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.