Daniel's Updates

Daniel is 11% done with Cold Iron Task

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:43:01 -0700

Daniel Shellenbarger is 11% done with Cold Iron Task.

Daniel is currently reading 'Cold Iron Task'

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:42:36 -0700

Daniel is currently reading Cold Iron Task by James J. Butcher

Daniel is on page 21 of 416 of 1637

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:02:27 -0700

Daniel Shellenbarger is on page 21 of 416 of 1637.

Daniel is currently reading '1637: The French Correction (38)'

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:02:11 -0700

Daniel is currently reading 1637: The French Correction (38) by Eric Flint

Daniel added 'MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror'

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 09:52:11 -0700

Daniel gave 3 stars to MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror (MEG, 1) by Steve Alten
bookshelves: horror, monster-story-creature-feature, survival
As a young child (before I learned how to swim), I once slipped off a ledge into deep water in a public pool and while I wouldn't say I almost drowned, I certainly was in over my head and had a bad time of it before managing to bounce and thrash my way back to shallow water, and since then I've had an... uncomfortable relationship with deep water. I wouldn't say I have a phobia of it, but I don't trust it, it's dark and suffocating and... well... there's no way to tell what's in there with you... dispassionately following your smell and sounds through the inky darkness and measuring you up for a meal. Not to mention, have you seen the insane things that live down there? Eugh... (shudders)

Anyway, thanks to all that, I find stories with sea monsters very effective. They combine the horror of being hunted by something that sees humans as nothing more than a food source with the disorientation of an alien environment in which humans are not best suited to survive. A place where so many factors could kill you if you make just the slightest mistake. A place inhabited by creatures which have no fear of man and whose forms and behaviors are utterly alien to our everyday experiences. Nope, definitely don't have thalassophobia, why would you even think that?

Hmmm... I'm getting off topic. My point is that Meg indulges in that fear of the deep, of the alien that shares our world, and it does it well enough to elevate what it is a very b-grade monster story. The other thing that elevates the Meg is that it's a book that cares a lot about its monster. Not like... "oh, you poor wittle sweetie monster, all alone in the world, boo hoo" (a twist I find only slightly more annoying than the "man was the real monster" trope) although there are some characters who do see it that way, but rather in the aspect that the book in general and the main character in particular find the megaladon fascinating (and terrifying) in its sheer lethality and how perfectly suited it is for its native environment. I think that's an essential thing for any good monster story; sometimes you approach it from the mystery angle: what creature could tear through titanium with a single swipe, walks with an eight foot tread, can squeeze through a six inch pipe, leaves a einsteinium-xenon-lanolin goo everywhere it goes, and eats people through osmosis? And the book gradually answer that question creatively. The other angle is approaching it from the side of a known creature, possibly supposedly (uh oh, two adverbs in a row, guess I'm the real monster) extinct and rediscovered or grown to unnatural size, which, due to its exotic qualities and lack of a balanced competitive environment, suddenly finds itself a lone super-apex predator with lots of yummy humans to eat. Either way, a monster story needs to make the monster intriguing, and the Meg succeeds ugh... swimmingly (I'm so sorry) at that.

Story-wise, this one is super straightforward. Guy thinks he saw impossible shark during dive in the Marianas trench, he freaked out and his passengers died. Guy loses his career, gets discharged from the navy, goes a little crazy, then studies marine biology in hopes of understanding what he saw and becomes an expert in Megaladons (basically ancient super-sized great white sharks). Guy gets approached about a job helping a new group doing some work in the Marianas trench and reluctantly goes along. Turns out he was right, monster shark follows them back to the surface, feeding frenzy ensues, various attempts are made to stop/capture the shark concluding with a final showdown in Monterey Bay.

So I felt like the setting worked and the monster worked, so why only 3 of 5 stars? Well, mostly it's the characters. The whole cast seems to be designed to fill a niche with respect to our protagonist: the cheating wife who doesn't believe in him but has no problem using him to make her own reputation, the best friend who's stabbing him in the back, the former navy commander who made him a scapegoat and destroyed his career, the doctor who screwed over his life by putting him in an impossible situation, etc. and at times the book feels more like a revenge fantasy [spoilers removed] Similarly, we have the old friend who always believed in him, the new love interest, the hot-shot who's like a younger version of him, and the well-meaning old rich guy who wants to make the world a better place and wants to help our protagonist get back on the horse (proof this was written in the 90's, if this was written today, he'd totally end up being the real villain, which is one of the many reasons modern writing sucks, too predictable, even compared to 90's schlock). I think you get the picture. Likewise, this book is written a lot like a b-movie. There are sudden time jumps, dramatic events, and cuts which make more sense from the perspective of a screen-writer than from narrative sense. In a perfect world, I'd give it 7/10 stars, but ŷ�� believes in chaos and madness, so I rounded down to 3/5 stars (I guess ŷ�� was the real monster after all... nah, it's definitely the giant man-eating shark).

