This week sees me reading something a little different from my usual escapist fare. Recently LeVar Burton began a reading club on Fable, and while I can’t access it in Canada, they did list the first three books he was recommending, and Go Tell It on the Mountain was at the top of his list….
Category: The Book Shelf
The Diamond Queen of Singapore (2020) – Ian Hamilton
Somehow, with all the wackiness that was happening last year, I missed the House of Anansi Press’ release of the next Ava Lee novel by Ian Hamilton. Of course, that just meant I could catch up on it now, and I won’t have quite as long a wait (theoretically) for the next one. This time…
Blast From the Past (1997) – Raymond Benson
Benson takes over 007’s adventures from John Gardner, and delivered this short story that first appeared in Playboy in 1997. Benson shows that he can tell a Bond story in true Ian Fleming style, though the ending definitely is a little more adult, but hardly surprising given the context of where it was published. James…
Panic (2014) – Lauren Oliver
Lauren Oliver’s Panic is a page-turner on a monumental scale. I can’t remember the last time I was so swept up in the narrative of a story. I had to find out what happened next. As much as I have been enjoying my foray into the tales of Ian Fleming’s 007, and the writings of…
Star Trek: The Ashes of Eden (1995) – William Shatner, with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
This week, I take my first step into what became known as the Shatner-verse, a series of Star Trek novels written by Captain Kirk himself, with the aid of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Set some months after the events of The Undiscovered Country but before the opening of Generations, Kirk isn’t doing to well with…
Cold (1996) – John Gardner
John Gardner’s final 007 novel, Cold aka Cold Fall, his sixteenth, feels a little bit more like the James Bond we know, a balance between Ian Fleming’s literary creation, and his cinematic iteration. Far more enjoyable than his adaptation of GoldenEye, the novel is split into two parts, taking place before, and then after, his…
Battlestar Galactica 5: Galactica Discovers Earth (1980) – Micheal Resnick and Glen A. Larson
The Battlestar Galactica jumps forward a ways, passing over a number of episodes (that will be visited in later books) to give us an adaptation of the three hour series opener for the ill-fated, Galactica 1980, which just didn’t have the oomph, mythos, production value or stories of the original, equally ill-fated, series, though it…
The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930) – Agatha Christie
Long before DC introduced us to Harley Quinn, a variation of the traditional harlequin character, Agatha Christie created her own Harley Quin, and introduced him to the world in a collection of short stories first published in 1930. This Harley Quinn is a tall mysterious man who appears at prime opportunities in the story, and…
Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia (1994) – Dave Wolverton
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Set four years after the events of The Return of the Jedi, this story just never sat well with me. I picked up a lot of the original Expanded Universe novels as they came out, and I can remember bits and pieces of them, and…
GoldenEye (1995) – John Gardner
John Gardner’s penultimate 007 novel is a short, uninspired adaptation of the 1995 film, GoldenEye which saw Pierce Brosnan finally step into the shoes of James Bond. I’m not sure if Gardner was simply tired of writing Bond books at this point, or if he was less than impressed with the film’s script and was…
The Mind Reels 