When I’m reading multiple books simultaneously, it’s usually because I’ve relegated one to my “before bed” pile. Absolution Gap, the conclusion of Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space series, was one of those. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the longer books I’ve attacked in a couple months, and half an hour per night hardly pays quick dividends. Even worse, Reynolds’ writing style is copious and unrelenting; I felt every single one of those pages.

I took a break from the Honorverse for a while and dove into John Ringo again with the third book in his Posleen War series, When the Devil Dances. All in all, it was much different from the previous entry, and an enjoyable one, at that. Part of the issue I had with Gust Front came primarily from the author’s propensity for excessively detailed military maneuvers. Given a map of the United States and an Axes and Allies game centered on US territory, one could easily plot out each action and counteraction for hours.

Lord, what have they done to poor Freddy Krueger? A reboot of this particular franchise had roughly unlimited potential. No more would they need to rely on self-referential humor and sight gags. It could finally be a gritty and disturbing jaunt into the human psyche, or at least a slasher leagues more engaging than Saw and its ilk. The choice of Jackie Earle Haley couldn’t have been more perfect for the role.

Read: part 1, and part 2. " ‘Fight the good fight,’ he said," mumbled Ben, almost incoherently, to nobody in particular. The silence became a living thing. Everyone knew about the Chicago explosion. By then, everyone in the bar stared at Ben in complete shock, not even breathing to disrupt his narrative. “I dunno if the man knew his plan or not, but those wasn’t water pumps we blew. That bullshit about the river flowin’ backwards is fer the tourists,” Ben said unevenly, “an’ gullible bastards like me.

I read a lot, but even good authors get caught in the deluge of published novels, and nobody can really keep up, so I depend on recommendations. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi was one of those books I’ve never heard of, yet nonetheless maintained critical acclaim in the SciFi community. Much like The Forever War, which concentrates almost primarily on how war would be shaped by relativistic effects, we’re given an intriguing and rarely explored theme to ponder.