The Worst Class Trip Ever - Dave Barry

   2015; 224 pages.  Book 1 (out of 2) in the “Class Trip” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Junior High Adventure; Humorous Mystery; Juvenile Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    Oh boy!  It’s time for the Culver Middle School class trip, and Wyatt Palmer is stoked.  Washington DC, here he comes!

 

    Well, the plane ride from Miami to Washington should be pretty neat.  And the class will go on tours of all sorts of museums, monuments, and government buildings.  But none of that is what has Wyatt excited.  He’s hoping that somehow his classmate, Suzana Delgado, will end up sitting close to him, maybe on the plane, maybe on the DC tour bus.  Maybe he can say something cute to her.

 

    But Wyatt knows he’s kidding himself.  Suzana will sit with all her friends in the “Hot & Popular Girls” crowd.  And Wyatt will be sitting with his all-too-appropriate group: The Nerd Boys.  Oh well, maybe there will be some other kind of excitement on this class trip.

 

    Be careful what you wish for, Wyatt.

 

What’s To Like...

    Wyatt is an 8^th-grader, so the target audience of Dave Barry’s The Worst Class Trip Ever is junior high-schoolers, particularly those of the nerdy category.  Amazon puts this book in a couple “Children’s" genres, but I think “Juvenile” would be a better label.

 

    I thought the character-development captured the junior high social caste system quite well.  Wyatt hangs around with fellow geeks, including Matt, who has a knack for getting himself and anyone around him into trouble, and “Gas Attack” Cameron, who is a flatulence fanatic.  Needless to say, the Hot/Popular Girls choose not to be anywhere near Wyatt and company.

 

    A pair of teachers accompany the kids to DC, but order falls apart quickly when Wyatt and Matt see two other airplane passengers examining something puzzling.  Luggage is swiped and hastily searched, but that just enhances the mystery.  Mayhem involving our heroes ensues, most of which is oblivious to the chaperones.

 

    Through all this Dave Barry’s madcap humor and storytelling shines brightly.  Yes, some of the antics are over-the-top, but that won’t bother the tween-agers reading this.  And even adult readers will be challenged to figure out just what the heck is going on.

 

    Everything builds to an equally outrageous ending.  It’s not particularly twisty; you know Wyatt’s going to save the day, be hailed as a hero, and impress the girl.  But 8^th-grade me would’ve loved reading how he manages to do that.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 1,194 ratings and 215 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.94*/5, based on 3,629 ratings and 597 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    ”So what was that about back there?  In the plane?”

    I shook my head.  “Those two weird guys… You saw them, right?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Well, I let Matt convince me they were trying to blow up the White House.”

    “On the plane?  Blow it up how?”

    “With a missile.  Or something.”

    She blinked.  “A missile?”

    “I know it sounds stupid.  It is stupid.  I can’t believe he got me to take it seriously.  I think Matt has this ability to lower the IQ of everybody around him.  It’s like a superpower.”  (21%)

 

    “Maybe we should tell the police,” I said.

    “You mean, like, the police who were just here and we finally got rid of them?”

    “I know, but maybe that was a mistake.  Those guys have Matt.”

    “And they said if we told the police, they’d kill him.”

    “They didn’t say they’d kill him.”

    She rolled her eyes.  “They said we’d never see him again, Wyatt.  What do you think they meant?  That they were taking him to Disney World?”  (37%)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Worst Class Trip Ever sells for $7.99 at Amazon right now.  The sequel, The Worst Night Ever, will cost you $9.99.  Most of Dave Barry’s “non-juvenile” e-books are in the $4.99-$13.99 price range.

 

They trained us for a lot of weird stuff in Secret Service school, but they did not prepare us for a kid to be vomited out of a flying dragon.  (92%)

    There’s zero profanity in The Worst Class Trip Ever, but that was expected.  There was one instance of a giant naked buttocks, and things close with a coming-of-age kiss, but trust me, there was nothing R-rated about either of those events.

 

    Adult readers might have issues with some of the plotline WTFs.  Explosives detonate within crowded Washington DC, yet no one is killed.  An airborne taxi driver conveniently escapes injury by falling out of the sky on a secret service agent.  And no, I won’t explain that last sentence.

