Ryan

When I was in high school, and started learning about the Greek myths from the source material rather than from adaptations/sanitations, I was always puzzled by the Trojan War. It seemed to be this big, complex mess, and I was confused as to how it was told. How rude of those ancient Greeks, teenaged me thought, to not put the whole story in one easily digested work?

Of course, as I became more familiar with it, I came to understand that this was because they were more interested in telling individual stories of tragedy and heroism rather than just history, and also that we still do that today - dozens of individual stories have been told about World War II, and Vietnam, but there aren't really many plays/films/poems that try to tell the whole story of those conflicts.

Eric Shanower, however, has decided to try to tell all of the Trojan War in one work, a planned 7-volume collection called Age of Bronze. The first volume is really all backstory, starting with Paris first coming to Troy, going through the taking of Helen, and ending with the Acheans first launching their ships against Troy. Taking 200 pages to tell just that part of the story shows how much detail is going into the story here, something that is carried through in the artwork - Shanower has obviously done a lot of research into the archeology, geography, architecture, society, and art of the Mediterranean, and that research is evident in the depth of the story and artwork.

Of course, being well-researched is not a substitute for being a good story, and the adaptation holds up on those grounds as well. He's working from classic material, in every sense of the word, and he tells it well, adding his own interpretations to a couple of things, but expertly combining religion, history, and myth into an Epic story of love, respect, and betrayal.

I can't see someone being interested in this if they're not already a fan of the TV show Castle, as the book is a metafictional tie-in to the show, claiming to be written by the main character in the show.

So it's a tie-in to the show, but also a parody of it - Castle (the character) is a bit of an egotistical blowhard, and the novel's character of Rook is a quite obvious work of author insertion, and very much how the author/character sees himself, as well as how others see him - Nicki Heat is madly in love with him, but refuses to admit it only and only his charm can help her overcome it.

So, tie-in, parody, and an examination of character all at once - there's a surprisingly high amount of stuff going on in this rather short novel.

A collection of short stories featuring the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, a fictional US governmental agency that investigates vampires, ghost trains, and the monster under your bed. And, since they are all “enhanced” individuals themselves, they're more than able to bump back at the things that go bump in the night.

The cases the BPRD investigate are kind of standard X-Files type stuff, but the main group of characters (an amphibious man, a ghost, a pyrokinetic woman, and a homunculus named Roger) are an interesting group that seem hardened and world-traveled without falling into the “grim and gritty” trap that many other characters fall into.

Really expanded the Legacy story, connecting Darth Krayt back to the old Republic, the Rebellion, and the Yuuzhan Vong all in one volume. Overall a really interesting story, and I'm enjoying the character of Cade Skywalker a lot, but the amount of Jedi who survived the purge that “wiped out the Jedi” is getting a little ridiculous, and only serves to retroactively make Vader and Palpatine look a bit foolish.

The last book written by Gary Troup, focusing on the Widmore family and published shortly after he disappeared on Oceanic Flight 815 when it vanished over the Pacific Ocean.

If that sentence piques your interest, it's most likely because you are/were a fan of the television program Lost; Bad Twin is a metafictional tie-in to the program, supposedly written by a minor character from the show. Which, as a fan of the show, fascinates me, especially since it promised to shed some light on the Hanso Foundation and the Widmore family.

Unfortunately, the info on the Widmore clan is almost laughably wrong, and the mystery case that takes up the bulk of the novel's plot is ham-fisted and cliched.

Bad Twin is, ultimately, a great marketing idea wrapped around a sub-par story. There's a lot of wasted potential here.

Crossover between Fables, which I read and enjoy, and Jack of Fables, which I studiously avoid. Didn't result in a good mix.

I like the central question of the crossover - What if god had writer's block? - but the execution tried really awkwardly to mix two different casts and writing styles, and the result didn't work for me at all. Too much cutesy, self-referential humour and not enough of the insight and compelling characters that are what I read Fables for. Especially after the Mr. Dark story got started in the last volume, this was unsatisfying.

I've always felt that Lando Calrissian's gotten a bad rap. I mean, he blew up the Death Star, helped to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt, (throwing away a very lucrative career as a gas miner in the process)and managed to wear this ridiculous-looking cape and still make it look cool. Yet he gets little-to-no respect in the Star Wars universe.

Given this, I was intrigued to learn that there were a series of novels chronicling some of Lando's adventures prior to Empire Strikes Back, and the Lando here is pretty true to form - a smuggling scoundrel of a gambler who has this greeat, unique sense of style, winning starships and droids in card games and pulling fast ones on local law enforcement.

The only thing I didn't like about this book was that the stakes seemed a little too small for someone like Lando - there's all this Empire and Rebellion stuff that we know are going on in the galaxy, and instead of being involved with any of that he's working with this race no one's ever heard of before to rescue a musical instrument that we only find out is important through last-minute exposition in the epilogue.

