Review of Tropico 4 From a City Building Standpoint

My Dictator Self

A disclaimer

I love city building games. What I really want is Sim City 5, but that doesn't exist. I was reading about video games and decided to try out Tropico, which has both city building and strategy elements. Since I am much more into city planning than political intrigue and building up armies, and the review reflects that point of view.

In a nutshell

You play as the dictator of a small island in the year 1950 (think Cuba) and can choose to be a benevolent ruler or a cruel tyrant. Your political and economic decisions and layout of your island will either make your people happy or cause them to rebel.

Starting out

You can choose to be modeled on a real dictator, or your own creation. You pick several options which will start you off with different bonuses. For example if you pick that your background is from many generations of police you start off with lower crime, if you went to school in the US you have a higher diplomatic rating with the US and lower with the Soviets.

You get a random island to start with. Since you can't build on strong slopes, if you get a mountainous island it makes it much harder. On my first two play throughs I got mountainous islands, and that really limited my building space. On my third game I got a great island with lots of flat areas to build.

To start you get $10,000 in your treasury, a dictator's palace, a tenement, a garage, a construction office and a trucking company (teamsters). You also get some other random things – I got two corn farms in my most recent game.

You want what?

You will get hints from your adviser, and various characters will request that you do things which will earn you money or support from various factions and countries. Much like Sim City, the advice you get is not always good and can really bankrupt you. For example, by trying to please the nationalists by raising salaries, I lost a lot of money and went to a negative balance in the treasury. I never did please the nationalists either.

Ca-Ching!

You have several different ways of making money. You can export raw materials from farms, mines or fishing. You can refine and export materials by making factories and canning facilities. You can build a tourist dock and attractions for tourists. You make money from building restaurants, pubs and other enterprises.

Every six months a freighter arrives and will take your exports and bring imports if you want any. So at first you want to be ready with cash crops like tobacco and coffee. Later you can make more money by building factories which make exports like cigars and rum.

You can build pubs, restaurants and other businesses for your citizens to patronize.

You can build a tourist dock and build stuff for tourists. I found this was really hit and miss. Some stuff like motels and bars made money right away, and things like the tour company and souvenir stands lost money. The revolving restaurant lost a lot of money! The zoo made tons of money while the casino sat empty. But the revenue from the profitable ventures made up for the losses.

How do I do this, and do I care?

The game didn't feel that intuitive. It's easy to start out making a country, building farms and housing. Once it gets to more complicated though, you have to wonder if parts of the game are supposed to be that way or just hard to figure out.

When you accept a request from a faction or country, it goes to the bottom right of your screen until you complete it. It doesn't seem possible to remove the requests and you can only accept a limited amount of them.

One of the requests is from the Chinese government who asks that you send them a certain amount of goat cheese. No problem! I made several goat ranches. But how to make cheese? On the place where you enhance the ranch there's only a place to make a beef smokehouse. Oops. But I had to have the request on my screen taking up space.

I also had agreed to send oil to another country, and though I was producing oil I couldn't figure out how to get it there. I'm sure there was some way of doing it, but it wasn't intuitive to me and by the time I got to that point I had really lost interest.

If I really was the dictator I would let people park on the street

4 garages needed for an area which is not built up much! 

Traffic is a hard thing to deal with. Tropico has many cars but apparently outlaws street parking. Some buildings have their own garages, but many buildings like apartments and movie theaters need parking but don't have it. This means you will have to build one nearby.

When your downtown area gets built up, you will receive many notices that your garage is overloaded and you need to build another one nearby. You will have to demolish buildings and put garages in their place. I had one stretch in my last game with 5 garages in a row, and still more were needed. This just doesn't fit into the game well.

Sorry folks, I built the hospital backwards.

You cannot move buildings once they are placed, you have to demolish them and re-build. When you are in building mode, you can't zoom in and out or turn. So it's hard to tell if you are building facing the right way. Buildings with their own garages must be built facing a road with their garages connected by a green arrow. In many views it's hard to see this and I ended up having to take down perfectly good buildings just because no one can park there.

I have decreed that we need a bus system on this island. Why do you not listen?

There is no bus service, and no on island transportation other than roads. Bus service would have been a great addition and much more realistic than building a parking garage for every other building. But don't listen to me, I'm just the dictator.

If variety is the spice of life, Tropico is bland

The buildings are all very cool looking. They must have spent some time studying the architecture of Cuba. Unfortunately there is usually only one style of each building, so when you build a pub, it is the same as every other pub on the island. You can choose to make it a nicer pub with a dress code, but it's still the exact same look. There is only one type of market where people can buy food. They should have made several levels – one could be a no frills market, then there could be a nicer middle class one and a fancy tourist market.

There are slight variations in some of the houses – if you build two apartment blocks they will look similar but be different heights. The condos have more variety. But it's really not enough.

There are not enough types of businesses. On the build menu, there is an “entertainment” section with twelve types of businesses ranging from a pub to a giant revolving restaurant. But most of the entertainment is big ticket items like shopping malls and zoos that you can only build once you are running a big profit. You also need a lot of room for the big entertainment.

They should have made a lot of smaller businesses like taco stands and little shops. This is more in line with the economy in countries like the ones that this game is based on. Smaller businesses would be easier to place in the city.