 

    Your enjoyment of The Worst Class Trip Ever will depend on how well you can “reset” your reading mind back to the years you were in junior high school.  My 8-star rating presumes you can successfully do that, but to be honest, I struggled with it.  There’s still a lot of Dave Barry zaniness to entertain you here, even if you can only read this with your "adult" reading mind, but then your rating will likely be around 6-stars.

 

    8 Stars.  For the record, I too had an opportunity to take a junior high school class trip to Washington DC.  Google tells me the distance was 151 miles one way from where I lived, which meant we’d go by bus, not plane.  I played hooky that day.

Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry

   1990; 313 pages.  Book 10 (out of 32) in the “Charlotte and Thomas Pitt” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Murder-Mystery; Historical Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It was a gruesome murder, right there on Westminster Bridge.  The poor bloke first had his throat slashed, then he was tied up to a lamppost.  It made him look like he was leaning against it.

 

    But the real shocker was the fact that the dead man was a member of Parliament, and had been in a meeting there up until a few minutes ago.  The victim was literally walking home from work, even though it was late at night.

 

    For Inspector Thomas Pitt of the Bow Street Police Force, it means that there is tremendous pressure to solve the case, and fast.  The daily newspapers will be running screaming headlines, which will terrify lords and commoners.  Within 24 hours, everyone will be demanding this case be solved immediately.

 

    Sadly, Pitt’s investigation will find promising leads few and far between.  Can things get any worse?

 

    Well maybe.  Suppose a second M.P. (“Member of Parliament”) were to get killed in exactly the same way, while walking across Westminster Bridge, late at night, on his way home.

 

What’s To Like...

    I loved the historical fiction aspect of Bethlehem Road.  As a tourist, I’ve been to the area London portrayed here, but that was in the daytime and in sunshiny weather.  To be immersed in it in Victorian times, at night, and in pea soup fog, was quite different. 

 

    Politically, the Victorian-era England was at a crucial time.  Ireland was demanding independence. Movements were afoot for prison reform, “poor law” reform, and industrial reform.  Anarchists and socialists were carrying out acts of violence, and ordinary citizens chafed under the rigid social class system.  Perhaps most significant of all, the movement for equal rights for women, including the right to vote, was gathering a large number of grassroots supporters, including Charlotte Pitt.

 

    The action starts right away.  Hetty, a street prostitute, propositions the first victim, only to discover he’s dead as a doornail.  Inspector Thomas Pitt discovers there are all sorts of possible motives this murder, including political, familial, accidental, and psychiatric ones.  His wife, Charlotte, also gets drawn into the investigation without his knowledge, on behalf of a friend of one of the main suspects.

 

    There are a number of red herrings along the way for the reader and Thomas Pitt to come to grips with.  A couple of plot twists finally lead to a tension-filled ending, resolving both who was the so-called “Westminster Cutthroat”, and why they did it.  Overall, I’d call Bethlehem Road more of a police procedural than a whodunit.  More on this in a bit.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Kip (v.) : To take a nap; to sleep.

Others: Tweeny (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 1,636 ratings and 151 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.97*/5, based on 4,620 ratings and 208 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Anarchists?” Pitt pressed.

    Deacon shook his head.  “Nah!  This in’t the way their mind goes.  Stick a shiv in some geezer on Westminster Bridge!  Wot good’d that do ‘em?  They’d go for a bomb, summink showy.  Loves bombs, they do.  All talk, they are—never do nuffink so quiet.”

    “Then what is the word down here?”

