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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
John Grillo has commented on (2) products
Warhammer 40000: Rulebook: Sixth Edition: Warhammer 40K RPG
by
Games Workshop
John Grillo
, November 30, 2012
This is the latest edition of the warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniature war game produced by Games Workshop. The book comes in at around 500 pages and many people I know refer to it as 'the brick'. The book itself contains the rules, all of which have a simple summary and a further explanation, the setting and playable races/armies and a little background on each of them. Finally, there are some very nice fold-out pages that are high detail followed by pictures of the models themselves as they are expertly painted and a few battle reports, one even written as a story. This last bit seems just seems superfluous in an already thick tome. I think dropping that could have made it cheaper than $75. $50 for the previous book was bad enough; I only got it when I when a gift card. The game itself is loads of fun and makes many 'bad' army books viable again. The book in question is well done, produced well, but overpriced and just plain heavy--I've had people ask if it was the complete works of Shakespeare or a law book with a silly cover.
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Fall of Damnos
by
Nick Kyme
John Grillo
, November 30, 2012
The verdict: This book sucks. Don’t buy it; use your local library, bum it off a friend or use a website like paperbackswap.com if you absolutely have to have it. Or save your time and just read my review. Spoilers ahead. The Fall of Damnos is the newest Space Marines Battle novel published by Black Library and written by Nick Kyme. The book details the events surrounding Damnos, an event mentioned in both the big rule book [BRB] and Codex: Space Marines. This is one of the few books to use the Necrons as antagonists. I ordered mine in advance since I liked Steve Lyons’ Dead Men Walking and as the date neared, I was excited to hear that the book is rumored to reveal more about the upcoming Necron codex release. I was especially excited to read on various blogs that we would finally have the points of view of the Necrons. So what’s wrong with this book? The simpler question would be what’s right with this book. The story structure is garbage, with too many under-developed plotlines and prolific plot holes and no sense of time as to when things take place. The occasional flashback chapter doesn’t draw the reader in but instead confuses the reader and leaves one with the impression that Kyme became bored with writing the Necron story so he decided to jump over to a random short story. The sentence structure is choppy, often causing me to re-read whole sections or chapters to figure out what just happened. Worst of all, the characters are at best cardboard cutouts, one-dimensional and lacking depth. The parts of the book that were for the Necrons or the average citizen/trooper of Damnos were gutted to make more room for Space Marines, but the Space Marine’s sections were gutted to make more room for the action. Again, the horrible writing can’t be stressed enough: it permeates every facet of this book. Comma splices and poor word choice abound and these are the least of his problems in between unfinished thoughts and sentence fragments. The dialog is either wooden or outright ridiculous, my favorite laughter-inducing quote being on page 318, when after a round of brutal ordinance, one character says “They must have used a weapon on us.” Really? I thought they were using rainbows! Kyme can not seem to make up his mind about the books terminology or point of view, which appears to be “3rd Person Ignorant.” Kyme constantly dithers about how much humans or even the reader knows about the enemy. Kyme continuously switches between everyone knowing every game term for the army, as if lifted from the codex, and nobody knowing anything. It is outright confusing when a squad of marines is called “Immortals” and Kyme either describes a similar Necron or eventually gives up all pretense and uses the term to describe both. And this is just with the Necrons�"similar instances populate the book. Also confusing and annoying is when the book is bisected with a force organization chart of the Space Marines. Why is it in the middle? Why not at the end? The book already reads like a long battle report, so why not place it at the end with unit costs or a small pamphlet about how to stage a similar battle for the table-top game? [Edit: According to 5th edition rules, the bare minimum points to use for the Space Marine side is 2075, without upgrades of any sort.] The complaints of the characters will be brief as they all suffer from the same problems mentioned earlier: either woefully underdeveloped or arrogant, especially in the case of the Space Marines. Though if this is from Kyme’s attitude or from an actual character trait fostered by their environment is unclear. The book suffers, greatly, from the fact that it is a long love-letter from Kyme to the Ultramarines and this becomes readily apparent when in order to make the protagonists look good, the author has to make their enemies worse. Speaking of which, if the enemies have to be made weaker and dumber for the protagonists to look good, then both have been done a disservice by the writer. The pages involving the Necrons start off well enough, but quickly lose steam. I don’t like the depiction of almost being computers in nature. They also seem to be transformed into a horde army built of tissue paper instead of living metal. Like everyone else in the book, they seem to do things for the convenience of the plot. There is something about “wanting to return to fleshtime,” but it doesn’t quite jive with the Necron’s character: If they can manipulate time and space, create living material from inert matter, then why can’t they just fashion brand new bodies and transfer their minds that way? It doesn’t make sense, nor is it ever addressed. Although Nick Kyme seems to go out of his way to break the “Show, don’t tell” rule, there are a few good moments in the book that I believe are worthy of mention. One marine being saved by a group of common miners-turned-soldiers was a nice touch. There are about four pages [of 414] where the Ultramarine Praxor and the venerable Dreadnought Agrippen have an exchange about the nature of honor and Praxor’s contempt towards the people of Damnos for not doing enough to help themselves. A named Necron named “Sahtah” has the only marginal flashback of interest. While the varying Necron lords contempt and racist/class deriding attitude towards the Flayed Ones and Destroyers is neat, but seems odd and slightly out of character, though I’m not sure why. At another point, a character notes just how creepy the silence of the Necrons is at around page 74. This could have been turned into a strong motif for the book: Sound vs. silence. Others would have been light and darkness and life and death. Memory could have been a great nuance to the Necrons; perhaps the lords could have used memory to inflict punishment on each other. It is this that is actually the Damnos’ and Kymes greatest crime: the missed opportunities. How wonderful it would have been to see a comparison of the Dreadnoughts to the Necrons, the true motivation of the few sapient Necrons revealed or the Space Marines getting over their arrogance of “lesser humans.” But in the end, the book cheats. It cheats with its premise, its characters and with its ending. The Necrons are portrayed as a nuisance rather than as a legitimate threat, for if they are that easily defeated, how could they have taken over a planet? The ending is a cheap cop-out: In both the rule book and the codex of Space Marines state that Imperial Forces lose, but the ending is presented as a scene of hope when more marine forces and vehicles make planet-fall. If you want a real book that satisfies, moves and involves the Necrons as a potent threat with a consistent background and better story, pick up “Dead Men Walking” by Steve Lyons.
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