You can beautify the area with a small assortment of trees, statues, gardens and fountains. Watch out though! The decorations can't be demolished, and you can't build over them. I put a bunch of gardens around the palace, and when I wanted to get rid of them to build other things I couldn't. It really messed up my downtown area on one of my games. I don't know if there was a problem with my game or they just didn't think things through. If there was a wider variety of decorations, and you could move them around I would have liked this game better.

The true wealth of a country is people

Your citizens walk and drive around Tropico. You can click on them and see what they are thinking, how happy they are and what they want. You get stats on their job, house, spouse and children, and a brief rundown of activities they have been doing.

Almost all of my people had the same two complaints. They didn't have access to a church when they wanted to pray and there was nowhere on the island to buy luxury goods. Ok, so I thought I had enough religious outlets with two churches and a Cathedral for 200 people. I built more and more churches and another Cathedral. People were still unhappy.

I had to wait a while to build the mall but I thought that would take care of the luxury goods problem. I saved a prime location for the mall and put a parking garage on either side of it. Actually almost no one went to the mall and people still whined about their poor shopping choices. There's no other shopping that you can build. I was annoyed.

Another problem was the food supply. I kept building more farms, but I had a hard time getting enough people to work on them, even after raising wages. I also built markets all over to distribute the food. Every year I would get messages that people had died of starvation. Gee, maybe they should have worked on my farms.

What do you mean you're unhappy?

I tried in all three games to make the citizens happy. I built farms, I built hospitals, I raised wages. I built electric plants and gave my people air conditioning. I gave them free housing. I never got above 54 percent happiness rating. I'm sure that if I devoted a lot of time to this game I could get a higher percent but by that point I was bored and not motivated to do research.

Of course this is a free country.

Every so often you will have elections. You have to try to get people's support by issuing edicts that will please them. You can attract religious supporters by having the Pope show up or by banning contraception. You attract environmentalists by banning pollution, though this pisses off the capitalists. You can make all housing free, but this will take a heavy toll on your treasury. So it's a balancing act.

You can also cheat on the elections or get rid of elections altogether, which really stirs the rebels up.

Bring it on, rebels!

When people are unhappy they will start with peaceful protests and then turn rebel. You have the opportunity to deal with this in various ways, by bribery, having them killed, putting them in prison or branding them a heretic. It's disturbingly satisfying to order protestors killed after trying so hard to please the ingrates. This was the only point I felt emotionally connected with the game at all.

Rebels will attack when their numbers become big enough. In one of my games the rebels attacked a mine, which means about 7 of them stood around and waved their guns while the miners calmly went about their tasks. The army ran on foot all the way across the island to meet them, which took a long time. We have cars and could have been there quickly. It seemed very silly to run across the island.

Your army can also rebel against you and take you down in a coup. This happened in my first game, where I survived the rebel attack but my army took over and I had to pack up and flee to Florida. Game over.

I'm a city planner, not a fighter

For my second and third games I was a much more careful manager and built up a strong and happy army. I managed to make a lot of money with exports and tourism. In my second game I lost a lot of money trying to please various factions though and got bored at around 600 population in the early 1980s. That is where the rebels started to pop up with increasing frequency.

I started another game. I did better financially in my third game but again got bored around 1980.

To some people the best part of the game would be putting down rebels with the secret police, building prisons, proclaiming Martial law. I just wasn't into that. I wanted to build transportation systems not a totalitarian government.

It's more interesting to be poor and hopeful

I usually find these games a lot more fun at the beginning when you are setting everything up. It's exhilarating when you turn the corner and you start making a profit and have extra money to play with. Then you have tons of money and can do just about anything. It becomes monotonous. So I was actually kind of glad that you can lose the game by losing a rebel war or coup and start over.

Crash!

I got to the point where I was ready to quit my third game and uninstall it. I took an aerial photo of the island for this review – and the game crashed. I had noticed there was a lag when taking photos before so I think this must be a weak point of the game.

That was the only crash. The rest of the time the game was as smooth as the flavored rum that was Tropico's most profitable export.

Was it worth it?

At $39.00, not quite. I didn't get nearly as much enjoyment out of this game as I have with other less expensive games. I don't feel ripped off, just kind of meh. If I had to do it again I would wait until the price dropped,or buy Tropico 3. Many reviewers who played both 3 and 4 have said there is not that much difference between the versions and you can buy the version of Tropico 3 with the expansion pack for only $14.99 on Steam.

I would buy an expansion pack for Tropico 4 if it added more types of businesses, transportation and housing options.

In a word: Bland

I never developed an emotional connection with this game. I didn't care if my dictator character got deposed or when people died from starvation. I felt a little annoyed when people were unhappy despite my best efforts, but that was it. The whole game seemed a bit shallow – not a great city builder, not a great strategy game but not terrible either. It was amusing enough for four days and now I'm ready to put it away.

Shattergrave Knights

This was a book I read on Kindle, because it kept popping up on my suggested list.  At first I didn't think I'd like it because it was set in a totalitarian world - those sort of books are usually disturbing.  This one was disturbing in parts - there is a witch hunt for traitors and innocent people get hung.  Overall

Jack and Olive are teenage twins living in a small town.  Early in the book we are given a history lesson in the form of a pageant that Jack is forced to participate in.  Basically there was an evil guy called Maxander who was supported by his Shattergrave Knights and goat-headed creatures called Tautho.  He was defeated by the Protectorate, the current religious totalitarian government.

