bibliodragon

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
A fascinating and scary look at the fast food industry and how its effects go beyond just making people fat, from its humble beginnings to agriculture to horror stories of what goes on behind the doors of meat processing plants to its prevailing marketing powers.

Yet despite the horrors in it I still found myself craving a McDonalds. Which I suppose proves the books point.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith
Continues very much in the same vein as the others in this series, the only complaint I have is that two of the plot threads, the rival detective agency and it's overconfident, sexist owner and Mma Makutsi's romantic entanglement are abruptly tied up and dealt with in a way that seems too easy.

The King of the Crags by Stephen Deas
While I found the the Adamantine Palace a slow go until picking up towards the end, it's sequel picks up straight away at where the last book left of and continues on much stronger. Some of the characters are deepened, with Jehal actually showing enough scraps of humanity and suffers enough setbacks to go from irritating ass to full on Magnificent Bastard. Unfortunately the female characters aren't given as much attention, with the one who got the most face time in the first one showing up briefly before getting offed, even though she manages to pull of a moment of pure awesome in that short time, and the main female antagonist feels like falling to the old fantasy sultry evil woman cliche.

But the political twistings are going full tilt enough to be much more interesting this time round.

And with Snow the dragon and her human companion we get a wonderful inversion of the usual happy clappy dragon and rider stories that have cropped up since Pern. Snow is very much a scary, wild animal who happily chomps her way through humans, including a character I was sure was being set up to be her companion's love interest. Yet the development in the relationship between them to a point where she is actively keeping him from harm from her fellow pissed off dragons is subtly done. This is a plot thread that deserves more focus than it gets.