Karsa Orlong

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury 1972 - Harper Voyager ebook - 145 pages Thoughts: Oh I just love the way he wrote Those are the opening lines from this, one of his lesser known works. It began life as a screenplay for an animated film that never got off the ground (there has since been an animated adaptation, made in 1992 and narrated by Bradbury himself) before he turned it into this novel for kids of all ages. It's the story of eight boys, led by 13 year old Tom Skelton (Skeleton, geddit? ), setting off on Halloween for a bit of trick-or-treating. Only there should be nine of them - the ninth boy, Pipkin (the 'greatest boy who ever lived'!), appears unwell, and tells them he'll meet them near the old haunted house at the edge of town (as you would!). At the house they find the eponymous Halloween tree, full of thousands of jack-o'-lanterns, and there they meet the mysterious, friendly, and yet somehow sinister Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, who proceeds to take them on a magical adventure through time and various cultures to discover the origins of Halloween. Through his gorgeous, poetic prose, Bradbury creates atmosphere with ease, conjuring haunting images of autumns we can all recall from childhood, setting it in a timeless smalltown America full of warmth and love and yet with his knack for creating a hint of shadow, an undercurrent of darkness that infiltrates and pervades the innocent lives of these children. And through this, somehow, he manages to celebrate life by celebrating death, and it touches on themes and emotions that I really didn't expect when I started it. It's one fault, perhaps, is that in its brevity he never takes the time to delineate the characters. Only Tom and Moundshroud really stand out and, although the others all have things to say, they all tend to sound the same. Apart from that it is wonderful. Hypnotic. Magical. It was 99p when I bought the Kindle edition a week or so ago. It's only £1.66 now. Go on, if you've got a Kindle - buy it. Curl up with it this coming Friday night, turn the lights down low, and enjoy a real treat. 9/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk9Wk96yzBY

There is, and I've nearly finished it: The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury ETA: reviewed it here

I can't remember reading any others

2015, not 2014 but still . . .

I don't normally revise my scores. I've done it once this year and, after a day or two, changed my mind and went and put it back to the original score

The Night Boat by Robert R. McCammon 1980 - Open Road Media ebook - 294 pages From Amazon: David Moore had a cushy life in Baltimore. The son of a bank president, he could have had the old man’s job if he’d just waited in line. But Moore isn’t the patient type, and rather than spend his life trapped behind a desk, he decamped for the Caribbean, to pass his days diving beneath the perfect blue sea. One day, diving deeper than usual, he spies a sunken ship. His investigations disrupt an unexploded depth charge, which hurls David to the surface with the sunken ship not far behind. The U-boat, still seaworthy after all these decades, drifts towards the island and gets caught on the reef. A strange knocking echoes from inside the hull, as though something within is still alive. When David opens the long-closed hatch, he’ll learn that some sunken treasure is better left undisturbed. Thoughts: Set on a cruise ship in the late 70s, this is the story of a ship's captain and crew getting involved in romantic adventures on the high seas - oh, wait, that's The Love Boat The Night Boat is a fairly typical story of boy meets girl, falls in love, loses girl in horrific boating accident (it wasn't a shark attack), goes diving one day looking for buried treasure, unearths a German U-boat (that decides to pop to the surface and beach itself in the harbour of an idyllic island), meets another girl - who just happens to be beautiful, of course - whilst the undead crew of said U-boat (zombie Nazis - or are they Nazi zombies? There's a difference you know!!) set about eating everyone on the island. Actually, if this had been an episode of The Love Boat I might actually have watched it I picked this book up because I'd mentioned Robert R. McCammon over in the 'Horror Month' threads and suddenly got a craving to read something else by him as we're fast approaching Halloween. The Night Boat is reasonably short and seemed like a good bet. This was the second novel written he wrote, and his third to be published, and it has all the hallmarks of an author still trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. The setting has great potential but he seemed to fall into a halfway house, not making enough of it. Whilst I was glad that the novel didn't overstay its welcome I did feel he could've done more with the setting in terms of building atmosphere and such. The character's, too, are pretty flat, so that I never really cared about any of them, and there's no humour to speak of. I mean, come on, the whole idea's daft so why not have a bit more fun with it? There's a bit of gore, but nowhere near as over the top as some other horror novels I've read. It's not as bad as I'm making it sound, though. I thought the central premise was quite good fun, and it generally reads pretty well. In the latter stages it starts to feel uncannily like Jaws. Suddenly it was as if the U-boat had stopped being an object and become a thing, a creature in its own right. That was kind of weird, because the Nazi zombies/zombie Nazis were no longer the focus, where I thought they should've been. Earlier on in the book he'd started to sketch in their backgrounds via flashbacks and I felt he could have pursued that angle a little more, giving their fate a more tragic slant, but he abandoned that approach all too quickly. In fact, there are a number of characters he introduced who seemed like they had a part to play but then they were gone before they'd had any impact. We all know that people are going to get eaten in zombie stories, I suppose, but it seemed a shame to underuse them so. Overall I didn't think The Night Boat was as good as some of his other books that I've read. There are a lot of shortcomings. Not a great book but by no means a bad one, just somewhere in between. 6/10