    “Croaked by someone as ‘ated ‘him, personal like.”  Deacon opened his little eyes wide.  “In’t no flam—I makes me livin’ by blowin’, I’d be a muck sniped in a munf if I done that!  In’t quick enough to thieve no more.  I’d ‘ave ter try a scaldrum dodge, an that in’t no way ter live!”   (loc. 1046)

 

    “Who should she say she was searching for?  It must not be someone in such circulation that Zenobia should have found her for herself.  Ah!  Beatrice Allenby was just the person.  She had married a Belgian cheesemaker and gone to live in Bruges!  No one could be expected to know that as a matter of course.  And Mary Carfax would enjoy relating that: it was a minor scandal, girls of good family might marry German barons or Italian counts, but not Belgians, and certainly not cheesemakers of any sort!  (loc. 2535)

 

Kindle Details…

    Bethlehem Road presently sells for $8.99 at Amazon.  The other e-books in the series go anywhere from $1.99 to $12.99.  That price range also holds true for Anne Perry’s 24-book William Monk detective series, some of which I’ve read and enjoyed in the past.

 

 

“Those who hold power have never in all history been inclined to relinquish it willingly.”  (loc. 2957)

    There is only a negligible amount of cussing in Bethlehem Road.  I noted just five instances, all of them four-lettered words of the “mild” eschatological variety.

 

    There was one missing comma in the e-book format: “sorry constable”, and one spelling mangling: “Ametiryst/Amethyst”, but I have a feeling that second one was a scanning boo-boo.

 

    My biggest quibble with Bethlehem Road was the murder-mystery plotline.  For most of the book it felt like none of the suspects and leads were plausible.  The end of the book was looming, and magically, out of left field, comes a whole new, promising angle.  True, Thomas and the reader both have to pick up on this, but it was way too much of a convenient coincidence.  Curse those dei ex machina!

 

    So read this book for its excellent historical fiction insights and accept the fact that you and the Bow Street Police Department are not going to solve this mystery until the deus ex machina pops out of nowhere.

 

    Which is how police procedurals are usually structured.

 

    7 Stars.  One last bit of wit.  At one point Thomas Pitt requests some records from one of the suspects.  The man complies and will have copies made on something he calls “an awful contraption” and which “sounds like a hundred urchins in hobnail boots”.  What on earth is he talking about?

 

    A recently invented thing called a “typewriter.”

Daisy's War - Scott Baron

   2018; 366 pages.  Book 5 (out of 5) in the series “The Clockwork Chimera”.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Space Opera; Alien Invasion Sci-Fi.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    The first phase of the Great War is complete: Planet Earth has been liberated!  Now it’s time for phase two, the liberation of the Chithiid home planet Taangaar.

 

    The battle lines are drawn.  On one side are the Humans, the Cyborgs, and several AI’s operating spaceships.  Plus some Chithiid “rebels”, freed from their forced slavery when Earth was retaken, and ready to mete out some revenge.

 

    On the other side are the countless hordes of the Ra’az Hok bad guys plus a whole bunch of Chithiid “loyalists”, whose families are being held hostage by the Ra’az Hok.  Past experience has shown that the baddies will not hesitate to slaughter any and all captives for the slightest reasons.

 

    Both sides have some hidden resources up their sleeves.  Interestingly, some hidden assets of the good guys are even being kept secret from the rest of the good guys.  I wonder how that’s going to play out.

 

What’s To Like...

    Daisy’s War is the fifth, and final book in Scott Baron’s “Clockwork Chimera” series, wherein he faced a daunting task: to bring together a bunch of characters scattered throughout the galaxy (including the mysterious wunderkind Arlo), consolidate the forces of Good and then purge the baddies from two armed-to-the-teeth and hostile planets (if the Ra’az home planet can even be located), resolve the Sarah/Sarah dichotomy (say what?), and finally, give Daisy a much-needed rest.  Oh yeah, and accomplish this in less than 400 pages.

 

    Missions accomplished.

 

    It wasn’t easy.  It takes time for the armies and spaceships of the good guys to gather together into one cohesive fleet.  Warp drives can be persnickety and fragile.  AI’s may be super-intelligent but sometimes they're a bit lacking in common sense.  And while the Ra’az Hok may be slightly (but only slightly) behind technology-wise, they make up for that by having a decided numerical advantage in spaceships and fighting personnel.

 

    It was fun to see the Daisy/Sarah arrangement (cue the Pink Floyd lyrics “there’s someone in my head, but it’s not me”) finally be revealed to other interested parties.  Ditto for the Sarah/Finn relationship.  Several deceased characters for earlier books are surprisingly resuscitated, thanks to the AI smarts.  One of them plays a vital role in determining who wins and who loses.

