earlier crime novels, before he basically became a crime-comedy writer, so it's actually pretty hard-boiled, although there are some funny character bits such as the banter between all the cops and the judge/victim being an incredibly corrupt and unlikable guy that no one misses even though they have to solve his case. I prefer Leonard in this mode rather than his later work where the characters' quirks get a bit out of hand (I've tried to watch Justified but I didn't like what I saw because I just didn't believe in the characters and the way the humor worked in the show).

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The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. A man falls down a deep underground crevasse and finds himself among an advanced civilization of winged people who have mastered the power of Vril, which gives them incredible power to create or destroy things. It's one of those old novels that is more like a travelogue than a modern novel with a well-developed plot. The narrator goes into significant detail about as many aspects of his hosts' society as possible, with them being utopian in almost every way, before an ending in which he has to escape because they decided he's a bad influence on them. As well-mannered as they are, they're also quite intolerant of lesser beings and the narrator warns that mankind's days are numbered if and when they ever decide to move to the Earth's surface.

Anyway, the book is interesting as a historical curiosity but also pretty dull to actually read.

I read those many years ago, and enjoyed them. Though with so much other stuff to read etc, I never read any more of her stories in the Valdemar series. In fact I did not buy any more of them, until many years later when they were quite cheap as ebooks, and I have collected the lot since then ... though still haven't gotten around to reading them yet ... in order this time ... eventually.

Alas, too much to read, and not enough hours or days in a life it seems.

Brilliant Green

I ended up reading this book after the librarian recommended it when I borrowed another, which was also one that I had a relatively low interest in, since I couldn’t find the ones that I was actually curious about. And it’s short and easy to read, and it does contain some interesting information. Plus that arguing against anthropocentrism and all the situations when, even among the scientific community, facts are rejected or distorted in order to fit established positions is always good to see.
The problem, however, is that the book is light on actual facts, and when it comes to the boldest claim, that plants are intelligent, I’d say that the only potential argument is in fact in another chapter, when that experiment demonstrating that mimosa pudica is capable of learning is mentioned. The other sections, aiming to prove that plants sense, react and communicate, are backed by far more solid arguments and interesting pieces of information, but those claims aren’t controversial, or at least they shouldn’t be in this day and age, those being pretty obvious facts for anyone who just looks around. But the chapter about plant intelligence starts by stating that, since so many definitions of intelligence exist, the one that was chosen was the one that fits, which sounds very much like putting the conclusion before the arguments. Or, ahem, distorting facts in order to fit an established position… Which wouldn’t otherwise result from them.
I mean, of course the ability to solve problems is a basic function of life, but that doesn’t necessarily imply intelligence. And a line can most definitely separate intelligent behavior from what may be described as living automatons. And stating that some plant functions may be similar to those of the simplest, most primitive, animal brains should probably count as evidence against the claim that they’re intelligent. And that may also apply to the fact that plants dominate Earth, since evolution does tend to lead to greater complexity and intelligence, but it’s driven by a need to change, the particularly successful species tending to remain unchanged and simpler.

Rating: 3/5