1001 Parsecs Books – Page 2 – Book Reviews and Reading Journal

Man vs. Nature vs. Man in Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour

I have yet to read a bad Louis L’Amour book. Some of them are more forgettable than others, but they’re all at least pretty good. The best ones, though, are in a league of their own, and I think Last of the Breed may be his best work.

It’s a Cold War thriller about an American Indian pilot who gets shot down in the arctic and falls prisoner to the Soviets, who plan to interrogate and kill him. But he escapes from their secret prison and embarks on an epic journey across the Siberian wastes, following the path that his ancient ancestors walked when they crossed the Bering Strait and settled in the Americas.

Westerns are typically about the taming and settling of the land: characters who leave the comforts of civilization behind to build a home and make a future for their children and their children’s children. In this way, though the characters themselves are often fleeing civilization for one reason or another, civilization follows in their wake.

But Last of the Breed inverts this trope, so that instead of the hero taming the land, the land actually makes him wild. Instead of looking to his posterity, he looks to his ancestors and becomes the sort of man who is deserving of the heritage they gave him. In an era of globalization, when the world has been explored and the last frontier has been settled, this is the story of a man who returns to his primal roots and surprises himself by what he finds there.

Of course, this being a Cold War thriller, there is no shortage of man vs. man conflicts either. In fact, it’s the human conflicts that make the man vs. nature conflict so compelling. Except for the most remote and unlivable regions of the Siberian wilderness, everywhere the hero goes he encounters other humans, such as miners, trappers, or bandits, whom he must either evade or form temporary alliances with, in order to stay one step ahead of his Soviet pursuers. And of course, the most dangerous man who hunts him is himself a man of the wild, a Siberian Yakut to the hero’s American Sioux.

It’s an incredibly gripping adventure, with a laconic ending that’s just about perfect. I do believe this is Louis L’Amour at his best, not just in terms of prose and writing, but in terms of theme as well. Highly recommended.

Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour

$6.99eBook: $7.99Audiobook: $16.20

Author: Louis L'Amour
Genres: FICTION, Romance / Historical / American, Thrillers / Suspense, Western
Tag: 2024-03 Books

Here is the kind of authentically detailed epic novel that has become Louis L’Amour’s hallmark. It is the compelling story of US Air Force major Joe Mack, a man born out of time. When his experimental aircraft is forced down in Russia and he escapes a Soviet prison camp, he must call upon the ancient skills of his Indian forebears to survive the vast Siberian wilderness.

Only one route lies open to Mack: the path of his ancestors, overland to the Bering Strait and across the sea to America. But in pursuit is a legendary tracker, the Yakut native Alekhin, who knows every square foot of the icy frontier - and who knows that to trap his quarry he must think like a Sioux.

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When good people are caught up in tragic circumstances: The Storm Testament IV by Lee Nelson

The Storm Testament is an older series, but it’s quite good. It follows the saga of the Storm family, starting with Dan Storm and his adventures during the Mormon pioneer era.

The first two books were a lot of fun, and formed a sort of duology. The third book followed Dan’s son Sam’s romantic adventures, and while I don’t think it was as well written as the first two, the story kept me guessing right up to the end.

But the fourth book, by far, is the best one so far. It follows Dan Storm and Porter Rockwell during the Utah Wars, specifically the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This is one of the more controversial periods in Mormon history—the sort of thing where everyone tends to pick a side and double down with their tribe whenever the topic comes up.

But Nelson didn’t do that at all. In fact, the most sympathetic character from the book is a woman names Susanna from the Fancher wagon train, who escapes and survives the massacre. She’s a genuinely good person, and also genuinely hates the Mormons for killing her husband, among other things. And it’s not like she has some sort of sappy conversion experience where she forgives the Mormons or becomes one of them. She sticks to her guns through to the very end.

At the same time, most of the Mormon characters are also treated sympathetically, including historical figures like John D. Lee and Porter Rockwell. You see things from their perspective and get the sense that these are good people caught up in tragic circumstances, where there are no good options left, only different kinds of bad options. And yet, when they do ultimately make the decision to carry out the massacre, there is no sugar-coating it either. The whole time reading it, you feel like grabbing them and shouting “no, don’t do it! You don’t have to do this!”