 

    I enjoyed the tie-ins to at least three movies: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Terminator, and Back to the Future.  I have no doubt that Scott Baron's cinematic tastes are stellar.  The Fibonacci Spiral getting worked into the story was also a nice touch.  I’ll even look the other way about the one Hydrogen and two Oxygen molecules getting together to form water.  The ratio is the other way around, and they’re atoms, not molecules.

 

    Everything builds to a suitably exciting climax, where the tides of war swing from one side to the other a couple times before finally settling out.  The final chapter is in a “whatever happened to…” format, and I thought it was a fine way to end this saga.  The war is over, Earth begins to slowly rebuild itself, and some of the series' characters retire to start families.  Things close with a couple of heartwarming plot twists.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 446 ratings and 45 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.43/5 based on 369 ratings and 39 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Janky (adj.) : of poor quality; unreliable.

 

Excerpts...

    “You were dead, man.” Omar replied.

    “I know.  Bummer, right?”

    “So now you’re a computer?”

    “Technically, a one-of-a-kind AI, if you want to get nitpicky about it,” he replied.  “But there’s something I need to ask you all, and I need you to be upfront.”

    “Of course,” Sarah said.  “What is it, Gus?”

    Their AI friend paused for a moment for effect.

    “Be honest.  Does this ship make me look fat?”  (loc. 23121)

 

    “So how did you do it?”

    “Here’s the thing, Captain.  Sometimes, well, things just aren’t quite what they seem.  And other times, they’re exactly what they seem, but even then they might not be.”

    “I’m not following you,” he said, confused.

    By the expressions on everyone present’s faces, he wasn’t alone in that regard.

    “Okay, I’ll break it down as basically as I can, but forgive me if I slip into a tangent here and there.  It’s been a long day, and I’m wicked sleep-deprived.”

    “Aren’t we all?” Celeste said with a little laugh.  (loc. 24304)

 

Kindle Details…

    Daisy’s War is priced at $3.99 at Amazon right now.  The other four books in the series are all in the $0.99-$3.99 range, and there is a 5-book bundle, comprising the entire series, for only $7.99, which is the format I’m reading.

 

“Basically, you downloaded yourself to yourself just before you blew yourself up.”  (loc. 20003)

    The profanity rate continues its steady decline for the series, which is a plus.  I counted just 11 cusswords in the first four chapters (ergo, 10% of the 40 chapters) of the book.  Previous cuss rates for the first 10% were 15 (Book 4), 20 (Book 3), 15½ (Book 2, extrapolated), and 27 (Book 1).

    There were a couple typos, such as clean-off/clean off; they/the; and queens/queen’s, but they weren’t a distraction.

 

    My gripes were the usual for this series.  Clockwork Chimera is first and foremost a Space Opera series.  Yet too many pages are devoted to making plans and discussing relationships, particularly in the first parts of each installment.  Here, the first eleven chapters dragged for me.

 

    To be fair, once the plans are set and the attacks get underway, there’s action aplenty.  Alas, dei ex machina (the plural of deus ex machina.  I had to look that up.) arise all too frequently.  One unexpected miracle is okay.  Maybe even two.  Here there were six.  That’s way too many.

 

    But these are personal opinions only.  If you happen to like your Sci-Fi Adventure-Intrigue stories heavy on the Intrigue, you’re going to love this series.  Ditto if your heroes get rescued time and time again by incredibly-timed luck.

    So just put your thinking brain to sleep and enjoy a story about Daisy and her friends saving Planet Earth, Planet Taangaar, and the rest of the Universe to boot.  You'll still be entertained.  I was.

 

    7½ Stars.  Scott Baron has penned at least four other Sci-fi Space Opera series, and this is the first one I’ve read to completion.  Up next is the Deep Space Boogie series, which I started reading a couple years back, by getting drawn in by Daisy’s adventures.

