Book Review: The Road

First off, sorry, haven't did much posting. Hopefully I'll get back at it.

Now, I just got the book "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy for Christmas. It isn't a terribly long book and has sizable print so I flew through it. It only took me two days to go cover to cover and part of me wishes I would have taken it slower. It was an exceptional story and is well deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won.

The book is set in not so distant future, but to say it is futuristic would be wrong. It isn't science fiction, instead, it is a look at what could happen to America (or the world for that matter) if we were set upon by an apocalypse. The story is dark and lacks any sense of hope, even though at the back of your mind you're hoping that some sort of utopia exists for the two protagonists.

The world is a mess. Everything has been burned and looted. An apocalypse happened some ten years earlier and survivors are few and far between. A man and his boy (they have no names in the book) walk the road trying to survive. They push a grocery cart, mile after mile with all their worldly possessions hoping to find someplace where they can live, where they can survive. They search through abandon houses to find food and sleep in hiding, hoping their small camp fire isn't seen by others who would set upon to take their things or worse yet, their lives.

It is a sad story, yet it is beautiful in the bond shared between father and son. They are what keep the other alive and it is quite evident throughout the entire story.

The writing is fairly complex. The author has an incredible vocabulary and the first page of the book is almost too complex for me to read. It is a good thing I pushed through deeper into the book, because after the first page you failed to notice the complexity of the writing and really began to understand the story. McCarthy is the kind of writer I wish I could be.

The other thing about the book that you should receive warning is that like the raw, desolate setting of the story, so is the punctuation and grammar of the story. He uses no real punctuation, other than periods. There are few commas and he never uses a quotation mark to determine who or when someone is talking. This however works very well and as I mentioned previously, seemingly adds to the story itself.

The book is incredible. I will warn you that there are moments where you lose all hope in humanity, that you feel horrible for what the people are doing and wonder if had been better if all of humanity had been completely wiped out. Yeah, it is that bad.

Anyway, you deserve to pick up this book and read it. It is wonderful and beautiful and depressing and enlightening all at the same time. When I finished the first thing I did was turned to the first page and started reading it again. Yeah, that good.

Review: Agricola

Last Thursday, when the board game Agricola was released in the U.S. with the English rules translation a very significant thing happened. For the first time in many years, a new title became the highest rated board game of all time. Now these ratings are based on the website Boardgamegeek.com. Over 2000 people rated Agricola and based on its average score, it overtook Puerto Rico as the highest rated game. To people who follow the board game industry, this is a very big deal. For years Puerto Rico was looked at as the epitome of perfection and now a new champ had been crowned.

Personally I have been waiting nearly a year for this game to be translated and released in the United States. It was a wait plagued by delays and unbearable anticipation. Starting in June I started saving my pennies, skipping lunch on Fridays so I could put money away to buy this monster. Even with my 30% discount from the store, I was going to need $50.00+ to pay for this game and I intended to have it the first day it was released. Well, Thursday I got my copy.

Let me explain a little bit about the board games I tend to favor. I like imported games (many of the best are conceived and released first in Germany) and most of the top games on the BGG list are from Europe. Agricola is one of those. The Euros (as they are typically known) are generally based on strategy and not luck. There is very little randomness and often times requires the players to manage multiple aspects of the game at one time. Additionally Euros tend to reduce the amount of direct conflict you experience with other players. In opposition, American games generally use a lot of dice, are linear (roll, move, do what the space on the board tells you to) and have much more conflict (think games like Monopoly where you are taking other player's money or Sorry where you are sending your opponent's pieces back to their starting areas). Euros are very cerebral and take great deal of thought and pre-planning. They require you to look a bit into the future and determine the course of action you are going to take. Finally, Euro games tend to be extremely high quality with wooden (as opposed to plastic) pieces, heavy card stock and beautifully rendered artwork on the boards.

Agricola (pronounced Ah-GREEK-ola) is a prototypical European game. It has tons (100s) of wooden playing pieces in multiple colors. There are more than 300 cards with individual artwork on each card. Additionally it comes with multiple boards that are configured to form the main game board (with individual player boards to track your own progress). The gamer is stunningly beautiful and the quality makes it well worth it's $70.00 retail.

