78. The Girls He Adored

The Girls He Adored - Jonathan Nasaw

This is a thriller. A very bad guy, a very capable psychiatrist, a very outside the box FBI agent. Mix it all together with some serous child abuse, sexual abuse, and a secluded area in which to hide in the mountains of Oregon. You get a very predictable, though still enjoyable jaunt through the exploits of a serial rapist/murderer with multiple personalities. There is the obligatory eventual victory of the good guys after they take their lumps from the bad guy.

At least this bad guy was believable in this book. I have read a few where the bad guy just never seemed to be real.

The book is nothing special. None of the characters are especially notable, though they were well portrayed. The story line was predictable. The little clues left around as to what would happen (there are always clues) were a bit too obvious for me.

If you are a strawberry blond, watch out for this dude.

77. Good Omens

Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This book was quite funny. Let's see, the Antichrist is accidentally switched at birth and is raised without demonic influence. When the time comes for the Apocalypse it does not go anywhere near what was planned.

The characters were hilarious. Stuff like the four horsemen being bikers. The disappearance of the entire core of a nuclear power plant, yet the power production continues. Atlantis rises from the sea. The "prophesies" foretold by a witch in the 1600's keep coming true, but the predictions are difficult to understand until after the fact. An angel and a demon have spent 6000 years helping people and causing disruption and become pivotal to the whole end times scenario because they find they actually like people.

It is funny. It is unlike anything else I have read so far. I really enjoyed reading it and recommend it when you have a desire for something different and funny.

76. Scrap

Scrap - Lauren Stephenson

This is a novella written by a student at Wofford College. Every two years the creative writing department of the college offers this class where the students write a novel or play or poetry or something creative. Lauren Stephenson was the winner of the 2006 Benjamin Wofford Prize in Fiction for this book. The winner gets their winning book published. The copy I have is one of the 2,000 copies the college published for winning the award.

I really enjoyed the writing. It is not technically difficult or overly ambitious. I didn't expect it to be outstanding writing. I figured it is a college student learning to write fiction, so how good could it really be? I don't think it was on a level with Steinbeck, Faulkner or Vonnegut, but who would think it should be anywhere close? For a college student this was outstanding.

It is a science fiction book about a guy who works as a tester for a huge pharmaceutical company. He discovers there are behind the scenes things happening that cause him to run away and for the company to hunt for him. His exploits are very interesting and the story flows very well.

The characters are interesting. Especially Vee (the protagonist), Emmy (his best friend), Abrienda (the doctor), and the the "scrappers".

I doubt you will find this book in a store or anything, but if you do see it somewhere, grab it and read it. It was a lot of fun and is worth checking out. I hope to see more from Lauren Stephenson some time in the future. Who knows if she will be a writer or not, but she has a pretty good start with this book.

75. Make Room! Make Room!

Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison

This is another of those movies I remembered from back in the 70's. The film was actually called Soylent Green. This one was a Charlton Heston movie. The only thing I recall really was the scene where he was yelling "Soylent Green is people!".

I found that this book was quite good. The film I remembered is VERY loosely based on this book. It comes down to being a science fiction (dystopian) story in an seriously overpopulated New York City and the problems that creates, along with some characters that have the same names. The story is not the same. The dramatic scene at the end of the movie is nowhere to be found in the book. It is a very different story altogether.

This is one of the few times I will say this, but I loved the movie...and I loved the book.

They were so different that it is pretty easy to separate them and call them two different stories.

74. Logan's Run

Logan's Run - William F. Nolan

This is one of those books I read because I remember thinking the movie was great when I was young. By today's standards the movie sucks.

The book on the other hand does not suck at all. I think it was fun and exciting. OK, maybe there were events that were a little too convenient. Maybe the story line could get a bit choppy. Things like Logan gets knocked out...when he wakes everything is OK and it is time to move to the next scene. I can overlook those things because I really liked the story. I really liked that this novel was VERY different than the movie.

I wish the movie had some of the elements of this book. The prison called "Hell". The Crazy Horse Mountain. The Thinker. The Sky Gypsys. The Baby Home. The Civil War reenactment. The whole idea the Sanctuary is not just some place with an old guy hanging out. I liked the whole twist with Francis (the other Sandman). I loved the way Logan and Jessica become a pair much better in this book than the random hookup in the movie. I liked the whole story with the cub scouts much better. Box was much more than some robot living in an ice cave. The maze.

