Another month, another update.
Last Finished:
A Sky So Big (Ransom Wilcox and Karl Beckstrand, on Kindle) - A Western "romance" in the fading frontier days of Nevada; a wayward son returns to reclaim the family ranch from a villain set on buying/stealing all the land in the area, as a woman seeks her missing relatives who were unwittingly partners with the bad guy. This was an unfinished manuscript by Wilcox, who was born just after the end of the classic "Wild West" era (only in Alberta, IIRC), drawing inspiration from his own life of ranching. It is not, by any remotely modern standard, a romance; there's a guy, and a gal, and they have some adventures (once they stop hating each other over misunderstandings), but nothing resembling love really occurs between them until the very end. It is, however, an old-school, fast-paced Western, with frequent gunfights and untamed swaths of deadly wilderness and all the trimmings. Horse-lovers beware - the equine death toll is very high, to the point where, if the MCs or their companions even look at a horse, it's sure to either be run to death or shot before they're through with it. As a relic of another era, it's not that bad, if a bit over the top at times (not to mention the last-minute Message), but it'll appeal to fans of elder-day Westerns more than me.
Sharcano (Book 1 of the Sharkpocalypse trilogy, Jose Prendes, on Kindle) - A straight-faced homage to B-grade monster/disaster flicks (such as SyFy's infamous Sharknado series), this one features a global apocalypse starring lava sharks. Yes, sharks made of "living" lava. Dealing with this disaster is a host of characters straight from the genre stock bin: the alpha-male reporter whose past womanizing cost him a relationship with his bitter ex-wife and humanizing young daughter; the sexy single scientist whose focus on her career has cost her her personal life, who is guaranteed to respond, despite herself, to the reporter's potent blend of masculinity and vulnerability; the backwoods hicks whose search for Sasquatch lands them right in the middle of trouble as Yellowstone blows its top; the young boy who just wants to save his ailing grandmother; the priest who sees signs of diabolical influence behind the disasters; etc. This one delivers just what you'd expect - a B-movie in a book, with lots of action and forced "human moments" and frequent death and destruction, none of which even tries for logic. The writing's a bit crude and clunky, not just with the potty humor but with pet phrases repeated too many times, not to mention a little repetition in the lava shark attacks. I also got sick of the backwoods comic relief duo, who got way too much page time. Overall, though, it's exactly what it promises to be, not unlike Sharknado.
Currently Reading:
A Fire Upon The Deep (Vernor Vinge, in paperback) - In a galaxy stratified by "zones of thought", from the dense (literally and figuratively) core to the divine fringes, a human expedition unwittingly wakes an ancient malevolence. As the civilized species scramble to figure out just what the threat is and how it can be countered, the sole survivors of the expedition - two children - become marooned on a primitive planet where the vulpine natives are pack-intelligences, single with multiple bodies. So far, it's interesting, though it requires a little commitment to follow, with the mind-bending setup and very alien races. As such, I tend to set it aside for a few days before finding the time to commit to pushing ahead.
Let Them Eat Shrimp (Kennedy Warne, on Nook) - The destruction of global mangrove forests - for real estate, ports, and shrimp farms, among other things - is one of the great unnoticed eco-disasters of the modern age. After that tsunami that wiped out so many people, in part due to the destruction of the mangrove forests that might have buffered the impact (destruction to make way for shrimp farms), I was curious about the things, so I grabbed this during a freebie promotion window. So far, it's interesting, though I'm only one chapter in.