Ryan
This one took me nearly a year to read, but only because it's not the kind of book one reads straight through; rather, you want to read just a bit at a time, enjoying each piece as you do. Partially this is because Pasricha started the book as a blog, but also because there's no narrative - instead it's just a list of things he thinks are awesome, and why.
In a way it's almost similar to one of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books, in that the Book of Awesome asks you to find joy and contentment in the simple things in life, such as surprise snow days, finding $20 in a jacket that you hadn't worn for a long time, and afternoon naps. It's a lot funnier than the Chicken Soup books, though, and successfully uses that humour to avoid becoming cheesy or saccharine. Highly recommended.
I loved this one when I first read it, and I'm so glad I went through it again as there's a lot of subtle stuff I missed in the first read through. Some of it was explicitly stated stuff, like the Old Bear being Ser Jorah Mormont's father; others were only hinted at, like my newfound belief that Jon Snow is part of House Targaryen.
I think the first time I read this I was a little blinded by the assumption that it was Eddard's story, and that the other stuff was just subplot. Knowing that it's more than that, that it's a large tapestry with dozens of equally important threads really forces one to look at the whole thing differently.
Beyond that I'm really not sure what I want to say about it, other than it's a complete masterpiece of high fantasy and a must-read for fans of the genre.
(note: Originally read in January 2005.)
It's interesting how cyclical culture can be. When Harry Potter first came out, I recall a lot of people being upset at the similarities between Potter and the Tim Hunter stories. Neil Gaiman, author of the latter, rightfully came to the defence of the Potter books, saying that both he and Rowling were just pulling from the same cultural touchstones and working in the same genre of YA heroic fantasy.
Now, reading a lot of the comments on the Percy Jackson books, I see a lot of people who read Harry Potter being upset that Riordan was copying what Rowling did. I'll admit that there are some similarities, but it's more that they're both modern urban fantasy based on a Campbellian model of the hero's journey, rather than any intentional ‘copying'. In fact, if I had to pick something to compare this to, it would be to describe it as a YA version of American Gods, albeit it one that focuses exclusively on Olympian gods rather than multiple pantheons.
The really selling point of the book, though, is the character of Percy himself. He brings a refreshing level of sarcasm and humour to what could have been a fairly staid story, and keeps you interested in the larger world.
I feel a little odd reviewing this, as “Century” is being released in three parts, and this is just the first.
The League enters a new century and the reign of a new monarch in this volume. Fittingly, then, we meet both a new generation of characters (Nemo's daughter plays a prominent role) and a new league, filled with characters a little more obscure than the previous generation. I had to google half the cast to find out who they were, which takes away from part of the charm of the series, which was familiar characters from Victorian literature being placed in a superheroic milieu.
Still, on the other hand, it's Moore and O'Neill, so it's still a good read, even if it's not quite at the level of the previous two volumes.
First read in ... er, 1989 or so, I guess?
The Hobbit wasn't the first fantasy novel I read - as far as I can recall, that honour goes to Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three. The Hobbit was, however, the book that made me a fantasy fan, so it's fair to say that this book helped shape my life when I read it; as a result, that 5 star rating I gave it can in no way be objective.
Still, it's a good, classic read, one that serves as a nice introduction to Tolkien's legendarium, and which tells a fairly straightforward but exciting story about dragons, dwarves, goblins, and gold. What made it even better was that I read along with the Tolkien Professor's podcast series - he's a university professor who specializes in Tolkien and records his lectures. It really helped me appreciate The Hobbit on a deeper level, especially as he made sure to show a lot of the subtle links between this book and both Lord of the Rings but also the Silmarillion.
Anthology of short zombie comics from Boom! Comics.
There's a couple of really fun stories in here (the one about the flim-flam man, for example), but most of them are pretty mediocre. Putting them all together kind of highlights that, as well - there's a lot of stories with little to distinguish between them.
I've been taught, as most people no doubt have, to “Never judge a book by its cover”. So even though I cringed a little at the title and cover art of this short story collection, I picked it up because I really liked the first book in the series (“Witch Way To The Mall”) and liked the idea (stories featuring Vampires in suburbia).
