So I know rinx is taking a mini Hubski break and I've been posting and commenting a lot less myself at the moment, but I really wanted to start a book thread. I just wrapped up one book and I'm starting up a second that I think is gonna be a lot of fun for me.

The book I finished

I just the other day wrapped up Louis L'Amour's The Iron Marshall. Like most of his books, I very much enjoyed it but I also finished it with mixed feelings. I'll put spoilers on this just out of general courtesy, though I'm pretty certain none of you guys actually care if I spoil a western novel.

In short, it's about a thug from New York who through a series of events finds himself in a small, startup town in the middle of Kansas where he finds himself to become a marshall who must not only stop a feud, but a seemingly inevitable train heist as well. It's a very easy read, not overly convoluted, and the characters are pretty much your standard stereotypical western characters. Familiar but interesting without being over the top. I do have a mild nit-pick about the main character though, Shanaghy, and how he's shaped. When I first picked up this story, I was kind of expecting a fish out of water tale, where his skill set is seemingly no good for the predicaments he finds himself in. However, that doesn't turn out to be the case to any extent, which is a bit disappointing. I did though enjoy the fact that halfway through the book, it turned from an adventure to a mystery and while there was action here and there, there was no big, crazy, stereotypical shootout in the end. It was flawed, not my favorite L'Amour book, but still fun. I probably wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it to anyone though.

The book I just picked up

Over the course of a week, kleinbl00 recommended quite a few books to me, one of them being The Ten Cent Plague. I've only read the first chapter, as I'm super busy at the moment, but it's one hell of a chapter. It talked about the early days of comics and their roots in newspapers trying to appeal to immigrants to becoming what we think of today when we think about comics, floppies. It talks about everything from minorities and class division to high-brow and low-brow culture. It's very well written and if this first chapter is just setting up the background for what's gonna happen and why, I think I'm in for a very, very interesting read.