Ryan
This was a lot of fun, with the caveat that you'd have to be fairly well invested in Star Wars trivia and lore to get anything worthwhile out of it. But, if you've ever wondered about the hidden lives of characters like the Mos Eisley bartender, the droid that malfunctioned outside of the Lars homestead, or the chief mechanic of Yavin IV, this is the book for you!
The collection of authors the book is comprised of are fantastic, as well - some of my favourite current sci-fi authors are here.
This was a fun read - trope-y in a way that makes it seem like a greatest hits of noir detective stories. If you're someone who likes detective stories as a genre, but doesn't read a lot of them, you'll probably dig this. For the more entrenched noir fan I could see it becoming a case of familiarity breeding comtempt, though? Regardless, the banter between Jack and Trixie is always fun (and that level of fun matched by the dual narrators in the audiobook version)
I was really excited to read this due to its historical status and influence, and because of those factors I remain glad that I read it. The historical setting, and the place the book has in the history of the wuxia tradition made it enjoyable. However, I wasn't really able to connect with it on a deeper level than that, which hampered my enjoyment somewhat.
This was a really well-done noir novel, set in the seedy parts of a New York that might not exist anymore. The novel really felt like it was set in the 1970s, despite email and Craigslist being a really important part of the plot, and that created this interesting friction as you read it. Aleas tells the story well enough, though, that you keep reading despite that friction, and manages to carve out an engaging and thrilling mystery with an unexpected resolution.
This was another fun superheroes vs monsters story. The action picks up fairly immediately after the last one ended, but with a switch in narration; this gives the story a fresh new feel. It's very much a “chapter 2” sort of feel, compared to a book that still stands on its own. This makes sense given the comic book inspiration of the story, but is something readers should be aware of.
I should add, as well, that part of what makes this series fun for me, as well, is the Waterloo setting. It's been a long time since I lived in that city, but I can still recall a lot of the local landmarks that get featured and it creates an extra level of connection to the story.
This was a fascinating book that looked at the case of Dr. Marcel Petiot, a serial killer that preyed on the people of Paris during the German occupation.
It's a dark, gruesome story, for multiple reasons, and as such I can understand it not being people's cup of tea, but I couldn't tear myself away from it. The lore that people built up about Petiot at the time - was he secretly Gestapo? Secretly French resistance, fighting the Gestapo? Or, was he an entirely domestic monster, taking advantage of the chaos of war to further his own ends?
It's also interesting to see how Petiot played the media to his advantage - that's something we often associate with more modern killers, but having someone doing it so brazenly against a police force unprepared for it was very interesting to see.
Overall, this book was an interesting look at a minor bit of history that often gets (understandably) overlooked in the shadow of the much larger act of violence that was unfolding across Europe at the time. If you're interested in either French history or serial killers as a topic, it's a very worthwhile read.
This was a much quieter and more introspective short story than we usually get from the Liath Luachra series, and to be honest it was a welcome variation. As much as I appreciate the action-based storytelling that we usually get with this character, it was nice to get something that focuses more on exploring and expanding our understanding of the protagonist. In many stories, having your mysterious, enigmatic warrior character become more familiar and open makes them less interesting, but O'Sullivan manages to avoid that with his version of Liath Luachra. I look forward to continuing to read more adventures with this character, now that I feel that I have a better understanding of her.
A retelling of Back to the Future done in “Shakespearean style” - a dialogue-heavy script with little stage direction and a lot of iambic pentameter. You'd have to be a fairly big fan of both the Bard and the 1984 film to be interested in this. Luckily I am a fan of both, so this was a pretty enjoyable read.
At times the expository material seems heavy - there are a lot of cases of characters describing what they're doing, which is necessary for the way this was written but would seem odd if it were actually staged. There are enough Easter eggs throughout to keep the reading light and entertaining (I especially enjoyed how they handled the Huey Lewis cameo).
The newest Magic: the Gathering set is a pastiche of fairy tales and Arthurian romance, and this is an exploration of that. If you've played with and enjoyed the set, you'll probably enjoy this, it's neat to see the cards that you've been playing with brought to life through an engaging tale. If you're not a Magic player, though, and are just looking for an Arthurian romance there are probably other tales you'd enjoy more.