One Second After is a tale of disaster and survival. It deals with the detonation of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon over the United States, which destroys the electrical grid and anything electronic attached to it. The novel focuses on one small North Carolinian town that struggles to keep itself together after this attack.

This was, on the whole, a fun book to read. Simple, readable prose (with, admittedly, several nagging grammatical errors), likable characters and a plot that easily moves from a to b to c. There aren't any great surprises or relevations in it, but as popcorn literature it works.

At the same time, it featured a lot of the typical points featured in disaster stories like this that tend to bug me. The first is that they always protray society as incredibly fragile - it takes only hours for people to start to descend into chaos and anarchy. I can understand that this would eventually start to happen, but it's unlikely that it would happen so quickly; people don't even have time to learn the true nature of the threat they're facing before they collapse.

Second, and more importantly, is that books like this tend to have curious values. Democracy and the rule of law (notice in OSA the imposition of martial law and summary executions of medicine thieves) are quickly abandoned as quaint, pre-disaster ideals, while others, such as patriarchy, militarism, and the right to private property are defended as essential. I'm not sure if that reveals something about the psychology of the authors writing these stories, or if it's just required for the purpose of advancing the plot, but it is curious nonetheless.

Ultimately, One Second After is a novel that wants to be taken as more than just a piece of fiction - the preface and afterward by a former US congressman and a navy captain, respectively, help to underscore how serious the threat of EMP is, and I understand that it is a theoretically plausible one, but the novel ultimately doesn't provide the solutions that something that is more than a iece of fiction would be expected to include.

A society where people are forced to be pretty via plastic surgery? Potent metaphor, and Westerfeld really makes the most of it, presenting some even-handed reasons why such a society would come about. You know they're wrong, but at the same time you can see their point. At least, before you learn about the secrets that the surgery are meant to hide...

Of course, setting can only take you so far - you have to have a compelling character at the centre of your story, and Tally Youngblood certainly is that - she's faced with some tough choices throughout the book, and despite a couple of missteps she does make the right decisions, no matter how tough it is for her to make them.

The only thing holding this book back from a higher rating? The ending. I really don't like it when books end in massive cliffhangers, especially when it's the first book in a series.

The title pretty much explains it. Three little pigs decide to leave their mama's home in the bayou, and try to make their own - but that tricky gator, Claude, wants to huff and puff and lash his tail around to try to get some pig for dinner.

I was born in Edmonton at the tail end of the 1970s, so I always had a general awareness of the World Hockey Association, but I didn't really know much about it beyond a bunch of the teams ended up in the NHL, and that Gordie Howe played on the same team with his kids at one point. This book was clearly an education, then.

The WHA story is an interesting one - it was started by people who seemed to not know much about hockey or business, and kept itself together with little more than duct tape and prayers at times before ultimately collapsing. In doing so, though, it completely changed the business of hockey and the way it's played in North America, so it's an important history to be aware of if you're a fan of the game.

In some ways, it felt like I'd heard this story before: the rise and fall of the WHA mirrors what I've seen in a lot of other places - there are parallels here to ECW wrestling, Valiant comics, Miramax films, and the “grunge movement” in rock and roll. It's interesting to see history repeat itself that way, but kind of sad as well.

Over the past year I've started to read a lot more crime and mystery stories, and in doing so, you tend to get a certain feel for the conventions of the genre. Not to say that all the stories I've been reading in that area are the same, or even derivative of each other, but there's a general feel to them

One of the unsettling things about this story is how clinical it can be at times. that you start to notice. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo violates those conventions completely in a way that , and in doing so leaves you unsure of exactly what the book is until it's nearly over.
A girl goes missing, under circumstances that are either baffling, or suggest murder. But no body is found, and decades later a disgraced reporter is hired to investigate the believed crime and see if he can implicate any of the girl's faamilyh members in the crime.

All three of the main characters (Blomkvist, Lisbeth, and Vanger) are all ultimately seeking the same thing - they want to be free of their pasts, and they paradoxically do so by digging in to the life of someone who had their freedom taken away from them; unfortunately, they become so focused on this that they ignore the other problems that they're digging up until it's almost too late.

One of the things I found unsettling about this story was how clinical the writing was at times - this cold could be an artefact of the Swedish to English translation, the author's past as a journalist, or just because the story's dealing with a crime that's nearly forty years gone by the time the action opens; regardless, it draws you away from caring too much about the characters, and more about the mystery. When you realize this is happening, though, you realize you're being put in the same sort of objectifying frame of mind that the villians of the piece are using. It's a very clever effect.

I'd recommend this one even to people who aren't fans of mystery novels, although your level of enjoyment is likely going to be affected by how familiar you are with the genre.

