The Help by Kathryn Stockett was a pick from our couples book club.  Yes, I’m in a couples book club – you in the back, cut the crap.  I’ll wait for the heckling to subside.  It has been incredibly fun to get together, drink and discuss literature.  It’s like a license to act like an adult for one night every two months – no kids hollering and screaming, no fighting, no family dinner.  It just feels good.

Our group seems to be fixated on the plight of the black woman in historical periods of America.  I only mention this because fully half of all the books we have read so far have dealt with this issue.  We started with The Street by Ann Petry which was a brilliant story of a young black mom in the 1940s living in a fomenting Harlem.  But that is not the focus of this review.  This review is about the monumentally fun debut by Kathryn Stockett.

As I always do with a book club book, I went out and read the other reviews on The Help.  This is a self-aggrandizing move on my part.  Hey, it makes me sound smart.  But it does play an important role in analyzing any book, especially reading those reviews that are counter to my own. If you have ever sat in on any debate, playing the role of counter argument is more fun than debating your own argument.  Who doesn’t like the role of Devil’s Advocate, even if it is just against yourself.

While there were plenty of fawning reviews to go around the negatives seem to congeal around one central theme: how dare this good looking vanilla author try to capture the vernacular of a sixties black maid.  Get over yourself people – even if you were there she has every right to artistic license as anyone else.  Besides, even if it weren’t a hundred percent accurate, it flowed.

The story itself was fantastic.  Any great story has a villain that you can relate to and the villain, Hilly, is absolutely perfect.  She is a Queen Bee, world class racist bitch that you love to hate because everyone in the world has met her doppelganger at least once in their lives.  It’s amazing how many of these people actually exist in the world and how much of our society caters to them.  Cruelty is a voyeuristic opiate that is all the more powerful for fear of it’s angry gaze ever being directed your way.  Look at the recent popularity of reality TV if you don’t believe me.  Fear is what gives the cruel so much of their power.

The conflict and joy of this story is about confronting this fear from different perspectives.  The maids, Minny and Aibeleen, literally have to fear for their lives when putting their stories and experiences with their white employers on paper.  These are poignant and powerful tales of injustice that need to be told.  The white protagonist is Skeeter, a gangly girl who works the outskirts of Hilly’s anachronistic antebellum society.  She is the architect behind cataloging and recording these wonderful tales.  The fear she has to confront is being ostracized from a society she doesn’t really want to be a part of anyway.

One could rightfully state that her risk is far less than the maids.  It reminds me of the story of the pig and the chicken.  The chicken asks the pig if he wants to open a restaurant called Ham & Eggs and split the profits 50 – 50.  The pig says, ‘That doesn’t sound fair’.  The chicken says,’why not?’  The pig responds, ‘well you’d only be invested where I’d be committed.’

Skeeter is clearly the chicken in this scenario but fear is always relative to the person it is currently assaulting.  Stockett does a great job of making this fear still feel incredibly real and painful even when Skeeter is not as committed as the maids.

Her writing is not on par with the Hemingways and Vonneguts of yesteryear but it is very engaging and she never strays from the mainline of the story keeping you involved from start to finish.  I recommend this to anyone with a pulse.

So our oldest is starting kindergarten in a couple of weeks.  This is the big leagues.  No more half day for our little girl, it’s nine to three or bust. We have already begun the process of arming her with the school accessories any kindgartener may require.

About twenty minutes in to the shopping trip I began dragging my feet.  Like 98% of all men who are not too in touch with their feminine side, I am not a good shopper.  I was there for my daughter period.  We decided to go to the mall instead of Target so I was already on high alert.  I’m convinced that the air they pump in to the mall is similar to what they pump into the casinos in Vegas.  Instead of energy inducing oxygen I’m convinced they use some sort of airborne estrogen that emasculates even the strongest man to watch a woman try on one more dress.  Devious bastards.

We started off with the accessories.  I pulled out a Dora the Explorer book bag that I thought looked fun and she shot me down with a venomous glare.  Not my wife, my daughter.  She liked Dora last year, so I looked at her slightly confused when I asked, “Why don’t you like Dora anymore?”  She hedged until I pressed.  She finally responded with some detail.  “I hate her hair.  I hate her shirt.  I hate her pants and I hate her shoes.  Ok?”  “What about Boots?” I asked.  “He’s OK but I can’t stand her.”  Gotta love an opinionated woman.  I wish I knew who taught her that.

