Kyle Erickson
This was a decent introduction to this series, but I do think it would have been better after reading A touch of Light. As it is, the majority of this prequel novella focuses on a battle and I am just less interested in combat for combat's sake. But I'm looking at this as an investment to get more context into A Touch of Light when I read it!
The Wheel of Time has one of the best endings I've ever read, to a series I mostly feel very mixed about. But damn. What an experience. I'm glad I didn't completely throw in the towel after book five like I planned. The second half of A Memory of Light are some of the best scenes I've read anywhere
9.5/10
This fifth installment of Sun Eater is everything you could want after Kingdoms of Death. It's probably the two books I feel benefit the most from being split (that I've read). Ashes of Man was able to deliver breathing space and emotional beats and a bit more of a ramp up to the next thing after all the crazy events of Kingdoms of Death.
I think I liked the climax of Kingdoms of Death more, but the falling action in this book is some of the stuff I've liked the most in the entire series. This book is harrowing and emotional, but still has epic space battles and pew-pews and laser swords. The characters in this series continue to grow and interest me in new ways, and Hadrian is so old now and been through so much that he feels like a new character from where we started, but in a believable, earned way. I also think this book has Ruocchio's best prose to date; it is extremely well written.
9/10
7/10
I have a lot of complicated feelings on this book and on this series as a whole but I am ultimately left dissatisfied. King does a familiar thing at the end here that he LOVES to do that I absolutely hate, and I wanted to lower the score on principle at that point. But there was a lot here I did like.
Ultimately it's very clear this book was mostly conceived of much later than the beginning of the story, and so much of the plot beats of this book felt like not organic parts of the Dark Tower Saga but moreso King working out some personal stuff. I don't mind the meta components to the story but I wish they were secondary or tertiary and not so central. I also think most of the character arcs were not wrapped up in a satisfying way for me. The villains in particular were very unsatisfying.
I think while writing this I may have talked myself into a three star but I will let the book settle and see how I feel.
There are other worlds than these.
Did I understand this book? No. Do I know how to review it? No. Do I understand how they're going to make an adaptation of it? No. Is existence pain, merely interlocking seconds across a vast tapestry of space and time in which we are all meaningless specks of dust floating through the universe with no meaning and no importance and doomed to an eternity of insignificance and nothingness? Perhaps.
I have never felt like putting a GIF into a review before, but my entire review of this book is just the meme of Troy Barnes from Community saying, “YOU'RE WRINKLING MY BRAIN”
There was a bit of silliness in here and I felt like the book was a bit longer than it should have been, but otherwise....damn.
9/10
This book was a lot of fun, way better than I was led to believe it was going to be. The prose is smoother than the first book, although the flashbacks are borderline filler this time. I also think the book could have been tightened up a bit, the middle has a bit of meander while the ending felt a bit rushed. But damn do I love Locke and Jean's relationship, and the epilogue of the book is great. Lynch also continues to be excellent at dialogue.
8.5/10
This was really good! I think Nero is usually put with Caligula and Commodus as a crazy Roman Emperor and while he did do some crazy things, he was a way more nuanced character. For starters, the people loved him. What is going on here?
The answer is a mix of genuine atrocity, curious decisions, and post-hoc political disparaging. I thought Everritt did a great job showcasing Nero's entire life and all the political stuff that lead to his end. The stuff with his mother, Agrippina, was particularly good. Highly recommend as a biography for this well-known, but somehow little understood, Emperor.
This book was so good! Abrams is 2/2 for oral histories with me, after loving his oral history of The Wire. I love good oral histories because you get such a variety of perspectives. There's an art to making an oral history flow well and have the people speaking complement each other and Abrams is fantastic at it.
There are so many cool things I didn't know in here. From the very origins of DJing and scratching and how it started the movement, how the commercialization of rap affected the genre and subculture, to the origins of the west coast vs east coast feud (main sparks: Suge Knight and.....Outkast!?). I thought the book was pretty comprehensive and gave due to artists who don't get a lot of recognition outside of hip-hop circles for their contributions to culture. I have so much homework now. I also have a much deeper appreciation for the different styles of rap and how the genre has overlayed on top of each other in response to other regions/rappers trying something new and levelling up what people thought could be done and the influences that could be brought in. As an aside, it always makes me sad when people dismiss rap as people just talking fast. Rap is art, rap is poetry, it's storytelling and it's culture. And I think this book does an outstanding job of celebrating it in all of its forms, even if I'm not a fan of certain subgenres.
Also, while I knew it intellectually, seeing just how many incredible rappers are mentioned in this book just made me realize how deep the bench is for phenomenal talents that don't get enough appreciation. Highly recommend this book for hip hop-heads but also just for anybody who wants to dig deeper into a subculture, especially one that has influenced our modern era of music so totally.
I enjoyed this book way more than I thought I would. Essay collections are usually just okay to me, sometimes good, and the audiobooks are easy to listen to while doing other things. I am not very familiar with Wu, only knowing of her from the controversy she talks about in this book - tweeting she was upset her show wasn't cancelled. I've never seen her act in anything.
But I found this collection pretty insightful and compelling, and in many places moving. Even when she is discussing something that on the face of it, I don't have too much interest in hearing about, she manages to write about it in a really interesting way. An example would be the first time she fell in love. I thought this was just a really good essay about how sometimes people slowly change and no longer want the same things, and the way she writes about it shows a lot of maturity and insight into herself and other people. She's also just funny a lot of the time.