A very nasty witchfinder is sent by the government to investigate an old woman who may be a witch.  The witchfinder starts convicting people of treasonous activities on flimsy or no evidence, and hanging them in the public square.

Jack and Olive find out they are the descendants of one of the Shattergrave Knights, and are given some magic items, just as the witchfinder decides to investigate them.  They are forced to flee, along with their newly discovered aunt and her friend.  Their destination is a city ruled by a dragon where the Protectorate has no power.

The book then becomes a journey style novel as the four of them head for the dragon's city.   They use ruses and magic to escape their pursuers.  They get into bad situations and escape them in surprising ways.  They pick up some unusual companions who end up helping them.   All of this is very enjoyable.  

After an interlude in the city they must go back and rescue their parents from a mind control prison situation and carry out rebel type activities on the Protectorate.  This is where the book feels a little choppy.  The journey to the city was covered in detail, down to what the characters are feeling and the vegetation of the terrain they are travelling on.  Then all of the sudden for the second journey - bang!  There they are at the destination.  I guess we are just supposed to imagine that a bunch of stuff happened, like the first trip but different and they got there ok.  This was not a major problem with the book though, I just felt like it could have been handled a little smoother.

This is a spoiler free review so I'm not going to talk about what happens next - it's pretty much what you would expect if you read a lot of fantasy novels, done in an entertaining fashion.

I was surprised how much I liked this book.  I hope there will be a sequel or other books set in this world.

A few things that worked well:

Most people have pretty common names in this book.  The main characters are Jack, Olive, Daniel, Prudence and Zanzibar.  Ok, the last one is a little unusual.  But there's no one named A'athurun or Emmyldr or anything like that.  The author doesn't need to constantly remind us that we are in a fantasy world by using made up names.  

I liked the system of magic a lot.  Magic is mostly done by speaking a special language which lets you overwrite reality.  You have to be very careful with pronunciation.  There are magic objects too, such as the magic circlet Jack was given which whispers to him the best way to destruct anything and anyone around him.  Very handy!

I hope there are sequels to this book, I would definitely read them.

Blogs That Cover the Covers - One Half Dozen Great Book Cover Blogs

As you could expect from a visual artist who loves to read, I've always been into book covers.

That's one of the things about eBooks that is kind of a down side - the cover is just this little bitty thumbnail.

That's ok, I can get my fix from a fine selection of book cover blogs.  What a subgenre!

These blogs mostly feature vintage books with comments on the cover and writing about the cover art.  There are other book cover blogs discussing the process of designing book covers which I will cover at a later date.  For now, bring on the (mostly) funny.

In random order

Good Show Sir 

Distracted by floating price tag

This blog features the best of the worst of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels.  Since Sci-Fi Fantasy has some of the weirdest covers, this is a highly amusing blog.  I like the way many of the entries are written as if they are instructions from the art director.  I really have to wonder who thought up some of the stuff on these covers.  Anyone can submit a photo, and the rule is they must be taken "in the wild" with a digital camera.  Most of them look like they were taken in a used book store.  No series or parody books are accepted.

Judge a Book by it's Cover 

Pigs?

This is a funny blog.  I liked how it had books from various time periods and genres, instead of limiting itself to one theme. Anything mockable is fair game.  It featured Mammary Monday and Phallic Friday so that gives you an idea of the type of posts.  Sadly it has not been updated in a while.

Pop Sensation 

This blog features my favorite type of cover - vintage pulp fiction.  Has a good balance of mocking and serious commentary about the book art.  Frequently updated.

When Lurid Was Beautiful

More vintage pulp book covers, because I can never get enough.  Good commentary.

Cover Junkie 

I actually had this Space Cat book as a child and I loved it.  The original didn't say anything about the mushrooms but now it all makes sense.  This blog has a good variety of books of different genres and time periods, with a big dose of snark.  Most of the books are not altered.

Vintage Irish Book Covers

Now for something completely different.  This is a serious blog of artistic book covers from the 20s to the 70s, in a stark graphic style with limited colors.  These were published with much lower budgets than most of the other books on the blogs I've linked to.  They don't have all the fancy colors and printing and rely on artistic talent.  Very inspirational.

Hello Again, I'm Back and I Have Brought My Kindle

I've decided to revive my book blog, in a slightly different direction.

Now I have gotten very into reading books on my Kindle.  I don't even have a Kindle actually.  I have a Kindle Reader on my phone, which came pre-loaded on it.  I didn't intend on using it.  I mostly bought books used from used book stores or thrift stores.  I borrowed books from the library.  I also used a book swap service online.

I like to read science fiction and fantasy novels, which frequently come in series.  So I would buy or borrow the first book in a series, take it home and devour it, and then want to read more.  But I was at home, either not wanting to go out or the library and stores were shut.  Then I realized I had this little device that I carried around with me all the time, a magic book obtaining from home device.  Oh dear.  All the first books I bought on my Kindle were second and third books in sci-fi series!