Daniel added 'This Inevitable Ruin'

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:21:22 -0700

Daniel gave 4 stars to This Inevitable Ruin (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #7) by Matt Dinniman
bookshelves: alien-invasion, comedy, dystopian, horror, modern-fantasy, science-fantasy, science-fiction, survival
Wow, hard to believe we're seven books in (also hard to believe how chonking big these books have gotten). Anyway, our heroes (and antiheroes) have finally made it to the ninth floor of the dungeon: Faction Wars, where the crawlers usually hide between the cracks as the off-world sponsor factions battle it out in their safe little fake war for prestige. This year is different. This year, the AI running the dungeon is out of control. This year, there are more (and stronger) surviving crawlers than ever before. This year the NPC's are waking up, and they're not happy about being recycled and killed over and over for thousands of years. This year, the safeties have been turned off. This year... for the first time in thousands of years and on untold devastated worlds, the hunters are the hunted because Carl and Donut and their friends aren't content to hide and survive, they want to win, they've got a plan, and they've got powerful allies ready to help them make it happen, and the galaxy itself will shake with the repercussions of their actions.

As a continuation of the series, this feels like a satisfying escalation as a lot of long-brewing elements reach fruition and the chaos that reigns in the dungeon begins to reach beyond in dramatic fashion. It also is very much a pivotal book as it feels like we're leaving behind the more intimate party dynamics of the first six books and onto a much more epic scope. This is also the main problem I had with the book: there's too much going on. Dinniman does a fine job of juggling all the various parts, but it's hard to keep all the various pieces in mind (and there are SOOO many pieces being juggled in this book), so as the audience you keep having moments of "oh yeah, there was that problem too," and there's certainly a lot of satisfying moments in this book, but at some point, as the audience you just feel like maybe one or two subplots could've been left out or set aside for later just so the scope of the book was more... manageable. We're a long way from a story about a guy in his boxer shorts and his ex's cat wandering into a bizarro alien survival gameshow with RPG rules to survive from freezing after 90% of Earth's population got simultaneously smushed and just trying to figure out what's going on and how to stay alive. That said, Dinniman still manages to keep things amusing amidst all the craziness and his imagination is truly... disturbed, and impressive, but mostly disturbed.

Daniel is currently reading 'MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror'

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:52:33 -0700

Daniel is currently reading MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten

Daniel commented on Becky's review of Quantum Interstellar Sports League

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:59:34 -0700

New comment on Becky's review of Quantum Interstellar Sports League (Quantum Interstellar Sports League, #1)
by J. Scott Savage

"If they lose, the planet gets turned into a fast food restaurant at which all humans will be slave workers" How very Invader Zim of the aliens

Daniel added 'Northanger Abbey'

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:20:11 -0700

Daniel gave 3 stars to Northanger Abbey (ebook) by Jane Austen
bookshelves: classic, parody, romance
Lyds suggested this to me as a follow-on read to Pride and Prejudice for more of the Comedy of Manners aspect. I have to respectfully disagree; this isn't comedy of manners so much as comedy of tropes. Miss Austen had clearly read a great deal of novels herself and having set out to write one of her own, she was aware of how things are SUPPOSED to go, but she had no desire to play by the rules. For instance, early on, our heroine arrives in Bath with her friends and things go poorly. They don't know anyone, so they have no one to introduce them or to socialize with. So for like 20 pages, our heroine's friend Mrs. Allen laments over and over how much better things would be if they only had a convenient friend with them. At first, I admit I didn't get it, I thought it was a running gag. Then I realized, she's not talking to our heroine or to the audience, she's BEGGING the author to supply a convenient friend so they can get the next stage of the story going. Then when Austen finally DOES invent a convenient friend to get things going again, Austen grudgingly admits that the woman has a tragic backstory and then straight-up refuses to share it with the audience, as she declares it isn't relevant. Similarly, our heroine is desperate for drama, having this idea in her head that once she gets out of her comfortable home town that she must inevitably fall into the sort of dramatic events that are common in her favorite gothic horror/romance novels, but she's surrounded by normal people and the weird things she supposes MUST happen on adventures just don't happen to her (more so, as the book goes on Catherine's good sense goes out the window and she starts jumping to conclusions, making crazy assumptions, and convincing herself that her host is secretly a murderous monster). Even funnier is how Austen loses it when she admits that her characters enjoy reading novels and then excoriates authors whose characters treat reading as a vile hobby (I mean, she pretty much hijacks the chapter for her diatribe). In a roundabout way, what I'm trying to explain is that many of the characters in this book seem to think they're in one kind of novel, but Austen has written them in a completely different sort of story and her narrator character seems stuck between sarcastic amusement and exasperation that her characters don't seem to get it and are dead set on making everything so dramatic. On the one hand, I appreciate the idea, and some of the situational humor is quite funny, but this book is also pretty rough in terms of its narrative flow and the narrative voice is very inconsistent, sometimes acting like a character, sometimes a detached (and snarky) observer, and sometimes basically vanishing from the story. Likewise, the pacing in this book is all over the place, with a nicely paced opening then a slow (and increasingly dreary) middle portion and then a rushed final act where things just sort of happen out of nowhere. The fact is, this is a first novel, and it has all the idiosyncrasies and roughness you'd expect from that fact. That's not a knock on Austen, who clearly improved significantly after this, just the reality of a new author learning their craft.

Daniel wants to read 'Blythin Castle'

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 10:02:43 -0700

Daniel wants to read Blythin Castle by Michael J. Sullivan