Agricola is basically a game about being a farmer in the 1700s. You start the game as a humble farmer and his/her spouse, with a plot of land and a two room wooden hut. The object of the game is to build up your farmstead, bringing prosperity to your family while struggling at times just to feed them. Each turn you get to take one action per family member. These actions range from plowing fields, building livestock pens, chopping down trees for wood, building on to your house, sowing your fields, or even fishing. As the game progresses you can expand your family, having up to 3 children who can then be put to work through to performance of additional actions. The caveat there is the fact that you have to feed each of your family members or resort to begging for food if you can't put the chow on the table. Furthermore, the only way you can have children is by adding on to you house, which requires more wood, reed (for the roof) or even clay or stone if you choose to upgrade your humble abode.

The game is about balance. It is also about understanding what you want to do and concentrating on that plan. While there is no direct conflict, there are opportunities to screw your neighbors by taking resources they had planned on utilizing. There are many different ways to win, be it by becoming a rancher and filling your pastures with sheep, cows and wild boar, or planting your fields and harvesting grain, afterwards sending it to the ovens to be converted to bread.

The game itself is won based on victory points accumulated by the expansion of your homestead. Each head of cattle, each planted field, each unit of grain or vegetables, each family member, even each room in your house counts towards the victory conditions. Failure to upgrade or fill you fields, or raise particular animals results in penalties that lower your score, so spreading yourself out and diversifying in the name of the game.

Agricola is very complex in what you can do, but fairly easy to learn. My first game was a disaster, as I was so preoccupied with feeding my family that I never properly built the infrastructure to do so consistently. I would sooner send my farmer to the fishing hole to catch dinner than send him to the field to plant grain that would continue to produce food long after I decided to ignore it.

Agricola is a learning experience. It is intense and enjoyable at the same time. There is a certain amount of initial frustration that goes into trying to get your food machine running, then a varying degree of frustration that comes with trying to expand you farm without out growing your food production capabilities.

Overall Agricola is simply brilliant. There are certain aspects of Puerto Rico and Caylus present in the game. There is a bit more luck involved in Agricola (the cards do this but also means that no game will ever be the same, something Puerto Rico and Caylus can't always claim). The game flows well with very little player downtime. Even with some downtime, most of it is utilized trying to figure out what your next step it. The game zips by in a hurry, but not so much as to seem frenzied.

I would recommend Agricola to anyone who has played some of the heavier hitting Euros (Puerto Rico, Caylus, Powergrid, or Goa). I would recommend it to others as well, but not without first playing it with someone who has had access to it previously. The rules can come off as complicated and the shear mass of pieces and cards can be quite intimidating. The game however starts to take off immediately and it isn't difficult to understand why this games, above all others has assumed the title of King of Boardgames.

Questions and comments are always encouraged.

Book Review: The Sleeping Doll

I haven't done a book review in awhile so I figured now would be a good time to do one. This time I'm taking a look at Jeffrey Deaver's most recent paperback release, called "The Sleeping Doll".

Deaver is one of my favorite authors and his characters Lincold Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are two of my favorites of all times. That said, whenever Deaver creates a new character I get a bit anxious wondering if he can capture the same degree of complexity that he has in those two.

I got a bit of a taste of Kathryn Dance in one of his previous novels (The Cold Moon) and frankly was really excited about reading this book. The Sleeping Doll plays off of my love for communication arts in that the heroine is a kinesics expert. What is kinesics? It is the ability to read someone based on their body language. Kathryn Dance is n interrogator who uses her kinesic reading skills along with her knowledge of paralanguage (voice inflection, tone, attitudinal shifts, etc.) to basically serve as a human lie detector.

In this book, a Charles Manson wannabe escapes from prison and manages to elude Dance using his abilities of manipulation and control. He is the perfect mirror of Dance in that he too can read people and uses this skill to control his victims.

The book is extremely fast paced, yet often cerebral. I would say it is a notch below the Lincoln Rhyme novels in it's complexities, yet still makes my mind race with thoughts of learning even a smidge of the skills Dance displays. Sadly, the parts of the book that deal with her skill sets are few and far between, which is a bit disappointing. It kinda reminds of that television show Numb3rs which is about a math genius that helps his FBI brother solve crimes. The numbers part is often secondary to the actual episode. It was the same for me in this book. That's however is not to say that the book was bad, it wasn't. It was a very good book and quite enjoyable, just not on the same plain as what my expectations were.

The criminal in this book is brilliant, though not flashy like many of Deaver's villians. I liked that quite a bit because it brought a bit more realism to the story. The Bone Collector and the The Conjuerer were great criminals in his other books, but they brought about a sort of otherworldly quality, something you would see in a comic book, not a newspaper. Daniel Pell, the killer in the Sleeping Doll, was pure evil, nothing more.