We switched to Scooby Doo to match her Mystery Machine lunch box.  Now she actually has three Scooby book bags in ascending sizes.  I hope our youngest daughter is a Scooby fan too.

We spent a full hour in the Franklin Covey store.  Not my idea of a good time.  I was alone in that.  The ladies in my family love stationary, leather bound address books, journals,  baby books,  even the odd birthday book or writing book, you name it they want it.  Not that they do much with these things once in their possession but they love to hoard them as if waiting for a stationary Armageddon where they will be the only ones that can send out personalized monogrammed invitations to the end of the world.  I drew the line at a book stand.  Show me the kindergartner that requires a book stand.  Honestly.

After two hours I started looking around for a stiff glass of scotch.  Turns out Orange Julius resents even being asked if they have a full wet bar.  Apparently, it hurts their family image. First time I’ve ever been cut off at a mall shake shop.

By the time we got around to shopping for clothes my whining became too much for my wife.  She finally gave me the go ahead to go home with a promise to come back another day.  I had my fingers crossed.

With all of the amazing video games out there, there’s not a whole lot of reason to drop back into the board game chest anymore.  Unless of course you have kids, the real reason board games keep getting made.  That’s the real reason all games keep getting made I guess, except for those creepy porn ones.

Over the last two months my wife and I have started the board game revival.  This is an experiment we’ve done where we’ve gone back over all the old board games with our daughters to see which ones still make the fun grade.  This is what we found out.

We started with axis and allies.  The axis and allies board game is a classic.  It is a World War II dice driven reenactment that goes really deep on strategy.  You can play with two to five people and take over one or more of the countries involved in the conflict.  Germany and Japan start off with the most troops but limited land mass.  Russia is a disaster where the US and Britain start off with a nice navy and air forces.  We had a great time dusting this bad boy off, but the kids couldn’t totally engage.  Once they got past the unit game pieces they got bored quickly.  The strategy of this game requires at least a seventh grade grasp of history and sense of place.

The next one we dove into was Monopoly.  Don’t think this is news to anybody, but Monopoly is an old school, cut-throat capitalistic nightmare where only one person reigns victorious over the salty tears of all the other players.  I forgot how long and painful this game can be.  I’m sure Gordon Gecko loves it.  After this painful reenactment we dropped Monopoly and picked up Monopoly Junior so the kids could really get into it.  I gotta say, Monopoly Junior is waaaay more fun.  The game only lasts about a half an hour and you’re dealing with much smaller denominations.  You also end up buying properties in an amusement park which is way more fun for the kids.  This is a keeper.

Next, we hit Sequence.  The Sequence board game is a hell of a lot of fun.  It’s a combo between poker and a traditional board game that relies almost entirely on luck.  This makes it great for kids of any age.  At least those old enough that putting poker chips in their mouths is not the high point of the game.

We then tried a variety of pc board games.  The World of Warcraft game was way too complex.  The instructions were like War & Peace.  Definitely not something for the young kids.  The hardcore WoW players would love it though.

We stopped with the Qwirkle board game.  I don’t know that you can really call it a board game.  It was more of a crazy combo between Scrabble and Dominoes.  The kids loved it though and my wife and I found it hard not to compete full bore against each other.  Always fun to see the competitive side yanked out of her.  Out of all the games we played this was the most fun of them all for the whole family.

We’re back to video games for now, but after this little experiment we’re going to need some board game storage to back up the video game storage we just purchased.  We’ll definitely get back to the board games.  This kind of entertainment is much better for the family dynamic and overall way healthier than video games.

I have always been a PC gamer myself.  The nice thing about PC games is that once they are on the hard drive you don’t generally need the CD or DVD after the fact.  Throw in the really nice downloading services available these days, like Steam, and the only requirement for PC game storage is a running computer.

Now that I have kids though, the games are starting to pile up.  We have Wii games, some old cheap ps2 games and almost every board game ever made.  The kids had taken over the house a long time ago.  We have been able to keep a little control over the house with artfully arranged toy boxes that get completely ignored by the kids.  They are nice for us though and we try to use them whenever we can.

