The Stupidest Angel

This is a Christmas story by Michael Moore.

It sees the return of the archangel Raziel (from Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff) along with a number of other characters from other books by the author. The book has the air of a bored author who just wrote something for kicks and giggles. That being the case, it's a fun, light, somewhat r-rated read for the Christmas season.

The Watchers

This is a book by Mark Andrew Olsen. Honestly, I picked it up because I liked the title, figured it would be some sort of 1984ish science fiction book. I was wrong.

The first few chapters were not captivating or anything, but they were ok. After about ten, I realized that Christianity was going to play a large part in this book, and I wondered if the author would be cool about it, in a DaVinci Code kind of way, or not-so-cool about it in a crazy bible thumper kind of way. It soon became evident the latter was the case. Even so, I persevered through 23 chapters and 145 of 411 pages.

But really, this book is lame. If there is an original thought in it, I didn't find it, except maybe the fact that heaven is really just an endless supply of LSD, or so the descriptions have lead me to believe.

So, if you are an east texas baptist, this is the book for you. Otherwise, don't bother.

Sword of Truth

This is a fantasy series by Terry Goodkind.

I've read five or six of these so far, out of the eleven that are published. It's sort of a cross between the Dune series, which I thoroughly bashed a couple years ago, and the Eragon books, which aren't too bad. (Some people may not like that comparison, since the first book of The Sword of Truth came out twelve years before Eragon, but they'll just have to deal with it.) Some scenes and plot devices lack originality. Some other questionable scenes are clearly just there to win points with the intended adolescent male audience.

Other than that, these are engaging books that a reader can lose hours in. I'd recommend it to fans of fantasy.

The Monsters of Templeton

This is a novel by Lauren Groff. I picked it up rather randomly at the library a while back. I was walking through the fiction section, looking for something to read, and noticed that there were two copies of this on the shelf. I figured no one would notice if I borrowed one.

Anyway, it's a rather interesting read, half mystery, half history lesson (though it is fictional history.) It's a pleasant and enjoyable book if you need something to pass away the summer.