The book centers on a murder (ala Charles Manson) that occurred many years before. The only person in the house that survived was a girl dubbed the Sleeping Doll, due to the fact that she had survived the attacks because she was asleep in a pile of stuffed animals and dolls, overlooked by the killers as they were murdering her family. The perpetrator of the killings has escaped from prison and it is up to Dance and her team to figure out why he is sticking around Monterey and not fleeing. He leads her on a chase, seemingly one step ahead of her at all times. Occasionally it will seem as if he is putting distance between them, but then Dance figures out his plans and manages to foil one of his many objectives.

The book is good, it moves along and is a story well told. I have one bone to pick however. Deaver loves twists, and this story has those. One in particular is the basis of the whole story and he does an excellent job hiding this untl the very end. There is another one, however that grinds my nerves. I won't say what it was, but I didn't feel it was necessary and while it deals with Dance and her relationship with another character, it is extremely clunky and doesn't fit well in the story. Furthermore it serves no real purpose other than to drag a couple more chapters out of the book, something it doesn't necessarily need.

I would recommend The Sleeping Doll for anyone who likes crime dramas. It was a good book with great characters and excellent pace. I was left wanting to read more about Kathryn Dance, which is a good thing in my opinion. If I had to rate it, I would say the Sleeping Doll rates a solid 4 out of 5.

Movie Review: Juno

Angie and I were sitting there Saturday night without a whole lot to do. I had noticed earlier that Megan had bought the movie Juno, and seeing as we had nothing better to do, we decided to watch it.

First, I'll give you Angie's review of the movie: she didn't fall asleep. This is how it works at my house. If Angie sits down after 8:00pm to watch a movie and manages to stay awake through the entire thing, then it is a good movie. Angie did not fall asleep, so it should tell you something about Juno.

Okay, now my review. Juno is a drama, plain and simple with quite a few funny parts thrown in. The character of Juno, played by Ellen Page, is a 16 year old high schooler who after an adventurous evening with her best friend, Paulie Bleeker, ends up pregnant. She makes light of the whole thing, deciding to go and have an abortion.

While at the abortion clinic she gets cold feet and eventually comes upon the decision to give the baby up for adoption. The movie revolves around the four seasons, and Juno's progression through her pregnancy. During this time she seeks out and finds a set of adoptive parents for her baby.

The characters in the movie are great. Juno is an odd, but humorous character who makes some very profound statements for someone who is 16 years old. She is a misfit at school but comes across as very charismatic. The baby's father, Paulie, is a goofie looking geek who is also a runner and a musician. He looks and sounds incredibly young and is the epitome of innocence. He too is quirky, addicted to long distance running and orange tic tacs.

Juno's family is also quite odd, ranging from her dad, the furnace repair man, her step-mom, and owner of a nail salon, and her little sister, Liberty Bell. I loved the characters and frankly they really made the movie.

The movie is set in Minnesota, near St. Cloud, but the movie itself lends me the same feeling as I got watching Npolean Dynomite. This is a far superior movie though.

There are moments of seriousness mixed with some great laughs.

There are also twin storylines going on. The first deals with Juno's choice of adoptive parents and her coming to terms with them. They are played by high maintenance mom-wanna-be Jennifer Garner, and ultra-cool commercial composer and former rocker Jason Bateman. They are the perfect oil to Juno's water.

The other storyline has to do with the relationship between Paulie and Juno. The baby was a mistake, in fact, Juno and Paulie had no romantic associations before that night, they had just been friends. There are some good tension filled scenes between the two and there is a nice chemistry. This secondary storyline intermeshed well with the movie and didn't seem to get in the way at all.

I would love to give you more details about the movie, but I won't. I'll just say that it was a nice, comfortable film with fantastic acting (Ellen Page was nominated for an Academy Award), a great storyline (Diablo Cody, the writer won the Oscar for best Original Screenplay), and wonderful music. This was really a good movie.

Tell me what you think...

Book Review: Forever Odd

Okay, so I finished the second in the Odd Thomas series. This one is called Forever Odd by Dean Koontz.

The story again is written in the first person. The thing about this book is that it is a bit easier to get into the view point (as long as you've first read Odd Thomas). This makes it a bit easier to get into the book, which I liked immediately. I'm the kind of person that gives a book about 50 pages to get rolling. If it can't, it joins the graveyard of books I have in a box out in the garage.

Forever Odd takes place about 6 or 7 months after the events of the first book. Odd has taken a leave of absence from the Pico Mundo Grill still toiling with issues from the massacre that occurred a half a year earlier.