I loved the fact that I could have books that I carried around with me all the time.  I'm a real estate agent, and that means a lot of waiting for people at properties.  Now I always had something to read.  I also liked the fact that I could read in bed without a light on.  I was hooked.

My little habit started adding up though and  I was spending a lot of money buying books.  Previously the majority of the books I bought were under three dollars.  Many of the books were a dollar.  Books from the library are free, unless you forget to return them.  Now I was buying new series books at 7.99.  I'm a very fast reader and the money was starting to add up - 79.00 for ten books!

I discovered that there were a lot of other Kindle books that were cheaper.  Much cheaper.  Some were even free - as cheap as a library book which would never have fines.  There was page after page of fantasy novels by unknown authors.  But isn't every author an unknown before you have heard of them?  So I jumped right in.  Most of the fiction books I buy are 2.99 or under.  

So I have decided to start writing about books again.  This blog will focus on books that are on the Kindle, but I will also write about other books and media.

Thanks for reading my blog, it is nice to be back.

An Interlude

This is the post between my old and new blogs.



This is in Baldwinsville, NY.  I was here for a concert and was testing out being able to post on Blogger from my mobile phone.  I accidentally posted on this blog instead of my  Syracuse Blog

I re-wrote the post but will leave the photo up.

It is good to be back book blogging, though it's hard to keep up with the writing.  I had remembered this blog as having many more entries than it did.  It seemed like I spent a lot of time on it.

Booking Through Thursday

Trailer-Camp Girl, originally uploaded by Biff Bang Pow.

I never read Trailer Camp Girl but I totally would read it if I had it in front of me.

Here is a new meme I am going to try out. Every Thursday a new book related question is asked on Booking Through Thursday and people answer it.

Sometimes it's nice to have something to get me started writing. Ok, it's always nice.

This weeks question:

Have your book-tastes changed over the years? More fiction? Less? Books that are darker and more serious? Lighter and more frivolous? Challenging? Easy? How-to books over novels? Mysteries over Romance?

Well, yes and no. I still like to read somewhat odd books, especially old books from the turn of the century, from the 50s, textbooks, self help books that solve problems I don't have, YA novels as an adult. Things that cause people to say "Why the hell are you reading that?"

The main difference is that I used to read a lot of mysteries, mostly series mysteries with amateur women detectives. I would get these by the bagful, as my grandmother and aunt would read them and hand them down to me. But after a while the suspension of disbelief got to be too much. That's when I started reading SciFi/Fantasy. Because I figured it was easier to believe that people were riding around on dragons than it was to believe that say, a woman running a catering company in a small town had solved 11 vicious murders where she was smarter than the police.

Ted's Caving Page

Ted's Caving Page This is a journal with photos. Ted and a friend decide to explore a local cave. They want to explore a part of it known as Floyd's Tomb but have to enlarge one of the passages. Then creepy things happen, naturally. I wouldn't say I was scared but it did make me feel uneasy. I have a fear of being trapped in a cave, like wedged in a tight passage where I can't get out. This takes a while to read and is pretty entertaining. After the ending I googled around and found other people discussing the page and their it was pretty much what I thought it was.






The End!

A quick update

Today I got the book James Reynold's Ireland in the mail. It's beautiful, with lots of drawings and paintings. I can't wait to read it.

Other books on my upcoming list are:

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner - a young adult fantasy fiction
Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink

And a November 1952 copy of American Home Magazine.

I'm also watching Hamish MacBeth, a BBC TV series made from a series of novels. I liked the novels a lot, the TV show not so much - at least the first episode.

Spooks Deluxe by Danton Walker

I think that must be my favorite title for a ghost book. It also has the best endpaper:


Aren't those just the cutest little ghosts?

This is the back cover of the book, since the front is text only.

Danton Walker was an old fashioned gossip columnist, man about town and bon vivant. Officially, his beat was Broadway but he did not limit himself.

Danton Walker was also a man who believed in ghosts. That is how his book Spooks Deluxe begins. He proclaims his belief in ghosts and scoffs at those ghost book authors who show doubts.

He met a lot of interesting people in his hob-nobbing nighclub-hopping social whirl, and he asked many of them if they had any ghost stories to share. Many of them did, including Burl Ives, Mae West, Ida Lupino, Walter Pidgeon and a bunch of people I've never heard of that must have been minor celebrities of the 1950s.

I was happy to see James Reynolds, a favorite author/artist of mine mentioned in the book. Apparently he was also a stage designer for the Metropolitan Opera house and tells a tale about a woman who goes to see the opera. Her friend had planned to go but had to cancel at the last minute. So the friend's ticket is sold back to the box office, and a terribly rude woman takes her seat. She calls out rude comments to the singers, makes lots of noise with her program, and worst of all, elbows her poor seatmate in the ribs. When the woman complains at intermission they tell her there was no one in the seat! The ghost is said to be the wife of a former opera director who used to carry on like that when she was alive.

Mae West gives a long description of her interest in spiritualism and relays several ghost stories that happened to her family.

Most of the stories are quite short. Some are sad, some are funny and some are not that interesting. The biggest charm of this book is the glimpse it gives into New York society life in the 1950s. Danton Walker was a very breezy and engaging writer and I got the feeling that he genuinely liked and was interested in the people he wrote about, dead or alive.