The problem with video games and movies is that you can’t just toss them in a box somewhere and expect that they will work next time.  We are now at the point where we desperately need video game storage as well as some way to keep our movies organized and intact from tiny little fingers that seem to be perpetually covered in syrup.

The books aren’t a problem because a book shelf looks good in the house.  It can actually add to the feeling and the decorative theme that you are trying to promote.  This is not true with video game storage, movie storage or board game storage.  I get that the people that create these storage devices are trying to sell a futuristic message.  But come on!  There has to be people in the future that have taste, no?

Or maybe the problem is perception.  The manufacturers may feel that those that are buying these storage units are all under eighteen and live in the basement of their parent’s house.  That might explain the bright colors and the function over form dynamic that seems to infest every one of these units.  It’s time to change this paradigm.  Gamers are aging and one hopes that as they switch from beer to wine, they’re tastes are maturing as well.  It’s hard to match a living room against toxic green or TRON blue.  Not all of us have video game posters littering the walls.  Give us some options!

I’ve started the search on Amazon but so far I’m getting nothing but goose eggs.  Some of the devices look like they are high quality but nothing could fit in a living room.  There needs to be a new market here that breaks from the den to the living room.

I recently downloaded Runes of Magic for free.  You have to take all of these free online rpg games with a grain of salt, it’s really hard to complain about something that you don’t pay for.  As expected, it is another World of Warcraft clone but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if it’s done right.  So far, Runes of Magic is doing it right.

I am nowhere near to making it to end game but the beginning of the journey is more fun than any other free rpg games that I have played to date.  The system is complex but not overwhelming to the beginner.  They ease you in gently but so far the depth is keeping me going.  It’s the traditional RPG based off of WoW.  Gather your quests from the guys with the giant, suspension of disbelief exclamation points over their heads.  Then complete them.  That’s the objective of any of these online fantasy games, but it’s not about the goal, it’s about the journey.

So let’s talk about that journey.  The classes are standard – rogue, mage, warden, knight, priest, warrior, scout, druid.  No real surprises to their skills or spells.  The one very cool aspect to classes, and this is a differentiator, is that at level ten you can play a second class turning your character into a dual class badass.  Once you go with two classes you have a specific set of skills that can only be used when you have that class as your primary.  You have a general set of skill that can be used when your other class is active.  These are your crossover skills.  I am playing a rogue / mage combo.  When my rogue is my primary class I have access to the rogue specific, the rogue general and the mage general skills.  When my mage is my primary I have access to the mage specific, mage general and rogue general skills.  This means when I’m playing a rogue I can throw down a fireball to pull or a mage snare when things get hairy.  The coolest part of this duality is the elite skills that become available when both classes hit fifteen.  These skill are a special hybrid between your classes and they are powerful.  For example, my rogue received a trap, similar to the hunter trap in WoW and my mage got a powerful DOT that abuses the NPCs that get in its way.

The crafting system is standard.  You have three primary gathering resources – herbs, wood and ore.  These can be used for cooking, tailoring, woodworking, smithing, etc…  So far, I can’t see any real use to crafted items except for maybe alchemy and cooking.  These give you quick buffs and heals during the day to day grind.

One of the primary weaknesses so far seems to be the economy.  I’m not sure if this has something to do with the population or not.  When I first started playing the world seemed pretty empty but it seems to be growing.  Hopefully, the economy will pick up with the population.  Right now, the auction house seems pretty useless.  I’m used to selling everything from green and up on the AH in WoW.  I don’t even think about auctioning anything below a blue in ROM.

I also haven’t had a lot of luck with getting groups for instances.  Again, I think this will change as the servers fill up.  The combat overall is fun.  It doesn’t fit within the land of violent video games like Age of Conan, but there is enough fur and teeth flying around to give a strong element of realism.

Overall, I would give the game a solid seven out of ten.  This is not bad for an MMO of its age.  I plan to continue playing for a while longer anyway to try to get somewhere near the end game.

I recently picked up an iPad.  I felt slightly guilty about going fully digital with books as I really want to see the medium continue.  So many people in the younger generation have stopped reading books entirely.  So much so that I fear a future of fast food literature.  I appreciate a good comic book as much as the next guy, but you can’t get into serious character development in thirty pages no matter how good the illustrations are.  That’s still preferable than tweeting, at least people put a little thought into a comic book.  I dread the day that tweeting is looked back on as poetic streams of consciousness.  Quit destroying my language!

