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.

Book 47: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

More of a short story/novella than a real book, I read this one through Daily Lit as well. You always hear the title of this story, but I hadn't read it before (or I don't remember reading it). Holmes and Watson investigate a case where it appears a ghost dog scared a man to death. It's mostly told through Watson's adventures as he goes to stay at the man's house with his heir and they try to solve the puzzle. I enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories, but for some reason, I never read them. I have a book of all the original stories together in one volume, but I've only ever read a handful of them. I need to dig it out because they really are enjoyable and it's a good change of pace from fantasy or horror.

Book 46: Glory Lane by Alan Dean Foster

This is one of the books in my Nostalgia Trilogy. For some reason, I read 3 books probably when I was 12 or 13, and these books are the ones I always think about when I remember those long ago days. The other two are Slither by John Halkin and Night Warriors by Graham Masterton. I'm constantly checking for these books at used bookstores. It seems like cheating somehow to order them off Amazon or Ebay.

Anyways, Glory Lane is a fun sci-fi book. Some regular humans get caught up in a galaxy spanning adventure. They meet all kinds of aliens and do some neat things. It's a thoroughly enjoyable book. Not too deep or anything, but good fun.

Book 45: Sleepwalk by John Saul

A fairly generic thriller/suspense by one of the genres main guys. A young teacher returns to her small town to find weird things going on with the population. The kids are acting like zombies and the troublemaker adults are dying of strokes. She teams up with the half Indian son of one of the stroke victims and figures out the cause. It was set in an interesting location - the American Southwest. Sop the whole town is fairly isolated and the kids feel like it is the worst place ever. It is everyone's goal to escape when they graduate but most of them know they'll end up working at the same refinery that their parents are at. This one took me a while to get through. I kept putting it down and picking up other things to read instead. But I did finish it and the finale was good in its own way.

Book 44: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

A true classic, yet so hard to read. I've tried at least 3 times before because it is my wife's favorite book, but I always gave it up. I used DailyLit.com again and they sent me a chunk every day and I eventually got through the thing this time. I knew the general story from watching it on Masterpiece Theater with the wife. It's a very gothic book and I can see why so many people like it. It's hard to care for the main characters. They are either insanely mean and spiteful, or plain stupid in their actions. But Heathcliff is an awesome name, so it has that going for it.

Book 43: 1632 by Eric Flint

I read this book through DailyLit.com. They let you subscribe to RSS feeds where they send you a few pages to your feed reader every day. I had tried to read this book a couple of years ago, but ended up quitting before I completed it. It has a solid premise, but certain parts jsut didn't hold my attention. There were other parts though, especially near the end, that had me adding more pages to my feed so I could read what happened next. A mining town in almost the present day West Virginia is tranported to Germany in the year 1632. The people there are then thrown into all the political turmoil of that area in that age. They decide to set up their own free country and start the American Revolution a little early.

Book 42: Night Plague by Graham Masterton

This is the third book in the Night Warriors series. It was by far my least favorite. The opening would be pretty uncomfortable for any guy to read. There is a plague that is unleashed by this witch and it infects people by spreading through dreams. The descendants of the Night Warrirs who fought the witch hundreds of years ago have to get their powers and team up to fight her again and stop the plague. It took 2/3 of the book before they even found out that they were Night Warriors. I probably should have liked it a little more. It had some good horror elements in it, but it took me near forever to actually get through it. I would read it for a little and then put it down for a week and read something else instead. But then again, I did finish it, so that's gotta count for something.

Book 41: Death Dream by Graham Masterton

I found the second and third books of the Night Warriors series one day in the Half Price Bookstore, so I picked them up. Now if I could only find the first one somewhere.

This was ok. A demon is manifesting through a young boy and killing anyone who is around him while he sleeps. The boy's father get messed up by the demon, but eventually finds out he is a Night Warrior and he joins together with others to fight the demon and try to save his son.

Overall, it was ok. I liked the 4th book better and I have a real nostalgic spot for the first one, but it's probably been almost 20 years since I read the thing.

Book 40: The Policy by Bentley Little

I think I need to take a break from the straight horror books for a while.  This book was a good story, but it didn't make me enjoy it.  It was uncomfortable to read, especially in the first half.  I don't know exactly why.  But, once again, Bentley doesn't disappoint if you want flat out horror.  There is a huge insurance company that runs all the other insurance companies in the world.  They have a supernatural aspect to it, and they end up destroying the lives of this group of people in Tuscon.  The finale was pretty cool in a large scope sci-fi/horror way.