Unfortunately, the contents of the book failed to exceed the low expectations that the cover/art gave me. There were two or three stories I liked throughout, but for the most part the authors failed to do anything interesting or innovative with the concept. And each of them might have even been okay if you were reading one vampire in suburbia short story, but putting them all together made the entire endeavour feel bland and uninspiring.
This book starts out with a warning: “Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and willfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.”
I really should have listened to it, because that's a good description. I kept reading - making it to roughly the 2/3 mark - because I kept expecting it to get better, kept expecting it to live up to the glowing blurbs on the back cover. Finally I just gave up.
“Independent fiction” has been in an interesting place for the past few years. It's definitely started to get a lot more respect than it has, but something I've noticed about a lot of independent authors is that they're telling the same types of stories as the major publishing houses - crime stories, science fiction, and vampire romances. Nothing against the stories themselves, but there's often little to distinguish them from the mainstream.
Concrete Underground, on the other hand, is described by the author as a “punk as fuck” crime story, which is not something I can ever recall a mainstream publisher advertising. Which, depending on how you feel about punk, might be a selling point, and might not. Regardless, it's a story that feels edgy, feels unpolished, and experiments with narrative structure in some interesting ways (especially one part in the middle where - well, I'm still not sure what happened). It's experimental, but keeps a pulpy feel that would drive away most readers looking for something capital-L “Literary”.
A look at video games as an art form, with discussions on how similar and different they are from other forms of art. Interesting, especially for the historical discussion of the medium, but also handicapped by age - Poole spends a lot of time talking about Tomb Raider II, for example, and I honestly can't remember the last time I played that game or any details about it. Due to the age, a lot of the discussion becomes obselete: games like Rock Band, World of Warcraft, and the modern incarnation of Grand Theft Auto make a lot of his points irrelevant, as do touch- and motion-controlled gaming systems like the DS, Wii, and Ipod. It would be interested to see a sequel to this written that takes those evolutions into account.
Silver Surfer is an interesting character that's had a bit of a tricky relationship towards the rest of the Marvel universe. He's cosmic, and alien, full of sleekness and speed, but given the nature of a shared Marvel universe, he spent a lot of time trapped on Earth, which eventually started to become a major limitation on the character.
Englehart tosses all that aside, returning the Surfer to his cosmic roots and using him as a tool to explore the intergalactic portion of the MU. There's lots of stuff here - a new Kree-Skrull war, soul gems, the In-Betweener, Galactus, and the Elders of the Universe to name a handful. If you're a fan of Marvel's cosmic stuff - especially as done by individuals such as Starlin or Marz, both of whom followed Englehart on this title - this is a great book to check out.
A short space opera novel about a woman who's been impregnated by a star, and whose living spaceship has become infested with a “linguistic virus eats through the minds of a group of scavengers”. I'm not entirely sure how I felt about this one.
On the one hand, it's brilliant. There are some passages here that sing with how sublime and fantastic they are (especially the first page, which had me hooked into reading the whole thing once I was done it). At the same time, it's complex and demanding. And in some ways that's a commendable quality to it - it trusts the reader enough to assume that they'll be able to follow along, and doesn't pander to them. I appreciate that. At times, though it was difficult to fully become engaged with the story, because of those same “commendable qualities”. This might just be the result of my reading habits - I read on the bus a lot, and that doesn't always allow for the deepest of interaction with a book, especially one that's working on a level like this. Regardless of how engaged I was, however, I'm really glad I read it.The opening paragraph in particular: Her lover was a supernova. She smiled when he came, his bright burning light rocking her body, impregnating her with the essence of stars. Through the metal bones of her ship she felt the gasses enter her, felt the compound light exploding inside her. Her hands clawed at the cracked vinyl of the chair, her legs spread to either side with toes stretched out, her mouth in piercing screams of ecstasy.
I'd gotten away from this series for awhile, but when I heard there was going to be a Savannah-centric book I knew I would be jumping back in, as the witches were always my favourite part of the Otherworld series.