This was a really interesting look at the history of computers as a DIY technology, stretching from the 1950s to the 1980s, when the first edition of it was published.

I find a lot of computer users look at the things like they're magic boxes, likely run by black magic and/or hamsters running in wheels; I confess to having moments where I've felt that way myself, but I'm trying to educate myself a bit more on how computers actually think and operate, and this book helped cement that understanding a bit more.

Additionally, this book reinforced two of the truisms I've repeatedly encountered when studying subcultures.

The market will replace your values with its own. It seems to me that subcultural movements tend to have certain values to them that make them popular with certain segments of the public. As they gain more popularity, the mainstream starts to notice them, and tries to find ways to monetize them, even if the movement was one that was based originally around non-commercial values. This is how we end up with Iggy Pop songs being used to sell Disney Cruise tours, and fashion that exploits women and their sexuality being marketed as “girl power” feminism. It's also how we end up with a generation of computer hackers who can't understand why anyone would want to buy a pre-assembled computer with the software already loaded on it.

History never ends. One of the main recurring conflicts in Hackers relates to who has access to computer information - we see this with the MIT gurus in the 50s trying to limit access to their computers, and again with the tales of early software users wanting to freely share programs vs. the companies wanting to use copy-prevention to increase their profits. And we see the same conflict now with the open source movement vs. proprietary software, and DRM media files vs. the Creative Commons. It's one that will probably continue as long as people are recording information by the bit, which should ensure that Hackers remains somewhat relevant for generations to come.

An unnamed private dick shows up in a town known as Poisonville, and tries to clean it up from the crooked politicians and gangsters running it.

What set this apart from a lot of noir, for me, was that while it's pessimistic, its not at all misanthropic, which was a nice change. It also did a good job of advancing a social argument that evil sometimes isn't something that arises in the individual, but rather is something that a place can inflict on a person. That's an interesting idea, and one worthy of further development within the genre, I think. It's also somewhere where Red Harvest would have benefited from being a longer book - it clocks in at under 200 pages, which memans that there isn't too much time available for rny sense of morality more developed than “Sometimes pepople are evil, and when they are they just need a killing to set themselves straight.”

The first part of this book made me angry. The main POV character, a journalist who becomes a successful blogger by writing about nerds making stuff, smelled strongly of author insertion and it pushed some personal buttons of mine with regards to how it presented people with weight issues. I think the issues raised by Lester and the fatkins diet could be interesting if developed into their own story, but as a subplot to a larger work it felt sloppy and disrespectful.

Later sections of the book were better than the beginning, but never quite rose to good - characters seem flat and two-dimensional, and are motivated primarily by a desire to move the plot forward. I can appreciate that Doctorow was trying to write a sci-fi novel that focused on the science of economics, but I can't say I enjoyed it.

Suicide is a tricky subject to write about. This is true when you're writing a novel, and also true when you're like Mason, the protagonist of this novel, and your job is to write about suicide. To write people's suicide notes for them.

Ghosted starts off in a Chuck Palahniuk sort of area, as you can kind of guess with the synopsis - a little misanthropic, a little nihilistic, and strung together with enough dark humour and adrenaline that you keep reading. Then, around half-way through the book, it takes a left turn and gets REALLY dark. The answer to the question “What kind of person writes suicide notes for other people?” is revealed to be “One with serious psychological and self-destructive issues”, and we also are reminded that no matter how messed up you may be, you need to be careful, because there are others who are way more dangerously messed up than you are.

I wasn't quite sure what Bishop-Stall was trying to say through the whole thing, though; it's clear from the subject material and the way that he writes about it that he isn't just out for entertainment, but wants something more. I left the novel not sure what that “something more” was, though.

I was doing some Arthurian-based board gaming a while ago with some friends, and realized that most of my actual knowledge of the Arthur myth comes from tertiary sources, which is a little pathetic. So Iread this as part of a larger attempt to become more knowledgeable about the Arthur story.

Ironically, then, Arthur's hardly in this! He's there at the beginning, when Gawain makes his wager with the Green Knight during a Christmas celebration, but is nowhere to be seen when Gawain goes on his quest to confront the Green Knight, and faces trials and tribulations along the way to prove that he is a knight worthy of his station.

Overall, I'd say I guess I kind of liked this one? It was full of knights, adventure, and a bit of intrigue, but at the same time it didn't reall have a lot of depth to it and I can't say I connected to it in any meaningful way.

One thing I found especially interesting while reading this was in looking at where some of the storytelling priorities lay, and how different they were from modern sensibility. Gawain's decision to either betray his host or break his vow to the lady, for example, is given only a quick thought – because of course he's not going to break his word – while the hunting practices of British royalty earns several pages. I can't see something like that happening in a more modern piece.

I'd say this is a must-read for people who are really into Arthurian legend, but a pass for just about anyone else – it provdes great background to our understanding of Arthur, but doesn't really succeed as a compelling story in its own right.

