What I’m Reading

I did a post awhile back about what TV my wife and I were watching. So I thought I’d do one now about what I’ve been reading.

Dresden Files

Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files are a fun series. I originally picked them up as a beach book to read on vacation a few years ago, and never regretted it. The idea of a wizard detective living in the “real world”, solving cases and fighting monsters is an interesting one. There’s no elaborate cover-ups, just people’s tendency to ignore the truth if it’s inconvenient.  Whole wars occur between different elements of the supernatural world and regular people come off as ignorant, but in a believable way.

Dresden is a great character, smart mouth, witty, with some anti-hero elements. He’s noble but not naive, heroic but resigned to it. Butcher makes Harry feel real, like a regular, decent person, who doesn’t want to be a hero, but wants to do the right thing. He doesn’t look for trouble, but nor does he run away from it. Unless running is the best course of action.

I haven’t actually been reading this for awhile; rather listening to the audiobook version. These are read by James Marsters, Spike from Buffy. He does a really good job with these and for all intents and purposes has become Harry Dresden. I hear he didn’t do the latest book and that will be sad. I am currently about to start White Night, so I have 6 remaining.

Enterprise Relaunch

I recently rewatched Star Trek: Enterprise when it came to Netflix. I watched the whole series, except the horrible last episode. It was just so terrible I didn’t want to do that to myself again. But when looking for something to read, as oppose to listen to, over the break, I thought I’d give the relaunch novel series a try. The first book, The Good That Men Do, by Michael A Martin,  rewrites history and takes the approach that since the final episode, These Are the Voyages, was portrayed as a holodeck recreation, that it was an in accurate history. It moves the events from 10 years in the future to immediately after the last episode and sets up the Earth/Romulan War.

It proved better than I was expecting. There were a lot of issues they needed to work around, both from that episode and from the rest of Star Trek lore, that they handled reasonably well. Trip doesn’t die but fakes his own death so that he can infiltrate the Romulans to steal or sabotage a Warp 7 prototype. No one knowing what a Romulan looks like in TOS was turned into a top secret issue because a lot of people didn’t trust the Vulcans. Earth’s Alliance was fragile and after the Terra Prime events (a storyline I found meh, but helped sell this) it made sense.

It wasn’t stellar, but it was an enjoyable read. Unfortunately, the second book, Kobayashi Maru, wasn’t as good.  There were to many characters and plotlines. The Romulans new technologies go a bit over the top. And people seem to know a whohle lot about them, where their space is, who their trading partners are, etc.  The whole book was a set up for the classic Kobayashi Maru scenario, but that felt rushed and misplaced.

I decided not to pick up the next two books in the series, that actually cover the war.  Majority of the reviews are pretty terrible. It sounds like the books go even further with to many characters and stories, and don’t follow the Enterprise characters well enough. And since this is supposed to be a war series, all of the battles are glossed over.

I had hopes for this series to be what Enterprise needed for a good send off. Had the series continued, I would have expected to see the Romulan War dominate the last few seasons like the Dominion did for DS9. Done properly, that could have been great TV.

Leviathan Wakes

I’ve thought about picking this one up for awhile, and after giving the rest of Enterprise a pass, I did so last night. I haven’t finished it, but so far am hooked. I was suppose to just read for 30min to an hour last night before going to sleep, read for 2 and had to force myself to put it down.

The universe of Leviathan Wakes is an interesting one. No aliens (so far) but Humanity has spread all across our solar system. Millions of people live on Mars, the Asteroid Belt (Belters), Jupiter and Saturns Moons. They have a fusion powered drive that makes getting around the solar system take weeks or months instead of years. The technology is all believably just beyond our reach; no artificial gravity, warp drive, inertial dampeners, just better engines and life support systems.

The evolutionary and social development of people living in all of the different environments is interesting. The book sets up tense relations between the inner planets and outer planets, the outer colonists viewing the people of Earth and Mars as weak because they live in a gravity well and don’t have to worry about things like water and air.

I’m eager to read the rest of it and anticipate I’ll be waiting for the follow-up books.