Books

Book 614: Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower #5) – Stephen King

In general, I am LOATHE to enjoy a book as slow as this, let alone a 7(+) book series, but this one is good, really good.

I think the biggest issue I have with this book is how quickly it ended. Some of this is of course due to the Amazon Kindle flaw of telling you have 8-10% left in the book when really you have 1-2% and the other 8-9% of those pages are bonus content. But, the rest of it has to do with this having the first true cliffhanger in the series. [This might not be true as I can’t really remember the endings of the others, just they all blend together.]

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Books

Book 612: Bob’s Burgers: Well Done (Bob’s Burgers #3) – Loren Bouchard, Ben Dickerson, Jeff Drake, Rachel Hastings, and Mark Von Der Heide

Similar to the last two (Bob’s Burgers Vol. 1 and Medium Rare), we get to spend more time with the Belcher children off-screen.

We’ve got more musicals from Gene, Erotic Friend Fiction from Tina, and mayhem and mystery from Louise. I really appreciated that with this collection we got a couple of longer stories and a continuation from the previous collection. The authors were always great at pulling in various details from the show and making these comics feel like they’re part of the show.

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Books

Book 598: Bob’s Burgers: Medium Rare (Bob’s Burgers #2) – Adam Beechen, Loren Bouchard, Ben Dickerson, Jeff Drake, Brian Hall, Rachel Hastings, Justin Hook, John McNamee, Mike Olsen, Mark Von Der Heide, and Anneliese Waddington

These really are great palate cleansers! We bought this one when we bought Bob’s Burgers: Volume 1 on our trip to NYC this past January. We got a third one and I ordered the remaining two when we got home, so I’m looking forward to reading the rest. I can definitely see an improvement in the stories and the sections of these issues bound together. They’re tighter, funnier, and more on character than those in Volume 1.

The two biggest changes in these issues (and thus this volume) were Bob and Linda’s. Bob’s got better, he designed food truck ideas, and Linda’s got worse, her’s were now just family photo attempts. Tina and Louise’s sections each had standout pieces, but Gene’s takes the gold in this collection.

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Books

Book 596: Bob’s Burgers: Volume 1 (Bob’s Burgers #1) – Chad Brewster, Jeff Drake, Rachel Hastings, Justin Hook, and Mike Olsen

Tim found the first three when we swung by Midtown Comics in NYC with an hour to kill before seeing Wicked. I’m looking at these as palate cleansers between the other books I’m reading. I don’t give major reviews of these, because there isn’t a lot to review. Each issue, of which there are four or five in each of these collections, in general consists of five parts: Tina’s Erotic Friend Fiction, Bob’s section, Louise’s Unsolved Mysteries and Curious Curiosities, Linda’s section, and Gene Belcher Presents. Linda and Bob’s sections changed (or were left out) between this first collection and the second, so I’m not sure what to call them.

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Books

Book 587: Longbourn – Jo Baker

I can’t believe I’ve had this on my shelf for as long as I have. It’s been almost TWO YEARS since I bought it. TWO YEARS! I’m not sure I would go so far as to say this is THE pinnacle of Jane Austen fan-fiction, but it’s pretty close.

I say this for a couple of reasons the primary being that Baker didn’t deviate too far from Austen’s characters, she stayed true to them and only played with the background characters (they’re less than minor) and filled in their back stories. The secondary reason I say this is because it received reviews in the major publications and was fairly mainstream for Austen fan-fiction/inspired fiction. I mean sure you’ve got the major adaptations like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Clueless, but those are both modern adaptations.

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