Balance is the key to this book - Armstrong tries to balance between writing urban fantasy and writing a mystery, and Savannah tries to balance the influence of her mother, Eve, and Paige, the woman who raised her for half her life. Savannah phrases that balancing in a series of negatives - several times she mentions being “not like Paige” or “not like my mom” which leads me to believe that for all her bravado she's not really quite sure who she herself is. And it's clear from what we know about those other women that she is like them, in many ways.
Despite the supernatural trappings and characters, the story really does read like a mystery - enough that I was a little upset at first when that mystery ended up having a supernatural explanation. It makes sense when you think about it, but at first it seems kind of deus ex machina.
Speaking of the ending - I don't want to spoil it (even with the “spoiler” tag on), but well played, Armstrong, well played.
I've read a fair number of books, websites, and magazines about cooking over the years. Prior to this book, though, NONE of them discussed using 3D printing technology to create cookie cutters/molds for cookies in the shape of the Linux mascot. Now, most of this book isn't nearly that hardcore, but it does give you a bit of insight into the mindset that went into developing it.
Cooking for Geeks knows its target audience well, and is full of content to appeal to geeks across all levels of experience with cooking - everything from advice on how to make simple pancakes to building your own sous vide cooker. It has recipes, instructional bits, interviews with celebrity geeks (people like Adam Savage and Meg Hourihan) on their favourite foods and interactions with food.
There's also a lot of discussion of the science involved in cooking, which I thought was pretty neat. If you've never heard of a term like “caramelization”, for example, it explains what caramelized food looks, what's happening to the sugar chemically as it browns, etc. I had this as a library loan, but I think I'll be picking up a copy for myself to keep on the shelf.
A murder investigation with as many suspects as there are witnesses. A femme fatale with icewater in her veins and sex appeal that she knows exactly how to use. A down-on-his-luck private investigator trying to make good on a promise to a client. In a lot of ways Who Censored Roger Rabbit seems like an assortment of cliches of the hardboiled detective genre, and then you pause for a second and realize that one of the main characters is a 6 foot tall bunny rabbit. It doesn't feel exactly like satire or parody, but more like an absurdist, screwball take on an old genre.
You might be thinking that you're familiar with Roger Rabbit, because you've seen the Disney film. The two are absolutely nothing alike - the character share the same name but the characterization is completely different, the plot's completely unrelated, and the tone and style is completely different as well. It's almost baffling how completely different they are from each other; I like each for what they are, but don't go into this thinking you're getting anything like the film.
One of the biggest differences, and one that I found most entertaining, was the character of Roger. Sounding like Annie Hall-era Woody Allen, Roger's a neurotic mess, and his play and banter off of Eddie Valiant's hardboiled straight man is good for a lot of laughs throughout the book.
Based on the series this is part of and the misleading cover art, I thought this was going to be a hardboiled, trenchcoats-and-dark-alleyways sort of mystery novel. What I got was something completely, wonderfully different from that: Stephen King writing post-modern metafiction.
Two old newspapermen sit down with an intern at their small-town Maine paper and tell her the story of The Colorado Kid, whose dead body was discovered on the beach some 25 years previous. They lead her through the mystery, with the whens and wheres of his disappearance and discovery, and along the way teach her the difference between Stories, which have a clearly defined beginning, middle and ending, and Life, which rarely does. That's why, these newspapermen theorize, people like stories - they're cleaner and safer than life, and better fit our preconceptions of things. Life, in comparison, is messy and thematically incoherent (and, I believe, more beautiful for those reasons), and that's why it's the job of the storyteller to tell their stories well. To prove this point, the mystery of The Colorado Kid is just that - it's a mystery, one that has no solution provided and now easy explanation of how or why it happened. It just ends, and leaves us as the audience to try to make sense of it - to make the life of these characters fit our idea of what story should be. That twist at the end - that the mystery is just a mystery, and has no explanation - wouldn't have worked if the characters were any less realized, and it wouldn't have worked in a longer story, but here? Damn, it works.
The ending's a little on-the-nose but that's appreciated; given the amount of mystery surrounding the entire story, leaving it at all ambiguous would have been horrible.
Brilliant.