Sounds kind of like the mini reading plans I did last year, which were fun. I may try doing it again - although that might involve looking at the TBR list which I'll no longer have Not at the moment - they're getting as much touring in as they can to fill their pension funds for their retirement I remember the dark days between 1983 and 1988, then 1988 and 1992, then 1992 and 2004 when they didn't tour over here, though Yes, agree with all of that - well, maybe not the demon reviewer bit I do find I have to post my thoughts straight away before moving onto my next read, otherwise I forget what I want to say. I don't write notes or anything, so I have to do it there and then or never. Re the scoring, I do find my scores tend to get skewed as the year goes on - books I read earlier in the year and gave high marks to are suddenly scoring the same as books I've read more recently and preferred. So yeah, it does render it a bit pointless, really. I'll continue with scores till the end of the year and then see how I feel about it.

Good idea! http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/rush-is-talking-about-putting-a-tour-together-for-next-spring-says-alex-lifeson/ Rats, I thought I might get away with it for a bit longer than that!

Good idea! I know what you mean. I've read quite a few doorstoppers this year and I'm tired of them at the moment. Give me shorter books! I was thinking about this a week or two back and have pretty much decided that next year I am going to abandon the statistics I keep in my thread(s). The TBR list is the biggest culprit, as I've found I've spent too much time looking at that, and forcing myself to read books on there that I have lost interest in. I've been trying to rush through books to get them off the TBR list instead of reading what I really want and slowing down to smell the roses (so to speak), and it's started to suck my enjoyment out of reading. So the TBR list is going. I won't be keeping a count of the number of books I read, either, because I've found that I'm constantly trying to beat the total I read the previous year, which again means I am putting pressure on myself and trying to rush through books and am not enjoying them as a result. I'm also thinking that I'll probably stop giving scores as well

Arrow 3x02 & 3x03 The Flash 1x03 The Strain 1x05 Defiance 2x04 All good!

I think the two photos of me that are in there already are more than enough for any board Oh The Time Machine would take you no time at all to read - it's only about 100 pages long You've got that hot-keyed haven't you? Well he asked me and I said 'no'. So then he had the cheek to go and ask Wells's estate and they said 'yes'. Bar stewards I've read five or six of his books and liked them all. Voyage is way out in the lead for me, though. If you're at all interested in the Apollo era then it's well worth a look.

