In which trek reviews Ghost Story

At long last, the four-month publication delay on Jim Butcher's Ghost Story,has ended. The thirteenth volume of The Dresden Files hit the shelves on Tuesday and, most importantly, it hit my mailbox on the release date.

I heard Jim read the first few chapters down in Williamsburg and read all of the first five chapters online over the past month or so and have been salivating ever since. Jim announced the delay back in January stating that if he met the original deadline we would have had a very half-assed book. Preferring to be known as an author who delivers full-assed novels, the release date was pushed back.

I am happy to report that Ghost Story is in full possession of two very generous butt cheeks.

Due to a very hectic schedule of my own on Tuesday, I didn't quite finish the whole book on the day it landed in my hot little hands. I did finish it within twenty-four hours of its arrival and seeing as how that circuit around the sun included an adequate number of horizontal hours, I'm calling it good.

Oh, wait. Sorry. You came here for a book review not a play-by-play on my reading it? Don't you want to know how much restraint I had to exercise at poolside on Tuesday afternoon when I was trying to read my new book, dang it and Neatnik's friend's dad kept engaging me in conversation about how his wife accidentally washed his Android phonethat morning? Aren't you the least bit interested in how many haircut minutes cut into my reading time? No? Are you sure? Oh, well, if you insist...

Be on the look out for random (possibly unannounced) spoilers...

To borrow a turn of phrase from the late (spoiler alert) Harry Dresden, Ghost Story was freaking awesome. When we last saw Harry, he had just been shot, fallen off the deck of the Water Beetle into the cold, dark waters of Lake Michigan, and was about to be hit by a train.

Ghost Story opens with Harry musing on the dichotomy between how difficult it is to create a life and how easy it is to end a life. Chapter One really sets the tone for the whole book. Harry spends quite a bit of time reflecting on events of his life and how his choices and actions have affected those around him and Jim uses Harry's reflections as a vehicle for providing the reader with a huge amount of information. Now we have a clearer picture of Harry's early lessons under Justin DuMorne and his actual encounter with He Who Walks Behind when Harry was sixteen years old.

I visited the Jim Butcher forum this morning and read a bit of a thread entitled "A little disappointed maybe...". The contention of the original poster is

"this book was more of a way for Butcher to reveal some of Harry's past, show how the world goes to shit without him and get him back alive then it was to move the story overall"

Why bring up a forum thread in a review? Ah, read my reply:

"I may be sticking my hand into a fire here, but the complaints I'm reading about Ghost Story being a holding pattern sort of book sound an awful lot like the people who moaned about too little action in the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The complaint there was that it was to tedious, all they did was hop around while debating horcrux locations to death.

The complaint here seems to be that there was too much reflection and introspection, too much back story and not enough story.

In both cases, I wondered if those complaining stopped a second to think that this is exactly the visceral reaction the authors intended to convey and that is the mark of good writing: that an author can make you feel.

For teenaged Potter, he was adrift and nearly directionless (find and destroy horcruxes) after Dumbledore's death. He needed to do a job but really had (seemingly) very little concrete information on which to act. For our boy Dresden, he is adrift and nearly directionless (find your murderer) after his own death. He needed to do a job and had (seemingly) very little concrete information on which to act.

In both books, the protagonist needed to reflect on what he already knew, to sift through memories and to process data previously acquired until a rational course of action could be determined. Once the protagonist was able to bring all of the pieces together into a coherent whole (HP after viewing Snape's memories, HD after reclaiming his own), then and only then the action could really take off and hurtle towards resolution (both HP's decision to return to his body brings about Voldemort's destruction and HD's decision to return to his body allows Jim to begin Cold Days and coincidentally to continue to make enough money to send The Boy to college <wink>). I think that if one were to reread the stories, one would notice that the really important action happens after the protagonist has processed thoughts and memories and random bits of information and come to a point where he realizes certain truths about himself and his situation which he was previously incapable of handling."

Ghost Story presents us with a Harry Dresden who is beginning to see things in a different light. For much of Harry's career, he flew into the fray pretty much by the seat of his pants. It wasn't until Turn Coat that he really began to strategize very carefully and to plan both his offense and defense with many layers. We have watched Harry become incrementally stronger magically for many years; now we begin to see Harry becoming even more formidable through his understanding of events and the repercussions and ramifications of his part in them.

All in all, a fantastic read. Might even be my favorite one to date. My only negative observation is that Catholics don't read the King James version of the Bible. Just saying.

PS - Hey, Jim, I love the first line of Cold Days. Need any more beta readers?

Ironing

I don't like to iron. In fact, I didn't even own an iron until I got married.