Book 39: The Inhuman Condition by Clive Barker

This one is a collection of short stories. A couple were good like The Inhuman Condition and The Body Politic. Both of those had interesting main plot points. The first had a string of knots that when unraveled unleashed a problem. The second was all about people's hands rebelling against their bodies. However the last couple of stories in the book pretty much were perfect examples of my problems with Clive Barker's writing. He's too literary. Down, Satan! was very short which was good, but he's commenting on man and our ability to be evil and it's just too deep for my shallow mind. The same with the last story, The Age of Desire. It's all about a man who is experimented on and the drug he takes amps up his sexual desire beyond belief. Sort of an interesting hook, but there's a little too much introspection and thinking about it. I'm more of a Blockbuster kind of guy. Just show me what happens and hit the action points quickly. Philosophical I ain't.

Book 38: The Ruins by Scott Smith

This book was pretty awesome. I ripped through it quickly which says something since it seems to take forever for me to get through a book anymore. Four Americans go on vacation in Cancun and they end up in trouble when they go to an old ruins/mine in the jungle. It's pretty straight-forward horror, but the language and style that the author uses is pretty unique. I don't know how to describe it - simple, but descriptive maybe. The ending was also unexpected. I didn't really expect it to wrap up like that, but it was well done. There was a movie made in 2008 and 'll have to rent that eventually and see if it compares.

Book 37: The Barrens and Others by F Paul Wilson

14 short stories here with a couple being a play and a TV episode script. I enjoyed this book. There's only one Repairman Jack story in here, and it's pretty short and simple. A few other stories stood out. Batman's enemy, the Joker, is featured in a solid story. The Barrens, the main story, is modeled after a Lovecraft tale and it is probably the highlight of the book.

Book 36: By The Sword by F Paul Wilson

More Repairman Jack. It's slowly getting toward the big ending. Very slowly. The books are good, but they're getting pretty repetitive. I'll keep reading them though. I am looking forward to the updated version of Nightworld that will supposedly follow after all the Jack books are finished.

Book 35: Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

Ender in Exile is the story of Ender right after the events of Ender's Game. It deals with why he can't go back to Earth and where he does go. It also ties up some loose ends from the Shadow series about Bean. I have a hard time with the Ender series in general. I love Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Those two are awesome. I've read Speaker for the Dead once or twice and also the Shadow of the Hegemon. But, I can never get any further. I've owned Xenocide and Children of the Mind for years and years, but every time I try to start in on Xenocide, I give up after 50 pages. It just doesn't grab me the way the first book does. Anyways, Ender in Exile was good. Ender is a hard character to relate to. He's so inhumanly smart that it seems like he can accomplish anything. He manipulates people all over the place in this one. On the other hand, he's an emotional mess and it gets a little old. I got through it fast and there are a lot of interesting points to it. The handling of Quincy Morgan and Achilles II were very well done.

Book 34: The Revelation by Bentley Little

A good little horror book. It doesn't try to do too much and it's pretty freaky in some parts. In this small town in Arizona, every few generations weird stuff starts happening and a travelling preacher appears and guides a few town folks to stop the evil from coming in. The preacher is an odd character. It's hard to tell if he's a protagonist or not. The plot revolves around miscarriages, abortions, and deformed babies, which was a little unsettling to read with my wife being currently pregnant. I really should read more Bentley Little. I've only read 2 or 3 books of his, but I've never been disappointed. You generally know you're going to get a straight forward, well told scary story.

Book 33: Wizard and Glass by Stephen King

Continuing the Dark Tower. I only remembered the long flashback to Roland's youth from this book. I completely forgot about the return of the Tick Tock man and the end of the Blaine ride. Honestly, I skipped the flashback and only read the other parts. I've recently read the Marvel Comics version of the time in Mejis and didn't feel like rhashing the story again. A lot of interesting stuff in here like the mentions of Captain Trips, the Takuro Spirit, and Nozz-a-la cola.

I did it!

So my goal was to get in 30 books in a year, and I got 32. That makes me feel pretty good even though I felt like a couple were cheats (The Girl Who Met Tom Gordon and the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - those were pretty small books.) I'll probably continue on with this just to keep a record of what I've read.

Book 32: The Waste Lands by Stephen King

Part 3 of the Dark Tower. This is probably the one I remember the least. The temporal paradox and the saving of Jake. The introduction of Oy. Lud and the Tick-Tock Man and Blaine. Great stuff.

Book 31: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

I decided to keep on going with the Dark Tower Series. I don't think I've read this since I was in high school so it's good to go back and reread it. I totally forgot who the third person being drawn was. I my head it was always the final part of the ka-tet, but it wasn't him at all.