A Spark of White Fire was apparently inspired by the Mahabharata, which I've not read (aside from a single section of the Gita contained within it). While I can't comment on how faithful it is to that tale, Mandanna has done a great job of evoking the feel of myth – not only because this is a story with gods running around in it, but in every aspect, from rhythm and diction to character motivation and interaction. Despite the futuristic trappings, it feels wholly like an ancient story being sung into existence, and the contrast between those two aspects was delightful. Rarely is the title of “space opera” so well deserved.
One of the most enjoyable elements of the story is how well Mandanna blends the tightly personal family drama of royalty with the larger political stakes that that drama affects. These are people, ultimately, who are playing games and settling family squabbles in a way that will affect the lives of entire civilizations; however, they never appear capricious or uncaring to how their decisions affect others.
Overall, A Spark of White Fire does a fantastic job of melding its science-fiction and fantasy selves, and is an engaging start of a new epic.
This was a fascinating read for me because I lived through this period - it was the time at which I first started paying attention to politics - but so much of the underlying context was unknown to me then. If you're looking for a well-written summary of domestic US politics in the 1990s, this does that well.
Equally fascinating, though, was how much the culture has changed since then - not only with regards to how differently Clinton's impeachment would be treated in the social media age, but with how commonplace the idea of the US political parties working together was in the early 1990s? Newt Gingrich's remaking of the Republicans, and the ways the Democrats responded to it, seems so ingrained in everything now that it's hard to see a way out. Kornacki doesn't provide any thoughts on how to do that (and it wouldn't quite fit with the story that he's telling to do so).
Even more depressing, though, is thinking about how those ideological changes have become so apparent here in Canadian politics as well.
This was an interesting, but dry, look at the history of pre-revolutionary Paris and how the city developed into our modern understanding of it. It's focused on a time period that I'm not incredibly familiar with, but seeing the trends develop and the impact of architecture and public works on how are populace sees and organizes themselves was interesting.
A fairly interesting social history of some of the giants of the Canadian snack food industry (Old Dutch, Hawkins, Ganong, and the like). A little on the dry/academic side, but interesting to see the impact of those companies on the communities that they inhabited, and the relationship that people develop between food and childhood memories.
This was a really mixed bag. It takes the old and familiar - a ragtag band of adventurers questing for a mcguffin - and infuses it with a more modern understanding of how politics and gender relate to war (given Khan's academic background in political science this is quite understandable). For the most part, though, the story dragged slowly and took some time to find its feet. Once it found itself, though, it became a lot more enjoyable, but it was a lot of work to get to that point.
The beginning of the end (one I'm not quite ready for yet). We begin with the crew of the Roci scattered across the universe, with the Laconians tightening their grasp across the systems. From there you can kind of tell where the story's going to go, but the experience of going there is what matters, and it's one that's incredibly emotional and exciting.
This was a fun, creepy, frenetic novella that mashes up the obsessive power of music and Lovecraftian horror. If you're the kind of person that notices the difference between the radio edit and the album version, or has a favourite bootlegged version of a song, the characters here will seem familiar.
The plot of the novella moves really quickly, which at times stretches credulity a little, but that's kind of necessary for the structure of the story, so it's forgivable. Overall you're left with a fantastic EP of a story.
This was sold to me as “Eurovision in space”, but really it's more like “Eurovision in space by way of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Hedwig and the Angry Inch for a soundtrack”, which is infinitely better. Valente takes a fairly standard sci-fi premise (aliens considering the destruction of Earth), fills it with an intergalactic singing competition, characters that are endearingly over-the-top, and aliens that are completely bizarre and beyond the imagination of most.
I thoroughly enjoyed this!
“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays”
Poker and poker stories bring me joy. Which made this a bad fit for me - Whitehead is incapable of feeling joy, and as such his writing about poker is as interesting as reading a page of tournament results, with the added bonus of the kind of hipster detachment that tries to make you feel like less because you had the audacity to feel something.
This is a wonderful souvenir of The Mercer Report, and is a must-own for people that were invested in the show. The book is 80% transcripts of Rick's rants on the show, with enough behind-the-scenes stories mixed in to give it some added value.
If you weren't a watcher of the show, but have any interest in Canadian politics, it's probably still of interest? Rick's rants always got to the heart of the political issues, big and small, affecting Canadians, and reading them in reverse chronological order is like stepping back into recent history. Social media has made following politics into a bit of a goldfish bowl, where people forget what things were like even a few years ago, and it's nice to have a document of what they used to be.