Welcome to Ivy Shame you didn't enjoy Cujo so much. You're wrong, of course, but still a shame

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter 1995 - HarperCollins ebook - 629 pages From Amazon: What if the time machine from H.G. Wells' classic novel of the same name had fallen into government hands? That's the question that led Stephen Baxter to create this modern-day sequel, which combines a basic Wellsian premise with a Baxteresque universe-spanning epic. The Time Traveller, driven by his failure to save Weena from the Morlocks, sets off again for the future. But this time the future has changed, altered by the very tale of the Traveller's previous journey. Thoughts: The Time Ships is the authorised sequel to H G Wells's The Time Machine. Stephen Baxter's novel was published in 1995 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the release of Wells's classic. I was slightly wary of reading it but some glowing reviews succeeded in changing my mind, and I'm happy to say that Baxter did a very good job indeed. It's kind of difficult to review without spoiling the wonderful original for anyone who's yet to read it. This story picks up directly after the events of the original novel and proceeds to take it in some very interesting and exciting directions. Baxter's work is always full of big ideas and this is no different. The Time Ships revolves around the principle of splintering histories and alternate timelines, beginning with the notion that the story of Wells's Time Traveller's original trip through time caused his own history to irrevocably fragment. From there, Baxter's Time Traveller moves forward and backward through time, witnessing the evolutions of Earths that turn out very different from his own. It's a brilliant base on which Baxter builds some terrifying alternate histories. What is also brilliant is how he evokes Wells's writing style. Whilst the original story was told by a writer relating the Time Traveller's stories as told when he returned to 1891 from his fraught journey into the future, here it is the Time Traveller telling his own story, writing it down in the first person, referring to the writer of the original in such a way that he may just as well call him Herbert George (I particularly liked, at one point where the Moon has apparently been colonised by man, the Time Traveller refers to those colonists as Selenites - a neat reference to one of Wells's other novels, The First Men in the Moon). I also liked the Time Traveller's slowly developing friendship with the Morlock, Nebogipfel - and that name is one of the only things I didn't like about the book, as it proved a stumbling block many times at the start of the book until I was happy with the pronunciation. The only other quibble I had with the novel is that it gets a bit long-winded towards the end, a little unnecessarily. Up until the last hundred pages or so I felt Baxter had kept it moving at a decent pace, with short, brisk chapters, but then the ideas become so HUGE that he has to take more time to show how blimmin' clever he is. Overall, though, it's a minor complaint in a book that probably had purists raging but actually turns out to be a hugely enjoyable extension of Wells's seminal work. It's vast in scope, mind-boggling in its ideas, and often thrilling in its execution. Not quite as thrilling as the original, perhaps, or maybe not even Baxter's own Voyage, but as a fan of Wells's classic I really didn't expect to enjoy it half as much as I did. 8/10

I do love his writing style. Looking forward to it!

Been playing Alien: Isolation. In terms of evoking the atmosphere of the first movie it's just about perfect. And it's bloody scary I think this video pretty much sums it up (there's some swearing - most of it bleeped out ).

Went to see Haken and Leprous co-headline last night at The Garage in London. They were both great. These two songs were particularly amazing (although the muppets didn't make an appearance, sadly! ):

Thanks all. Yeah, I do feel I have more energy, generally, Kay so that's a good thing I expect I'll get to that one eventually Got some others to get through first: The Illustrated Man, The Halloween Tree and From the Dust Returned. Good question It's not scary, so no worries there, and it's short so won't take much time to read. Only thing is, it's a bit expensive for such a short book

Oh there you are, I was wondering where you'd got to. Glad to hear you've got it all sorted now I've decided to abandon my statistics next year - they're stopping me from enjoying my reading! The advantage being that I won't be keeping tabs on my TBR pile anymore

Health kick, sort of. I had an NHS health check at the beginning of last year and the only problem they came up with was that my cholesterol level was high. So it was either change my diet and do more exercise, or go on statins. I was keen not to go on medication so I chose the former route, and it seems to have worked, thankfully, as my cholesterol has gone down from 7.8 to 5, and I've dropped from 11.2 stone to 9.7 stone (last time I checked) - although my BMI was okay when I had the health check done, so that's more a bonus than something I was striving for Yes, you must That'll be after you've read The Time Machine, of course

Yeah, I'm such a slacker

The Walking Dead 5x02. Oh look, yet another cast member from The Wire

Thanks! Glad I could help Hang on, you're just trying to point out that it's another science fiction book you read before me, aren't you?