Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. PART 1

Alright, the guy is a good writer, I admit that. In fact, for the most part, I loved this book's action, and am also a fan of a few of his other books.

However, and this is a big however, there is a lot wrong with this book.

It starts out with Robert Langdon, our would-be hero who spends most of this book... um... sort of following people around and learning things, who is dreaming. In his dream, he is in Giza, the place with the pyramids, and is actually trying to climb one! At the top is a beautiful woman, who turns into a cadaver or something, screams at him and cue the cliche wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat scene. Foreshadowing!? ...well, no. This is never brought up again, and has very little, if anything, to do with the plot.

So he gets a call from an amazing science institute that, although I, as an astrophysics degree-holder, have never heard of it, apparently holds like 90% of the world's scientists. This place may exist, since there are supercollider facilities all over europe, but somehow I doubt they are secretly creating ever invention on earth other than the Honda robot.

I digress. They send out a plane to get him, because he has to see something (anyone want to bet it's the body of guy with something cryptic written on or around him in blood? I'll bet $100 it is, since that seems to be the Langdon special.)

Naturally, it is. But before we get to that, let me just point out that there is absolutely no organization, private or government, that can afford to use a sub-orbital shuttle to transport people. I'm sorry, nothing short of nuclear holocaust would inspire anyone to fly a single person halfway around the planet in a spacecraft without any profit.

So, the guy who meets our skill-less hero is basically Cheney-In-His-Wheelchair. He shows Langdon the requisite cryptic corpse, and does what any good novel character does: EVERYTHING WRONG!

He froze the location with science, which I'll accept given the setting, but certainly a scientist knows that freezing a corpse causes it and all the organic material around it to rupture at a cellular level. In other words, he destroyed evidence such as hair and skin. Then, although the freeze might have destroyed skin oil marks anyways, he and Langdon take some time to touch everything and disturb as much of the scene as possible, including the victim.

Now, through all of this, remember that the point of freezing the chamber is to preserve the scene. (To this end, I'll accept that he may have kept the room just above the rupture point, but I won't accept that either man would not realize that fiddling with all sorts of things with their bare hands and even moving and adjusting things is NOT good preservation procedure.)

Corpse disturbing done with, they go to the man's lab. You see, this corpse, of course, is a religious figure, but is also a quantum physicist.

Here is where I nearly screamed...

Angels and Demons

I will be adding a full review to this post when I get up in the morning for my glorious day off, but as I am in a mood to point out the flaws of this book right now, let me say this, for now: PHYSICS DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! AND DESTROYING UNIQUE. ANCIENT, AND UTTERLY PRICELESS WORKS BY GREAT PHYSICISTS IS NOT SOMETHING A HISTORY PROFESSOR WOULD EVER DO!

Curious? well, stay tuned. I'll explain all in a few hours.

Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold by R. Macinko and J. Weisman. PART 2

Holy Crap! Part 1 just got deleted!? wtf?

okay, lets sumarize: the cover is wierd, with an odd choice of imagery involving a pair of grainy photos photo-shopped together.

The author reads his book like a robot until he starts getting into it, but most of what he says is just daydreaming about the glory days or preening with phrases like "...pipe almost as thick... and long... as my dick."

Since part one of this review didn't publish because of an internet flicker, I'm mad and am not going to finish reviewing this extremely dull audio tape right now. I'll try to come back to it later.
Instead, just keep an eye out for my Angels and Demons (the book) review.

--Ro'Tor




Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold was written by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman, and was read on Simon Schuster Audioworks tapes by Richard Marcinko.

Ever Heard of Rogue Warrior?

Rogue Warrior is a series by (at least) author Richard Marcinko.

I've actually heard a lot of good things about this author, but I also have heard a lot of bad. basically, I hear that it's the army-theme equivalent of a Clive Cussler book series. And I like a lot about Clive Cussler. But, for the hell of it, I dug up an old audio book of Rogue Warrior to listen to, it's even read by one of the authors (this one having two, so it should be doubly-good, right?).

