The Gathering Storm
Written by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Publisher: Tor Books
Released: October 27, 2009

It’s time for fans of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series to stand up and celebrate. The release of a new book is upon us. Even more than just a new book, this is the beginning of the end; the final book in the series. Okay, so there’s actually three books remaining, but they were meant by Jordan to be one book. Unfortunately (or perhaps, very fortunately depending on your point of view), the story became too large to release as one volume, so the editors decided to break the final book into three parts, the first of which, titled The Gathering Storm, saw release on October 27th, 2009, with the other two seeing release at a later date, hopefully in 2010 and 2011.

Unfortunately, the book split isn’t the big story about this release. No, the big story concerning this book was the untimely passing of original author Robert Jordan on September 16, 2007. With Jordan’s passing, many feared that we would never see the end to his sprawling series. Fortunately, Jordan had written a large portion of the book before his passing, and left detailed notes on the rest and writer Brandon Sanderson was quickly chosen by Jordan’s editor and wife to finish the series, putting fans’ minds at ease [...]

Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less
Edited by Nick Douglas
Published by It Books
Release date: August 25, 2009

My first thought was “you’re missing the point” when I heard someone was planning to publish a book containing only 140-character messages from micro-blogging site Twitter. Then I discovered that this someone was former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas and my thoughts instantly shifted to intrigue.

Douglas is a talented wordsmith, who in years past, has demonstrated a vivacious ability to both inform and entertain readers, [See, Everything indie sucks now]. Having been with Valleywag, it’s obvious that he understands technology from all angles, including the cultural level. If anyone is qualified to create a book of tweets worthy of being collected and bound for $12.99, Douglas is certainly a front runner. Twitter Wit is such a book, featuring about 600 tweets and a foreword by Twitter Cofounder Biz Stone [...]

The Strain
Book One of The Strain Trilogy
By Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
William Morrow
Release date: June 2, 2009

Every so often, the world of fantasy literature will be rocked with a series of books that will forever change the way people read. Lord of the Rings did it. Harry Potter did it. Twilight (unfortunately) did it. Since all of those series are over now, many readers have been looking for a new book to devote their lives to.

Cue famed director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, the Hellboy films) and Chuck Hogan’s first effort together, The Strain. This 400-page tome begins what is to be a trilogy, with The Strain being followed by The Fall (in 2010) and The Night Eternal (in 2011).

In the opening of the novel, a Boeing 777 (one of the biggest passenger planes in the world) lands at JFK airport in New York City and shuts down completely not five minutes after landing. No radio transmissions are received from the crew. No calls are received from the passengers. No movement is detected inside. The police decide to open the doors of the plane, and find everyone on board dead. Of course, a post-9/11 media circus ensues, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather of the CDC (Center for Disease Control) is called on to investigate what is assumed to be a viral attack of some sort [...]

Make Love The Bruce Campbell Way
Written & Narrated by Bruce Campbell
St. Martin’s Griffin
Available Now

Bruce Campbell, exploitation movie stalwart and man-god to millions, has always secretly dreamed of transcending his B-flick actor trappings and hitting the Hollywood big time. One day after his literary agent Barry simultaneously rejects his proposal for a book about walking and proposes that he instead write a book about relationships, his acting agent — also named Barry — calls Bruce and informs him that he has been invited to audition for a major supporting role in an upcoming romantic comedy for Paramount Pictures starring Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger and directed by Mike Nichols called Let’s Make Love. Bruce is wary of the offer at first but a trip to New York City and a chance to meet a great director proves too irresistible to pass up.

At the audition he uncomfortably encounters just about every big name actor in the movie industry and when he reads for the role of Foyl Whipple, a salt-of-the-earth doorman at a high-end New York hotel always ready with sage advice and an open door, it does not go too well. Returning to his rural Oregon home in what he believes to be defeat, Bruce is surprised to get the news that he won the part. It turns out that Mike Nichols is a big fan of his and wants to be the one to give the struggling actor his big break in mainstream film. This gesture on the filmmaker’s part inspires the star of the Evil Dead trilogy and Assault on Dome 4 to prepare for this role the way a professional actor would [...]