Spooks Deluxe was published in the UK as That Ghost I Saw and republished in the US in 1969 as I Believe In Ghosts

Review of Danton Walker's Guide to New York Nightlife on Freebird Books

Mr Two Million Circulation - Danton Walker article in Time Magazine

Final Fling - Danton Walker Obituary in Time Magazine

Link to Danton Walker Books on Amazon.com

Over the River by Sharelle Byars Moranville

This book brings to mind a word that I hate to use. It's one of those words that I aways see in book or movie reviews and gag a little bit and turn away. And I liked this book! Yet when I turn this book over in my head, that is the word that keeps popping out. The word is heartwarming.

This is the story of a little girl with a few mysteries in her family. Her father is gone - still alive but never came back from the war after WW2. She lives with her mother's family, who really hate her dad and don't want her to talk to any of his relatives.

It's not exactly hard to guess that Willa Mae's dad comes back and eventually takes her to live with him. They go to a city and even though she enjoys part of it and likes to help her dad with his business, she misses her family and school.

Mostly I enjoyed the descriptions of rural life in the 40s, cooking big Sunday dinners, deciding whether or not to get hooked up to the new electricity coming their way, decorating the graveyard on memorial day, sewing dresses, going to the general store. The author grew up in the time period and are she writes about and does a great job of conveying the atmosphere.

There are differences in the families, for instance her mother's family are very religious teetotalers and her father's family likes a little homemade wine with their meals. I kept expecting some big pivotal fight about this but none came.

I would recommend this book to the younger end of the young adult reading spectrum and to adults who want a quick enjoyable happy read. I think it would also be a good movie.

Amazon Link:

Over the River

If You Can Talk, you can write

I hate to write! I love thinking about writing, talking about what I'm going to write, and telling people that I am a writer. But actually sitting down and producing anything? I never really did. The hardest thing about writing, really, is starting to write. Sure, I had good ideas and a notebook to keep them in. I had a good writing style, a word processor, and a copy of writer's market. When I took a writing class and was forced to write, other people loved my writing and encouraged me. Still, I did not write.

Just because I was not writing, doesn't mean I stopped reading about it. I love reading how to write books how to write mysteries, how get your work published, how to break into magazine writing. There are thousands of writing books out there. If you spend a lot of time reading them, you won't have time or energy to write. I didn't. One day I read a book about writing that was different. It was the last one I ever read. After that I started writing.

The name of this book is If You Can Talk, You Can Write. It's written by Joel Saltzman.

The main premise is that anyone can write. The important thing is just to keep the words coming out. Even if what you are saying is garbage. If you can't think of anything to write, write something anyway. You could write a description of what your kitchen sink looks like, or what you wore to school in third grade. The act of putting words on paper leads you to what you want to write about.

However, if you leave your writing in that form, it is going to sound like self indulgent garbage. The other half of the equation is edit, edit, edit. But don't edit until you get to the end. If you keep editing as you go (like I used to) it's hard to get anywhere. Write the whole thing through. Then let it sit and go back and edit. Think of the writing as the big picture, and the editing as the little details. Once you get out what you want to say, you can go back and tweak it. If you keep going back and messing around with what you wrote in the last sentence, it's difficult to get any momentum going.

One problem I had with my writing was excessive use of the word "I". Much of my writing is based on my personal experiences. The word does tend to pop up when you are writing about yourself. I would obsess over finding ways to say what I wanted, without using the dreaded word. That made my writing jerky and awkward.

Now I just write, not worrying about making the perfect sentence every time. I say what I want and then edit it later. A lot of my sentences get deleted in the final editing process. Why waste time making each sentence perfect when there's a good chance it won't be in the final version anyway?

If you are a frustrated writer, I recommend getting this book and reading it. It really does make you feel like writing. Also, it's quite entertaining to read. The writer uses a good mix of examples, amusing stories and quizzes to explain why his method works.

Here are a few other things that have helped me write more.

1. Don't tell anyone about what you are writing. I used to love to talk about the book I was working on. The problem was, it was all talk. There was no writing. Telling people what I wanted to write took away my need to write it. So if you want to write, shut up and write!

2. Find a situation where you must produce writing. Try a creative writing class or a writer's group. If I have a deadline to meet, that makes me write. The more I write, the more I get in the habit of writing on a regular basis. Telling myself I'm going to post in my blog every day helps too.

3. Remember that your writing will improve with practice. The more you write, the better you get. This is something I have a hard time remembering, but it's true. I read something I wrote and I swear it sounds like it was written by a precocious eight year old (an an annoying one at that). But I just have to keep on going and editing.

The Giant Shrimp in the Laundry Room and other stories

The Giant Shrimp in the Laundry Room and Other First Person Accounts of the Paranormal

This is not a book, it's just a page of first person accounts sent into Strange Magazine. They are short tales of the unusual, not investigated or anything, just in their raw first person form.

I found them fascinating, and they really stimulated my imagination. I liked the emotional intensity of the giant shrimp story. Wow, creepy.

The Wreath and the Wraith was mysterious and scary. I would like to know much more about both of these accounts. They are both written by elderly women and happened a long time ago when the women were young. It seems like they were too freaked out to investigate further at the time and have not been able to get the experiences out of their heads. I know if either of these things had happened to me I would think of them often. Even if I just dreamed either of these they would haunt my life.

