I am only a moderately intense follower of the Xanth novels, but this one looked like fun (I usually get around to them eventually), so I checked it out.

The humor is still there. There are too many puns for me, though I do enjoy many of them, and this one was on the topic of destroying puns even! My impression is that over time the humor has been toned down a bit and the social commentary has gotten just a bit stronger, a feeling I also got about another book I read recently.

If you’re a Xanth fan, you’ll want to read this one, of course. If you’re not, I’d generally recommend starting earlier in the series, though no matter where you start, Xanth takes a little bit of getting used to!

I rate it 4 stars.

I asked my pastor for a good book on the basics of Christian conversion and he handed me William Barclay’s little book Turning to God.

It’s a small book, with just 103 pages of reasonable size text. It’s not complex. The vocabulary is straightforward. I wouldn’t recommend it for speed reading, but you don’t need any strong theological background to follow the discussion.

Barclay works from the conversion stories and evangelistic methods presented in the book of Acts to develop both an understanding of what conversion means and the approaches to evangelization that will produce conversion.

This is an exceptionally good book. It appears to be out of print, but there are quite a number of used copies available online.

I give this a definite five bright stars!

Nick May is coming out with his second book, Minutemen. (His previous title is Megabelt from Energion Publications.)

This book is not at all like Megabelt. It’s the story of four young men whose relationships haven’t worked out (or are deteriorating) and the decisions they make as things spiral out of control more and more. There’s no obvious solution to the ever increasing problems. But the one thing you can expect in this book is that unexpected–and positively weird–things will happen.

Nick claims no moral to the story, but I can make several of them, and perhaps that’s the point of not having an intentional moral proposed (and made obvious) by the author–one can make up one’s own.

This is coming from the brand new Eucatastrophe Press.

I’ve enjoyed previous books by John Ringo, especially the Prince Roger series, so when I saw this book at my local public library I grabbed it and read. Of course, I was jumping into the middle of a series, which is generally a bad idea, but that happens to me quite often.

The book starts slowly. In fact, I was beginning to wonder whether Ringo had abandoned action entirely. In the end, however, perseverance paid off, and things got more interesting. Not that the character building isn’t interesting. I’m just not used to having so much of it at the start. You will continue to see the early characters as the story develops.

This is some good space opera with a “Terra über alles” feel to it. Though earth is the underdog in the story to all appearances, there is a clear human superiority going on as human ingenuity surprises the aliens. I rather enjoy that sort of story for a change, and Ringo does action rather well.

I rate this 4 stars.

I read this book, and the previous Nikki Heat volume, Heat Wave, because I found the concept of a book by a ghost writer, writing for a fictional author interesting. (OK, that sentence is too convoluted, but I’m not going to fix it.) I find the ABC show Castle entertaining in a non-intellectual sort of way. It’s good relaxation.

As for Heat Wave, it took me half the book to get interesting. It almost fell into a rating of 1 on my scale, by virtue of my failing to finish reading it. But about half way through it managed to become mildly interesting and ended up OK. Because I decided to check out the next volume, it makes it, just barely, to a 3.

Naked Heat was better. I was interesting throughout. It’s not a book I couldn’t put down. In fact, I put it down in the middle of quite a number of scenes, including one with Nikki Heat in the middle of a fight. I also had a fair idea what was going on too early in the book, though the evidence was not always presented all that clearly. Some authors keep you guessing by having a complex case. Others do it through some obscure presentation of the evidence. This one uses the latter a bit.

It’s still a decent book, and the concept is fun. I give it 3 out of 5 stars. I also give Heat Wave 3 out of five stars, but Heat Wave barely made it, while Naked Heat is a solid 3.

I’d recommend reading this more as fantasy than as historical fiction and give it 3 of 5 stars.

Buy The Hittite from Amazon.com.

Well, it’s not nearly that type of capability–we’re still a long way from that, but we’re moving down the path.  Today in my gizmag e-mail I got an article on the Third Space FPS gaming vest that lets you feel the gaming action.

Time marches on … sometimes faster than we want it to.