Flatland is a quirky little novella about a square, living in Flatland, a country comprised entirely of two dimensions. Mr. Square is content to go about his polygonal existence, until he has a revelation of the Third Dimension, and meets a sphere.
As the title implies, though, this is a story of “many dimensions”, so it's not just that: it's also a rather funny satire of both religious revelation and Victorian social culture, looking at social stratification and the belief in innate differences of class and ability and lampooning them.
Where things get really interesting, though, is that a century later this whole thing also stands for a perfect metaphor for where modern physics is at. I have, I confess, had a really tough time understanding string theory, and its reliance on extraspatial dimensions. So the protagonist's resistance to the third dimension really resonated with me, and I think that even if I'm not closer to understanding string theory, I can at least see a little better where its proponents are coming from.
I came to cyberpunk from an interesting vector: I discovered it through Marvel's 2099 comic series, of all places, and then watched the Matrix, and only after that became aware of authors like Gibson, Cadigan, and Stephenson. So while I've read a lot of cyberpunk, and have a fondness for it as a genre, it's a patchwork sort of fondness, which is why I'd never heard of this until recently, despite it's role as a primum movens within cyberpunk literature (something that William Gibson talks about in the introduction of the edition I read).
Like a lot of science fiction, the philosophical angle to this one is as important to the plot - robot builder Cobb Anderson goes to Mars, has his body broken down, and gets reborn inside a robot shell. Which sounds straightforward, but Rucker also throws in a lot of questions about identity and self in with that - does the robot Cobb still have an essential “Cobbness” to him, even though there's no physical continuation between the two? Is there a “soul” that can be transferred, even if we can transfer things like memories? Even wider than that, is a person still a person when so many of those essential human qualities (the need to sleep, eat, procreate, the fear of death) are taken away from them? It's heady stuff, and like any good philosopher Rucker doesn't completely answer them as much as lay them before the reader for them to provide their own answer.
When reading Software, I think it's important to remember where and when it's coming from - compared to other novels of its cohort(books like 2010, Foundation's Edge, and the Ringworld Engineers) there's a quantum leap of difference in terms of how the book understands technology and our relationship with it that might cause a modern reader to undervalue how important and influential a book like this would have been.
Near the end of the second world war, the angels came, drawn to places of great suffering and bloodshed. They've remained on Earth since then; some of them, like Metatron, silently watching over us, while others, like Azrael, getting involved in organized crime. That's the setup, but that's not the interesting part of this novella.
The interesting part is that someone's starting killing angels.
The killing isn't what interests our protagonist, MI6 agent Killarney, at first. After all, she starts the story by attempting to assassinate Raphael. What concerns her is the systematic way in which they're being eliminated, and how that will affect the power balance of the Cold War.
This was a really enjoyable, fast-paced read. The espionage elements reminded me of the Bourne stories at their best, and the fantasy elements took what's becoming a very common story element (angels) and presented them in a way that seemed fresh and exciting, but also stayed true to the mythology of Judaism and Christianity, if not to the theology of them.
A bittersweet ending to the Share series. Bitter because it is an ending to an excellent set of novels (as well as due to some plot elements I'm not at liberty to discuss, as per Article 37). But sweet, at the same time, because we've seen Ishmael Wang grow from an 18-year old whiz kid into a man who has built a life for himself in the cold of the deep dark, one fully different from the kid he was but yet fully recognizable.
I was a little worried about this entry in the series at first, because the plot seemed like the kind you would find in a sitcom spin-off series: Ish gets his own ship and company, and has to take on a new crew-member who needs to fulfill a year in space to fulfill the terms of her father's will and inherit a shipping fortune.
The entire thing, though, is handled with enough skill and graceful crafting that once the story's started, you don't second-guess it, and get dragged into the narrative. It's a fitting ending, one that brings us full-circle to both the beginning of the entire series and the second half of the series that was started in Double Share, while still maintaining its own narrative and emotional arc separate from the series on the whole.
Crime stories, noir ones at least, tend to have a love/hate relationship with their setting. Their plots are almost always dependent on them being in large cities, yet they often seem disdainful of cities - the city is seen as a hive of scum and villainy, one that corrupts those living in it. Whiteout reverses the expectations of noir, both on a visual and a story level.
