Tag Archives: Half Price Books

The Cestus Deception

A week or so ago, I got caught up in Star Wars excitement despite myself, and snagged a Clone Wars novel at Half-Price Books, the second one I’ve read now. The whole idea is the thing where they can do some guided merchandising, build a bit of storyline between the two movies, and just generally synergize. Still, though, I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. (See also how I’m writing this from a line I’ll be sitting in for the next ten or eleven hours in order to see that one movie at the back half of the two I previously referenced.)

In any case, I finished The Cestus Deception a couple of nights ago, and have now found time to leave general impressions. They are largely the same as the impressions I had of Shatterpoint last year. You’ve got your exciting lightsaber duels, only with Obi-Wan instead of Mace Windu (also a tentacly-headed Jedi named Kit Fisto), an army of Force-sensitive bio-droids being manufactured to kill Jedi, and also lots of clone troopers. They are busily being humanized even as the Jedi are slowly being crushed by the pressures of the War. You have to admire Palpatine’s strategy; he’s put them in this impossible position where if they sit back and do nothing, everyone hates them, but if they step up and do what needs to be done in order to win the war (like force the cessation of Jedi-killing droid manufacture if it can be handled diplomatically, and I think we all know that it cannot), they get their hands dirty and nobody trusts them anymore. Much like Shatterpoint, this is more of the dirty hands storyline. I really hope the movie tonight touches on some of this theme before things start going bad, so that it’s understandable where the popular lack of support came from. If not, well, at least there are lots of people with the talent to make it clear in non-movie places, and I can just take the whole thing as one piece. Frankly, I’d rather be able to rely on the movies for everything, though.

Sahara

The thing about buddy action-adventure flicks is: hard to talk about. Because, we’ve seen it all before. In Sahara‘s case, it’s James Bond (they nearly always are), but if he had retired from the secret service to become a deep-sea diver, and also if he had made friends with some guy at some point in his life.

The rest of it is exactly what you’d expect. Is there a pretty girl in danger because she’s stumbled across a secret that could threaten the fate of the world? Is there a power-mad industrialist willing to protect that secret at any cost? Is there a boss somewhere that wants the world safe, of course, but wishes his stuff would not get destroyed quite so often? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then there are more seminal works that you ought to see instead. If you do, though, this one is pretty good. They found the right balance of drama, comedy, and explosions. Plus, there’s a civil war treasure hunt, just to add a new flavor for the palate.

This Dirk Pitt guy seems alright. If I can figure out what the first book of the series is, I’ll probably pay Half Price Books a visit and attack the stories from multiple angles. The problem being, my to-read shelf is failing to get smaller. You’d think with the moving and packing things up, I’d have a little bit more discretion. Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but I really thought I would. In fact, though: I would not.

I Am Legend

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine recommended a horror author I’d managed to never hear of, Richard Matheson. I found a copy of A Stir of Echoes in my local Half Price Books, and I later read it all in one afternoon, while I was stuck at home watching the floor guy take up all of my downstairs linoleum. I’d seen the movie, and the book was largely the same, but just different enough to keep the mystery in real doubt all the way through. In any case, I enjoyed myself. Part of it was reading a book in one day, something I haven’t done in, well, I sincerely cannot remember how long.

In any case, I finally got to a better stocked HPB and found several more of his books, mostly in Penguin-sized short story collections. The one I’d been looking the most forward too was I Am Legend, the story of the last man alive in a world full of vampires. As it happens, the copy I got is about half that, and about half several more short stories, which I have yet to read.

Good story, though. In addition to Matheson’s drive to find a scientific explanation for every vampire characteristic, he explores themes of isolation in familiar but well-written ways and themes of identity in ways that I hadn’t considered before. What makes a man good? What makes a vampire bad? Is it possible to cross those lines? Is it desirable to?

I know that I just said it was cool to read a book in a day (and I could have done with this one, although I did not), but the one weakness I found was that I was never able to get all the way into the head of the main character. The whole story was from his point of view, and I didn’t really feel like I knew him any better by the end than I did in the first ten pages. He was an excellent means to Matheson’s multiple ends, but I’m not convinced he was more than that. I actually felt more for the three main ancillary characters than I did for Robert Neville or his (expired, at the opening of the story) family.

For now, though, I have all those short stories left to read.