Doing Some Catching Up

I was looking today at my little blue book - the one in which I keep Cedar's reading list, all of those books that we have and have yet to read, and all those which we've read with the date we finished reading them. I thought we were slipping.

Between September 1st 2005 and August 31st 2006 we read 20 books and abandoned one - it was dire. I thought it was half of that over the same time period from 2006 to 2007... that is until I realised that there were many books that hadn't been written into the little blue book, because the blue book had been elsewhere at the time. In the end it turns out that between September 1st 2006 and August 31st 2007 we have read 17 books (so long as I didnt forget any) and abandoned 2 dreadful ones, so it turns out to be not so dreadful after all.

Over the next couple of days we're going to try and catch up with giving brief reviews of the ones that haven't been given the reveiw treatment we usually do - they'll be a little bit different because we haven't got the 'key quote' in them. That's where, as we're reading the book, we make not of a quote that sums up the book or the tone of the book for us, but in every other way, they're given the same treatment. So, onward we go...

Starting With This One

The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin.




From product information on Amazon:

As revealed in Last Full Measure Commander Charles 'Trip' Tucker was not killed in an explosion, but rather, his death was staged. With the assistance of Captain Archer and Doctor Phlox, Trip is swept up by the shadowy organization that was employing his best friend, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, and sent deep under cover. After discovering that the Romulans have a new warp drive, faster than any vessel, Starfleet sends Trip to determine if this will be a threat to the new fragile alliance.


The thought that a family oriented man like Trip could just up and disappear, let all those who love him think he was dead is unbelievable enough, compound that with the fact that, with no training whatsoever he manages to survive a deep cover operation where seasoned field operatives are captured and killed and you have a ridiculous scaffold on which the authors could hang themselves... which is a shame, because take Trip out of the equation, you actually have a damn good storyline that would have been better told without Trip as the main protagonist... Malcolm maybe except that he doesn't have the right field of expertise - ie warp drives - but even that would have been a bit of a push... It suffers I think from the trap that many of the Star Trek books have fallen into, and forgets that its readers are intelligent, reasoning human beings.

That said, it is still, in places, a very moving read, particularly with some of the scenes with T'Pol, Trip, or Trip and T'Pol together... albeit in places disturbing. But then, what could possibly untie the knots left by B&B at the premature ending of the show?

The Second of a Pair

What Price Honor by Dave Stern




From product information on Amazon:

The Starship Enterprise NX-01 is humanity's flagship -- the first vessel to begin a systematic exploration of what lies beyond the fringes of known space. Led by Captain Jonathan Archer, eighty of Starfleet's best and brightest set forth to pave humanity's way among the stars. Tempered by a year's worth of exploration, they are a disciplined, cohesive unit. But now one of their number has fallen.

Bad enough that Ensign Alana Hart is dead. Worse still that she died while attempting to sabotage the Enterprise -- and at the hands of Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, the ship's armory officer and her nominal superior. Even as questions swirl around Hart's death, Archer, Reed, and the rest of the Enterprise crew find themselves caught squarely in the middle of another tense situation- a brutal war of terror between two civilizations.

But in the Eris Alpha system, nothing -- and no one -- are what they seem. And before the secret behind Ensign Hart's demise is exposed, Reed will be forced to confront death one more time.

What can I say about this...? I enjoyed it, it was a reasonably good read, the characterisation, while not completely spot on was close enough, for the most part. Perhaps Reed was not quite as sharp as his own self, but I suppose this was a literary device to allow the readers to figure things out as they went along too. Predictable, perhaps, but the most annoying thing, the most irritating tendency on the part of the writers was to ram the 'important' facts down the readers throats by repeating them two or three times. Star Trek audiences are smart people... for the most part I have found this to be true, and the books do tend to 'write down' to them.

While focussed around Lt Reed and his affairs, the story was ensemble enough to feel a little like an additional episode of Enterprise, which was, I suppose, a refreshing thought. :) It could have been a little sharper, but on the whole, enjoyable enough.