Ryan
A look at an important period of Canadian history, one that sadly gets often overlooked (I know my own scholastic looks at Canadian history jumped from “Voyageurs” to “Confederation” and then skipped right ahead to “Vimy Ridge” as if nothing worthwhile had happened in between).
As much as 1867 was the year Canada became a country, the era that Laurier oversaw is equally important to our concept of nationhood, so it was very interesting to see that presented from a source not that far removed from the material.
To start, a confession: I only discovered Murdoch through the television show, and am now starting in on the books (of which I mistakenly thought this was the first). As such, that's my frame of reference going into this.
The book was very different from the show I've grown to love - some characters are missing, others are very different, and the tonality of the entire story is completely different. Enough that it feels like a completely disconnected story from the Murdoch Mysteries television show.
And yet, I loved it in its own quirky way. The depiction of 1890s Toronto is gritty, without becoming anachronistically noir, and Jennings puts an amazing amount of detail into understanding the social structure and mentality of characters of the time period, without making it obvious or pointing out the differences.
The mystery itself - why a member of the Toronto constabulary would commit suicide during his shift, in an abandoned house - it's well told, and actually is a ‘mystery', rather than a thriller that you're able to see coming from a mile away, which is nice.
Once upon a time, there was a small town in the south of England. This town, Pagford, was filled with nasty, petty people who hid their vices and small-minded hatreds behind a mask of stereotypical British politeness. Then, a beloved member of the town dies, and the brittle facade that all these people were hiding behind slowly falls apart. I suppose we're meant to feel sympathy for them and their quiet tragedies, but the book is so fatalistic and depressing that you don't really empathize or identify with any of them.
And that's about it. After having read it, I'm not quite sure why Rowling wrote it, or what point she was trying to get across other than that people are often cruel, vindictive, and selfish, but I respect that she did.
I've been using the adjective “fun” to describe books a lot lately, and see no reason to stop that here. Bypass Gemini is a space-faring romp about a down on his luck courier who races across the galaxy making deliveries and getting in trouble. Imagine Han Solo with a dash of Arthur Dent without any of that dreary “Jedi” or “Empire” business holding him down.
A classic tale of finding yourself and of living life to the fullest - which, in Hemingway's eyes, seemingly consists of bumming around Europe and getting drunk a lot. This will surprise no one who's familiar with Hemingway's life.
That being said, it's a lot more readable than a lot of the “classics” of literature from the same era, and does a good job of capturing the zeitgeist of postwar Europe, I think.
This was a very...curious story that hinges its sense of dread and drama on the reader knowing who Darkseid is and why he would pose a huge threat to Earth, but also assumes the reader is ignorant enough of the JL that they'd be happy with the first half of the book be nothing more than an introduction of the heroes, their powers, and relationships. Ultimately it didn't really do anything for me other than remind me of how awesome Rock of Ages was.
I was expecting this to be yet another “kids with special abilities at school” story, in the vein of X-Men and Harry Potter. And yes, it was a very good example of that, full of the awkwardness, nervousness, and fun that high school can be, but it also had a deeper level of intrigue and mystery that will keep me coming back for more.
Apparently the fights between superheroes and supervillians are a sham, prearranged WWE style and fought for the benefit of an audience. But we're not told the how, or why, of this, and I think it's going to be fascinating when we eventually find out.
Revenge of the Vinyl Cafe is one of those books that holds no real ‘surprises' in it - if you're familiar at all with Stuart McLean's writing, either read on CBC Radio or in the previous VC books, you know what you're going to get: A series of poignant and sometimes hilarious stories about Dave, a record store owner, his wife Morley, and their two kids.
The lack of surprise doesn't detract at all from McLean's gift as a storyteller. He's capable of taking these tiny moments that seem completely innocuous and turning them into grand adventures, and can bring an audience to tears or laughs over the course of a simple paragraph.
If there's one set theme to these stories I would say it's about how important stories are to the human experience. Sometimes this is made explicit, like in the story with Dave trying to read his library's only copy of Goldfinger, but sometimes it's more subtle.
This one had a lot going for it - it's one of the first steampunk novels, and combines Arthurian legend, Atlantis, and the novels of HG Wells. As one of my favourite podasts says during the sponsor breaks, “I like ALL of those words!”
It might be that I'm so fond of all of those things that I didn't enjoy this as much as I might otherwise have - it's a fairly well-told story, but it felt like all of the different elements of it were just being thrown together for the sake of throwing them together, rather than having an organic reason behind it.