I started the great ebook search months and months ago.  Before the iPad came out it really boiled down to the Kindle and the Nook.  In my opinion and in the opinion of every one of the ebook reader reviews that I read, the Kindle was the far superior product.  I even added the Kindle to my shopping cart once or twice.  One thing you can say about Amazon is that they are pros when it comes to ebook marketing and ebook distribution.  When I learned that there would be a Kindle app on the iPad, that made up my mind.

The Kindle is still a superior ebook reader to the iPad.  The electric ink that the Kindle uses makes the words just pop on each and every page.  This is a huge advantage when it comes to reading outside.  Glare just isn’t an issue for the Kindle where it really makes reading the iPad a chore even in the faintest sunlight.

So why get the iPad?  The apps obviously.  The iPad was science fiction when I was a kid.  I remember reading Ender’s Game when I was in early high school.  In this book they had something called a ‘desk’ that the militant little super kids trained on.  They could do all their homework, plan battle strategies and run games and psychological simulations from this one device.  He didn’t know it at the time but Orson Scott Card was describing an iPad.  He was prescient on many other things including the rise of China and India, but man did he ever nail the iPad.  The guy must have a hot tub time machine in his back yard.

The beauty of the iPad is not only in the apps though, it is also in how it has so quickly become a centerpiece of my life.  It’s creepy.  I read the paper on it.  I fight with my five year old daughter regularly about giving it back to Dad when he wants to use it.  After winning one of these tantrum laden battles, I triumphantly sit back and read only to find that she has gotten the last laugh when my fingers encounter fly traps of jelly, syrup or lollipop residue.  I still don’t understand how being sticky is so acceptable to kids.

The other crowning achievement is how well the iPad syncs with your other Apple devices.  Especially when it comes to books.  I can start a book on the iPad, travel downtown to an appointment, and pick up right where I left off on my iPhone.  When I grab my iPad that night, it syncs my position in the book from where I was on the phone!  Sounds like it should be obvious but this blew my mind.  It’s still blowing my mind.

Bookmarks are totally irrelevant now.  The traditional paper lower case Ls anyway.  The only reason to bookmark something is to save it for future reference.  You can also see what other people are highlighting.  Half the time you have no idea why they underlined a certain passage, but it’s still interesting to see what other people think stands out in literature.  The other thing that blew my nose and then blew my mind is the built in dictionary.  How many times have you wanted to look up a word when reading late at night but were too damned tired to go grab a dictionary or pop online?  Now your book does it for you.  Amazing.

When I first got the iPad I went and downloaded all of the free books like the Constitution, the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, Ulysses, The Origin of Species, etc…  Still haven’t read any of the big ones but at least my library makes me look smart.  The first fantasy ebook that I got for free on the Kindle app was His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik.  That will be the subject of my next review.

I can’t wait to keep browsing through these great online libraries.  I look forward to continuing the great ebook search as I go on reading ebooks.

Somehow I keep tricking myself into reading the next book in the Chronicles of the Necromancer.  I either forget how bad the previous one is or hold out hope that something interesting will happen in the next installment.  Maybe it’s the name: Chronicles of the Necromancer sounds pretty bad ass, especially when you find out the necromancer is the good guy.  I won’t make that mistake again.

The series started out innocently enough.  The second son of a monarch is forced to watch the murder of his parents and younger sister by his older brother in a fairly entertaining round of Regicidal Rampage.  Tris then flees for his life as big brother uses his far superior resources to hunt him down and kill him.  This is where the book begins to sour.  The chase seems to take forever.  Tris begins to understand his powers as a necromancer but it takes too long and the journey is just not very interesting.  When they come back in and take down the usurper, you’re so happy that the book is almost over that you don’t notice how boring it all is.  Overall I would give round one a four out of ten.  Failing grade and nothing to write home about.

Normally I would not reveal plot lines in a review, but I just don’t care with these books.  I can’t even remember most of the second book or why I decided to punish myself by continuing.  I bought the third, the reason for this review, well after reading the first two.  I had definitely forgotten the first couple when I made that choice.  I almost put it down several times in the reading but muscled my way through for sheer kitsch value at the end.  Unfortunately, it’s not purposefully bad.  Otherwise it might have made a good campy extreme out of itself.