This book has so much more to offer than the movie ever did. It makes me regret that I did not read it 20 or 30 years ago.

I have purposely avoided specifics regarding the plot line. I think that you should give it a shot, especially if you liked the movie at all.

Is it great writing? No, not really. I do recommend it because it surprised me with the joy it gave me while reading it.

73. All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet On The Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

I read it. It took forever because I was busier than I have ever been in my life this last five weeks or so.

So busy in fact that I don't even feel like blogging about this book.

It was very good. War sucks.

72. The Boy

The Boy - Naheem Murr

This book was very dark. It was too dark. It was so dark that I didn't want to read it after I started.

There is this guy from Ireland who spends his whole life building himself up to be Prime Minister. He calculates every step. He maneuvers every action in his life to reach that goal. At some point he messes up and does some stupid stuff with a prostitute. He fathers a child with her (the boy)..

The guy has given up his dreams of running the world because he now has a big skeleton in his closet. He becomes a renowned social worker with something like CPS. When the prostitute gets killed he decides to be the foster father for this boy.

They lived together for five years. During that time his legitimate son dies, his daughter commits suicide and his wife leaves him. The boy goes to a group home. The man falls apart but maintains his job.

Time passes and he then goes in search of the boy. Now the boy is a "rent boy" outside of London. He has mastered manipulating everyone around him to achieve his goals.

It seems like every character in this book has some serious mental issues. The ex-priest running the boys home and his wife are ridiculous. The boys in the home are all nuts. The foster father is a whack-job despite being the guy at the top of the social work chain of command.

The only person I think is normal in any way is the girl who cooks at the boys home, who the foster father has a thing for because she reminds him of his ex-wife.

Oh...the end sucked.

Anyway...if you want to read something really dark (have I said it was dark?), this book was pretty well written. I liked the words used. I liked the way it flowed.

Overall, this was not terrible, but it is definitely something you have to be in the right frame of mind in order to read.

71. The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom

This was a very interesting book that tells a tale of a very old man after he died. He thought he lead a boring and wasted life. The five people he met when he went to heaven showed him how his actions, intentional and unintentional, had influenced their lives. He learned that his "wasted" life had actually saved hundreds upon hundreds of children's lives.

It was fun to read. It was a feel good book. I doubt it was very hard for the author to write this one. Nice, but not very difficult to figure out every step of the way.

It was not what I think heaven will be like.

70. Batman & Dracula: Red Rain

Batman & Dracula: Red Rain - Doug Moench, Kelley Jones, Malcolm Jones III, Les Dorscheid, Todd Klein, Eric Van Lustbader

I thought I would give one of these graphic novels a shot for a change. There are 20 something year old guys at work who talk about these graphic novels and "manga" and what look to me like comic books. They are very into them for whatever reason. So, I asked about them and a few guys said this one would probably be good for me.

What did I find? Well, this is a part of a series called "Elseworlds". "Heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places- some that have existed or might have existed, and others that can't, couldn't or shouldn't exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow."

OK...that sounds wonderful...so what did I get?
Dracula comes to Gotham City with his vampire army. They feed on the homeless. Batman must fight him to save the city. Batman wins, but he becomes a good vampire who will live forever.

What did I learn?
Nothing at all. Not a single vocabulary word. Not a single thought worth mentioning.

What did I really learn?
The guys talking about these books are not very intelligent I guess. They talk like this stuff is the best writing in the world and the stories are classic. It was just a fancy stinking comic book. It was written like a comic book and felt like a comic book as I read it. OK, they added a little sexually suggestive junk with female vampires to make the horny dorks like it more I think.

Something else I noticed. The list of credits for writing a stupid "graphic novel" is ridiculously long.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

69. Chasing the Dead

Chasing the Dead - Joe Schreiber

This book is OK, but a bit to Stephen Kingish for me at this point in life. This type of horror book where some creepy guy who was killed 100's of years ago coming back and doing things in the modern world just seems too childish any more.

It was not bad, but didn't really get me wanting to read the rest of the story. It was suspenseful, but not edge of the seat suspenseful. It was puzzling trying to figure out what was happening, why, and who the "bad guy" really was, but it never really mattered to me as the reader.