Well, I won't find out tonight, but tomorrow evening, after a hard day's work, I intend to pop it into my long-neglected tape player and comment as it goes. It may be worthless drivel I write, or (and I doubt this...) comic gold, or (most likely) just a series of plot points utterly spoiling the book for readers.

Well, keep an eye out tomorrow for Richard Marcinko and John Weisman's Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold.

Fukuzawa Yukichi by Helen Hopper Part 2

I can't believe it, page 12 and I'm already bored with this book. Let's get through this as quick as possible, then.

Holy crap! All I get is MORE background.

Osaka... no, that isn't about Fukuzawa. ... Tokugawa... again, not about him... *sigh* still looking...

Ah, back at the bottom of page 14 we come back to Fukuzawa, for a few sentences. Just long enough to introduce the new background subject: The F*#(@ng DUTCH!

So, we go over how the Dutch are more bff with Tokugawa Japan than other countries are, once again forgetting who this biography is about. Naturally, we won't be coming back to the point for a while. We get back to the hard work of... Yukuchi? When did you start calling him by his other name!? Ay Carumba! Oy Vei! Ai Ya! [Other Shouts of Exasperation]!

It isn't hard enough when I can't tell cities from people, you're going to switch the name you use for the main figure on me? This is going to be a long 150 pages, isn't it?

So let's skip ahead, a bit, and just jump into chapter 2.

THE LURE OF THE WEST.

Oh dear god, what is with these titles!? Well, let's keep reading...

Well, now Fukuzawa is being called by his full name. So, after pages of background to lead up to Fukuzawa's life, we cover less than ten pages for him to go from a first time student in a Dutch Learning school, and now he's TEACHING one!?

The pacing in this book is rediculous. Oh, and now he's in Edo (modern day, Tokyo), for those keeping track.

Okay, no problem, let's just turn the page and find out more about his life in edo and... what the hell? now we're back in time to the year of his birth? why? what possible... oh, I see. Now the author has brought us back, AGAIN, for more background.

You know what, I think that's enough. Let me just sumarize the rest of this for you, reader.

Fukuzawa makes a living being a teacher and a total prick to anyone in power in Japan, pretty much flipping off the man until he becomes the man, then living a life of ease. blah blah blah. In fact, the last chapter of this book, almost 10% of the pages in it, is devoted to his descendents.

In total, more than fifty percent of the book was background for the subject matter. It read like a history book, and from the little I let you in on, you can tell it read like an ill-paced and disorderly one.

You missed a lot of it. EVERY CHAPTER jumped to a different time, often to ancestors or descendents of Fukuzawa, with little or no information for the first few pages as to who is being discussed or what is going on.

Take my advice, if you're a history buff looking to learn about a famed figure in Japan, don't pick up this book, leave that for the students. I suggest just going on Wikipedia and searching him, instead.

THE COMING LINEUP

So... Yeah.

I will be moving in around a month, but before then, I plan to start in on a few books. So let me list off some of the ones I'm going to start with:

Fukuzawa Yukichi (sorry, but I should have at least one biography)

Angels and Demons (YOU might not have been depressed by this one, but I was, so I'll share my pain)

Star Wars: Millennium Falcon

Monster by Frank Perettie

and who knows what else. So stay tuned, and enjoy.

Fukuzawa Yukichi by Helen M. Hopper Part 1

From the outset, I want to say that I have infinite respect for authors, whether they write fiction or nonfiction, and no matter their beliefs, but sometimes the mistakes, lazy editing, etc. must be addressed. (And if I misspell things, please don't let that take away from opinions... I don't pretend to be an author... unlike some of those to come.)

*sigh* Alright, with that out of the way... I think it's time I actually talk about a book, huh? Well, I'll start with a simple, short biography (since it's on the bookshelf closest to my computer).

Fukuzawa Yukichi: From Samurai to Capitalist.

...Fukuzawa Yukichi. Hard to spell, fun to say.