That’s what makes this book so great. If Lee Nelson had picked one side or the other, it would have been a cheap and forgettable story—or worse, a thinly-veiled piece of propaganda that’s memorable for how bad it is. But at the same time, it’s not like he sits on the fence, refusing to take a side at all. Rather, he somehow manages to take both sides, and the effect is that the conflict feels less like a loss or a victory and more like a genuine tragedy—less like a monolithic conflict between two sides, and more like the struggle of genuinely good people who are caught up in tragic circumstances.

The best civil war fiction does exactly the same thing—and I suppose when our current era is over, the best fiction set in our own time will show good and honorable people on both sides driven reluctantly into conflict by forces beyond their control. It’s not everyday that you read a book like that, and when you do, it really makes you sit back and think.

I already enjoyed Lee Nelson’s books, but this one bumped him up a couple of notches in my estimation. He’s not just an author of pulpy historical adventure fiction, but a genuine bard in the best sense of the word. Highly recommended.

The Storm Testament IV by Lee Nelson

$15.95eBook: $8.99

Author: Lee Nelson
Series: The Storm Testament, Book 4
Genres: Christian / Historical, Christian / Western, FICTION, Western
Tag: 2024-02 JMW Books

When the Fancher Company rides through town, Dan Storm learns that his old enemy, Dick Boggs, is traveling with them. However, at the insistence of Porter Rockwell, Storm leaves the territory to scout out a force of U.S. troops who set out from the East to unseat Brigham Young and install a new governor. When he later finds out that Boggs and the rest of the company are headed south - toward his home in American Fork - Storm sets out to protect his family from Boggs, but arrives too late. Furious, Storm joins the Gosiute chief Ike in trailing Boggs and the rest of the Fancher Company to Mountain Meadows, where an unusual sequence of events triggers one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of the American West. A beautiful blind woman, the kidnapping of two little girls, a frantic chase through the Utah wilderness, and an unanticipated romance make this one of the most intriguing historical novels of Western LDS history.

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Bringing Back the Book Blog

When I originally started this blog, I wanted to spin off my book reviews and reading life from my primary blog, One Thousand and One Parsecs. That blog was originally about my writing, and it still is, but I also post other random things there too, and thoughts on a variety of other subjects… and honestly, I don’t know what I post there anymore, which probably isn’t a good sign. I’ve been struggling for the last few years to know exactly what I should post there, but the audience fell off a long time ago, given how social media has replaced blogging generally, but since I made the conscious decision not to do other social media, my blog has more or less been my online home… except, not really. It’s complicated.

In any case, I launched this blog during the pandemic, and was originally really excited about it, but when I saw all the outrage and toxicity that was circulating in the social media world at the time, I did an about-face and made all of my previous posts private. I still kept up the book pages, since I use those for my newsletter when I share book recommendations, but I killed the blog itself. My thinking at the time was that since this is how I make my living (writing books), I shouldn’t be doing things that might make me a target for outrage mobs in the reading space, or that might turn off potential readers for my own books. In other words, I didn’t want a reader to enjoy one of my books, only to read some of my opinions about her favorite book and realize that I didn’t like it. Something like that.

But recently, I came to a realization on one of my early morning walks that made me think that it might be good to bring back the book blog and turn it into a thing. That realization was that the era of mass culture is coming to an end, where everyone in our society reads / watches / consumes the same things, at least to the degree where we’re all familiar with it. Instead, we are entering a world of the thousand true fans paradigm, where the content is exploding and the culture is fragmented a thousand different ways, into tiny niche communities that the wider society is generally totally oblivious to. It’s been going that way for a long time, but I think we’re reaching a critical mass where this new cultural paradigm is going to replace the paradigm of a mass culture.

In this new world of cultural fragmentation, one of the best ways to provide value is to become a voice that people in your tiny subcommunity can trust to help connect them with content that they will genuinely enjoy. Creating great content to put out into the world is a fine and good thing, but what’s even better is to create good content AND connect the people who find that content to other great content like yours. In a world where everyone is overwhelmed with all of the available reading options, sharing your recommendations for where to find their next read can be a really great thing. It can also be a good and useful way to differentiate yourself from other writers / creators, since even if a reader doesn’t agree with all of your recommendations, the fact that they understand your tastes a little better helps them to figure out what they like about your own work. For example, I haven’t read all of Larry Correia’s books just because urban fantasy isn’t my cup of tea, but based on the stuff he shares on his blog, I’ve got a very good idea of the kind of stuff he writes and whether I’ll be interested in reading it.