There are two essays that really resonated with me. The first is a horrific story when her teacher didn't believe she was smart enough to have written something and she went to all of her other teachers, in front of Wu, and asked if they thought Wu was smart enough to have done it, and they replied no. Absolutely devastating for a child, and it reminds me of all the teachers who dismissed me as a kid because I grew up on a carnival.
The second is the one about rabbits. Her rabbit has the same disease as my rabbit does, and her talking about the whole situation and also the fact that her rabbit is getting old and she will soon miss the little things really got me. Also she defends loving rabbits well, which is something that's annoying in our society.
“people often ask me, ‘why do you love bunnies so much?' and I always want to ask back, “Why do we love anything?”. Listing reasons almost cheapens the love, in my opinion. I don't have an explanation for love. It's also an insulting question. Nobody asks, “why do you love your dog?”. Why is it that love for certain animals is understood, but others require explanation? Everything and everyone is loveable to someone, even if it doesn't make sense from the outside. Love isn't something achieved through merit, its something that happens with time. “
The Bosch series is pretty consistently good, but I've really enjoyed the addition of Renee Ballard to the overarching series, because their dynamic is really good. The previous one was actually my least favorite of the series, but Desert Star is a return to form. This is just good old fashioned crime fiction done well. Bosch is one of my favorite non-fantasy protagonists.
One aspect I don't see talked about is the audiobooks. Maybe it's just on my mind because of the very end of this book, but I've never seen audiobooks done the way the Bosch universe does them. The actor who plays Bosch on the show, Titus Welliver, went back and recorded some of the older Bosch books and now does all the Bosch audio. The voice actress who does the Ballard books also does Renee Ballard. So these collab books have trading viewpoints, but the dialogue of the opposite character is always done by the respective voice actor (so Titus will voice Bosch in Renee's POV chapters) and Connolly has a third series, the Lincoln Lawyer, which also crosses over occasionally. This book had that character in for a single conversation and they brought in the voice actor for those books to do like 10 lines. I just really like this approach. I wish more series did it.
8/10
The first two thirds of this book are utterly fantastic, I was supremely invested in every scene. This book largely focuses on three bit characters from the first book and that seems like a questionable decision at first, but I immediately loved their dynamic and what they brought to the story.
The struggles in Troy and the problems between Priam, Agamemnon, and Odysseus is so well done. This is probably my favorite depiction of Odysseus to date, I just find Gemmell doing great things with him. And of course we have to talk about Andromache, who is an absolutely phenomenal character and I honestly don't know how I can adjust to other Troy retellings now that I find this version of Andromache such an absolute badass. She's just fantastic in every scene. There are other great characters in this but l'll leave it as a surprise.
In general, Gemmell absolutely Excels with character and dialogue. The dialogue here isn't particularly witty like in other series I love dialogue for (Martin, Lynch, Abercrombie, etc) but it does a lot with a little. Every conversation feels like a conversation that would actually happen, which is hard to do. Each one also makes me appreciate the characters involved a little more, either positively or negatively.
Once again, this book isn't particularly action focused. It's slightly more than the first book, but still not that much. There's a chapter that is named after a battle that makes you think it's gonna be a big deal, but then the actual battle lasts for like a page. Gemmell does write fight scenes well, but I feel like people who don't love action scenes as much would love this series, because once again, Gemmell does a lot with a little (seemingly his strong suit).
The book reaches an emotional climax and a pretty good plot climax about two thirds of the way through, and I feel strongly that it should have been the end of the book. It was the highpoint of the novel in all ways, and the stuff that came in the final part of the book was still very good, but there was a time skip and it introduced new characters, locations, conflicts and relationships, after spending 2/3s of the book building up to a bunch of great things that I absolutely loved. I wasn't really interested in reading about new characters and a different sub-conflict right after.
However, because Gemmell is great, he still wins me over. These rando characters I wished he had saved for next book (and to be clear, there are still major characters from the first half involved, they are just interacting with new people) ended up getting me invested, and their little mini-arcs in the last third of the novel had me invested. Once again, a lot with a little.
The very end of the book felt cliffhangery in a way the first book didn't (which I maintain could be read and appreciated as a standalone, if one chose), so this book should probably be read close together with the final book.
9/10
This book was awesome. So many great scenes, such good character development and moments for every character. I read most of this book in two days because I just couldn't stop. It would easily be a 10/10 but the last chapter is one of the dumbest things of all time and even being spoiled on it early didn't stop me from hating it.
So 9/10, Robert Jordan shouldn't have been allowed to write romances by legally binded contracts
Music + neuroscience + memoir? This book was made for me.
I read this incredibly slowly because the author recommends certain songs for you to listen to as examples to learn more about listener profiles and various aspects of music, and it would always distract me by making me want to listen to more music. But this was great. I learned so much in every chapter. Since starting it, I have listened to music differently. I do think the subtitle of the book is very misleading though; the book doesn't go into “what your music taste says about you” at all. It tells you a lot of interesting information about how to figure out your own music taste and what makes you fall in love with a song. There's also just a lot of cool things about how listening to music works in general.
9/10 because some of the ancedotes and random things the author included were either unnecessary or repetitive.