Book 54: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

Eh. A lot of it doesn't make sense. Isn't Lord Asriel a bad guy? Why does anyone want to support him? I got through it all. Some weird sexual metaphorical stuff near the end that creeped me out some.

Book 53: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Will is introduced from our regular Earth. He meets Lyra and it all moves forward. This is where you find out that Lord Asriel plans on overthrowing Heaven. I didn't take it badly from a religious standpoint, but I didn't really understand it in the books. He does some horrible things, but plenty of people are supporting him. I didn't get a clear view as to why he wants to accomplish this feat. But, whatever. I won't read these books again.

Book 52: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Meet Lyra and her adventures. The movie doesn't really do the book justice. It dumbs it way way down. It took a little to get into this, but I liked this book well enough. The next two were harder to enjoy.

Book 51: Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

I've completely forgotten the plot of this book. Reacher is on a subway and sees a woman he suspects of being a terrorist. Then he gets all involved in a plot that he shouldn't, etc, etc. But any Reacher book is a good read and I liked it when i read it, but it's months later now and I forgot it all.

Book 50: The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams

I love this trilogy. This is the start and it really gets off on the wrong foot. The first 200 pages are a drag, but if you get to page 200, the story takes off. The old king who united several smaller kingdoms has died and his eldest son takes over the throne. He is persuaded into making some poor decisions and the whole kingdom starts to suffer. The seasons are all out of whack and strange beings are wandering around the countryside. A kitchen boy named Simon ends up hearing and seeing more than he should. The book is mostly about his adventures first escaping the castle and then his journey to bring information to the king's younger brother Josua and beyond. It's a great book and I am glad the author chose to stop with only 3 books. It's good to read a story that ends. It gets frustrating when an author drags it out over 10-15 books, some of which have nothing going on in them. Or the author takes several years in between books. Or the author dies before completing the story. Anyways, this is probably my favorite fantasy series. I'm not a huge Lord of the Rings guy, and I might enjoy George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series more, but it's not complete and who knows if he'll ever get it done, so Tad Williams is the current leader.

Book 49: Under the Dome by Stephen King

A very solid book by the king. A mysterious dome/forcefield appears over top of a small town in Maine. The people go appropriately crazy and the good guys end up battling the bad guys to decide who will run the town. The military cannot get inside to affect anything that is going on. There were some memorable characters like Scarecrow Joe and Junior. Not as good as Duma Key, but at least it was more in line with King's older stuff and not his "literary" stuff. I stayed up way past my bedtime several nights to get through it. I couldn't stop reading - which is a good thing.

Book 48: The Hacker's Diet by John Walker

So this software engineer realizes that he's succeeded pretty well in life as far as his career goes, but he's a failure health-wise. So he tries to apply some logic to losing weight. This is all very common sense stuff, but he uses a practical engineering way to go about it. It's mostly about taking in less calories than you use every day. Pretty standard stuff, right? He created some tools that help you graph your weight every day and it shows you a trend line, so you can easily see how your weight is trending and you can avoid the daily ups and downs that you see on the scale that can be so frustrating. He talks about how so much of the body is water and so much of it is processed in and out every day that the scale is always going to have variations. This trending graph is really useful because you can see that even though the scale says you're heavier today, you can see that you're still going down. He has some other things in there about an exercise program and some heavy math to calculate the graphs and similar stuff. I mostly took the trend line approach out of it. I found Physics Diet online and it does the graphing for you, so you just have to enter your weight every day. Like I said, everyone knows how to lose weight, this is just a different, more structured way of looking at the process.