The biggest insult is how bad the writing is.  I honestly wish I knew how some of these things get through a publisher.  It’s not easy to get published yet crap like this is more prevalent than it has any right to be.  The dialog is blander than Buzz the Bee on the back of a box of Honey Nut Cheerios.  I’m afraid to say I don’t think Ms. Martin has ever heard the words metaphor or simile.

Unfortunately, I did buy the fourth one when I bought the third (I usually pick up series in twos), so I have to decide what to do with it.  I’m thinking dog toy.

I just finished reading The Name of the Wind for the second time.  It’s that good.  As the cover proudly proclaims, it won a Quill award, whatever that is.  This is one of those books that has gotten positive reviews damn near everywhere but it’s worth talking about one more time out of sheer admiration.  It’s simply one of the best fantasy books I have ever read.

If I were doing a writer review, Rothfuss would fall amongst the greats and not just in the fantasy genre.  The reviews you read on this particular masterpiece naturally compare him to Tolkien.  His writing style glows with metaphor, natural dialog and that rare gift of environmental awareness that has the ability to put you in the scene with the hero Kvothe.  I think he comes close to Hemingway and Vonnegut in these critical elements of writing.

What I love about the book is that it carries you along with the main character throughout the entire tale.  It does not split into multiple parts every three chapters funneling you down an off ramp to a new group of characters right when the story was getting good.  Kvothe is interesting enough to have a Dos Equis commercial made about him.  He doesn’t need a supporting cast to draw attention away from him.

The other strength of the book is how quickly it establishes the villain of the tale.  The Chandrian is the mystical evil baseline that drives Kvothe to become the most interesting man in the world.  In true master style, Rothfuss only feeds you tidbits about who and what the Chandrian might be.  Every new tidbit leaves you longing for more.  Kvothe makes his share of enemies along the way but none hold the captivity of the immortal or supernatural that the Chandrian does.

He also does a great job of keeping the number of characters in the book manageable.  This is not always the case in fantasy – Tolkien being the worst of the lot.   There is something to be said about creating a deep and immersive world based on story and character development – there is something else to be said about turning it into Mr. Miller’s History Lecture.    Rothfuss keeps the small roles small and to the point.  They accomplish what they are meant to without any obligation to somehow include the personal history of everyone the hero meets.  Tolkien was a genius but you get the sense that he was a bit of a blowhard.  Rothfuss happily shrugs off this part of Tolkien’s legacy.

He also treats magic, or sympathy, like science.  I couldn’t help but lap this up.  He has a way of bringing this into the story that allows you to peer behind the scenes in a logical fashion that makes the reader believe that if you were a character in the story, you might have a shot at being a sympathy master yourself.  It’s magic for the layman but not insulting in anyway.  It’s like reading about physics as described by Hawkins.  He doesn’t assume that you can solve the Schrodinger equation yourself, but he has the passion to describe why solving such a thing can be so damn cool.

I can’t wait for the next installment.

Nylund crested the New York Times bestseller list with a book set in the Halo world.  I try to stay away from stories set in video game worlds.  Smells too much like fan fiction to me.  My experience with fan fiction is it falls into two categories: syrupy melodrivel or someone painstakingly describing an in-game gaming session sans the BO and chronic masturbation taking place behind the computer.  I can’t judge Nyland’s Halo adventure since I haven’t read it so I’ll hide my bias and stick to Mortal Coils.

Mortal Coils is one of a line of new fantasy books that I have read lately that is set  in a fairly standard urban modern fantasy.  Two twins, Fiona and Eliot, grow up under the tyranny of their grandmother and the awful cooking but slightly kinder gaze of their great grandmother.  Grandma is a cruel taskmaster and their days are filled with classical learning and non fiction.  TV and socializing are completely out of the question.  Their only form of enjoyment is a game in which the twins flex their encyclopedic knowledge by hurling  insults at each other that derive from obscure texts or MENSA hand guides of pretension.  Surprisingly, Nylund does this well.  You can tell he’s aching to stretch his own intellect but he manages to do so without losing sight of the story or boring the reader to tears.