And The Rest Is History - Jodi Taylor

   2016; 432 pages.  Book 8 (out of 14) in the series “The Chronicles of St. Mary’s”.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Time Travel; British Humor; Historical Adventure.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Clive Ronan is the biggest enemy that the Historians at St. Mary’s (don’t call them time-travelers!) have.  He routinely jumps through the security measures of St. Mary’s as if they weren’t even there.  And today is no exception.

 

    He apparently knows what jogging path his archenemy Dr. Maxwell (“Max”) uses, and has plopped himself on it.  Clive meets her as she comes trotting along, and has a surprising proposal for her: how about a truce?

 

    Naturally, Max is leery of it.  Neither one trusts the other, and both have good reason not to.  But she agrees to meet in a very open place of Clive’s choosing.  Namely, the Egyptian desert, 25 centuries in the past.  What’s the worst that could happen?

 

    Well, either party could arrange a double-cross.  Saharan desert storms can be killers.  The Time Police, who don’t particularly like St. Mary’s or Clive, could try killing two birds with one stone.  And the anthropomorphic muse called “History” might override everyone else’s plans in order to keep the correct timeline unchanged.  And you really, really don’t want to mess with History.

 

    But don’t call it Time Travel.

 

What’s To Like...

    And The Rest Is History is the eighth book in the Chronicles of St. Mary’s series by Jodi Taylor.  To no one’s surprise, the hastily arranged meeting betwixt Max and Clive runs amok immediately.  Clive feels that Max set him up, and vows revenge.  And if you’re reading this series in order (which I am), you know an angry Clive is a dangerous Clive.

 

    There is a pleasant balance of time travel and personal interaction ion the storyline.  Various St. Mary’s employees are in various relationships with coworkers, which can be a hazardous situation when you’re traipsing all over the historical timeline.  I like how Clive’s character is being developed; his “all black” persona is starting to turn just a bit “gray”.

 

    Once again, Jodi Taylor doesn’t skimp on the time-traveling.  The reader is treated to eight chrono-hops, including one to the future, one by others to St. Mary's, and several of them chronicling events leading up to the historically crucial Battle of Hastings in 1066 CE.  Yes, this is fiction, but it’s obvious the author did some deep research of the lives and aspirations of both Harold Godwinson and William of Normandy, and I learned a lot because of that.

 

    And The Rest Is History introduces three new characters to the series.  The first is Max and Leon’s son, Matthew.  The storyline hints that since he was born at an impossible time (due to his time-traveling parents) he has some very unusual talents.  Then there’s Adrian & Mikey, who reminded me muchly of Bill & Ted from their most excellent adventure movie.  They make only a cameo appearance here, but I have a feeling all three of these will play important and recurring parts in this series.

 

    The ending is, as always, exciting, historically enlightening, and spine-tingling.  St. Mary’s and the Time Police, who tolerate each other grudgingly at best, are forced to team up to carry out a rescue endeavor which turns out to be quite a gory affair.  Once the crisis is resolved, both agencies are more than happy to get back to their normal bickering and feuding.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 5,774 ratings and 476 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.44*/5, based on 9,083 ratings and 687 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty person?”

    I said, “Well, it depends where you are at the time.  The Technical Section will say never mind whether it’s half empty or half full, the glass was obviously too big in the first place.  Dr. Dowson will tell you it’s not contemporary to the time period and you should be using a goblet.  The History Department will enquire what bloody glass?  The Security Section will be gloomily surveying the broken shards on the floor, and Mrs. Mack will just tell you to get out of her kitchen.”  (pg. 111)

 

    It takes a lot to catch St. Mary’s off balance.  Over the years, we’ve been attacked, blown up, gassed — several times actually, because Professor Rapson just can’t work out where he’s going wrong — mobbed by swans, crushed and drowned by a runaway monolith, the list is long and we’ve risen above all of it.  We’re St. Mary’s, we say, and our proud boast is that we can handle anything, and that’s true, but you can imagine my surprise and consternation when, out of the blue, a bloody great teapot materialised.  Right in front of us.  Right in the middle of the South Lawn and flattening a croquet hoop at the same time.  (pg. 325)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Firkled (v.) : searched; rummaged

 

I’ve been at St. Mary’s long enough for the kookaburra of caution to hover over my head occasionally.  (pg. 352)

    The cussing in And The Rest Is History is negligible.  There were only three instances in the first 25% of the book, all of them “hell”.  Later on a couple more profanities were used, mostly the scatological word.