D&D: Player’s Handbook 2
A 4th Edition D&D Core Rulebook
Written by Jeremy Crawford, Mike Mearls, and James Wyatt
Wizards of the Coast
Release date: March 17, 2009

I’ve been meaning to do a series of articles on the books being released for the newest edition of Dungeons and Dragons since I started playing several months ago, but it just kept getting pushed back. However, I now find myself with some free time and spare energy, so I will begin this series today, by talking about one of the most recent books released for the game, the Player’s Handbook 2.

Player’s Handbook 2, or PH2, is a fairly important book in the line, clearly the most important since the first Player’s Handbook. Each Player’s handbook is important because these are the books that tell us what kind of characters we can play. Where PH1 laid the groundwork for the game and gave us the basic classes and races for characters, PH2 gets a bit more exotic, with 5 new races, and 8 new classes.

Some are of the races are classics from earlier editions that were left out of PH1 for space, while some are new additions to the game that look to set out their own place in gamers’ hearts. The five new races are Deva (kind of an angelic race and the opposite number of the Teifling from PH1), Gnome, Half-Orc, Goliath, and Shifter [...]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Paperback Edition
By Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith
Quirk Books
Release date: April 1, 2009

Jane Austen’s literary classic Pride and Prejudice has long captured the hearts of women, thanks to its independent, intelligent heroine Elizabeth Bennett and her antagonist turned love interest, the handsome Mr. Darcy. Since its publication in 1813, this tale of romance set in the Georgian age of social propriety and conformity has rarely enticed a male readership, but Seth Grahame-Smith’s new mash-up novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is sure to do just that.

Grahame-Smith took the majority of Austen’s beloved novel and incorporated a plague of attacking zombies hellbent on feasting on the brains of the people of England. While most of the countryside is open game for the “Unmentionables,” the wealthy are able to hire ninja warriors to protect them from the constant zombie assaults. Some well-off families, like the Bennetts, had a different strategy — the five Bennett sisters, including Elizabeth, were sent by their father to the Far East to study martial arts with a Shaolin master and are now in His Majesty’s service to protect their fellow countrymen.

Mr. Bennett takes pride in his daughters’ abilities and encourages them to train further, much to the dismay of their mother, whose sole purpose in life is to see her daughters married well [...]

Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead
Paperback
Written by Jonathan Maberry
Citadel Press
Release date: September 1, 2008

It’s a good time to be a zombie, or at least a lover of all things zombie-related. Max Brooks recently had two best sellers about the undead hordes, The Zombie Survival Guide (a sort of “worst case scenario” book for dealing with the ghoulish undead) and World War Z (an oral history of the coming war against the zombie hordes.) Call To Duty: World At War had a special game play mode after the credits rolled, where suddenly you have to fight your way through hordes of carnivorous Nazi undead in order to extend your miserable life. Zombies from the Third Reich also appear in Dead Snow, a selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in which a group of Scandinavian kids who accidentally awaken Wehrmacht and SS zombie hordes in the Nordic snow. We will even soon be treated to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a classic Regency zombie romance re-write of a Jane Austen classic by Seth Grahame-Smith.

To all this zombie gold, we must add Zombie CSU – The Forensics of the Living Dead by Jonathan Maberry. Taking something of an opposite tack from Max Brooks’ work, Maberry starts by asking “What would a real zombie outbreak look like?” and then goes to find answers from real pathologists and criminologists who are interested in the subject. Along the way, he provides frequent little detours into zombie-related subjects like the roots of the modern zombie phenomenon, lists of key zombie films, differences between zombie film genres, the zombie in art and illustration, and quotes from fellow zombie-philes in the arts and sciences [...]

Silver: My Own Tale with a Goodly Amount of Murder
By Edward Chupack
Paperback
St. Martin’s Griffin
Release Date: January 6, 2009

Best known for striking a cutthroat figure in the classic Treasure Island, Long John Silver takes up the plume in Silver to recount with no regret how he became the lovable blaggard pirate fans have know him to be. And it’s not pretty. Silver has a way of making fast friends and killing them just as quickly, all while on a decades-old quest to find a mysterious treasure.