The other story that resonated with me was This One Will Grow on You, the story of a Mojave Desert mushroom that grows on people. I did used to live not far from where this story takes place and I 'm glad I never encountered that mushroom.

The rest of the stories are less remarkable, but still interesting - a man with Pterodactyl wings (sounds like Mothman), mysterious nocturnal bites, Bigfoot in the desert, ghostly wolves and the standard I moved into a house with a ghost story. The whole thing is a quick read.

I'm enjoying reading rest of
strangemag.com, which I guess is the free part of Strange Magazine online.

How I Write

This is the method that seems to be helping me procrastinate less about writing blog posts. I write in bed in my notebook, by hand. I cross out stuff, write little notes in the margins, and sometimes draw things. Then later I sit down at a computer to transcribe what I wrote.

That is, I start to transcribe, and then I find that I actually don't even look at the notes once I get going, I just write it. It usually comes out better than the notes. The first draft is really a rehearsal.

I'm thinking of going to a cafe to write, or just to sit outside somewhere now that the weather is warm.

Writing does get easier when you do it more often and make it a habit, kind of like going to the gym is now a habit for me.

I also joined this group through another blog called Fess Up Friday where you write about what you wrote that week. It's just kind of nice to know there are other writers out there struggling with the same things. So I will see how it goes.

My goal is to write in this blog and in my art blog every day this week.

I've wanted to start a book review blog for a long time. In fact I had written a bunch of book reviews because I didn't want to start out a blog with one measly review and keep adding to it. And you know what? I lost them in a computer incident. So every time I would start thinking about writing a book blog I would think about my lost work and feel mournful, and do something else. So now I have decided to just do it.

Spell Book Of Listen Taylor by Jaclyn Moriarty

I didn't take to this book at first. I stopped reading halfway through the second chapter. It's one of those books where the point of view keeps switching around from person to person and I found it confusing. Plus as it was set at least partially at a school and with teachers and students and it's in England, I thought it was going to be one of those Harry Potter inspired books, you know that don't have much substance beyond Look it's Wizards! In a school! You know with Spells and stuff.

But I was wrong. When I went back and started reading again I realized the book is set in Australia, so I had to switch around the accents in my head as I was reading. Secondly, though it's got spell book in the title, it's not really your average fantasy novel at all. I would say it's just a slight bend in reality. And lots of unlikely and outrageous stuff happens. But I was thinking it was going to be a book about witches and magic, and I was wrong.

No, it's a book about adultery. At least that is one of the major themes running though it. It's also a book about adults. Only one of the major characters is a young adult, Alissa "Listen" Taylor and she does not play a main role. The book centers on two sisters in the Zing family,Marbie and Fancy, and Fancy's daughters second grade teacher. Also on their relationships with men. Oh, and their parents as well. Plus early hot airballoon inventors. Whew! It's a complected book. But I did find it worthwhile to persevere, and soon I was unable to put it down.

I liked the part where Fancy was complaining about her husband, about the little things he does that bother her. I read that part to my husband and naturally he took the husband's side.

The part with Listen is about her starting Junior High, and being ostracized from her group of friends in that cruel random way that kids of that age have. It's an interesting thread of the novel which does weave in well with the rest of the plot. In your average young adult novel this would be the main story and the rest of the book with all the adultery and adult stuff would be going on in the background. A most unusual book this is.

The Zing family secret is one of the other themes of the book. Let me just say that it was not what I thought it was going to be. Not at all! Each Friday night they meet in the garden shed behind Fancy andMarby's parent's house. The secret is revealed to us in tantalizing bits and pieces, until it is all explained near the end of the book. The secret is silly and unlikely, but fascinating. So is the rest of the book, so it fits right in.

After I finished to book I looked it up on the net . I was surprised to find out it was a rewrite of one of the author's earlier books for adults, which was called I Have A Bed Made Of Buttermilk Pancakes. They took out the swears and moved a few things around, and bingo - it's a young adult novel. Huh? Why? It seems like a perfectly good adult novel. But then I found the author's explanation on her own blog. Now I'm curious to read the first book. And also the author's other books I will read because I did like this one very much.

Amazon Links:
Spell Book Of Listen Taylor

I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes

The Game By Diana Wynne Jones

A quick read, this novelette is a retelling of some of Greek myths in a modern setting. Since the book is so short there's no time to develop characters and I never felt I got to know them or really care what happened to them. I also had a hard time with suspension of disbelief. In a book like this I need to really feel for the characters in order to turn of the part of my brain that says "No way!"

The main character is little Hayley, a staple of young adult and fantasy fiction. She's the parent-less child sent to live with strict relatives. And she doesn't know what happened to her parents either. Her grandmother is a humorless and unpleasant woman obsessed with rules. Her grandfather can be OK, as long as his wife isn't around. But a lot of the time he's off visiting his other family.

The book starts off with Hayley shipped off to her aunts' house in disgrace. But she has no idea what she's done. Gee, do you think it might have been the time you entered the Mythosphere, that mysterious realm that you aren't allowed to know about? Duh. And what kind of a punishment is it to be sent off to a house full of cheerful happy cousins who love to play games?