 

    As always, I greatly appreciated Jodi Taylor’s inclusion of a Dramatis Thingummy.  Here, however, it felt like the list of “Security Department” personnel was for some reason omitted.  The spelling typos were few: see/seen, though/thought, and, incredibly, Ort cloud/Oort cloud.  Punctuation typos were more numerous: at least one missing comma, one missing period, and a slew of missing “close quotation marks”.

 

    But these be quibbles.  And The Rest Is History was sheer delight to read, and fully deserving of those lofty Amazon and Goodreads ratings listed above.  The series shows no sign of succumbing to the “let’s just crank another one out” syndrome, I’m so wrapped up in this set of stories, I haven’t even had time to explore Jodi Taylor’s related series: “The Time Police” (5 books) and the “Frogmorton Farm” series (2 books).

 

    9½ Stars.  Acronym Appreciation Moment.  On page 317, the acronym SPOHB is used, which is short for Society for Preservation of Historical Buildings.  Shortly thereafter, the acronym BDSM is used, causing everyone at St. Mary’s to get all excited.  It turns out it stands for… well, we’ll let you read the book to find out, but its not what you think.

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

   2004; 434 pages.  Book 1 (out of 3) in the “MaddAddam” trilogy.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; Genetic Engineering Sci-Fi.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Snowman, once known as Jimmy, ekes out a solitary existence.  As far as he knows, he’s the last living human being on Earth.  The only one with immunity to the Plague.

 

    I guess you could count the genetically modified “Children of Crake” as fellow human survivors.  Unfortunately, thanks to their designer, Crake, they have a built-in, self-destruct trait in them.  At age 30, they drop over dead.  Immediately.  Automatically.

 

    Ah yes, Crake.  Snowman’s best friend.  A genius at just about everything.  And Oryx.  Such a sweet young lass, although worldly-wise since childhood.  She loved both Snowman and Crake, and was loved by both of them in return.  Crake and Oryx are gone now, both of them.

 

    Snowman can’t go on living like this.  The pigoons and wolvogs are becoming intelligent predators, and sooner or later they’ll catch Snowman, rip him to shreds, and eat him for lunch.  It’s time for Snowman to start planning a trip.

 

What’s To Like...

    Oryx and Crake is the first book in Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” post-apocalyptic trilogy.  The title could be expanded to “Oryx and Crake and Snowman”, since the latter is whom we primarily follow in the book.

 

    For the most part, the storyline jumps between the present-day “post-” and the past “pre-" apocalypse”.  You can tell which time period you’re in by whether our protagonist goes by “Snowman” or “Jimmy”.

    The disaster scenario reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  But here the steps leading up the civilization-ending plague are gradually revealed via Snowman’s flashbacks.

 

    The world-building is complex and thought-provoking.  Global warming has wreaked havoc on our planet.  God’s Gardeners remind everybody that the End is near for humanity.  BlyssPlus pills keep everyone happy, but at a deadly cost.  And the working class is forced to live in company compounds which means the corporations control every aspect of their lives.

 

    Genetic-tinkering has a major impact on the coming catastrophe.  It’s original aim is well-intended: grow your own replacement organs.  But it rapidly goes awry.  We’re now up to our ears in pigoons, wolvogs, snats, rakunks, bobkittens, spoats, giders, hemorrhagics, Crakers, and kanga-lambs; all carving out their niche in the creature pecking order. 

 

    There are some interesting characters to meet and greet, including Uncle En the child pimp, Jimmy’s wayward mom Sharon, and Jimmy’s crazier-than-a-loon dorm mate, Bernice.  The character development of both the primary and secondary persons is excellent.

