Ryan
This was a really fun idea for a novel - Prohibition-era urban fantasy, full of jazz-era character archetypes and a classic pulpy story about corrupt politicians, land deals, and murder. Once you get beyond that surface level of fun concepts, though, they don't actually meld together very well - they different threads make friction rather than harmony. Not a bad read, but one that feels like it could have been better than was.
Six Wakes is a sci-fi/mystery that takes the familiar idea of the locked-room mystery and moves it to a spaceship. Six clones wake up aboard a ship, their last memory being just before they boarded it twenty-five years earlier. Around them is evidence that all six had recently met with foul play. The novel follows these six characters as they try to unravel the mystery of their missing time, and find out which one of them was the murderer in their previous life.
What makes this story so fresh and dynamic is how Lafferty is able to blend the the two pillars of the story together (the mystery elements and the sci-fi ones), creating a story that felt both familiar and completely unique throughout the entire time I was reading it. She slowly unveils this fascinating, complex world that's been impacted by its technological developments, and provides us just enough clues to keep us engaged in the novel's central mystery while withholding enough that it remains compelling and thrilling. Along with the worldbuilding, the interesting characters, and the engaging mystery, Lafferty weaves themes of rebirth, hopefulness in the face of tragedy, and how technology affects our sense of morality. This was a fascinating book and I loved the experience of reading it.
I want to start off by saying that I get why people would love this book, and there were a bunch of moments in it that were fun. I'm in the demographic that's the prime target for the book (“geeky dude that was alive in the 1980s”) and on a surface level it was a fun trip down memory lane.
Under the surface, though, the story becomes a little disappointing. The main character, Wade, seems really underdeveloped and unremarkable, with little personality beyond “good at videogames”. Despite being such a cypher, though, the other characters in the story idealize him. The villains are similarly shallow. The justification for them being villainous is originally “they're a corporation and try to play the game strategically”, but then they're suddenly murdering dozens of innocent people. The story would have been a lot stronger had its characters been more developed and more fully realized.
This continues with the way that Ready Player One relates to its main theme of nostalgia. Nostalgia – specifically early-to-mid-80s nostalgia for mainstream pop music, video games, and movies – permeates every aspect of the story and the characters' lives. On the surface this might seem fun, especially for the target audience of the book. The problem is, however, that it's a story in which nostalgia and culture have become corrupted. The characters aren't nostalgic for the reasons that people in real life become nostalgic for stuff – because they're wishing for a return to a more carefree time, or because of personal, emotional links to the material. Instead, they're nostalgic for the 80s, a culture that they never experienced or encountered, because Halliday was nostalgic for the 80s. The rich old man has warped society into this cargo cult that worships the trinkets of his youth to the disservice of all else. There's no evidence of any culture existing in the world of Ready Player One beyond 2002 – just slavish observance to the things that Halliday loved. Halliday has an absolutely abusive relationship to the culture of the OASIS, and it's unfortunate that the book doesn't make any attempt to critique or analyze that relationship.
There were some fun moments in Last Shot, and Older has a great grasp of the two protagonists and what makes them tick. Ultimately, though, this suffered from the same problem the Solo movie did, which is that it insists on making Han Solo the protagonist when he's the least interesting part of the story.
Lando's amazing in this. Leia's great, in the small role that she plays. Fyzen Gor is an interesting antagonist. More minor characters, like the Sana Starros, the Gungan security guard, and the Ewok hacker, steal every scene they're in. Han Solo? He mostly shows us why Luke Skywalker was the protagonist of the original Star Wars movies.
I was really of two minds with this. As someone who's a big fan of Rogue One, it was exciting to see more of the characters in the movie, and learning more of their backstory will no doubt make my next viewing of the movie an even more enjoyable experience.
However, as a stand-alone novel this felt unsatisfying. Saw remains a cipher, Jyn's character arc has no real resolution (and the way the plot is developed, it couldn't if it wanted to line up with RO), and the new characters that are introduced seem inconsequential and underdeveloped.