They play hide and go seek, but their favorite game is The Game, you know, like the title of the book. It's where they go to the Mythosphere, that dreamlike land where characters from myths, fairy tales and astrology hang out. They have to bring back objects like Cinderella's glass slipper or the sword in the stone and the first one back with their prize wins. This is forbidden though, and when their mean uncle catches wind of it he's furious, and Hayley has to be brought to her other Aunt's house in Scotland to be hidden, where she was apparently supposed to have gone two days ago. Right, like the Mean Uncle is not going to look there.

After this they spend time in and out of the Mythosphere, meeting mythological characters and avoiding the mean uncle and being all quasi-mythological and stuff. The whole Mythosphere thing is murky, like I never really understood how they get there or what the point of the game was and when one of the cousins is in danger of being ripped apart by a mob of drunken slatterns I didn't care a bit.

This book would have been a lot better if it was longer and had character development. But Diana Wynne Jones is a skillful enough storyteller that I still enjoyed this quick little tale.

Amazon Link:

The Game (Firebird)

Size 12 is Not Fat by Meg Cabot

Size 12 is Not Fat by Meg Cabot

Recently at the library a book caught my eye. "Size 12 is Not Fat" was boldly proclaimed on the cover. When I picked it up, I thought it was going to be a non fiction book, dealing with the way many people view any woman over a size 6 or so as fat. No, it's actually fiction. Hmm, I looked at where I took the book from and it's a section where they have "Chick Lit" books. Those are fiction books aimed at women, not formula romance novels but they have a romantic component, and usually feature women in their 20s and 30s. I haven't read many of them, but the ones that I have read all take place in New York City. They are not really my thing, but I'll read them occasionally and I decided to read this one because it deals with weight issues.

It turns out this is a chick lit mystery. I used to read a lot of mysteries, but rarely do any longer because they make my brain explode with how unreal they are. I just can't suspend disbelief enough to enjoy them. The characters get themselves into situations where they would be dead, or arrested. They do such stupid things that are totally outside the realm of any sort of reality that I just can't stand to read them. That's why I started reading science fiction and fantasy novels, I figure it's easier to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story when you are on a fictional world. This book only had a few moments where I had to put it down because it just got too silly, but unlike many similar books, it had enough redeeming qualities that I picked it up again.

The protagonist/detective is Heather Wells, a former teen pop singer whose mother has stolen all her money and run off to Argentina. She's broken up with her boy band pop star boyfriend after catching him cheating, and was dropped by her record company (run by her ex-boyfriend's father) and is the assistant director for a college dorm for a fictional New York college. She lives with her ex-boyfriend's estranged brother, who is an actual private detective, getting free rent in exchange for bookkeeping.

Heather has also put on a few pounds, up to a size 12. She apparently put on weight the same way I did, likes to eat and doesn't exercise much. Through a lot of the book, it talks about what she's eating and how much she's enjoying it and that she feels it's worth it. It's also got other people's response to her "fatness" and her feelings about her boss, a fitness and dieting fanatic who is beautiful, slender and well dressed.

It's written in first person in a casual, engaging style that is easy to follow. Meg Cabot has written a lot of books, including the popular Princess Diaries series for young adults.

The mystery aspects start very early in the book, when a young woman dies by falling in an elevator shaft. Everyone but Heather thinks that she was elevator surfing, kind of a daredevil game. But Heather says that girls don't elevator surf, and especially not the victim, a very straight, conservative young woman. When the next woman dies, same thing, and Heather discovers a connection between them and starts to investigate, all the while in typical amateur sleuth mystery fashion, having her private detective landlord/roommate and the police telling her to stay the hell out of it.
Did I mention that she's in love with the private detective? Well yeah, she is. She fantasizes about him a lot. I didn't like him that much, he seemed rather cold and sort of boring. Then again, the kind of guys who get written about in chick lit novels really don't float my boat.

I had the murderer narrowed down to two people about a third of the way into the book. Before long, I was pretty sure who it was, and it did turn out to be that person.

At the end of the book is a section where the author talks about her inspiration for writing the book, and then there's the first chapter of the next book.

I certainly wouldn't call this a must read, but I did enjoy it enough to read the next book in the series Size 14 is Not Fat Either. I'll review that one when I'm done with it.

Amazon.com link:
Size 12 Is Not Fat: A Heather Wells Mystery

Ghosts In American Houses by James Reynolds

The title of this book is kind of a misnomer. It's more of a book of folklore and stories. I read a lot of ghost books, and they usually talk a lot about the ghost and haunting, and people who have seen the ghost. Then they give you some back story on the ghost, or speculate about who the ghost could be. But James Reynolds starts by telling a long and detailed fascinating story. You forget you are reading a ghost story until the last paragraph when he briefly describes how people will see a lady in Victorian dress walking down the street with her head held high and not realize that they have seen a ghost.
Another thing is not all of these ghosts are in houses. This book got it's title because of his earlier books Ghosts in Irish Houses and Ghosts in English Houses. The stories in those books are pretty much all set in grand old houses heavy with the weight of history. They are the kind of places you expect to find a ghost. Well of course castle so and so has a ghost, it's 1200 years old! But there's no buildings with near that much history here. It seems like the houses are emphasized more than they should be. But James Reynolds was a very atmospheric writer and did a wonderful job with describing the houses so I don't wonder that he chose to focus on them.

