Books: Lo, I Am a Geek of Many Facets

Dungeon of Dread by Rose Estes

This was the first "Endless Quest" book, TSR's answer to "Choose Your Own Adventure", in which the brave knight Caric, aided by comic relief halfling Laurus, enters the stronghold of the evil wizard Kalman in search of his vast treasure. I picked it up out of nostalgia. While aimed at someone a quarter my age, there's a reasonable amount of theme and backstory written into the dungeon. Further, in the cases where choosing "flight" over "flee" is suicide, the text provides exactly enough hints that no, you don't want to take on the minotaur just because you managed to kill the goblin. (And, being a huge geek, I did a little flowchart of the choices, and determined the optimum path.)

Token by Alisa Kwitney

Having met Alisa at Arisia, I picked up her contribution to DC's ill-fated Minx imprint. It's the story of a teenage girl living in Florida, who is unpopular, whose father has a new girlfriend, who has never been kissed . . . and who takes up shoplifting as validation. Despite being way, way outside the target demographic, I truly enjoyed it, and wished it was longer. Recommended.

Unfolding Meaning by David Bohm

I can't recall if I bought this physics/philosophy work because of Grant Morrison's work on Animal Man or because of my own work on Trinity, but I do remember that I tried to read it back in the 90s, and gave up fairly early on. I tried again last week, and didn't make it any further. I'm no stranger to philosophy or weird scientific theories, but Bohm seems to be reveling in the vague and misunderstood. Just credit the universe to locus genii, why don'tcha?

The Hornblower Companion by C.S. Forester

A gift from my father, this is in part a bunch of maps depicting Hornblower's travels and battles, and in part Forester's reminisces about how the novels came to be. I found the later far more interesting, particularly as he describes how he kept insisting he was done with HH . . . only for something to inspire him to write about him again. Particularly poignant is the end of the book, when he describes his ideas for the next HH novel . . . which he did not finish before dying.

Doc Savage in Fortress of Solitude and The Devil Genghis by Lester Dent

As usual, Doc's enemies (in this case, John Sunlight and assorted flunkies) are more interesting than the nigh-personality-less Doc, but at least he has a hint of emotions in these novels. First, guilt, because he feels personally responsible for the evil the villain is doing (Sunlight, you see, has discovered Doc's vault of superweapons . . . ). Second, because at one point he puts on a music performance for charity, and not only shows stage fright beforehand, but walks away later musing about what he missed out on by being trained from birth to fight evil. Mildly recommended.