This collection is Neil Gaiman's attempt to do a soft reboot on Kirby's Eternals concept from the 1970s, and for the most part it works. Kirby was great at putting forward these grand, madcap sorts of ideas, like alien gods who created not only human civilization, but who also genetically engineered a race of super-powered humans who would protect the Earth (but from what?! FROM WHAT?!) and inspire many of our myths about the gods. Gaiman, on the other hand, is an absolute master of taking grand mythological ideas and bringing them down to the level of the individual. It's a good mix of strengths, and makes for an enjoyable read.The main problem I had with this volume is that there's only the one - it reads like a set up and introduction to the characters, with a fairly straightforward “the world is in peril” plot, and then it ends. Not just the volume, but the series - why bother spending all this time re-introducing characters if you're not going to do anything further with them? The art can be kind of ugly at times as well - JRJR's great at Kirbyesque landscapes and giant Celestials, but his people all look stilted and unattractive. The Eternals should be more magnificent to look at.which, as the introduction of the book states, was a belief put forward by Erich von Daniken shortly before Eternals was first published.

I remember reading this when it first came out and really liking it. It had a great Chuck Palahniuk kind of feel to it, some really well-developed characters, and a futuristic world that terrified my inner socialist - one where taxation had been abolished and the government privatized, allowing corporate interests to exert themselves to their fullest authority.

At the same time, though, there were elements of it that seemed somewhat far-fetched. The US government at the time seemed to be growing stronger at the time, claiming powers and authority that could be described as “extraconstitutional”. The idea of it being completely emasculated by business seemed somewhat quaint, like a leftover from the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Having been following the rhetoric and “debate” surrounding health care reform in the US in the past year, however, it doesn't seem to far-fetched any more; I could see someone like Sarah Palin or Glen Beck advocating for the tax-free, corporate dominated society that is depicted in JG.

A good primer on Doctorow and his thoughts on copyright, media centralization, and the creative power of the internet. The essays contained within were written over many years and for many different audiences, so you see the re-use of several analogies and rhetorical devices throughout. Apparently, for example, when Doctorow was living in San Fransisco, he discovered his barber through Google Maps. You learn that fact several times :o)

A fun, but dark, little children's story about dragons and winter, which has some thematic similarities to Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. Enjoyable enough but nothing special.

An adaptation of the Mark Waid/Alex Ross graphic novel. Adds a lot of necessary depth, especially to the POV character of Norman, but is hampered by silted dialogue and descriptions. I wouldn't recommend reading this one on its own, but if you're fond of the GN it's a good enough read.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with noir. I love the feel and pacing of it, and the intrigue and characterization. Part of this is, no doubt, because I grew up reading comic books, and noir literature comes out of the same tradition of pulp fiction that the comics do.

At the same time, though, a lot of classic noir - Spillane, for example - is very much a product of its time, which is a polite way of saying that its full of troubling attitudes regarding sex, politics, and race, and which also means that it can be difficult to read at times.

Queenpin does a great job of encapsulating everything I like about noir, but with a modern sensibility that makes it a lot more enjoyable to read. There's murder, intrigue, double-crosses, and an ending that I didn't quite see coming.

Recommended if you're a fan of modern noir (Sin City, Veronica Mars, etc) or of the classic stuff (Spillane, Hammett, Chandler, etc)

When they're done right, tie-in novels can be really enjoyable - they can expand the universe of the original story, and create nuance and variety where some might have been lacking.

Accomplishing this would be difficult in a M:tG novel. Especially in the early days, the metanarrative of the game was minimal, so there wouldn't be much to hang a plot on, aside from working in game mechanics. It feels like the author of this didn't even try, though - it feels like he just dusted off and unused manuscript, changed a couple of names here and there, and called it a Magic story.

As far as the story itself goes, the characters are flat, we're dropped in media res into a world that isn't adequately developed, and the ending kind of just comes out of nowhere.

In science fiction circles, there's often a debate about “hard” vs “soft” sci-fi, and which makes for better literature. Proponents of hard sci-fi argue that it's essential to get the scientific details of a story right, and that things which violate known rules about physics (time travel, faster-than-light spaceships, etc) should be avoided. Fans of softer stuff, on the other hand, argue that the story is what's important, and that scientific accuracy is important only to the degree that it advances or helps the plot of the story.

Master and Commander is kind of like the hard sci-fi version of a sailing novel set during the Napoleonic wars. It seems very historically and navally accurate, and from reading the author's forward it's obvious that achieving that accuracy was of great importance to him. It's almost too accurate, though - as someone without a background in sailing, it took me a good chunk of the novel to understand was was going on, when the relationship between Aubrey and Maturin was what I really cared about, rather than the technical stuff.

I can see what people like in this, it just isn't for me.