 

    The ending is hopeful, terrifying, sad, and terrifying all at the same time.  Things stop at a logical place, as the present and past timelines of Jimmy/Snowman finally merge.  The how and why of the apocalyptic event are fully explained, and it is strongly hinted that the sequel holds a “first contact” scenario in store for Snowman.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.3*/5, based on 12,763 ratings and 1,568 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01*/5, based on 269,400 ratings and 16,881 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Caecotrophs (n., pl.) : nutrient-rich fecal pellets.

Others: Gestalt (n.), Suttee (n.), Kakking (v.)

 

Excerpts...

    The rakunks had begun as an after-hours hobby on the part of one of the OrganInc biolab hotshots.  There’d been a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guys doing it; it made you feel like God.  A number of the experiments were destroyed because they were too dangerous to have around – who needed a cane toad with a prehensile tail like a chameleon’s that might climb in through the bathroom window and blind you while you were brushing your teeth?  Then there was the snat, an unfortunate blend of snake and rat: they’d had to get rid of those.  (pg. 57)

 

    “These are the floor models.  They represent the art of the possible.  We can list the individual features for prospective buyers, then we can customize.  Not everyone will want all the bells and whistles, we know that.  Though you’d be surprised how many people would like a very beautiful, smart baby that eats nothing but grass.  The vegans are highly interested in that little item.  We’ve done our market research.”

    Oh good, thought Jimmy.  Your baby can double as a lawn mower.  (pg. 359)

 

Kindle Details…

    Oryx and Crake sells for $12.99 right now at Amazon, as do the other two books in the series, The Year of The Flood and MaddAddam.  Margaret Atwood has more than a dozen other novels for you, ranging in price from $4.99 to $17.99, plus a couple of short stories for $0.99 apiece.

 

Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?  (pg. 417)

    There’s a moderate amount of profanity in Oryx and Crake.  I noted 18 instances in the first 20% of the book, and later on, male genitalia are referenced.  There are various “sexual situations” presented, including ones involving minors.  None of them are lurid, but still, you probably don’t want little Timmy or Susie asking you what those passages are all about.

 

    I spotted two typos, both of which involved word splitting, which makes me think they occurred during the formatting stage in the e-book.  The funniest one of these was the phrase “antique roadshow” being split up into “anti queroadshow”.

 

    But I pick at nits.  Post-apocalyptic tales ought to have gritty and nasty parts, otherwise they wouldn’t be realistic.  Oryx and Crake fully met my high expectations for any novel penned by Margaret Atwood, and I have the other two books of the trilogy waiting for me on my Kindle.

 

    9 Stars.  One last teaser.  If you happen to be into role-playing games, Jimmy and Crake get hooked on a bunch of them here, including Blood & Roses, Barbarian Stomp, Three-Dimensional Waco, Kwiktime Osama, and my favorite (and theirs) Extinctathon.  Won’t somebody please develop and market real-world versions of these?

The Sun Kings - Stuart Clark

   2007; 189 pages.  Full Title: The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Astronomy; Non-Fiction; Science History; Biographies.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Let’s see if you’re as resourceful as an astronomer named William Herschel.

 

    The year is 1801.  Herschel is already well-known in his field for all sorts of discoveries using his state-of-the-art telescopes, including the planet Uranus.  However, he’s now investigating sunspots, using an indirect method that avoids staring directly into the Sun and burning one’s eyes out.

 

    Herschel finds that sunspots vary in number and intensity over time.  What effect does that have on Earth’s weather?  When there’s a period of time where there are no sunspots, will the Earth be warmer than normal, cooler, or stormier?

 

    Watching sunspots is nothing new.  Astronomers have been doing that since Galileo invented the telescope, back in the 1600s.  A number of “low sunspot periods” have been chronicled since 1650, lasting anywhere from 2 to 20 years each.

 

    Unfortunately, nobody’s been recording the daily temperatures throughout the world yet, so how can Herschel correlate global weather conditions for the past century-and-a-half with sunspot activity?  Can you figure out a way?