The book gets rolling when Odd wakes up in the middle of the night to find the local radiologist (who is also the father of Odd's best friend) standing in his room. Of course this is a ghost that escorts Odd to his home where our hero finds the mutilated body of said doctor. He also finds that his best friend, Danny, is missing, supposedly kidnapped by his psychopathic biological father. Odd registers immediate concern because Danny has a rare bone disease that makes him susceptible to fractures.

If there is one point that bothers me about the book it is the existence of Danny. I know that Koontz could never have anticipated the success of the first book in the series and may very well have never considered writing another Odd Thomas book until her heard the feedback from the first. That said, it was still uncomfortable reading about how close a friend Danny was to Odd when Danny's name never showed up in the first in the series. Now, after a few pages I was over this, but still, it rubbed me the wrong way.

The book is a bit surprising. As the story progresses the setting changes and I can't help but feel that given everything that has happened in the small town of Pico Mundo, that would be the last place on earth I would ever want to visit. Of course this could also be said about Las Vegas if you failed to accept the fact that the television drama CSI is just a work of fiction. Anyway, the story progresses to the site of a tragic casino fire. As Odd tries to rescue Danny he meets a completely different kind of villian with a bizarre purpose for abducting Danny.

For the sake of not spoiling the story I will just stop right here with the plot summary.

The book, like the first, was very good. There was a nice mix of humor and horror. It carried the same stanza as the first book and you can't help but love the main character. I've already purchased the third book in the series so as to continue the voyage with Odd.

The story itself was also very good. It left you guessing throughout the entirety. There was a bit of randomness to some of it (like the existence of Danny that I mentioned earlier) as well as an appearance by a mountain lion (I won't give any more away). I wouldn't say it was as good as the first book, but it was pretty close. The first book gave you a better character build which I really enjoyed. This one got right to the story and used the plot to fill the pages.

To close, I will give a bit of a spoiler for those who have read the first: At the end of this book we find out why Elvis came to Pico Mundo and why he is always crying. :)

Questions and comments are always welcome by clicking on the little comment link or emailing directly to my blog mail at lonnbristolblog@gmail.com.

Book Review: Odd Thomas

I am typically very careful when deciding to purchase a book by Dean Koontz. He seems to be the type of author that can write a book that knocks it out of the park, but has also written novels that I've thought were pretty tough to read. Odd Thomas fits into the first category.

The story is about a rather typical 20 year old who not so typically sees ghosts. I initially thought the book was going to be very quirky, as the first person style of writing that Koontz uses tends to present this in the first few pages. It however is much more serious as the book progresses and the first person style allows you to see things through the eyes of Odd, the oddly named protagonist.

The story is actually pretty grim. Odd Thomas toils as a short order cook in the small western town of Pico Mundo. He has never left the town mostly out of fear. He is comfortable in Pico Mundo and if he was to leave, he anticipates helping the ghosts that he sees on a daily basis would become much more difficult. He comes from a dysfunctional (if not our right broken family) and tends to keep to himself but maintains a healthy relationship with the town's chief of police, a local author/celebrity, his boss and co-workers as well as the love of his life, Stormy Llywellyn.

Odd goes to work one day and notices a man followed by dark shadowy demon creatures that only Odd can see. These creatures are a foreboding sign that terrible death will occur. The last time Odd had seen multiple bodachs (as he calls the creatures) it had been when crossing the path of a psycho who ended up killing his entire family with a power drill. When the man leaves the diner Odd is shocked to see close to twenty of the bodachs following him. This whole encounter sets Odd on an adventure to stop the man from unleashing whatever hell it is that is following him.

The story is very good. The character development is sensational. When the book is all over, you realize how attached you've become to the protagonist and his friends. The book can be a bit clownish, with characters representing all colors of a kaleidoscope, but they really work well. There is real pain, and real terror written into the book, but also a great deal of heroics.

From the perspective of a casual reader, the book gets to the grit quickly, meaning it doesn't take long for the reader to become immersed. The story flows in short, smooth chapters making it easy to put down when the world interupts. There are very few slow sections of the book, which makes it flow incredibly well. This is the kind of book that could easily fill a rainy afternoon.

One positive about this book is that it has already spawned two sequels with a fourth set for release this May. The sequels are called Forever Odd and Brother Odd. I know I will read all of them as I've already purchased and started reading Forever Odd.

Tell me what you think of Odd Thomas after you read it, or direct your questions to my new blog email at lonnbristolblog@gmail.com.