To put it simply, I’ve come to realize that this blog, if done right, may provide as much or more value to my readers than simply writing the next book and putting it out into the world. Of course, “if done right” is the key qualifier, since the internet is already brimming with toxicity and I don’t want to add any more to any of that. So moving forward, when I do dedicate a post to my thoughts about / review of a book, I will generally only do that if I think it’s a book worth reading. I may make an exception if it’s a big-name author or a very popular book, but I’m going to be very careful not to punch down or to spread too much negativity or outrage content.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I have some ideas and will experiment with a few things until I find what I like. Maybe a monthly recap of all the stuff I’ve read, patterned after how Howard Tayler used to do his movie reviews (with the threshold of awesome and the threshold of suck—I read enough books these days that I could probably do a monthly post like that). Or maybe some other content. I don’t know, but I’m certainly open to ideas. What sort of stuff do you want to see?

Joe Reviews: On Beyond Zebra! by Dr. Seuss

Even good old Dr. Seuss’s zany imagination
could not have ever thunk a place as crazy as our nation.
Where decent folks, quite sane in fact, upon one knee quite bended
Fear the cry of “racist!” from the perpetually offended.
Who scream and swear and stamp their feet at everyone else’s sins;
They cannot create, they only destroy, so do not let them win!

So I can get why people think that And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is racist. I personally don’t think it’s racist, but “a Chinese man who eats with sticks” is admittedly pretty insensitive. But this book? Seriously? You do realize that there is no place called “Bazzim,” and that the “Nazzim of Bazzim” is an entirely fictional, even Seussian creation, right?

I speak Arabic. I have lived in and traveled across the Middle East. I know more about and am more personally connected to the culture that supposedly was offended here than most, if not all, of the people calling for its cancellation. I can tell you right now, the Arabs are a very proud people, and they would be far more offended by the thought that they need to be protected from the cultural insensitivity of Dr. Seuss than they are from this book itself.

And with good reason. We are living in a moral panic over “racism,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy” that will, in the fullness of time, be viewed with the same contempt and horror that we hold for the Salem witch trials and the red scare of McCarthyism. Sadly, I fear that the digital book burning is only just getting started.

Scrambled Eggs Super! By Dr. Seuss

Once again, we have a supposedly racist Dr. Seuss book that commits the grave sin of… what, exactly? Having a fictional character named Ali who lives in a fictional country, chasing fictional birds? To see the racism in this book, you really have to squint hard and turn it sideways. And to all the people who say “the only reason you can’t see it is because you’re white,” I don’t have to squint at all to see your racism; you display it quite prominently.

Joe Reviews: And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss.

Even good old Dr. Seuss’s zany imagination
could not have ever thunk a place as crazy as our nation.
Where decent folks, quite sane in fact, upon one knee quite bended
Fear the cry of “racist!” from the perpetually offended.
Who scream and swear and stamp their feet at everyone else’s sins;
They cannot create, they only destroy, so do not let them win!

This book is a real classic, so I hope that people pirate it like crazy now that the Geisel estate has decided to cancel it. Is this book truly racist? The image of a “Chinese man who eats with sticks” is admittedly an insensitive racial stereotype that was probably informed by Geisel’s own prejudices, which he later denounced. But that doesn’t justify removing it from print, much less banning it from sale or digitally burning it.

There’s a difference between books like Mein Kampf and How To Be An Anti-Racist that overtly proselytize racist ideologies, and books like this that were simply informed by the racism of their time. Every generation has its own blood and sins, ours no less than any other. Our present moral panic over “racism,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy” will, in the fullness of time, be viewed with the same contempt and horror that we now view the Salem witch trials and the red scare of McCarthyism.

It would have been better to let this old classic fade gracefully into our cultural history, warts and all, but the perpetually offended cannot create–they can only destroy. Sadly, I fear that many more books will be burned before this moral panic is over.

Joe Reviews: Wool by Hugh Howey

This is a pretty good book. It’s got a lot of interesting twists, and the post-apocalyptic world is both terrifying and fascinating. Also, it’s very well written. So why am I DNFing it?

Mostly because I don’t have the stomach for this kind of story right now. It’s very depressing. The post-apocalyptic world of the silo is not the kind of place I’d ever want to visit, much less live in. None of the characters really strike me as all that heroic, or as people that I can look up to and admire. I recognize that not all good stories need to have these things, but that’s what I’m looking for right now. It was different before the pandemic, but now that we’re living in an apocalypse of our own, I’m going to give this story a pass.

