Monkeyballz

So I was just reading the Twitters today, when this caught my eye.

Ride a cloud? I only know of one person who rides a cloud, and it's not this Goku character. Hold on, I've got to check this...

The Little Sister (Philip Marlowe, #5)

This one takes a little longer to get going than some of the others in the series, and isn't as funny, but the mystery and the noir elements are very strong and everything ties together very neatly in the end (in fact, almost too neatly). A very satisfying read though.

Farewell, My Lovely

I enjoyed this one much more than The Big Sleep. It seemed less chaotic and the solution made more sense and better accounted for all the things that happened.

How to Make Tea

A lot of people like to tell you there are a whole let of very specific rules for how you should make, serve and drink tea, and they are all idiots. Tea is not difficult. It's not complicated.

The Secret World Chronicle

This is sort of like two books in one. It starts as a series of vignettes about super heroes fighting space nazis, which is awesome, then about two thirds of the way through it flashes back thirty years to a completely unrelated story about witches and vampires, then near the end it returns to the present and is about super heroes and nazis again. Both stories are good, but they don't seem to belong in the same book.

There's also a weird inconsistency where one of the super-hero characters' name changes after the witches and vampires section with no explanation. It seems intentional but the lack of explanation is puzzling. This is the first book of a series though, so maybe it gets explained later.

If you like super-heroes you should read this book. If you're not into the supernatural stuff, you could skip the bit about witches and vampires without missing anything important, although I enjoyed that bit too.

750 Things I Wish They'd Told Me about America

The things that are unique about a country are never the things you expect. Those things tend to be pretty similar everywhere, we just like to think they're special. It's the weirdest things that turn out to be different. This book talks about some (750) of the things that are weird about America, and it is fascinating.

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

I only read about a third of the book, but Lovecraft's stories all seem to be pretty samey. Knowledge brings fear, progress is bad, indescribable horror, protagonist goes mad or manages to escape before they learn the terrible truth that drove someone else mad. Also, all the stories have this weird quality where they seem like they should be set about 100 years earlier than they are. It seems anachronistic when a car or a telephone appears even though it actually isn't.

The Big Sleep and Other Novels

The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye are both great, but Farewell, My Lovely is the best by far. I haven't yet read The Simple Art of Murder, Playback, Poodle Springs or The Pencil, but of the ones I have read it's by far the best, and would make this book worthwhile on its own; The other two are just icing on the cake, really.