On paper, I should have liked this. I mean, I like the idea of planeswalker cards in Magic, and I like the fact that Wizards is trying to make the lore aspect of things more front and centre to the game. I even liked some of the characters - Tezzeret is an interesting character, mafia boss as much as he is wizard, and I spent my youth listening to far too many Cure songs to not like someone like Liliana.
Still, I didn't like this. The protagonist, Jace, alternated between being unlikable and clueless, and really didn't do much of anything that was at all interesting over the course of the book. Add to that a setting that was presented fairly flatly and there isn't much to recommend to people with this book.
I was of two minds when it came to reading this: on one hand, the only other M:tG book I've read was really, actively terrible. On other other hand, though, Alara was the current set when I started getting interested in Magic again, and I really liked it as a setting.
Alara Unbroken felt a bit disjointed at first, but that made sense given the book's setting, which is a plane of existence that's been fractured into five “shards”, with each shard being home to a different type of magical energy. Now, though, the shards are being manipulated by evil dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas, who wants to steal their energy to something something (take over the multiverse, I think? It's not clear exactly).
This was a pretty fun read. The characters are all fairly archetypal (Ajani the reluctant hero, Rafiq the grizzled veteran who's too old for this shit, Bolas the scheming Bond villain), and the story is fairly straightforward, but Beyer keeps it moving along at enough of a quick, enjoyable pace that you don't really notice how archetypal everything is until you're thinking about it afterwards.
Wizards (the company that produces Magic) has been trying for the past few years to bring the whole concept of “planeswalkers as characters” to the forefront of the game, and stories like this do a good job of making those cards interesting. So it's enjoyable on a meta/transmedia level as well.
This was an incredibly fun read. Slapstick zombie comedy has always been something that I've enjoyed, and Karina Fabian has put a lot of that in here, in this story about zombie exterminators gathering for a conference when, you guessed it, a bunch of zombies show up. It's refreshing to read a story that doesn't assume that the arrival of zombies would just mean the end of humanity, and the society that Fabian presents remains similar enough to our own that the entire zombie experience becomes a surreal comedy looking at environmentalism, reality television, and the price of fame. Recommended to all fans of the undead.
What if you did something horrible to save the world? Horrible in the sense of nuclear explosions that cause tsunamis, killing countless people and displacing others? Would you be able to live with yourself and the knowledge of those sacrifices you made, and of the lives you crushed for the greater good?
Worse: what if your plan didn't work?
It's a horrible, horrifying question, and it's at the heart of Maelstrom, which picks up right were Starfish (Watts' previous book) left off. As in the first book, Watts does an excellent job of blending the epic (the efforts of the powers that be to stop Lenie Clarke's Typhoid Maryesque spreading of unkillable contagion across North America) with the intensely personal (Lenie struggling to put her life back together).
The only problem with Maelstrom is that Watts paints a picture of humanity so bleak, so corrupt, that by the end you're actually cheering for the ßehemoth to spread, because clearly we have no future as a species. Balancing that, though, is the knowledge that this isn't the end of the series - there's still another book to go, and from here humanity has nowhere to go but up.
This was an interesting collaboration between two authors: my understanding is each took a character from another work of theirs and threw them together. Hijinks ensue, as they usually do in this type of story.
I have to say I enjoyed one half of the story a lot more than the other, but overall this was a fun, quickly paced novella designed to introduce you to the characters and their worlds. It definitely succeeded at that, and I'll be checking out more work by these authors in the future.
Imagine a disease that kills you by rearranging the proteins that make up your brain, creating holes in it and turning your grey matter into a spongy, useless mess. It's incredibly tiny and hardy, making it almost impossible to detect, and resistant to most forms of sterilization. It can lay dormant within a host body from anywhere from two to forty years, and the only real way to know that someone's been infected is via autopsy.
This is a prion. And it's been behind several different diseases in the past century, most notably “mad cow” disease, but also associated diseases such as kuru, Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease, scrapie, and others.
In Fatal Flaws, Ingram manages to lay out the history and pathology of prion disorders, using prose that is technically sound but still easily accessible to a layperson, and manages to present the horrifying reality of prion disorders without seeming sensationalist.
He also paints a refreshingly honest picture about the realities of modern science, and how personality clashes, showmanship, and hubris influence what gets published and what gets attention paid to it. Too often public discussions of science try to show scientists as these demigods of rationality and logic, when really they are just people - smart, dedicated people, but people all the same, with the same feet of clay that the rest of us have.