I suspect that the post-apocalyptic genre is going to change a lot over the next few years. History goes through cycles of crisis and rejuvenation, and the kinds of stories that speak to people before a crisis are very different than the ones that speak to people after it. This is very clearly one of those stories written during the pre-crisis era: dark and foreboding, trying to shake people and wake them up to how horrible things can be. But now that we are living through a crisis era, I think our culture is going to swing much more toward the opposite kind of story: one where good, kind, and just people fight back against the darkness, both within and without, and work together to build the new world.

Perhaps that’s actually what happens in this book. I don’t know. I read the first section, which is actually the self-published short story that kicked the whole thing off, but after that the book just seemed to wallow in the same claustrophobic despair that drove much of the short story, so I gave up. Perhaps I’ll come back to finish it some other time, but not right now.

Joe Reviews: The Black Hole by Alan Dean Foster

When I was about five or six years old, I saw this movie and it gave me terrible nightmares. I only remembered bits and pieces of the story, mostly just the scenes and images that had left an impression. So when I saw this novelization at the used bookstore, I decided to pick it up and give it a try.

It starts out like a classic golden age sci-fi story. You have your crew of stock characters on a typical space exploration mission: the square-jawed no-nonsense captain, the young hotshot pilot, the dispassionate, objective science officer, the emotional and empathetic female crewmate who looks and acts like she walked out of a 60s sitcom, and the gruff, contrarian journalist. There’s also a robot, who acts like a slightly more snarky version of Spock. Towards the beginning, they discover a titannic spaceship that was sent out decades ago to perform the same exploration mission, but never came back. The ship is now run completely by robots, with your stereotypical organ-playing mad scientist the only surviving human.

Aside from all of the overdone cliches, the first half of the story was pretty good. We got hints that something was wrong as the mad scientist invited the crew on as his guests and gave them a lavish, No Mr. Bond, I Want You To Dine style meal. The scenes and images from my 5-year old nightmares all started coming together into a story. The mad scientist claimed that he’d released the rest of the crew to return to Earth, but had continued on the mission because of his love of pure science. All of the wonders of the ship were things that he had singlehandedly invented or ordained, including one very large and very intimidating robot named Maximillian, who served as his second in command.

I just realized that my summary of this story reads like an away mission from the indie game The Orion Trail. Such a hilarious game. If you enjoy classic sci-fi tropes and cliches, this book is dripping with them—except that they’re all played completely straight, unlike The Orion Trail. So yeah.

The rest of this review is going to contain spoilers, so if you want to read this book, consider yourself warned.

The action picks up in the second half, as the crew learns the truth about the mad scientist, argue about what they should do, and ultimately have to fight their way out because the mad scientist has decided to plunge his ship into the black hole—for science! There’s a harrowing escape, with a small but not unpredictable plot twist as the journalist turns coward, tries to run off with their ship alone, and promptly gets it destroyed. The rest of the crew has to run across the main ship in a mad bid to escape, with explosions and hull breaches everywhere. Lots of skin-of-your-teeth moments, but there’s never really any doubt that they’ll make it.

Except… they don’t. They get to the only remaining shuttle, undock with the disintegrating wreckage of the titannic science ship—and promptly find that the shuttle is already preprogrammed to go into the black hole. This was probably what gave me nightmares as a kid: the fact that the film writers decided to subvert an otherwise totally cliche sci-fi adventure by having everyone die at the end, instead of escaping alive. But that’s the only trope that gets subverted—everything else is played so totally straight that it almost parodies itself.

Still, it was an entertaining story, and up until this point I was willing to give it at least three stars. The suspense building up to the final voyage into the black hole, and what our heroes (and villains) would find there, was actually quite well done—which is probably why I developed such a fascination with black holes and astronomy as a kid. But the last page ends with the surviving characters finding that their disembodied consciousnesses can now span the entire universe, so they aren’t really dead, just immortalized in some weird spiritual way because they went through the black hole and came out the other side. It was very weird, and not in a good way. Frankly, it felt like a total cop-out, and that’s why I’m giving this book two stars.

So yeah. It was a fun trip down memory lane for me, but it’s not worth reading twice, except perhaps for the nostalgia. The movie was probably better.

