Derek
I've always enjoyed Faye Kellerman, but this was better than most. Considering that Kellerman is about my own age, perhaps older, I'm astonished at how well she remembers teenage love. The ending was predictable - which I don't find at all a problem in this kind of story.
Two bright young kids (15 & 14) in love (well, they think they are, and what else matters?), school bullying gone deadly wrong, and a dedicated, caring, police force (a guy can dream!). It makes for a fast-paced, enjoyable, read.
Howard W. Campbell, Jr, is writing his memoir as he sits in an Israeli prison cell, accused of war crimes in Germany during World War II. If you believe Howard W. Campbell, Jr, he's guilty as charged, but he's the only person whose direct testimony we're given. He surely was a high-ranking Nazi propagandist; he might have been an American spy. Certainly, some Americans seem to have conspired to protect him from war crimes charges at the end of the war, but even the man who recruited him as a spy doesn't seem to think his great service to the allied war effort makes up for the damage he did as a propagandist. On the other hand, the Israelis seem willing to acquit him if only he can prove the existence of the spymaster.
Throughout, Vonnegut dances around the questions of what a person's moral duties are in a time of worldwide insanity. We'd all like to think that we wouldn't be the people who helped send Jews to Auschwitz, but would we be able to stand against such insanity? Certainly Vonnegut has no interest in telling us either where the line between good and evil should be, or on which side of the line either author or readers stand.
In the end, Howard W. Campbell, Jr. seems to consider his death the final touch in his propaganda campaign. So it goes.
Somewhere around a thousand authors must have tried their hands at Sherlock Holmes, as he's been so long out of copyright, so I don't really understand how the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate really feels they have any particular right to choose an author to write an “authorized” Sherlock Holmes novel, but I must say they did a pretty good job in choosing Horowitz.
It's a long time since I have actually read Conan Doyle's novels, but this novel certainly reads the way I recall those stories. Holmes, Watson, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson and even Moriarty, seem totally authentic. The two intertwined cases show Holmes usual brand of brilliance in detection – though Horowitz' version relies on a whopping great coincidence to tie them together. I can't help thinking Conan Doyle would not have approved.
Only once in a while did a glaring anachronism manage to creep in – I wonder if it's actually easier for an American to write about 1890 London than it would have been for someone living in London today. The one that jumped out at me was a police officer giving the arrested man his rights: “you are not obliged to say anything unless you desire to do so, but whatever you do say I shall take down in writing...” This wouldn't have happened prior to the Judges Rules of 1912, at least.
A children's fantasy in the vein of [a:C.S. Lewis 1069006 C.S. Lewis http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1211981595p2/1069006.jpg]' Narnia series, or even [b:Out of the Silent Planet 100921 Out of the Silent Planet (Space Trilogy, #1) C.S. Lewis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327959123s/100921.jpg 879622], or more recently [a:Philip Pullman 3618 Philip Pullman http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1196023994p2/3618.jpg]. It's a little preachy at times (though not nearly so much so as Pullman), but it's hard to argue with a moral that says “Love is good, hate is bad” and “we are all individuals”.Meg can be a little annoying, but she's a pre-teen girl. ‘nuff said.
I feel so totally betrayed by this book that I don't even care if this is a spoiler. I was led to believe, by my library, my wife, and the Danish Crime Academy (who gave it a “first book award - that seems a little unreasonable given that it's merely the first collaboration by a pair of authors using A.J. Kazinski as their pseudonym) that this was a mystery. It turns out to be a fantasy in the Dan Brown style - but with far less of the thriller to it.
If somebody had really been out to kill the 36 righteous men, I'd be good with that. But if God creates 36 righteous men, and then routinely kills all but one, then (a) that's sick, and (b) doesn't God actually do things for a reason?
That's three days of book-reading wasted.
What a waste of time. Back on page 71, she told us where this story was going. But when we got there...
Nothing happened.
There's no conclusion to this book, and I feel ripped off.
One of my GR Friends is reading books with strong female protagonists. This book's only strong characters are female, but it doesn't do a thing to redeem it.
Oh, and Cadigan had to actually explain the roots of the character name “Body Sativa”. Please... the first rule of comedy - never explain a joke.