Sometimes, however, you need an iron. When you sew things, you need to make sure that there are no wrinkles and you have to press seams so that there's no undue bulk.

Another time one needs to iron is when one's offspring is getting ready for a week of Vacation Bible School. This year, Neatnik is only going to be able to attend one week of VBS but that's okay because every church in the area is doing SonSurf Beach Blast.

I picked up the decal a week and a half ago and finally got around to ironing it this afternoon because

You have to iron it with a very hot iron for quite a while
to make it stay put and the edges to seal properly.

VBS starts tomorrow morning.

Ready for wearing with hours to spare.

Don't judge my timing: I don't like to iron and the air temperature has been in the triple digits for days.

As long as I had the iron out, though, I figured I'd do that Warrior cat logo like I promised Neatnik a while back. Wouldn't want to waste all of that iron heat, now, would we?

First, you have to print the reverse image you want on the transfer paper.

Make sure you have no sharp corners
or your image will flake and peel.

Then, you need to position the design(s) and iron the snot out of it (them).

Positioning can be a pain.
Watch your fingers!

I put the title logo on the back.

Be careful when working near the collar
so that the design doesn't develop wrinkles.

You need to wait a couple of minutes for the transfer and fabric to cool before you peel the backing from the design.

Didn't want to keep the website URL.

Looks pretty good, I think, and there was a bonus: the transfer paper envelope had a Box Top on it!

In which there are cocci

I was collecting up some interesting things to share with the blog and then a minor disaster struck my minor. Today, we regale you with the Wednesday Night Bullet Post, now with more cocci...

• Neatnik is sick.



• Again.



• For the second time this summer.



• Okay, the last ailment was not exactly during the summer.



• It was during the last week of school. She had a stomach bug and so graciously shared it with me.



• But since the temperatures that week were rocking the mercury into summertime values, we are calling that week "summer".



• Neatnik had a really rough night and she got up this morning with a very raspy voice, a cough, tender glands, swollen tonsils, and a nice little fever.



• We scored our favorite doctor which sort of made up for the gagging during the swabbing.



• Yep, you guessed it: strep throat again.



• Bad year for strep locally.



• Ran several laps through school this year.



• Neatnik caught it each and every lap.



• Almost like snatching the brass ring except with more snot.

Caring for a coughing, sneezing, feverish, and clingy child is tiring under the best of atmospheric conditions. Take that same child sporting the same set of symptoms in 98°F heat, add a side order of excessive humidity, and you experience a whole new level of physical and emotional drainage.

You'll just have to take it on faith and trust me on this one, though I can offer this one bit of additional proof: I'm going to bed now and it's only just 9 o'clock.

In which trek reviews Invasion

I had the opportunity to review Invasion via NetGalley. This book is available in Kindleand hardcovereditions as well as in CDand Audible audiobook formats.

Colt McAlister's parents die in a head-on collision with a drunk driver - the problem is, the driver had just come from his doctor's office and the doctor swears that the man was not intoxicated nor even drinking at all. Is the doctor covering up for a favorite patient or did the guy slam a few shots right after leaving his appointment? Or maybe, just maybe, Colt's parents weren't victims of a random accident. Colt's mom, an investigative reporter, was just about to go public with a disturbing article about Trident Biotech. Was the "accident" a clever assassination and his dad's death merely a bit of unfortunate collateral damage?

Uprooted from San Diego, Colt moves to the Phoenix area to live with his paternal grandfather and things rapidly morph from merely odd to outright weird. Colt's new buddy, Oz, tells him that all of the Phantom Flyer comic book stories set during World War II are not just true history but that his Grandpa McAlister is the Phantom Flyer, a war hero who worked for a black ops organization known as CHAOS, a group still in existence today and which is headed by Oz's own father. The purpose of CHAOS? To prevent aliens from taking over the planet.

While I am not a comic book aficionado nor am I in the target demographic, I have to admit that Invasion delivers a swiftly moving story with a lot of action, tons of covert operations, and just a touch of teen romance. I do have to say, though, that there was one bit that did bother me about this story. Colt's childhood friend, Danielle, had a truly remarkable store of illicit technological toys and black hat hacker skills. Her character seemed to exist only to drive the plot. Other than that one complaint, I really enjoyed Invasion and am looking forward to the sequel, Alienation

WNBP - Now with more bugs

I haven't got much but what I do have, I give you in the Wednesday Ngiht Bullet Post format...

• Neatnik continues to enjoy day camp overall but there have been a few minor bugs to be worked out.



• One of those bugs stung her today.



• Literally.



• She and another girl were standing by a bench and both were stung by hornets.



• Ouch.



• I had to sign my third first aid report this morning.



• Camp's only been in session seven days.



