Last God Standing by Michael Boatman

Jehovah the God is retired and incarnates and lives the life of an asthmatic black man aspiring to marry his girlfriend and make it as a stand up comedian.

All deities have agreed not to interfere with mankind but something is up and Lando must dip back into the Godhood biz and try to keep the universe from shattering.

Does he give up his mortality to set things straight or is it already too late?

Then we sell you to a sweatshop in Mexico or Singapore or Waco, or just rent you to those two idiots from John & Kate Plus 8. I guarantee you… in five minutes you’ll regret everything you ever did in your whole life.

Dated references can be problematic. Pluck a reference from pop culture today and catch the zeitgeist the characters are living, or risk appearing corny as hell in a few years. I think we know in what category John & Kate Plus 8 falls.

Broad humor falls flat as often as not. It is played out by a 'bumbling' god and a cast of unsympathetic characters. A shaky foundation to the 'rules' of magic/religion make this an uneven read. Impossible things happen but are then impossible again. The premise is interesting but it can be a chore to pick up the book again after a rough patch.

Eventually the author abandons humor to get to the rest of the story out.

The alternate reality thing was pretty good. Imagining a world where Africa and the Americas are the predominant world culture rather than Europe was well done.

Through them, I plunge into the river of human consciousness. Through them I am absorbed into the flow of All, allowed entry onto the DNA-encoded information superhighway that defines every god who ever lived. I kick down the unlocked doorways of doubt – doubt can’t help me here – and plunge deeper, past what is known to what is hoped, to what is dreamed and dreaded and adored and hated, falling until I reach the primaevel core of human creativity, linked directly to the collective unconscious; the morphogenetic field; the phenomenon that unites humankind through simultaneously generated ideas and shared cultural symbolisms. It is the sea from which consciousness arises and the river through which it flows. It is the uncharted depths of shared metaphor, the River of Souls: the Eshuum

The novel aspires to combine broad humour and some pretty heavy metaphysical concepts. Not quite successful in this but there are some pretty good scenes and the ending does manage to wrap up strange god/supergod premise.

Finished reading December 18, 2016

Barking by Tom Holt

This standalone novel by Tom Holt twists the werewolf-vampire trope into a humorous story about belonging and the magic of chartered accountancy. An old childhood friend inserts himself into the life of our protagonist. Is being a dull junior lawyer doing estate law different from being the junior monster in a werewolf pack?

No, he argued with himself, it’s not the magnificent heightened senses and superpowers and all that stuff. It’s not even the changing into an animal, because that’s great. It’s them: Luke, Pete, the bloody Ferris Gang. I was right to leave them and wrong to come back. If only I can get away from them for good; New Mexico— 

But that wouldn’t be possible, would it? Your wolf is first and foremost a pack animal. He’s part of a group. He belongs. Now, belonging is a wonderful thing, as opposed to being isolated and lonely and nobody in the world giving a damn. But like everything else, it depends. Above all, it depends on who you belong to.

This is a fun and surprising take on werewolves. Comparing and contrasting the pack mentality with being a lawyer, and a dull estate lawyer in particular, in a law firm turns out to be a great source for humor.

Biscuits: he remembered them, vaguely. They belonged to a world where people were people, rather than werewolves, zombies, vampires or unicorns; a place he might once have taken for granted, but never again. The events of the last two days suddenly rushed up around him, like flood water, and he huddled in his chair, his face in his hands, as though his memories were a cloud of buzzing flies.

Holt apposes mundane office life with the fantastic to make the fantastic both mundane and silly. The problems of werewolf life include maintaining pack order, not chewing the furniture, getting drinks in down at the pub, and not snacking on cats.

A quiet room somewhere with no windows, a calculator and a pencil, and that’d be the end of Bowden Allshapes. A few calculations, some straightforward addition, the two bottom lines would balance and that’d be it. Accountancy as a lethal weapon; death by double entry. And then he’d be free.

The central conflict of the book revolves around trying to balance the numbers in a set of books. It is less a werewolf story than it is about identity and finding where you belong... and the magic of accounting. Plus there's a unicorn.

Finished 12/11/2016 8:02 AM

The Geek Alphabet

The Geek Alphabet from geeksaresexy.net: from "away team" to "zork".

The pictures are from Flickr licensed under Creative Commons.

David Forrest - And to my Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game

AND TO MY NEPHEW ALBERT I LEAVE THE ISLAND WHAT I WON OFF FATTY HAGAN IN A POKER GAME... is probably the longest title of a novel I've ever seen. A humorous British novel set in the sixties cold war. An island off the coast of Britain (in the Scillies) is occupied by American and Russian soldiers and they learn to get along and have a good time.

The inheritor of the island, a young British man, suffers the trials of trying to get his girlfriend into the sack while stranded on the island with the soldiers and the girl's father.

Quite funny. Not very in-depth in terms of character. Nor is there much interesting in the way of a plot. Views into the ignorant silliness happening in the rest of the world was quite enjoyable. The fuzzy-headed British PM was especially funny.

Well worth the read.