J's Pages

by Theodore R. Cogswell and Charles A. Spano, Jr.

I had this ancient tome sitting in my "too be read" section of the bookshelf. In this case it's a book I've had since high school. (The cover's missing, so it must be an illicit copy I picked up from the late Page One Bookstore in Roselle.)(In case you don't know, instead of paying to ship back boxes of unsold books, bookstores can rip off the front cover and return those for a refund from the publisher. The bookstore is supposed to discard the rest of the book, but Page One put them in a rack at a sidewalk sale and sold some of them to unsuspecting me.) Years ago I started rereading all my SF paperbacks to see which ones I wanted to keep. I'm down to a handful, and finishing this book brings me one step closer to the end. Unfortunately, I still have too many keepers and need to get more shelf space. But I digress. Spock, Messiah! is one of the earliest Star Trek novels to come out since the demise of that beloved series. In fact, besides the novelization of the series episodes, there's only two other Trek books advertised at the end of this one. Compare that to the back pages of any Star Trek novel on the shelves today. Anyway, the story is fairly straightforward Trek: The Enterprise crew is discreetly surveying a backwater planet using newly devised implants that allow crewmembers to telepathically tap into the brains of the natives. The technology screws up and problems ensue. In this case, Spock, who was hooked up with a religious fanatic, goes nutso and uses his vast intellect and skills to bring about the native's messianic ambitions. He manages to thwart the obvious solutions--beam him off planet, zap him with a phaser, etc.--and in so doing also prevents the ship from escaping an oncoming cosmic storm. So Kirk has a limited time to stop Spock and repair the ship before the storm irradiates the ship and strands the crew on planet. It's a fairly enjoyable tale, although it does show it's age. The crew trusts the technology implicitly and never once questions the ethics of psychic eavesdropping. Two of the main male characters give a female ensign a "friendly pat", with nary a charge of sexual harassment. Also in one scene, when the computer describes this native as "a paranoid" who believes he is chosen by God, it calmly makes a parallel with Mohammed. Not something you'd see in a current Trek novel. Anyway, it was hardly great literature, but I enjoyed the book. Definitely an entertaining bit of waiting room material.  

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Labels: StarTrek, WaitingRoomMaterial

by Lucile McDonald

My final acquisition from the spring library sale is also waiting room material. It's a history of the city of Bellevue, which sits across the Lake from Seattle. It's a complete enough book, but is certainly not a people's history. The Japanese internement of World War Two, for example, gets far less copy that the history of the city's downtown mall, Bellevue Square. Many of the earlier sections are obviously culled from land records and other historical documents, rather than personal recollections. Having attempted to write a suburban history once myself, though, I can appreciate the burden of having to fill in the gaps between anecdotes. Another weakness is that the book was not written for the ages. There are numerous references to an old homestead having stood "where the x building now stands." Of course, now that 20 years have passed since the book's publication, some of those referenced buildings are now history. Still, it was an interesting enough read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the city of Bellevue. For me, however, the best part of the book was the colophon on the back page where it mentioned everyone involved in the production of the book, giving their name and what they did. An odd little touch which ended with the lines: "This was a fun project. We had no special difficulty with the work." Man, I'd love to be able to sign that to my jobs. I wonder if Ye Galleon Press is hiring? 

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Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial

by S. D. Perry

A Star Trek novel featuring some characters from the Deep Space Nine and Next Generation series. I picked up this first volume at the library sale and was not inspired to seek out volume 2. Still, I've read worse waiting room material than this.

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Labels: StarTrek, WaitingRoomMaterial

by William Horton, Lee Taylor, Arthur Ignacio and Nancy L. Hoft

I've been thinking of late about the poor aesthetics of my web sites. Not doing anything about them, mind you. Just thinking. I think I'm being influenced by a lecture on making genealogy pages and my continual browsing of weblogs. So when I saw this tome at the Library sale, I was moved to pick it up. Alas, this book didn't really help. It gives the basics of structuring your site and web pages, but no so much as to how to make them look pretty. It was written circa 1995, back when modem speeds and and other technologies limited one's choices. Even though the book is the same vintage as my computer, I found the references to Mosaic and Lynx quite quaint. Guess there was an internet before Internet Explorer, eh? Anyway, the writing was clear, but not as entertaining as some technical books I've read. The content was somewhat generalized, but they seem to cover all the basics. If it was 1996 and I was designing a web site for my business, I would probably find this to be a good resource. In 2004, however, it's merely waiting room material. The biggest problem with it is that it was written with a companion CD in mind, but that CD never made it to the library sale. Remind me never to write a book with a companion CD. 

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Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial

by John Ferling

For the biography of the second president I chose a book with the same publisher but a different author. The tome was a great read and a great companion piece to George Washington: A Life. Whereas Washington was from Virginia and was involved in the military actions of the Revolutionary War, John Adams hailed from Massachusetts and spent the war years serving first in Congress and then as a diplomat. I found Adams to be a very interesting and influential man. In one sense, I could see a bit of myself in him. Adams had quite an ego and had a tendency to neglect his wife and kids for his career. Also his accomplishments never quite matched his ambitions. Where the similarity ends is that my wife has never let me get away with such neglect and Mr. Adams ended up being a very influential and accomplished man. (Though his achievements lacked the prestige of those attained by General Washington.) Mr. Ferling did a very good job of presenting Adams' life, as well as taking the time to give capsule biographies of those involved in his life. You not only get a biography of John Adams, but also a peek into his generation. Another book to get on my shelf, should I seek to increase my collection of history books.

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Labels: OnMyShelf, PresidentialBioReadingList