Now as far as historical figures go, Yukichi isn't a well known figure, and one with a convoluted history, but is that an excuse for writing a book with so little focus on the reader?

The chapters loosely follow the subject they are about, but tend to wander dramatically from their original topic, and get pulled violently back to a forced set of conclusions that don't flow well together, and end up skipping through the man's life so often that I spent most of the book flipping back and forth like I was reading a "choose your own adventure" novel desperately trying to find out what's going on, who this person is, and what job Fukuzawa has at this point, and where he is.

Okay, there is another problem: A writer HAS to have a common name they call their character or subject. Especially when the person's society has a different naming convention than the reader's!

In Japan, the family name comes first, followed by the personal name. In fact, the author has a section right after the preface where she vows to write names in the Japanese manner, and yet throughout, Fukuzawa Yukichi occassionally becomes Yukichi Fukuzawa, just Yukichi, or just Fukuzawa. This is a name that a westerner has trouble keeping track of, especially if they haven't had much experience with Japanese names, which tend to be long and dificult to pronounce for english-speakers. Now amplify this issue by adding dozens of other people being named and occassionally even being the center of attention for page after page and yu'll come to understand why my copy of the book has rugburns from being thrown to the floor in frustration so much.

Alright, preface over (and that wasn't as long as Helen Hopper's acknowledgements for her 138 page book.) Let's take a look at this book, chapter by chapter.

As a biography, naturally the first line of the book begins with the place and date of Fukuzawa's birth. This, naturally, is followed by absolutely nothing about him.

I'm dead serious. He's born, then the author seems to forget about him. She talks about his father's life, yada yada yada, and I get that it's neccessary to have some backdrop for all of this, but how many lines can you possibly need to say that he was part of a samurai family that was of a samurai class incapable of attaining wealth honorably, because low-level samurai, well, sucked. They didn't do anything except carry swords and inspire a generation of cloistered white guys in america to think they understand Japanese culture by watching animes about them.

So, then, shouldn't that be pretty much all she says about that? Really! In fact, I'll grant her an entire page to cover definitions (even though those are also covered in a glossary in the back, with such hard-to-defne words as Geisha, Sensei and Samurai being fully explained) and Japanese-history-in-a-nutshell.

So, then, how many pages in your 138 page book are taken with this filler, Ms. Hopper? 7 and a half.

...

That's around 5% of the book, just as an introduction. And I'm not counting the INTRODUCTION. Or the start of every chapter and subchapter where 90% of what she just went over will be covered again and again until you are totally sick of seeing the word Bakufu starting another swing at traditional Japanese society.

So.... let's have a look at some of these subchapter titles (because there isn't enough filler in a book thinner than my callendar without them, is there?):

"Breaking out of Nakatsu," "Sidetracked in Osaka," ... what the hell? These sound like titles for hair metal ballads or, at best, chapters from an R. L. Stein novel. Unfortunately, they're pretty fitting titles, though, because almost every parapgraph begins with the name of an island or city in Japan.

I'm now 11 pages into this book, and am litterally falling asleep... more to come when I can stand to read more of it.

Welcome. An Intro

I have been a fan of online reviewers for a few years now. I watch videos and read posts for video game reviewers like the Angry Video Game Nerd (www.cinemassacre.com) of the Spoony One (www.spoonyexperiment.com), comic book reviewers like Linkara (atopfourthwall.blogspot.com), and movie and television reviewers like The Nastalgia Critic (thatguywiththeglasses.com), but I haven't seen anyone do that sort of review (cruel, yet comical... sometimes) on novels.

I, on the other hand, spend more than an unhealthy amount of time surrounded by books, and have taken it upon myself to critique some of them for readers.

My tastes range into the science fiction realm, for the most part, and so I have a lot of them to comment on, but I also have a good selection of comical writing, horror, and classic novels to examine as well.

Anyways, I don't want to get preachy... yet. So read on as I post, and enjoy.