This dull existence carries right on up to their magical sixteenth birthdays at which point they discover they are actually the spawn of a goddess and Lucifer.  This isn’t a spoiler as you can read this on the back of the book cover.  This is where I let out a bit of a groan.  Too formulaic.  Everything is dull and painful in your existence then you turn a certain age and BOOM – ‘You’re a wizard Harry.’  Or ‘You’re father’s Poseidon.’  I feel sorry for the poor kid who finds out his father is Tiger Woods when he turns sixteen.  We all know what his powers will be – dropping putts and sponsorships while showing off the huge head on his driver.

They do indeed have magical powers and from that point forward a lot of the book is spent on them discovering what they are.  Eliot’s gift has to do with music while Fiona’s is a little more violent in nature.  I found myself wishing the author spent a little more time developing the details of Eliot’s power as anything magically musical is pretty damn cool.  Except the bard class in damn near any fantasy role playing game.  The music dynamic just doesn’t translate from fiction to a quantifiable set of rules.  Instead you get some weak ass stilted approximation that is just painful to be a part of.  But I digress.

The twins are set three Herculean tasks that they must complete.  These will test their mettle and more importantly their allegiance.  Are they going to be good?  Are they going to be evil?  These questions don’t truly get answered and Nylund sets you up with a final teaser that will segue into the next book of the trilogy or series.  It wasn’t one of the top fantasy books I have read but for the most part it worked.  The formulaic nature felt a bit like I was watching television.  I’m still undecided on whether I will pick up the next one.

Lovegrove’s Age of Zeus is an interesting blend between science fiction and fantasy but I would still place it firmly within the science fiction genre.  With the adolescent Riordan Olympus taking center stage on both the best seller lists and the silver screen, it’s nice to see a mature rendering of these ancient legends.  This is my first attempt at a Lovegrove work and I was pleasantly surprised at how he turns a phrase.

The central concept is that the Gods of Olympus are back.  It is unclear at first whether or not they have always been here and in hiding or if their arrival is a recent thing.  As expected, the gods wreak havoc on the international governments until all that remain are those willing to kiss some deific ass on a regular basis.  The Tony Blair’s of the world justify this olfactory rectum rubbing by pointing out that global war has vanished along with the majority of crime and most of the world’s suffering.  And all it cost was subjugation of the human race to these in-the-flesh gods.

I especially loved this point at a time when freedom often takes a back seat to national security, at least in the U S of A.  It’s amazing how many people I speak to that are willing to sacrifice the simple freedoms bestowed on us by the constitution and the bill of rights for the potential of being a little more safe.  The most common argument I run across is one of profiling.  It scares me how many people are willing to flout the fourth amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizures for the chance to profile and molest those with a middle eastern tilt.  Those that are willing to give up these freedoms seem not to realize that they are bringing us closer to the close minded cultures that have propagated this fear in the first place.  Sad.

Our group of protagonists are those that refuse to labor under the yoke of repression regardless of how benevolent that yoke may feel.  They are brought together by a wealthy tech tycoon that plans on bringing down the Parthenon.  And he’s got the tools to do it.  Lovegrove goes a little Heinlein with his TITAN suits but this is a forgivable facsimile as he appears to do so with a spirit of respectful admiration in his emulation.  The suits give the team of Titans the ability to go toe to toe with the rogue deities.  Except for the main triumvirate of Titans, the rest are cardboard cut outs.  They need to be there to fill out the mythical role call but you have a hard time relating to the entire group because of how many there are.  The only unforgivable aspect of this large number of good guys is that you typically feel nothing at all when one of them dies – half the time I had to go back in the book trying to uncover who the Titan was.

Once our Titans get outfitted in their god kicking gear the story takes on a video game feel.  They start with the lesser monsters in their efforts to beta test their technology.  Each of these battles has a mini boss feel laced with some teenage venge-angst as select TITANS get to retaliate against the monsters that had done them harm in their past lives.  This progresses to sub bosses as the TITANS advance to the demi god stage.  This staged progression does not detract from the story however, it instead makes the reader feel as if they are right there accomplishing something along with our heroes.  The only downside is it is very formulaic.

The formula is deftly broken before the end.  The ending holds some clever twists and a not so clever explanation for the existence of the gods themselves.  While the ending was somewhat disappointing you definitely feel like you got your money’s worth.  Not one of the science fiction classics but still a good read.