The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this series. Cherie Priest, the Queen of American Steampunk, has created this big wonderful world that keeps getting bigger and more wonderful.

In The Inexplicables, Cherie Priests brings us back to walled up, zombie infested, Seattle and this time there’s no weapons of war, and only a few zombies but there’s a new “something” (that which is the Inexplicable) and the main protagonist/anti-hero (which most of Priest’s characters seem to be) Rector, is actually one of the first character’s we met in the first book, Boneshaker. Rector didn’t get much time in the first book and he wasn’t ever heard from again (that I can remember) until now.

The Clockwork Century world, that Priest has created consists of four books (Boneshaker, Dreadnought, Ganymede and The Inexplicables) two short stories Tanglefoot and Reluctance) and a novella (Clementine).

This is a series about exploring what’s possible in the steampunk genre. If you’re a fan of scifi/fantasy and haven’t read any steampunk yet but are curious, this is actually a good series to start with. The stories are excellently written and very accesible despite their scifi/fantasy nature.

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Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a dark confession to make: this is my first Doug Adams book. While all my friends were devouring The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I was going through a strange period of contrarianism. Instead of being influenced by what all my friends were doing, I was doing the opposite of all my friends. I think I wanted to be the first one to discover a book or a band or a fashion trend. If my friends had already discovered it, I was going to find something else. So besides watching the Hitchhikers movie, my life has been ignorantly Douglas Adams free. My loss.

Then recently the BBC decided to turn Dirk Gently into a TV series and it was brilliant. It stared some of our favorite BBC actors and it was expertly written, but like most things BBC that aren’t Doctor Who, it’s life seems to have been cut short. As heartbreaking as it is, I don’t think they’re going to continue the series. They’re loss.

So I walked down to my nearest Waterstones and bought Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (they’re not available in Kindle). There are only two of them, although there was a third Adams started to write as a Dirk Gently novel, but then apparently decided would be better as part of the Hitchhikers “trilogy” and then he died. Our Loss.

The first Dirk Gently novel is, what I imagine all Adams novels are like, hard to classify or explain. It’s a detective novel about time travel, ghosts and aliens. The story often takes a back seat to Adam’s writing and Dirk doesn’t even make a proper appearance in the story until almost 2/3 of the way through the book.

I quickly realized the TV series is only loosely based on the books but both are very enjoyable. If you’re an Adams fan, I probably don’t have to recommend the books to you. If you are a general scifi fan and a fan of Sherlock Holmes then I definitely would recommend Dirk Gently.

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