The history of prion science, as Ingram tells it, is part Sherlock Holmes, part Indiana Jones, and part Michael Crichton. It's a great read for a non-expert with an interest in the field.
Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that that which did not kill you made you stronger. Nietzsche was an optimist. There are things out there that don't kill you, but which twist you, and turn you into something that isn't quite human anymore. Something which might be better, or might be monstrous. It's hard to tell, some times.
Nietzsche also said that looking into the abyss meant that the abyss looked back at you, and also some things about monsters.
I know Starfish isn't a Nietzschean work, but it sure as hell felt like one. Peter Watts takes a group of scarred, emotionally damaged people, runs them through a bunch of post-human surgeries, and deposits them at the bottom of the ocean, in a high-pressure landscape that's as alien and inhospitable as any extraterrestrial planet. They're supposed to be the only living things down there, but quickly find that's not the case, and before long we're faced with the possibility that the sort of life that's forged in the blackness of the ocean might be completely incompatible with our own. And it might be stronger than us.
Starfish is a bleak, raw, gritty work that mostly likely isn't for everyone, but which I absolutely loved. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series once I've decompressed a bit from this one.
This was a lot of fun to read in a big, loud summer action movie sort of way. The Ministry of Peculiar Occurences is a Victorian equivalent of the X-Files, but the agents that we're introduced to here, Books and Braun, are more of a cross between Riggs and Murtaugh and the Peel/Steed Avengers. Add a steampunk patina (mechanical men! Analytical engines! Bulletproof corsets!) And you've got a pretty fun read.
What's more interesting than a story about two generational ships locked in decades-long battle with each other? The same, but in the depths of the ocean!
There's a lot of interesing stuff going on here - a look at generational conflict within a generational ship, the mechanics of a city-sized submarine, and some discussion of the human tendency to fight with outgroups, rather than work with them. There are also, in Thom and Ralla, some very interesting characters.
Unfortunately, the (to me) interesting stuff all takes place on the sidelines, and the main plot, with its cliched madman of a villain and boring love triangle, wasn't as nearly as interesting as the other stuff.
Take a standard tale about someone travelling from our world to faerie, and dress it up in more modern contrivances (our world is in modern time, and faerie-land in approximately 1930s tech), add in enough adventure and daring-do to make Lester Dent or Ian Fleming blush, and you've got Doc Sidhe.
If you can imagine Neil Gaiman wanting to do a Doc Savage homage in Sandman, or Warren Ellis putting a faerie story into Planetary, that's roughly what you have here in temperment. Add in likeable characters and a plot that puts the fate of two worlds at risk, and you've got a winner.
Bit of a fun romp through mythological Greek and Europe, with around as much accuracy (and a somewhat similar style) as an episode of Kevin Sorbo's Hercules or Xena.
The fun was somewhat spoiled by characters so flat and wooden they wouldn't seem out of place in an Ikea catalogue, and one of the most deus ex machina endings I've ever read.
Secret agent Will Shakespeare, visiting the locations of his plays while on His Majesty's Secret Service.
Aliens that turned the Roanoke colonists into the pieces of a bomb, to explode if they're ever gathered together in the same location.
The Doctor and his companions, called to 17th century Venice to negotiate an alien disarmament treaty, and meeting Galileo along the way.
Any one of these would have been a good plot for a Who novel. All three of them leaves you with a bit of a mess, plot-wise.
If you needed a model of why X-Men became so popular/relevant in the 1980s, this is it: not flashy art, or huge crossovers, or even super villains to fight. Instead, we have a strong, thoughtful piece of character work that looks at tolerance, group identification, and the changing political and cultural landscape of 1980s America, and how that would be reflected in a superhero setting.
What saddened me, re-reading this book for the first time in over a decade, is how relevant the whole thing still feels today. I mean, Rev. Stryker might have a youtube series rather than a cable channel, and he'd be hawking certain brands of fried chicken as a way to “stand up for traditional DNA”, but otherwise, it could be published today as a statement on tolerance in the 2010s with little alteration.
Paul Moses is a retired CIA assassin - the kind of man that knows how to kill someone 12 ways with a Bic pen. He's retired, though, so he spends his days in the countryside trying to forget his past. At least, until someone at the CIA decides he knows too much, and needs to be eliminated.
This was kind of enjoyable, in an Ellis-being-Ellis sort of style, but it goes by too fast. There's not nearly enough meat on the bones of the story.