• Poor kid.



• She really enjoyed yesterday's waterpark excursion.



• Complained that they only got to be there for "about 20 minutes!"



• They were there for three hours.



• Yeah, she had a blast. Wants the family to go together.



• I recently finished reading Falling to Piecesby Vannetta Chapman.



• Someday, I will remember that her first name is not spelled Vanetta



• It was a pre-release from NetGalley.



• Which means that I can't post a review on Amazon yet.



• I could read it on the go on my Kindle, though!



• I really liked this book: it wasn't your typical, run-of-the-mill Amish fiction.



• The protagonist wasn't Amish, for one thing.



• For another, it was a real murder mystery.



• Sort of like a cozy except with bonnets and suspenders instead of knitting or reading... though there was a quilt shop involved...



• It is set in Shipshewana, Indiana, instead of in one of the Amish communities in Pennsylvania or Ohio.



• Now I am reading another NetGalley pre-release except that Invasionby Jon S Lewis has already been released.



• Timing. Sometimes mine is a little "off".



• This is shaping up to be a good read although I do not think that I am really in the target demographic.



• If world security depended upon my comic book knowledge, we'd all be doomed.



• Fortunately for mankind, protagonist Colt is fluent in comic book lore.

Tomorrow is Pajama and Breakfast Day at camp so I need to get sorted out for that. Neatnik's group is to bring fruit so I am thinking apples and bananas. They are breakfast-y, right?

In which Neatnik day camps

Summer is officially here: temperatures have soared all week and Neatnik's summer day camp started on Tuesday of last week. One of the benefits of being an only child is you don't have to share your parents' attention with siblings. One of the downsides to being an only child is you have no siblings with whom to fight play during the summer. The child needs the socialization and I need the time she is there to workout and to try to keep chez trek running smoothly.

Camp is administrated by the town and the park where it is run is just a wee bit under a mile from home. Every camp morning last week, Neatnik and I walked to camp. I signed her in with her counselor and then I walked home. At the end of the camp day, I walk to the park to collect her and we walk home together while she tells me about the games they played.

We shall stick to this arrangement for the summertime - as long as it is not raining, of course. Rainy days camp is held indoors at a local school gym. It is farther from home: even with umbrellas, walking over a mile in the rain isn't so much fun.

This past week, I was able to do additional walking on two days and a good bike ride on one. One of the ways I try to keep the fitness from becoming boring is to vary routes and try to dual purpose those routes. My two extra walking days this week involved a trip to Neatnik's school to drop off some paperwork and a rather circuitous trip to the library.

I finally got around to printing out my certificate for my summer reading club reward. It was a set of eight i-Clip punctuation bookmarks.They are small and secure with a punctuation mark on one side and an arrow on the other so you can put the bookmark along the side edge of the page to point at your exact spot.

There's been a lot of reading so far this summer. Neatnik's earned her next two blue stars for her tae kwon do pants. Before camp, she does her math workbook but after camp, in the car, and in the evenings it is all about the reading. I've even been able to borrow a few Kindle books for her on Lendle. Did I mention that I coughed up the cash to become a Patron? Yeah, I did. No more ads and I'm supposed to earn more as a Patron.

Except that I've not had any requests to lend this past week.

In which trek mini-reviews

A few really funny bits from books along the way...

The Zombie Survival Guide,by Max Brooks was laugh out loud funny but more than that it was well-researched and the author clearly thought the scenarios through very carefully. I was impressed with how much attention Brooks spent on details.

On the very first page he effectively suspends disbelief by telling the reader that he is separating fact from fiction. Zombies are not created using black magic they are zombies because they were infected by the highly virulent Solanum virus which caused both their death and their reanimation as walking dead.

Inside these pages you learn the necessity for constant vigilance, good physical conditioning, and the double tap because, remember, "no place is safe, only safer."

# # #

A ten-year-old boy is trying to gross out the protagonist on page 205 of Disaster Status,by Candace Calvert:

"'Chicken guts, liver, kidney?'
She rolled her eyes. 'Nurse?'"

Enough said.

# # #

The amateur sleuth protagonist in Sweet Ginger Poison,by Robert Burton Robinson, is Virginia Lightley, known to all as Ginger, proprietress of Coreyville Coffee Cakes. Main character's name in the title of the book and in the name of one of the coffee cakes, I'm okay with that. I have to wonder, though, why the author had to come up with such lame names for some of the other characters: Navy Newcomb, Dan Foenapper.

I guess Robinson didn't know about this helpful site.

In which trek reviews Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic

I requested several books from Lendle for vacation reading. Four books in a week was going to be perfectly doable and since the loans are two weeks long, if I fell behind I would still hvae a seven day cushion.

