Books September 2018

• ServiceNow Developers Handbook - Tim Woodruff
• Knee-Deep in the Dead - Dafydd ab Hugh
• Batman Inferno - Alex Irvine
• Doom 3 - Matthew Costello

It was a pretty thin month for reading this September, but that’s okay. I had fun.

The novelizations for the game Doom were candy-like cheap fun when I read them the first time through, and I digging into Knee-Deep in the Dead took me right back to those days of reading cheap paperbacks while crashed out on a pull-out sofa in my parents’ basement. I clearly remember that it was at a time when I was subsitute teaching in my old high school for $40 a day, mooching off my parents, and trying to pretend that I had not completely wasted five years earning a degree in English Education.

I may not have completely wasted those years, but the fact is that I don’t teach English now, so that says something.

I was unhappy then as you might expect, and reading stuff like Knee-Deep in the Dead took me far, far away from what I was doing, and to be frank I do not care one whit how poor these books are. They’re fun, and they took me into a world that I knew fairly well from playing the games for years.

Doom 3, by Matthew Costello, by the way, is another level. It’s a sharply written book that doesn’t happen to deliver on the frantic fight-for-your-life experience of the earlier novels, but I don’t care. It sets up a sequel that I just added to my list of books to purchase some soon day, and I can’t wait until I get to it.