I'm indulging an insatiable thirst for TMP to TWOK Books, just finished Christopher L Bennett's Ex Machina and finally went out to get The Darkness Drops Again. I'm toying with continuing on to Forgotten History and High Frontier. If I'm still on this track I think I might double back and work on Duane's Rhiannesu series, hopefully finishing it this time (I didn't have the Empty Chair the last time I worked through it).
I just started The Drawing of the Three; the second book in the Dark Tower series. It starts off really strong, with some serious consequences for the protagonist. I see serious problems ahead for the gunslinger.
Ellis Peters' A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first of her series of mysteries starring Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk in England (though Cadfael is Welsh) in the 12th century. I last read this in 1993, so I truly didn't remember much about the story at all -- who it was that was killed, who did it, even large swathes of the plot. The one thing I did remember, vaguely, was the climax of the book, but I didn't realize it was the climax until I got to it. The Abbey in Shrewsbury sends a mission into Wales to recover the bones of St. Winifred, a minor saint. (She was beheaded by a man who wanted to take her virginity, another Saint, Beuno, came along and reattached her head, she returned to life, and she caused the man who beheaded her to melt away into water. She then became the leader of a convent and died a virgin. This is a real saint, and this is her real story.) The locals are opposed to a bunch of English monks taking Winifred's bones away, one local landowner who was most vocal in his opposition is murdered, and the English lover of the man's daughter is suspected. Cadfael, part of the crew sent to Wales because he's bilingual, suspects that someone else did it. but who? As a mystery, it's adequate; there's a good twenty characters in this book, and the plausible suspects you can count on less than a single hand. The plot's straightforward, the ending is a little cryptic (Peters never spells out what happened, she just drops lots of hints), and the prose is fairly dense. I enjoyed reading it, or rather, rereading it -- it's frequently funny -- but later books in the series, IIRC, are better plotted and better mysteries. This was, I believe, intended as a one-off, not as the launch of a series.
Jacobi was why I read a couple of the books way back when. I liked the series, so why not read the books? I have them all as ebooks now, bought here and there when they went on sale, and I'm planning on giving my old paperbacks (not a complete set) away to the local Little Free Library.
This inspired me to start The Galactic Whirlpool. While I liked Vulcan!, I haven’t really been too impressed with the Bantam stuff. (Spock Must Die is bad, you guys! And Spock, Messiah: woof.) But I’m hoping that David Gerrold has good insights and knows how to write Star Trek beyond what is arguably the best and unarguably top ten episode.
The series (and Jacobi) was the reason I gave the books a try too. Enjoyed them back in the day. I've just finished The Andromeda Evolution by Daniel Wilson (though Amazon list it under Michael Crichton).
I'll be working my way through my Prey trilogy reread for awhile. Once that is over, I got Starfleet Academy: Collision Course by Shatner and the Reeves-Stevenses. The Shatner books are already doing their own thing, so I'm going to approach this one like it's in the Fahrenheit timeline (my way of saying not Prime or Kelvin). When I'm not reading Trek, I'm reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.
The Fall - The Crimson shadow. (does no one have smart phones/communicators/tablets in the 24th century lol)
I've been in a comic book mood the last few days, so I picked up the digital version of the collection of Terra Incognita, the third STTNG Mirror Universe miniseries. It's written by David and Scott Tipton, with art by Tony Shasteen, Carlos Nieto, and Angel Hernandez, colors by JD Mettler, Frank Gamboa, and Mark Robters, and letters by Neil Uyetake. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to stick with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I'm almost 150 pages into it and I'm starting to get bored. It started out OK, but since the character got aboard the Nautilus it's been constant descriptions of all of the fish and other sea life that they're seeing, with no real plot.
I'm reading all the essays I didn't write in ZLONK! ZOK! ZOWIE!: The Subterranean Blue Grotto Guilde to Batman '66 -- Season One, a collection of pieces about the first season of the Adam West Bat-program.
Star trek Tos Chain of attack by Gene DeWeese& Tos The Pandora Priciple by Carolyn Clowes& Vulcan's Glory by D.C.Fontana