The art in the book relies heavily on the use of white for negative space, which makes a lot of sense given the setting (Antarctica, which is lots of snow and ice punctuated by the occasional animal or human settlement). This is an environment that could easily kill you, and the starkness of the black and white is a constant reminder of that.
Despite the homicidal nature of the environment, though, it's presented as a welcome aspect of the story, rather than a hostile one - this makes sense given the fact that Antarctica isn't naturally inhabited, and the people who are there are there exclusively by choice. Even Carrie, the US Marshall who is the protagonist of the story, has her reasons to see the Ice as a welcome place despite not being there for scientific purposes. The Ice of Antarctica is a refuge, so when murder strikes, it's seen as even more of a violation than it is in the World that we live in. It's a nice marriage of plot, character, and setting, which really help make the story stand out as unique even if the plot by itself is a little by-the-book for a noir story.
I think I've been cured of my Star Wars tie-in fiction reading habit.
It's more the fault of the series rather than just this book specifically, there's nothing believable here, not the general plot or the actions of specific characters. Characterizations differ wildly from book to book, and thematically it works to undermine not only the New Jedi Order but other novels going back as far the Courtship of Princess Leia, if I'm remembering things correctly. All in the service of covering the same ground in nine novels as the prequel trilogy covered in three movies.
My reading through Alan Moore's oeuvre comes, ironically enough, with one of his earliest North American works, and one of the ones he's best known for. I'm actually surprised that it took me this long to get to reading it, due to how influential it is compared to a lot of his other work - it's been argued that without Swamp Thing, Vertigo Comics would never have coalesced, which I think would have had a huge impact on how comics are formatted and marketed today (especially regarding the now-routine collection of comics into trade collections) as well as the types of stories being told. Reading this volume it's easy to spot how some of my favourite Vertigo series were influenced by it, like Jamie Delano's Animal Man run (which, criminally, remains uncollected) and Gaiman's Sandman (I had no idea that making Cain and Abel part of The Dreaming predated Gaiman).
One of the things that I've always liked about Moore's work is that it's very personal, and you can often see him using the story he's telling as a vehicle of self-discovery, like he's trying to figure out his attitude towards something by telling a fantasy story with it. I got that feeling with this book – Swamp Thing is a vessel for him to study the mind-body relationship, and what part of a person is truly ‘them'. Because of the nature of this as a series, rather than a single GN, he's not quite finished figuring that out, but it's already being taken in some interesting directions.
In terms of story, we get something that was unique at the time but now seems like standard Vertigo, if such a thing exists; Swamp Thing journeys to Hell to rescue the soul of the woman he loves, after her demented uncle condemned her there, meeting the likes of Etrigan, the Phantom Stranger, and Deadman along the way. After his eventual rescue of her, they explore what exactly their relationship can be, given that he's not technically human but a sentient plant. This exploration includes a fascinating scene involving hallucinogenic yams, and from there we lead into the next GN in the series.
One of the pleasant surprises here is that, given how much Moore is (rightfully) associated with long-form comics, the story I enjoyed most was the standalone “Pog”, which is a blend of Swamp Thing, Walt Kelly, and A Clockwork Orange. It's a 22-page short story, told between two rather heady storylines, that is bizarre, simple, and moving in a beautiful way that serves to sharpen the emotional impact of the stories that surround it.
This was a bit of a unique experience for me - I've been a fan of Lafferty's work for awhile now, both in terms of her fiction projects (Playing for Keeps, Heaven, The Takeover) and her nonfiction work (the I Should Be Writing podcast), but this was my first time actually reading her in print. Well, as close to print as e-ink is, anyways.
This was a really fun read. I love the setting (an alien settlement on the moon becomes “Mollywood”, the hottest cultural Mecca of the 21st century), as well as how it looked at art, media, and commerce and the sometimes messy ways that they interact. There's a lot going on here, but Lafferty manages to present it in a way that leaves you satisfied with what you've gotten, but still hoping for more. It's not easy to do that in the novella format, but she does it well.