Trajan Decius AR Antoninianus

The 10-year old got this one for twenty bucks today. We're starting to get a pretty good collection.

Legend by Wildwinds.
IMP C M Q TRAIANVS DECIVS AVG, radiate, draped, cuirassed bust right / GENIVS EXERC ILLVRICIANI, Genius standing left with patera & cornucopiae; standard at right. RIC 16c, RSC 49.

Soldier of Rome: The Legionary by James Mace

I like the Romans. Hell, I love the Romans. Who needs Snookie when you've got Elagabalus, an early third century emperor who was killed by his granny in favor of another grandson? Good stuff.

So, I pick up The Legionary, despite my rule about books with terrible covers (free book freeloader here) and leave it in the ebook TBR pile. Now, in the meantime I've started collecting Roman coins, and that spurred me to read this book.

We know what the book is about: Rome waging war in Germania. A third of the way in, the army is moving in to defeat the traitorous Arminius. For a good portion of the first third, we are following our hero, Artorius, as he trains to become a soldier. Due to the fact that there are massive info dumps (both text and dialog), this can drag on for a while. Having said that, there is a lot of information that you need to understand, and a lot of information that you may want to learn, and you will get it from the first section of this book. The information about Roman army structure, training methods, etc., is presented didactically. Without making the book incredibly long, this may have been the best way to present it. To say I was riveted to the page while absorbing it may be overkill, but I'm glad to have learned it.

TWO WEEKS LATER:
Alright, I finished it, and by that I mean I skimmed the last 20% of the book (mainly reading the dialog (maybe I'm back to a screenplay state of mind?)). Here's the rub: I'm not sure what the rub is. It seems like there was a fourth act to the book, when it could have ended naturally after the climax. This is the first book in (to date) a four-book series, so the fourth act could have been the beginning of the second book (and maybe it is).

Here's my rub: I'm not sure how to rate this book. Because I'm a Roman fan, I liked it, but the battle scenes went on, etc. If you like battle scenes, you may love it. I won't give this book a bad rating because I know how difficult it is to write a book. (Mace clearly knows his stuff. Shoot, from his website it looks like he is a Roman re-enactor.) And I may be spoiled by Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles, which are wonderful.

Overall: stop hatin', haters. The history is good (to my limited knowledge) and there's a lot of good information here. At some point I'll pick up the next book in the series.

SIDE NOTE:
I think he could improve the product with a better cover, but, then again, I'm a cover whore. I took a stab at it using Powerpoint, and I don't think it turned out terribly. 

Elagabalus, RIP baby

We picked up one similar to this from a local coin dealer last month, though ours is in a little better condition. We picked up a Phillip the Arab denarius while we were there as well. My ten year old son is learning the fine art of negotiating - he got almost twenty percent off the pair.

Elagabalus had a hard time of it. While he was trying to figure out whether he liked girls or boys, his granny fomented a plot to have him assassinated in favor of another grandson, Severus Alexander. Thems the breaks. Ettu, Granny? More about Elagabalus here.

Legend from Wildwinds.
Elagabalus Denarius. IMP ANTONINVS PIVS AVG, laureate draped bust right / P M TRP IIII COS III P P, Victory flying left holding open wreath, star in field right. RSC 195.

The Zona by Nathan Yocum

I've read a few post-apocalyptic books in the last couple years. Want to be depressed for a week? Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Want to be depressed for two weeks? Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy then watch a movie called The Road. Want to depress your son for life? Name him Cormac.

I recently read The Walk by Lee Goldberg and liked it. One of the better ones was Run by Blake Crouch. I'd review it, but I read it last year and have slept since then (I give it Fo' Stars, Blakester).

In a doom-and-gloom move, I picked up The Zona. It had some good reviews and I picked it up at no cost (free book freeloader here).

The Zona is a thinly veiled screed against Christianity, or at the least organized religion, so if you cannot get past that, then this isn't the book for you. If you can see past it and you like the genre, you should pick it up.

It takes place ~25 years after the western US was decimated by storms and an Old West mentality permeates the region. Religious zealots have most of the control and our hero, Lead, is one of the Church's enforcers. The book tracks Lead's trek from being an enforcer to abandoning the Church.

The book was very well written and a true page-turner. It started out a bit slow from the standpoint that it took a little while to figure out what was going on, but once it got rolling it was hard to put down.

One point about the dialog: a lot of it made me feel like I was aboard the Mayflower. To illustrate how far civilization had slid backwards under fundamentalist rule, Yocum at times uses Pilgrim dialog. "How far doest thee needest to goeth?" I made that up because I'm too lazy to look up an example, but that is a representative sample. After a while I either got used to it or he toned it down.

Good writing, good cover, good formatting, good editing. Great effort, and I would read something else by this author. Bueno, Nathno, Fo' Stars.

Stonewall's rating system here.