Joe Reviews: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

The first four Murderbot books make a complete story arc, so this one in a lot of ways felt like a satisfying wrap up to the series, even though of course there are other books. I strongly suspect that Martha Wells wrote these with the intent of self-publishing them, but her traditional publisher gave her such a good deal that she went with them instead. The way it’s split into four short books instead of one long novel feels a lot more like an indie published series.

With this one, Murderbot comes full circle and finds itself in a situation where it has to rescue the friends it made in the first book. It all takes place in the grand capital of the corporate rim, and the things we learned in the first three books have raised the stakes considerably. The villains are ruthless, and more importantly, quite smart, so Murderbot definitely has its hands full. But as always, the real challenge for Murderbot is overcoming its extreme social anxieties and the general awkwardness of actually having friends.

This was a really solid Murderbot book. If you love the first book, you will probably love this one too. If you haven’t read any Murderbot yet, definitely start with the first one, because reading them out of order would be as terrible as watching something like Breaking Bad out of order. The first four books really are one single book, told in four semi-autonomous parts.

And that is my one major critique of this book. While I enjoyed the satisfaction of finishing a bite sized novella in only a few sittings, I think the story would have been stronger if it had all been woven together into a single book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great story, but if it were all combined together I think it would be more than the sum of its parts. I definitely felt that was the case with the fifth book, though apparently my opinion is in the minority as most people prefer the first four books to the fifth. But hey, I also thought Serenity was better than Firefly, so YMMV.

Great book!

Joe Reviews: The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard

This book is the third and final volume of the complete original Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E Howard, and it absolutely lives up to the high quality and excellent production value of the previous volumes. Besides including what many consider to be some of Howard’s best Conan stories, the commentary paints a detailed and fascinating picture of the latter part of Howard’s writing career, the events leading up to his tragic suicide, and a genuinely appreciative tribute to his contributions to the fantasy genre. The style of the illustrations contrasted quite sharply with the other volumes, which may be a bit jarring, but I’m glad the editors made that choice because it was really interesting to see Conan depicted across a variety of styles and artistic visions. Really excellent stuff.

All of the stories included in these three volumes were added in the order that Howard wrote them. The Conquering Sword of Conan contains the last five, including “Red Nails,” which may be his most famous story. It certainly deserves to be. Of all the Conan stories, that one stands out most sharply, at least to me. So dark, so bloody. The commentary at the end pointed out that where most Conan stories are about the virtues of barbarism, “Red Nails” is all about the vices of civilization and the ultimate collapse of decadence. Also, Howard wrote it just a few months before his suicide, and it’s not difficult to imagine the dark thoughts that must have been going through his mind as he wrote it.

The two weakest stories, in my opinion, were “The Servants of Bit-Yakin” and “Man-Eaters of Zamboula.” The weaker Conan stories all tend to portray the female characters as props or window dressing (some might say this of all the Conan stories, to a greater or lesser degree), which was certainly the case with these two. Still, I enjoyed them, keeping in mind that they were written for a different time. “Beyond the Black River” was quite good, though aesthetically it felt more like an American frontier story than something from an ancient fantasy world. But the commentary gives some interesting insight into that, since apparently Howard was starting to branch into Westerns at this point and probably would have become a well known Western writer, if not for his suicide.

My favorite story from this volume, which is perhaps my favorite overall Conan story, was “The Black Stranger.” This one was also a bit anachronistic to the rest of Howard’s (albeit creatively anachronistic) Hyborean Age, as it’s a pirate story with Conan as one of the dueling pirate captains. The reason I enjoyed it so much was because the setup was basically an inverse Mexican standoff, where three pirate captains who hate each other’s guts have to work together to get the treasure, and the second one to betray the others is the one who wins. Also, it started with Conan fighting for his life in mysterious circumstances, which made for some really fun suspense. All of those things, combined with the mystery of the black stranger himself, made for a really fun page turner, with a surprising yet satisfying ending. Great story.

In the end, though, this volume made me both sad and angry because of the way in which Howard took his own life. I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been for his father to lose both his wife and only son in just a few days, or to see his son’s body in the car with his brains blown out like that. Furthermore, Howard truly was a brilliant writer and storyteller, perhaps even a genius. How many stories were deprived from the world when he took his own life? In some ways, it really does feel like he took the coward’s way out, though of course he would claim just the opposite. But that’s why suicide is the most tragic form of mental illness, especially in Robert E Howard’s case.

Rest in peace, and thank you for all of your brilliant contributions to the fantasy genre. May your stories long outlive you.