My favourite Star Wars novels are always those that play with the conventions of what the reader expects from a “Star Wars story”, and this one was no exception. It's an employment drama that mostly focuses on interpersonal conflict and workplace politics - it just so happens that those politics and interpersonal relationships are focused around the building of the Death Star. And as a workplace drama it's a pretty entertaining one; the audience of course knows the outcome of Galen Erso's increasing unease over his work for the Empire, and the tension in the story becomes mostly about how much of himself he's going to lose to the manipulations of Orson Krennic and Grand Moff Tarkin. Reading this made me excited to watch Rogue One again, as well, because knowing more about the relationship between those characters will probably deepen my appreciation of their scenes in the film.
This was just a delightful read. Kincaid is a very archetypal urban fantasy protagonist - she's snarky and funny, barely keeping her life together in most areas, but with just enough badassery that she gets through the day. Beyond just being that archetype, though, Charish fills her with enough sass and edge that she's a lot of fun to follow on her adventure.
Beyond that, the world that Charish builds here has a lot of verisimilitude. It's a world filled with zombies and ghosts, but their motivations for being there (and for other people wanting to keep them around) ring very true - dead grunge rockers being summoned to give people guitar lessons, voodoo practitioners being asked to raise zombies to settle contract disputes - it's at the same time both very mundane and fantastical, and the tension between the two really makes the story sing.
This was an absolutely beautifully written examination of heroes and monsters - how they're created, what drives them, and how the realities that surround them help to shape them.
This book is often described as a modernization of the Beowulf myth, and while it very obviously is that, it goes far beyond that as well, subverting a lot of the tropes of the original story. It's not necessary to be familiar with the old English poem to appreciate the story here, but knowing that connection adds an intriguing layer of depth to the overall story.
I've started this tradition of reading Hiaasen novels in the middle of winter. He tends to write so evocatively about Florida that it serves as a nice little mini-break from the weather, and the zany hijinks his criminals engage in can lighten the mood in even the dreariest of seasons.
From that perspective, I was a little disappointed in this one. The narrative's perfectly serviceable, and the satire of celebrity culture works a little too well - Cherry's so vapid and her personality so ephemeral that we never really care what happens to her, and Bang's so well-written as a sleazeball that we never empathize with him. It was a fun enough way to pass the time, but definitely not as entertaining as most of his work that I've read.
For the first 75% or so of this book, I thought it was a fairly standard “first book in a YA trilogy” novel. You have the young heroine who is more powerful than she believes herself to be, the brooding love interest with the mysterious past, the oppressive society that mistreats people similar to the heroine. The supernatural elements, and the society of daevas/djinn, were fairly unique and definitely interesting, but by themselves they didn't feel like enough to carry the story. It felt not bad, just fairly uneventful. Then, at around that 75% mark, the book takes a sharp right turn away from your expectations and it makes it so much stronger. You realize that Chakraborty has done a great job of leading the reader in a certain direction, while also setting up the surprise twist so that it still feels earned. It will be interesting to see where she goes next with this story.
Mata Hari is a fascinating historical figure, and her story is one that is both exciting and a testament to the injustices that women face in patriarchal societies. She deserves books that explain the sensational and extraordinary life that she led.
This, unfortunately, is not that book. Coehlo chooses to frame his story through a series of letters written at the end of Mata Hari's life, and in doing so makes the story more focused on her death than on her life. In doing so, he deflates a lot of the dramatic tension from her life.
The voice in the storytelling is awkward, as well. Mata Hari's letters are written in the first person, but she writes as someone aware of the infamy and iconography she will achieve after her death, which makes the voice sound more like the Coehlo's rather than the character's. This creates an awkward tension in the narration that detracts from the protagonist's telling of her story.
I was excited to learn this was a novel, as I watched the Pryor/Candy film as a kid and loved the idea of a millionaire having to work to lose all his money.
The story here is rather entertaining as well - it's a quick, light read, and it works both as a comedy in its own right, as well as a send-up of Horatio Algar-type rags-to-riches stories.