Of course, then I went and downloaded two NetGalley review copies at the same time and checked things out of the library and then I left Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholicfor last. Uh oh.

A two hundred page fiction book is a breeze that I can finish in no time at all. The same length non-fiction book takes me a bit longer. This book is taking me even longer than normal. On my walk with it this morning I realized exactly why it is taking so long.

Is it poorly written? Not at all. It is, in fact, riveting.

Is it an unenjoyable topic? Nope. It is about Catholic dogma and doctrine and I am loving it.

Am I being unreasonably interrupted when I try to read? Not really.

What is it, then? Actually, the book is doing more than making me think. It is making me pray. No joke.

I'll be tooling along and a particular passage will make me pause. I'll re-read it. Then I close my Kindle cover and ponder and mentally cross-reference and draw connections and wing a comment or two Upstairs. Then, and only then, I reopen the cover and resume reading.

Sometimes the Kindle falls asleep waiting for me.

It is taking longer than expected to finish this short book and I don't mind at all. Excuse me, wont' you? My loan expires on Saturday and I'm thinking that I might want to go re-read some sections.

In which trek reviews Moving Violation

I borrowed Moving Violationby Melanie Jackson from a fellow Lendler. I was looking for a light, quick summer read and this seemed to fit the bill, despite some fairly critical reviews over on Amazon.

This is the first book in the Chloe Boston series. Chloe is a short, slight meter maid whose dearest dream is to make detective. Unfortunately, one of the requirements of the local police department is the ability to lift a 100 pound sandbag, which is pretty much impossible since Chloe can't deflect the scale's needle that much fully dressed, shod, and soaking wet.

Officer Boston is determined to prove to the new police chief that the ability to solve crimes does not depend on a brawny build so when a local real estate developer, Rupert Sellers, turns up dead at the skateboard park the same night her fellow parking violations officer, Jeffrey Little, disappears, Chloe feels there could be a link. Oh, yes, and the victim's wife claims that sixty-thousand dollars have gone missing as well. Shut out of the official investigation into Sellers' death and with no one else on the force concerned with Jeffrey's disappearance, Chloe launches her own investigation.

Jackson has created a protagonist with several odd quirks. The first one is her insistence on taking Blue, her 14-year-old dog, just about everywhere with her, including on her parking violation beat; a second is her ability to find lost items; and a third is ANALYTICO, which is what she calls her own personal logic language that she employs to find connections between pieces of data. I suppose this is meant to be cute or something but it comes across kind of flat to me. ANALYTICO seems to be a skewed corruption of the SQL database language. This example is taken from location 2378:

"RETRIEVE Jeffrey FROM FACT BASE. Next, EXTRACT Sellers as well."

Um, yes, well, moving right along.

The book itself is very short so not a lot of time invested. Simple, light summertime reading. Despite some plot weaknesses, the solutions to the three mysteries are somewhat clever. The remaining eight books in the series are even shorter, more along the lines of novellas than full-length novels. If not for some decidedly adult situations, I'd think that this was a book written for children Neatnik's age.

Happy

Feathers on Fridays: Saturday edition

Hi, this is Neatnik, guest blogging for Mommy again. We went to Pipey's place last Saturday to visit the chickens and Mommy took some pictures.

Their new coop is really big. It has three levels. The nesting area is in the back and it goes across the whole coop. They get to it from the ground by going up a long ramp. They have a roosting shelf that they seem to like. When one chicken goes on it, other ones join her. See?

Elle is in front right; Ash is middle left; and
Red is hiding in back

Ash and Elle switched and Red came out to say hello
Elle's a little camera shy

Daddy delivered the chickens to Pipey only a week before these pictures were taken. Now they look much more hennish. Elle is rounder and had much more white. Ash has some more white, too. I think Dee and Emma especially look hennish. Red looked basically the same to me - just a bit bigger.

Emma seems to like stalking bugs.

Emma: still the smallest
but she stands up for herself!

Pipey has a dog who really wanted to play with the chickens. She wasn't allowed in the coop but she kept running around trying to get a good look at them. The chickens just ignored her.

I think the chickens are happy at Pipey's place.

In which trek rejoices

I have been waiting for this since I bought my Kindle! The New American Bible Revised Editionis now available in Kindle format and the cover art is charming. I purchased my copy Wednesday evening for just $5.99.

I read the preface to the new edition and the preface to the Pentateuch Thursday morning and then Neatnik and I read Genesis chapter 1 together.

The footnotes appear after the text of the chapter and things are nicely cross-linked.

This edition is lendable but that strikes me as kind of funny: I don't know anyone who has read the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation, in two weeks or less.