"Marvel Superheroes: Secret Wars" by Jim Shooter

I went to Borders (the large-format English bookstore chain) last week while Troë was at soccer to have a look around. I have several books sitting unread on my bookshelf at home still, so I was there more to browse then buy. With that in mind I started flipping through books in the graphic novel section.

One of my favorite things about Borders is how great the graphic novel section is. The Bournemouth Borders store has more graphic novels than most comic book shops I've been too and they have the books (roughly) arranged in alphabetical order. It's not the most extensive selection, but it's damn better than anything Chapters has ever done.

I was familiar with the Secret Wars title mainly because I had discovered many years ago that Secret Wars Issue 8 is the comic in which Spiderman first discovers the alien black costume. (This is the costume that directly leads to the creation of the Spiderman villian Venom.) Needless to say, I was instantly intrigued but I put off reading it because of the difficulties involved in collecting 12 older comic issues, and because I have been burnt before from buying comics merely based solely upon a random occurance of ancient character history. Also by the time I started reading comics Venom and Carnage were already established characters and the black costume was long forgotten so this wasn't a story that I felt I had to read.

The other thing I really like about Borders is the comfortable seats scattered through-out the store for customers to sit in and read. Chapters used to provide this service, but stopped doing it years ago. I was pleased to discover an empty seat to drp myself in and promptly became one of those customers I hated when I worked at Chapters.

The premise of the story isn't that uncommon to the comic genre (dozens of big name characters - good and evil - are mysteriously spirted away to a foreign world and forced to battle each other) but this is one of the best approaches I've read. In the forward Jim Shooter explains that what he set out to do with this story is to dramatically change each of the characters involved - and he skillfully does just that. Albeit many of these changes were short lived in the Marvel Universe, but most were character tweaks I had heard of.

The story telling tries to balance the dozens of major characters evenly and dosen't do a great job of this: I think both Spiderman and the X-Men get short shafted; but when Dr. Doom easily steals the spotlight in many of the isue I found it didn't bother me. Doom was brilliant. Don't get me wrong - I've never disliked the character of Dr. Doom - but he was just so amazing in this story.

Also many of the characters from Marvel's inital HeroClix line - Infinity Challenge - that I had never heard of were prominent chacters in the story line. (Yes, I'm a geek, get over it.)

This is a great read for anyone who enjoys the major characters of the Marvel Universe.

"Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction" by Timothy Gowers

http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780192853615

This book was a good read. It was much more complex and technically complicated that the other VSI titles I've read - but don't let that deter you. There was nothing in this book as difficult as anything you'd tackle at a university level. In fact, an explanation of calculus isn't even attempted. This is a book about math, though, so the author assumes - understandably - that the reader has at least a passing interest in the subject matter.

The book was how the presentation continually hints at much more complex continuations of many of the concepts. Math is a subject I personally hold dear, but I am far from an expert in any of the fields.

Something I quite liked was the author's ability to mix the ancient roots of Math, with modern, cutting edge, discoveries. Today's technology and society makes it much easier for scholars to get access to the all-important mathematical foundations of those who came before.