American ghosts are scrappier, and not as obsessed with haunting ancient buildings, though there are mansions in the book. But the stories are just as likely to take place in Pennsylvania barns, shacks in the Ozarks, the Streets of San Francsico, the hills of New York State and alongside moving trains through the Great Plains.

In fact James Reynolds was also a painter, and I know in his other books and in earlier editions of this book there are both black and white and color illustrations by him. There were none in this book, not even the cover. That was disappointing . I'm going to keep my eye out for an illustrated edition of this book. This summer I will be going back to California to collect a lot of my belongings, including a shed full of books in the Mojave desert. I have his Irish and English ghost books there and I am really looking forward to reading them again.

I read a lot of ghost stories and a fair amount of folklore, and I'm impressed that all but one of the stories in this book are new to me.

I would like to know more about the life of James Reynolds, his writing and his art. I have not been able to find much on the internet. I have not even been able to find a bibliography.If anyone has information please let me know. I would especially love to own some of his art.

I did find in my searches a review of this book in Time Magazine, which is archived on the web. This book cost twelve dollars when it came out in 1955 - a fortune!

Time Magazine Review of Ghosts in American Houses

I would like to find a complete bibliography. These are the ones I could find on the web:

Ghosts in Irish Houses
More Ghosts in Irish Houses
Ghosts in English Houses
Ghosts in American Houses
James Reynolds' Ireland

The edition of Ghosts in American houses that I have has a horrid cover. I can't believe they didn't use one of his paintings. The cover is a sort of lurid looking ghostly bride descending a staircase. I was going to scan it so I could post it here but I can't find it. I imagine it was stolen by a ghost. Though I don't actually believe in ghosts. I probably read more "non-fiction" ghost books than any most other non-believers!

On edit - I now have another version of this book and have scanned the cover, which has one of James Reynold's paintings on it. I also got Ghosts in Irish Houses and will be reviewing that one soon.

I just ordered James Reynolds' Ireland from an online used bookseller and am looking forward to reading that.

Faerie Wars by Herbie Brennan

This is a young adult book which alternates chapters between our world and the world of Faerie. Until of course, the worlds meet up.

The main characters are Harry from our world and and Pyrgus from the other world of Faerie.

Harry lives in modern day England, and his family is having problems pretty typical of the type you find in YA novels, but with a kind of a surprising twist. He finds solace with his friend Charlie (a girl, but not a girl friend) and by spending time working for an old man, cleaning his house. The old man is quite a character who believes in all sorts of conspiracy theories and has a house full of junk.

When we first meet blank he is being pursued through the world of faerie by some thugs and the book becomes action packed quickly.

The world of faerie has a cool combination of science, industry and magic. It has a steampunk feel to it. There are portals to get between Faerie and earth and the description of how these were discovered and then improved upon was really imaginative. I loved the orange dwarf with the poisonous bite who has a slot to put an information card in his head. Where can I get one of those?

There is more sickening violence in this book than in most YA books I read. The demon prince gives quite a description of what he is going to do to one of the heroes of the book. I did skip a half page or so when I was at the part with the glue factory and I figured out what was going on.

The glue factory owners were fun, in a very bad way. With Brimstone, the main glue factory owner, it almost seems a little stereotypical bad rich man (oh noes, he enjoys evicting widows) but I did like what happened to him.

Blue, Pyrgus' sister is a more interesting character than he is. Their father seems kind of bland and unbelievable. The part where Blue has uncovered evidence of a plot to kill Pyrgus and her father insists on just throwing away the evidence just doesn't ring true at all. His son has been poisoned and diverted to another world and he is concerned that his daughter has stolen a journal from someone who had been trying to kill his son and sends his daughter to bed without the book, which will be returned to it's rightful owner? Yeah sure.

What I didn't like - light faeries vs the dark faeries and the dark ones are evil. Could there not be some other way to differentiate between types of mythical creatures that are good and evil besides dark and light? I guess maybe it's just the classic way but it seems so ham handed.

I would have liked to have seen Charlie, Harry's friend, either have more of a presence in the book or just be taken out. The part with her in it almost seems like a false start.

However, there is a whole series of these books and it's entirely possible that she will turn up as a stronger character in the next one.

I did enjoy this book and will look forward to reading at least the next in the series.

Amazon Link
Faerie Wars

Hey, I thought you said you weren't going to start any more blogs!

Uh, yeah. Anyway, this is a blog of books I read and other media I watch or listen to. It will be mostly books because I am a big reader. I go through periods where I read 20 or 30 books a week.

I don't have cable or even a TV so I don't watch many TV shows unless I rent them on DVD.

I also don't really like going to movie theaters. I'll go to small theaters but the last time I went to a big commercial multiplex type theater I was just disgusted by the amount of advertising foisted on me without my consent. I'm not paying nine bucks to be a captive audience for ads.

But it's not like I'm only into good books, you know the important thoughtful ones that adults are supposed to read. No. Far from it. I will read all sorts of stuff, from children's books, mysteries, books from the early 1900s, old diet books, advice books, old romance novels, self published vanity press books, young adult novels and a lot of nonfiction, especially books about the paranormal like ghosts and cryptozoology.

I do sometimes read high quality books for adults. But honestly mostly I read for entertainment.