If you’re fearing a fanfic retread of classic waters, then you can rest easy. The pretense of the novel is a defeated post-Treasure Island Silver, who has been imprisoned on his own ship by an unnamed former hearty (shipmate). His only way of tormenting his captor — because what other scheme would the Long John Silver cook up? — is to write to him daily about the seafaring way of life and his life in particular.

Villainy doesn’t come easy, we see in this fictional autobiography. It takes a certain amount of moral bankruptcy, plenty of lies, and — if you’re doing it right — a significant body count. It’s the kind of career plan that necessitates an evil laugh or two, but Edward Chupack’s Silver stays true to the psychopathic roots of its main character and narrator with a playful lyricism that’s all about piratry in the name of practicality. You’re hungry? Steal. Did that guy just insult you? Stab the bastard. For once, we have a main character who’s clear on what he wants and who he needs to kill to get it. There’s no moral compass in this book — and if there is one, it’s constantly pointing to kill [...]

Ask any comic fan in your local comic book store who their favorite comic company is and more often than not, they will list the two top: Marvel Comics and DC Comics. For as long as the comic business has been around, it seems as though DC and Marvel have always been in battle with one another. When one prospers, the other is not far behind and when one is failing to appeal to fans, the other is sure to come along and pick them up. Everything is a competition with one another and so it is no surprise that both companies would commission books made to spotlight the evolution and history of their respective comic brands.

The Marvel Vault and The DC Vault, both published by Running Press, are massive coffee table books that double as handheld museums. The idea is simple: Each book is broken into chapters and showcases the history of both each comic book publisher. Along the way, there are these nifty plastic pages that hold various reprints of mementos published under each company. Want to see a letter by editor Dick Giordano asking for Jeanette Kahn’s permission to kill Supergirl during Crisis of Infinite Earth? Or how about an invitation to the nuptials of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson? Both books are packed with rare items such as sketches, Christmas cards, and reprinted ashcans that have, until now, not been shown to the public [...]

Time travel, as a story premise, can be a slippery slope. While some creators go to great lengths to describe how the Grandfather Paradox can be overcome, others find themselves backed into a corner, waving a magic wand at logical thinking and asking the audience to take it on good faith that the hazards of time travel can be easily overcome.

Meanwhile, Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy Night Watch — the 29th novel within his Discworld series — takes it at face value and has everyone run with it. When Sam Vimes, commander of Ankh-Morpork’s police force, is thrown back through time while chasing a psychopathic killer, there’s hardly a moment to spare for either Vimes or the reader to ruminate upon the logistics of it all. Instead, Pratchett’s time-travel is a set-up for much larger questions — and we’re talking more than just, “What would happen if he killed his grandpa?”

That’s where the subtle strengths of Pratchett’s writing come in. Though written in the third-person, Night Watch’s story unfolds more like a stream of consciousness. Rather than being bogged down in thoughtful monologues, the story actually takes off as Vimes spends his time observing other people and contemplating how he can play to their emotions and instincts. The novel is less about asking what one would do with time travel, and more about how you would have to do it. For his part, Vimes is forced to go through the motions of the past while still hunting down a notorious killer that no one in the past has even heard of — without upsetting the reality they’re used to or the future he came from [...]

I feel as if I should have had this review written and published it a week ago, and that had been the intent. I had greatly anticipated the arrival of Brisingr, the third installment in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, having enjoyed the first two quite a bit. But it seems that in the past couple of years since I first read his first two books — Eragon and Eldest — my ability to judge good writing has grown.

So, no, this is not going to be a glowing recommendation of Brisingr.

But I have to make one thing very clear from the outset: Paolini has created a fascinating story. The problem is, he just can’t write all that well. And as a result, the enjoyment of the book was severely punished by how hard it was to struggle through the inept form the story took.

