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Sex Magick Best Of The Equinox Volume III: 3
Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches
How to Be Kinky: A Beginner's Guide to BDSM
This was a good book, but more geared toward people who are looking to be involved in the community of BDSM. I guess I was looking for something geared more toward someone who just wants to play with a single partner. I still got some useful information from the book though. And the pictures were fun.
Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA
I read this as a favor to a friend who gave me the book. Frankly, I found it ridiculous. The artifacts on Mars and the moon I find rather unbelievable,but it's the part where he tries to tie in the Kennedy assassination where he really lost me. He doesn't even attempt to explain why Oswald would be involved in a conspiracy involving alien ruins on the moon, which might have at least upped the entertainment factor. Instead there was an overabundance of shifty math and pseudoscience. The book was too dull to be entertaining and too nonsensical to be taken seriously. I do enjoy seeing the pictures of the moon and Mars, so those were cool.
Horns: A Novel
As much as I tried, I could not keep the knowledge that this is Stephen King's son from coloring my view of this book. Luckily it lived up to the standard. Not scary like most of his dad's stuff, but interesting. I did think the last flashback sequence was badly placed and brought the proceedings to a screeching halt just when they should have reached that inexorable rush to the climax. But still a really good book, and looking forward to seeing the movie with Daniel Radcliffe.
The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
This was one of those memoirs where they try to fill out the pages with random lists and poems, etc. I was a bit surprised that Marilyn Manson would use the same trick as Jenna Jameson to try to make it seem like there was more to his book than there was. I don't think you can take much of the book at face value, either. It felt to me like he was trying to mythologize himself. playing up how little he cares about anyone, and just generally trying a bit too hard to demonstrate how hard core he is. And some parts (the car wreck where 2 people die very dramatically in front of him and he just blithely strolls by comes to mind) feel entirely fabricated just to show how detached he is from the rest of humanity. He keeps insisting that what he does is performance art, but everything he said makes it sound like shock rock to me. In fact, Alice Cooper's stuff always seemed to have a much deeper message than what Marilyn Manson does. All that being said, it was not completely unenjoyable, and it at least broke the pattern that most of these rock star memoirs follow. Also the stuff about Anton Lavey was interesting.
The Best of the Equinox, Sex Magick: Volume III
I am receiving this through the first reads giveaway program.
Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
This was great! I have been a fan for years, but these last couple of books have both been so different and unexpected. I even enjoyed all the shameless name dropping of the artists throughout.
Eddie Van Halen
I don't know why this book needed to exist. I thought it was a biography. But it is a collection of rather average pictures of Eddie Van Halen interspersed with testimonials about what a great guitarist he is. You don't need to convince us, if we didn't think he was good we wouldn't have picked up the book. The pictures were all very average and did not justify a book to collect them.
Jesus the Magician: A Renowned Historian Reveals How Jesus Was Viewed by People of His Time
This can be a bit of a dry read at times. There is a lot of repetition. The author makes several assumptions and runs with them as fact. He also at one point uses an "extended" version of Mark that only he has ever seen evidence of as proof. All that being said, I still enjoyed the book. The author makes a reasonably solid case despite its faults. He also cites many sources that I hadn't seen before. I didn't know there was mention of Jesus in the Talmud. Also some nice quotes from Egyptian magical papyri, although it appears that the author did his own translations here, and with the Talmud and even the Bible. The whole "I discovered a secret version of the book of Mark that no one else has ever seen, but it disappeared" thing makes the author a bit suspect to me, but I will now be looking for other writers who examine this aspect of Jesus' career that don't rely on this author for their arguments to see if the evidence is as good as it is made out to be here.
Ghostbusters
It was o.k., not great. The parts about Peter running for mayor were kind of slow, and the final showdown felt anti-climactic. But it was still fun to read a new Ghostbusters story, they should put out more of these.
Deja Dead
I decided to try this due to the t.v. show, but the book was not my cup of tea. The long descriptions of what she does to the bones and the analysis of the cuts etc. I found tedious. For people who enjoy this kind of book I'm sure it's great, but again it's just not my bag.
Conspiracy: History's Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups
This is a rather standard overview of popular conspiracy theories, quickly reviewed. It is somewhat entertaining and decently written. I was somewhat baffled by the other reviews that claim the author was out to deny all conspiracy theories, as that is not what she does. She admits that several of the theories have merit to them. I suspect that these reviewers were just upset because she cast doubt in their personal favorites. They also complain that not all the facts are presented. However this is pretty ridiculous, as all of these theories have had multiple volumes written about them. There would simply not be enough room in a book of this nature to present every fact and every angle on all of these theories. The resulting book would be several extremely large volumes that only the most die-hard conspiracy enthusiast would be willing to read. This book is obviously meant to just be a quick summary of several of the more popular theories, and is actually one of the more balanced books of this type that I have read.
The Bible Dilemma: Historical contradictions, misquoted statements, failed prophecies and oddities in the Bible
I want to make clear, I am not a Christian so this is not just a knee-jerk reaction to this book. That being said this is poorly written and many of the issues he points out are not issues at all. He will repeat many of the same assertions, reworded to make them seem different. I assume he does this to pad out the book to make it look more substantive. He makes many assertions about history but does not source anything. He quibbles about the way names are spelled. At one point he says that a name that Jesus mentions is not used in the Old Testament, then on the next page has a quote from the Old Testament that uses that name. And the grammar in this is awful. I'm guessing this book did not go through any editing process. I was looking forward to a book that would honestly discuss the Bible story in contrast to documented history, and look at its internal inconsistencies. The author of this was so intent on making the Bible look foolish that he made himself look foolish in the process. Pointing out that one chapter says 3 years and that another says 4 years does not destroy the underpinnings of the whole book. He does touch on some very important points in the book, like the lineage of Jesus, but spends the bulk of his time on such small things as whether Solomon was David's second son or his fourth. There are some interesting things to be found in this book, if you have the patience to skim through all of the non-sense to find them.
Triplanetary: A Tale of Cosmic Adventure (Lensman Series, Book 1)
Kind of old fashioned and corny, but still fun to read. The author had trouble at times making his statements clear, but I kept reminding myself that he didn't have the shared lexicon of sci-fi that we enjoy today to rely on.
My Cross to Bear
I enjoyed this, although I do have a weakness for rock star memoirs. He is pretty candid about some things, though I think there are others that he glossed over. There is a half-hearted attempt to write in his speaking voice that makes some of the sentences a little clunky to read. Over-all it's pretty enjoyable and he doesn't seem to take himself as seriously as most rock stars do.
Foucault's Pendulum
An entertaining book that just took a little too long to get where it was going in my opinion. It also painted a bit of a cartoon portrait of occultists. Although I know that some are just as absurd as the book shows, some seem to be decent, relatively normal people that you wouldn't suspect of being into the occult if they didn't tell you. Of course, occultism and conspiracy theories ended up being more of a backdrop than a central theme, which may be why I was disappointed, being a big conspiracy theory fan.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan
One of my favorite books of all time. I first read this in high school and have re-read it several times. I also recommend it to all of my friends. It is very funny, one of the few books to ever make me laugh out loud. I really enjoyed the way it is written, though I can understand why it is difficult for some people to follow. It also introduced me to discordianism, the Fugs, and Robert Anton Wilson's rather unique views on philosophy and spirituality, which I have to admit heavily influenced my own. And while it did not introduce me to Aleister Crowley, it did peak my curiosity to the point to actually start reading his books.