Godzilla

Yes, you read that correctly, this is about the novelization of the recent Godzilla (2014) .  If you like monster movies at all - who remembers watching the original 50's and 60's versions of Them, The Thing, I was a Teenage Werewolf? -  you'll enjoy this movie too. While the production values are much higher, the 2014 movie is a throwback to those movies.  The movie didn't win any awardsbut the cast, including Ken Wantanabe, Elizabeth Olson, and David Strathairnn, is excellent.

If you like a movie or TV show, you'll probably like the novel that goes along with it.  For the "classics" the original books are undoubtedly better but don't discount this movie novelization or others.  Everyone deserves a little bit of relaxing, easy reading from time to time.  When reading a book based upon a movie, TV show or game I enjoy picturing the characters as I have seen them on the screen. With vocabulary like Brobdingnagian and effulgence the author doesn't write down to his audience.  On a side note, the author, Greg Cox, lives relatively near by in Oxford, PA.

A mystery.

Finally a fiction book I can wholeheartedly recommend.  If you're looking for a fun read,
Gretel and the Case of the Missing Frog Prints: A Brothers Grimm Mystery  is it.  This is the first in what is currently a three book series.   The author P.J. Brackston, has written a prequel to this one but it was actually published later.

The Gretel of the title is That Gretel ( a schtick that is repeated in the book.)  She is a grown woman and lives with her brother Hansel ( Hans).  To support the two of them, she has become a detective   In this book, a messenger arrives at her door, hands her a letter requesting her services and dies.  Two drawings by the artist Albrecht Durer have been stolen from the Nuremberg apartment of one of his heirs.  Gretel and Hans make their way to Nuremberg and she begins to work on the case while her brother and his hilarious school friend, their host in the city, take part a sausage festival.   After an appropriate number of twists and turns including the help of some talking mice, our heroine triumphs not only in her case but in her personal life as well.

I enjoyed this book.  After several books that were a chore to finish, this one was a breeze.  The cast of characters was easy to keep straight, a few fantasy elements made it into the story and I learned a bit of art history as well.  I wasn't able to find any evidence that Albrecht Durer actually did any frog prints but I could find his rhinoceros print that is mentioned in the book.  I'm going to keep my eye out for other books in this series.

Five Years in Heaven

Yet another "friend " book.  My best friend mentioned that she was reading Five Years in Heaven: The Unlikely Friendship That Answered Life's Greatest Questions , so I checked it out of the library and read it.  I'm happy for her that she really liked it but it was a slog for me.

I really wanted to like this book - it has a nun in it!, it's written by a fellow Catholic!, and it's about friendship. Rather than disliking the book, perhaps it's better to say I just didn't care for it.  Only discipline got me through this book.

What didn't I like about it you ask?  There are too many holes in the story.  The book is memoir of the author's relationship with an elderly nun he meets running an errand with a friend and how it grew over a 5 year period.  It bothered me that the author was stingy with information about the dates he knew Sister Augustine.  The book's description of when the events take place is shallow.  Oh, there are some dates mentioned, the Sister's year of birth, Christmas, certain weeks before or after Christmas.  It just felt unnecessarily coy to me.  Why not include the years this happened?

The cover of the book mentions answering Life's Greatest Questions.  Well, Sister mentions she wasn't afraid to die as she viewed death as going to her reward.   Love is important.   God is in control.  All of these are true and wonderful but the author's writing style doesn't present the answers in any coherent fashion.   His description of his own education, family life, and faith makes him seem as if he is a well catechised individual.  There is nothing in the book as to why these questions were such issues for him.

Memoirs ARE about the person writing them but this one left a lot of unanswered questions.  Did John ever paint with Sister Augustine?  What effect did the money from the ceramics sales have on the Benedictine convent?  What was the name of his cookbook?

Enough complaining and now for the positives.  I enjoyed getting to know Sister Augustine through the book.   John Schlimm writes in a pleasant conversational style   I'm glad to be returning the book to the library.

Elusive Salvation

Elusive Salvation (Star Trek: The Original Series)  is one of the latest, if not the latest book, in the on-going Star Trek series.  Kirk and Spock are the main characters from the Enterprise, although Drs McCoy and Chapel do make brief appearances. This book is set prior to the events in the Wrath of Khan movie and touches briefly upon the theme of genetic engineering.  The basic plot has a new race coming to Star Fleet / the Federation for help.  Important information was lost on Earth in the mid 19th century.  The new aliens are seeking this information as a way to correct genetic engineering forced upon them.  No trace of this information can be found in the "current " time so Kirk and Spock travel back to the 1980s to find the information   In the past (1985), Kirk and Spock enlist the help of Roberta Lincoln, who was first introduced in the TV series episode "Assignment Earth".  As you can probably guess, the lost information is found and our heroes return to the future.

It's been awhile since I've read a Star Trek novel and it may be a long time before I read another.  I had to make an effort to finish this book.  The cast of characters was large and I was left with the feeling that somehow this was a sequel to another book and, as the reader, I should have known the characters.  Unfortunately, there was nothing in this book to say what that other book might have been. Nor was there any addendum to provide any information on these characters.  I searched for one of  the other characters on a well known Star Trek Wiki but couldn't find him.  While an important story element is time travel,  the narrative jumps around in time, although each chapter is started with the year that the events described occur..