I admit that I picked up this book purely because of the title. I was expecting something a little goofy, and that’s what I got, but not in the way I expected. The action takes place in Orario, an area defined mostly by the existence of The Labrynth, what seems to be a cave of who-knows-how-many-levels filled with monsters. Adventurers come to town to slay the monsters and earn both reputation and money. Also in the case of the hero, Bell Cranell, the admiration of […]
Panzer Vor!: Part 2
The second installment of the Girls und Panzer graphic novels picks up where the first left off, mid-contest. Having encountered some difficulty the girls from Ooarai Academy’s begin “Operation More Sneak Around” against St. Gloriana Women’s Academy during their first tankery team practice match. The match ends with a close call defeat for our heroes. The disappointment is of course cut short by the appearance of the St Gloriana captain, Darjeeling whose conversation with Miho and gift of tea (apparently this means that Darjeeling views […]
Jefferey Steingarten Becomes Jeremy Clarkson For A While
I want to start out by saying I remember really liking Jeffrey Steingarten’s first book The Man Who Ate Everything. I was looking forward finally to getting to his second. As with the first book, It Must Have Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything is a collection of Steingarten’s essays on the subject of food, spanning the 90s into the early 200s. Again, as with the first collection, many of the essays in It Must Have Been Something I […]
John Watson’s Ubi Sunt the novel
This story takes place as a series of flashbacks recounted by an ageing John Watson. Many of the characters from the original Sherlock Holmes stories have died, and Watson is putting down one more that had not been told during Holmes’ lifetime. An art dealer comes to Holmes and Watson for help, and the two detectives are drawn into a second mystery when three key witness-suspects are killed, one apparently by Holmes himself. Holmes is arrested and put in prison, but eventually escapes to join […]
The Adventures of Mr Slightly Damp, Goblins, and a Steam Engine
This novel represents the latest installment of Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. It follows the adventures of Moist von Lipwig who, having conquered the postal and banking systems of Ankh Morpork, is now tasked by the Patrician Lord Vetinari with seeing to the implementation of a railroad. Following in his father’s footsteps, Daniel Simnel, the man “wi’ t’ flat cap and sliding rule” who “ has the learning of the sine and cosine”, has built the Iron Girder, the Discworld’s first functional steam locomotive. Daniel […]
A sort-of Scientific Mind Meets 103,000 Magic Books
This is the story of Touma Kamijou who believes that he the worst luck possible. He lives in a world in which a sizable chunk of Tokyo is taken up by “Academy City” a place where people gifted with special psychic abilities come to train their powers. Touma himself is ranked a a Level Zero, meaning the official tests reveal that he has no special ability whatsoever. Except that he actually does posses an ability called “Imagine Breaker” which cancels out any other special ability […]