4. Clowns of Death by Keith T. Breese

I was a huge Oingo Boingo fan in high school (still am, just don't listen to music as much as I used to).  I have had this book sitting on my shelf for decades and was prompted to read it when a friend of mine mentioned how it was actually Danny Elfman's older brother who started the group The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo when they were doing crazy theatre shows in LA.  I am really really not a fan of writing about music and books about bands (the deep disappointment of actually listening to REM after reading Rolling Stone going on and on about how intelligent and groundbreaking their sound was has never really left me), so I sort of surprised myself when I cruised through this book.

The first part is a biography of the band, with information collected from other articles and interviews and the author's own personal knowledge. The rest is basically a very detailed discography with brief reviews of each of the songs.  They style is breezy and definitely from a fan's perspective, but Breese doesn't take himself too seriously.  He just seems to have wanted to get this information written down and shared with the world and it is a very useful reference guide for a fan of the band.

Here's a great Oingo Boingo song for your listening and viewing pleasure:

Makes you think, don't it folks!

3. To the Resurrection Station by Eleanor Arneson

I read in passing that Eleanor Arneson had a really good space opera series but wow is it hard to find her used books anywhere.  I've checked all my haunts on the elite coastal cities I have the great fortune to visit and so far nothing.  I got this one from a guy who was selling all his old paperbacks. 

It's a fun read, but one of those disjointed sci-fi novels that seems to be testing out several concepts rather than really wanting to tell a story.  It's about a young woman who lives on a colony planet, long since disconnected from earth.  She is yanked from her college dorm to go to a remote colonial mansion where she is supposed to marry a high-bred native of the planet.  Then it turns out the robot guardian is actually the original colonist and there is rocket ship in the mansion.  Shit happens and they return to earth which is now a changed world, with uplifted (but kind of simple) rat communities in Manhattan and weirdly unmotivated humans in Brooklyn.  And oh yeah the young woman has some kind of probability distortion effect so that extra weird things happen to her.  The first half of the book, I kept wondering if some editor had just chosen that cover purely arbitrarily to sell the book but that scene does end up actually happening.

As you can see, it goes all over the place.  Some of the places it goes are pretty interesting and cool, but you sort of wonder what it is all in aid of.  I later read that this was her first novel, so I'm okay with that and will keep looking.