Everything became horribly clear when a friend of mine forced me into reading the third book in Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn Chronicles while I was also reading Brisingr. Now reading more than one book at a time is not new for me, as I’ve often got 5 or 6 on the go at any given time. But it was a severe mistake to have picked up such good a book as Keeping Place amidst reading Brisingr. It was blindingly obvious that Carmody knew how to write, and that Paolini really wished he knew how to write [...]

After the film Notting Hill was released, I had a business trip to London. When I asked a good friend if there was anything she’d like me to get her while I was there, she had one request: “a picture of the blue door from William’s flat in Notting Hill.” She wanted to frame it and put it in her bathroom, which was also blue. It seemed like a simple enough request, and a quick search of the internet revealed the location. Unfortunately, it was all for naught, because once I finally got there, the famous blue door was now black. Just for fun, I decided to see how many other sites from the movie I could find… and quickly got very lost.

Enter Movie London by Tony Reeves.

This meticulous guide is jam-packed with hundreds of movie filming locations throughout London, both past and present. Everything from the obvious (James Bond, Harry Potter) to the obscure (Laughter in Paradise, The Nine Ages of Nakedness) is represented. For the movie buff traveling to London, few guide books could be as indispensable.

The good news is that the guide is very well organized, taking London region by region and detailing anything of movie-related interest that happened there. Handy maps lay out exactly the route you need to take to see all the sites, and small black & white photos help you to make sure you’ve found the right spot (more important sites get color photos in an 8-page inset)…

The second part of the X-Wing series of Star Wars novels, and the second last set of books from which I’ll be reviewing, we are introduced to Wedge Antilles’ idea of a flying-commando group. While Rogue Squadron turned out to be fliers who might be able to do other things, Wedge wanted a group of specialist commando’s who, just probably, could fly.

And thus, Wraith Squadron was born, and with it some of the greatest characters you could ever hope for.

Only Wedge is brought over from the first four books for Wraith Squadron, and he is joined by Wes Janson, a character that appears very briefly in Empire Strikes Back. Together, they choose a bunch of misfits and outcasts, most on their last chance in the New Republic military, but that have specific skills, to join their new Wraith Squadron (Wes is Wedge’s number 2)…

With the Rebellion finally bringing an end to the Emperor and his dark servant, Darth Vader, the New Republic is born. However, it isn’t just a case of strolling into Coruscant, or as the Empire renamed it, Imperial Center. The Empire isn’t dead, just its leader, and the New Republic would find it was a great many years before they saw the end of the Empire.

And it all started here, with the X-Wing series of books. Focusing on Wedge Antilles and, at first, the famous Rogue Squadron, these books are very character driven, but in a way that represents the struggles of the New Republic as it strives to take Coruscant.

A continuing trend I am noticing as I continue to read through this mass of Star Wars books that have piled up next to my chair is the diligence the authors are showing in respect to the Stormtroopers. Since the inception of the Star Wars universe into the mainstream, the Stormtrooper has simply been the men in white — recently known, in some cases, to be Clones – who are the Star Wars equivalent of the Star Trek red-shirts.

This will reach its ultimate example when, this August, Star Wars: Clone Wars hits cinemas, and soon afterwards, TV screens.

But for the moment, a few weeks away from its release, we can continue on our journey through the Expanded Universe. This week, we’re focusing on the Rebellion Era books, those books which take place in and around the original three movies, and in particular, Allegiance by Timothy Zahn.

For this installment, MajorJJH reviews four of the books in the Star Wars: Clone Wars series: Shatterpoint, The Cestus Deception, Yoda – Dark Rendezvous, and Jedi Trial.

Batman Unauthorized collects numerous essays from critics, scholars, and comic book professionals as they take a scrutinizing look at the Dark Knight and the impression he’s left on society.

In this week’s installment of our Countdown to Clone Wars series, we look at the three published books written by Karen Traviss from the Star Wars: Republic Commando series, spawned from the computer game of the same name.

For the next 7 weeks, leading up to the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated film, we’ll have a review for a Star Wars Expanded Universe, starting with Drew Karpyshyn’s Darth Bane: Path of Destruction.

This Gamer’s Edition of the famous book is the ideal coffee table book with a big emphasis on visual input and an eye-catching design.