 

    The answer is given at the end of this review.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Sun Kings is an ambitious half-&-half blend of biography and astronomy genres.  It covers the time span of 1795 to the present, with most of the focus on the 19th century.  The Richard Carrington mentioned in the subtitle is the main biographical subject, but other astronomers share some time in the spotlight too, including William Herschel, his son John Herschel, Edward Walter Maunder, and the enthusiastic but eccentric Elias Loomis cited below.

 

    Mixing details of the astronomers’ personal lives with their scientific endeavors seems a bit risky, but Stuart Clark makes it work remarkably well.  The main focus of the book is of course scientists trying to understand the workings of the Sun, but Richard Carrington’s personal life had some noteworthy (and sometimes sordid) moments, and Britain’s astronomical community quite often sinks into some down-and-dirty politics.

 

    Fifteen photographs are included in the book, most of them from the 19^th century and all of them interesting.  My favorite was astronomer Warren de la Rue’s 1860 "photoheliograph" of the sun totally eclipsed, showing multiple solar flares and slight depressions in the Sun’s horizon.  It’s absolutely fascinating.  There are also footnotes, usually giving anecdotal sidelights to something and conveniently placed at the bottom of the page, and well worth taking time to read.  One example is given in the second excerpt below.

 

    Sciency topics abound, many of which were new to me.  I was familiar with things like St. Elmo’s Fire, and how electrons were "found".  But it was enlightening to read about Ceres and Pallas being discovered; what Baily’s Beads are;  the probable causes of Europe’s “Little Ice Age”; and the havoc-wreaking appearance of the 2003 “Halloween Flares”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 79 ratings and 51 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 176 ratings and 31 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    One of Loomis’s early attempts at meteorology was to estimate tornado wind speeds in a rather macabre way.  A persistent prairie story was that chickens unlucky enough to be caught in tornados were often stripped of their feathers.  In 1842, Loomis chose several even unluckier chickens for his experiment.  He killed them and fired each carcass from a cannon.  His plan was to use different explosive charges so that each chicken would be propelled at a different velocity, then to examine each to see which had been stripped and which had remained feathered.  Things did not go quite according to plan.  He wrote, “My conclusions are that a chicken forced through the air with this velocity is torn entirely to pieces, so tornadoes likely possess wind speeds of less than the measured chicken speed of 341 miles per hour.”  (pg. 83)

 

    On 27 December 2004, the largest burst of gamma rays ever recorded cut through the solar system.  Smothered in the radiation, satellites instantly began transmitting alert messages to their masters on Earth.  As the torrent swept past our planet, part of it bounced off the Moon, and struck Earth again.  When astronomers triangulated the blast they found that it came not from the Sun but from deep space.  Tracing the blast backward, they found just one celestial object from which it could have originated: the supposed dead heart of a star, just twenty kilometers in diameter and lying some 50,000 light-years away.  (pg. 188)

 

Something strange had taken place on 1 September.  Something that had made the Earth’s natural cloak of magnetism quake.  (pg. 19)

    I can’t think of anything to gripe about in The Sun Kings.  I don’t recall any cusswords, but that’s to be expected for a scientific tome.  The text is only 189 pages long, but there were enough scientific topics discussed to where I wouldn’t call this a fast read.

 

    The Sun Kings fills a knowledge gap between the early days of the telescope (thank you, Galileo) and modern astronomy, where we now can view the universe from observatories orbiting in space.  The book also puts to rest any fears that Astronomy is a dead science in which everything “out there” has already been discovered and figured out.  As detailed in the second excerpt above, our Universe still has lots of surprises for anyone poking telescopes, cameras, and/or other monitoring devices at it.

 

    9½ Stars.  Here’s Herschel’s mind-boggling solution to the sunspot/weather correlation issue.  In his time, no one was recording daily temperature highs throughout the world.  But the yearly global market prices of wheat were available, because Adam Smith had listed them in his famous book The Wealth of Nations.

 

    Herschel reasoned that a high price of wheat indicated a meager crop that year, implying poor growing conditions.  He found that when sunspots were more numerous, wheat prices were generally lower, indicating the harvests were more bountiful.  Ergo, sunspots are good for Earth’s weather patterns, depressing the sun's heat and giving us calmer weather.  Sheer genius!