Sam Kean
This was a fairly interesting collection of anecdotes about the role different elements have played historically, as well as how the modern periodic table was developed. There was no real grand narrative to that development, though, which made the book as a whole lack some coherence (which is ironic, as a later chapter discusses coherence as a state of matter). Still, a fun read if you're interested in the topic but don't know much about it.
This was a nice memoir. Like Myers, I'm the first-generation son of immigrants from the UK, who (ultimately) settled in a working-class suburb of Toronto, so the parts where he focuses on his childhood were VERY relatable to me. There was a really nice oral history of the comedy scene in the 80s, including a lot of reminders of how groundbreaking and influential Second City has been on comedy culture.
At the same time, it's very clear Myers is writing from an outsider perspective - he has lived in the US for many years now, so his view on the culture is seen through rose-coloured glasses. Still, on the whole it's a fantastic love letter to the Great White North.
I've been really enjoying the new Star Trek TV series, so I was excited to read more about Captain Georgiou and Burnham's time together on the Shenzhou, given the brief hints that we've gotten of their relationship on TV. At the least, I was hoping this would add some additional context and depth to those characters, as well as the other characters from the show. Those characters were overshadowed by the “guest stars” from the Enterprise that are either not really that interesting or characters that we already know very well.
As far as the plot goes? The a-plot felt like a rehash of Move Along Home, with Burnham and Spock trapped in an alien escape room, and the b-plot's felt uninspiring. As the first novel adventure for the Discovery characters, I felt like they deserved something more.
This was beautiful, tragic, thoughtful, and far too short. Moreno-Garcia has crafted a wonderful character study here of Amelia, a young woman who lives in the gutters but dreams of the stars. Hamstrung by a gig economy, crumbling public infrastructure, and the isolation of modern life, Amelia's dreams seem like they'll never be realized. Set against a background of a Mexico City that seems equally inspired by Gibson and PKD, as well as current depressing trends in economics, Amelia's life is at once both instantly familiar and frighteningly tragic. The result is a beautiful work of fiction that I can only hope will be revisited in a larger setting at some later point.
Reading this, it's obvious why it's such a classic. Poirot is the very archetype of the detective, the setting is unique and fanciful, and the titular murder is accomplished under mysterious and seemingly impossible circumstances. Throughout the story, Poirot deftly uncovers the most subtle of clues to arrive at a fascinating conclusion. If there's any drawback to the story, it's that for a modern audience some of the clues might be too subtle, as they rely on outdated cultural references that most modern readers wouldn't be familiar with. On the whole, that doesn't detract from an enjoyable story, however.
This felt, more than anything, like a walk through Gaiman's greatest hits. You have the fantasting coming of age story (Stardust), the analysis of childhood innocence through adult eyes (Mr. Punch), the terrifying childhood monster (Coraline), and the balance between myth and reality (Sandman, Neverwhere). That is by no means a knock against the story - it's a fun read - but rather an acknowledgement that he's treading familiar ground. If you're a fan of his other stuff this is definitely a worthwhile read.
This was a delightful set of short stories from Tanya Huff about the life of the world's most powerful wizard, if the world's most powerful wizard was the epitome of a 90s slacker. Magdalene has everything she ever wants, at the snap of her fingers, but completely lacks any of the ambition or thirst for power that so often characterizes wizards. This makes perfect sense for the character because hey, magic, and Huff fills the stories with enough humour and excitement that the overpoweredness of the character never really seems out of place.
Another interesting element of the story is that the publisher took advantage of ebook publication in an interesting way. The stories are presented in order of publication, but each also has a hyperlink at the end that allows you to follow the stories within Magdalene's internal chronology as well. It's an interesting way of having the technology influence the storytelling, and for stories about a wizard it seem especially apropos.
I'm glad to see this is becoming an annual event - as with last year's version, this is a short collection of stories centred around different elements from Celtic folklore and mythology. The stories based on Macha and An Dagda stood out as especially enjoyable, but the whole collection does a great job of blending both the traditional myths and more modern Irish culture.