Good Company, Good Books, and a Crappy Connection

Well, my sister came by to visit this weekend. I had ended up taking both Thursday and Friday off due to my ill-health and she was kind enough to run to the store after getting here Friday afternoon and load me up with drugs. NyQuil is my daddy.

She ended up sticking around 'til around 6 Saturday evening. She had never seen the second or third installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy so we watched those in three installments of 2-4 hours each. By the time she left I was feeling mucho better. I went to Cabot to visit D and discuss guns, politics, and housing developments. (Don't ask. We're still in the wishful thinking stages ATM.)

I managed to finish both Animal Farm and MHI over the course of my illness. I would recommend both. Animal Farm would be best described as a cautionary tale about socialist democracies (and possibly governments in general). I'd highly recommend this to those of you who might be dealing with a friend or loved one who's living in a state of denial about the direction that our own government is headed.

MHI was a very fun read and I do recommend it but with one caveat. Please remember that this is author Larry Correia's very first published novel. Unfortunately, the lack of experience shows as "stream of consciousness" writing style in several places. There are several misspellings (in more than one language), run-on sentences, and some sentences that are just down-right constructed poorly. It's obvious that Larry could use the services of a few professional proof-readers. If this is the kind of thing that can distract you from a good story, this might not be the novel for you. However, if you're willing to forgive a few grammatical faux pas in the pursuit of an excellent story arc, then this is something you'll want to read. The story breadth is really astounding for a first-timer (though those of you who've read the Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler thread on THR probably had an inkling of Larry's abilities.) It's almost unfortunate that there have been so very many mainstream vampire/werewolf/zombie blockbuster movies recently as this feels almost like it's trying to use those as a springboard to get more of an audience than it really would otherwise attract. However, as the story progresses, it's obvious that Larry has no intentions of sticking with the same old same old. He manages to use the old horror formulas, throw in a dash of campfire ghost stories, add a generous sprinkling of Lovecraftian lore, and the excellent portrayal of use of a metric ton of the biggest and baddest small arms that you'll never see on the big screen and manages to serve up a novel that is completely new and exciting.

Overall, I'm giving MHI 4 out of 5 smoking .308 casings of approval (with 0.5 deducted for technical writing errors).

Lastly, my internet connection has been flaky for the better part of this last week. It seems like if I go for more than about 3-4 minutes without bringing up a new web page, the ISP drops my connection. I then have to use the repair button on my local area connection icon in the toolbar and everything's fine until I let the connection idle again. I have no idea if this is an ISP issue or if my modem might be flaking out on me (it's about 4 years old now and was getting glitchy before the move anyway). Anyone have any ideas as to what the problem might be?