Where the books of the “First Law” trilogy span a continent, and their sequel [b:Best Served Cold 2315892 Best Served Cold Joe Abercrombie http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1246971611s/2315892.jpg 2322406] spans another, [b:The Heroes 9300768 The Heroes Joe Abercrombie http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1284418103s/9300768.jpg 12879765] goes in a completely different direction. Most of the main characters were introduced in the original trilogy, but the action focuses on one battle for a piece of the Northland surrounding one small town, over just a few days.While the story is full of “heroes”, “The Heroes” is actually a stone circle on the hill commanding the battlefield. This isn't your usual “epic fantasy” both because of its narrow focus, and because there's no simple struggle of Good versus Evil. I expected not to enjoy the story, both because I love “Good versus Evil”, and I'm kind of sappy about happy endings, but I was surprised to find myself pretty well enthralled (though I might have skimmed through some of the more graphic battle scenes).There are no truly Good guys (except possibly Harod dan Brock, who is presented as being pretty much too good to survive), but there are no truly Evil guys either. Black Dow is as evil as they come, but even he comes off as someone who's just doing what he has to do, in the only way he knows how. As for the Heroes, as much as anything, this is a story about the tenous connection between actual heroism and being known as a hero. We have a character who can perform 10 heroic acts before breakfast - but in reality has no concern for his own well-being, and more frighteningly, none for the well-being of the people he's supposed to be fighting with, either. There are at least two “heroes” who are outright cowards - one who's fooled everyone around him, and another whose instinct for self-preservation might save those around him, but only if he doesn't need to throw them to the wolves, first.In the end, one can only try to “do the right thing”. It probably won't make you a hero, but you might sleep comfortably.
Not my favourite Weber. The story of a crack military unit being stranded on a hostile planet and fighting their way across a continent to rescue has been done before, and better, in many books, of which his sometime collaborator [a:David Drake 19472 David Drake http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1207164263p2/19472.jpg]'s [b:Redliners 714616 Redliners David Drake http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1290067181s/714616.jpg 700871] is, in my opinion, the best.In addition, I really dislike the whole “interstellar empire” subgenre. I can't imagine a scenario in which interstellar civilization, even with faster-than-light travel, can work with hereditary nobility - and if it could, I don't want to live in that civilization. To cap it off, the “bad guys” in this universe are “eco-freaks”. They're even less likely to be able to run a galactic civilization. Give me a break!The primitive inhabitants of the planet Marduk are about as inhuman as a species could be (gigantic, six-limbed, amphibians, with wicked horns) while still eating food edible by humans, and yet from page to page you could easily forget they're not human - because they act just like humans.Meh.
I found this book very frustrating. In the first place, Krauss spends far too much time God-bashing, instead of just sticking to the science. Fine, he doesn't believe that God created the universe, but there's absolutely no good reason to even bring it into a discussion of how our universe has been created from nothing.In any case, ultimately, his arguments seem no better than a belief in a supreme being as creator. Krauss waves his hands and tells us that most of the universe consists of “Dark Matter” (fairly easy to believe, as it is simply matter that we can't detect with current instruments), and “Dark Energy” (a seriously kludgy substance that exists purely to make physical theory match observed reality, via the “Cosmological Constant”). How is it that if we believe in God, we're credulous cretins, but if we believe in Dark Energy we're “scientists”?He even had the nerve to introduce Occam's Razor. If we are to use the Razor, perhaps we shouldn't jump so blindly on the Cosmological Constant bandwagon — a part of Einstein's General Relativity that he seriously regretted, and considered an error.Now, my knowledge and understanding of physics is probably about as good as it gets for someone without a degree in physics, and I didn't have too much trouble following the science in the book — but it was hard enough that it can hardly be considered as being a book for the layman (that is, the science is far harder than [b:A Brief History of Time 3869 A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1333578746s/3869.jpg 2192250]). Perhaps he could have provided arguments that would convince me, but if so, the book contains too little physics to convince anyone of his case, and too much for most readers to follow.
An interesting outing from a new-to-me author, but I can't say I cared much for any of the characters, less for the disillusioned-communist backstory, and it wasn't much of a whodunnit - we know almost from the start who dunnit, and the list of possible who-was-duns is small.
So, I'd try another book by Indridason, but won't be pushing him to the top of my to-read list.
The title refers to the time left, at the start of the novel, to the official handover of Hong Kong to China by the British. As a thriller set in the politics of the period, it's great. The author obviously understands the political and cultural environment of the period, and one can only desperately hope that he's exaggerating (though I suspect not...).
Unfortunately, his understanding of some of the technical details of his plot seem a bit weak. Our hero, Chief Inspector “Charlie” Chan, discovers a cache of “pure” Uranium 235, but fortunately leaves its actual recovery to others - who die gruesomely of radiation burns within a couple of days. Well, I grew up immersed in nuclear physics - my father taught it to nuclear plant operators - and I was pretty sure that couldn't happen. No less an authority than the US Centers for Disease Control agrees with me. Without generating too much of a spoiler, suffice it to say that earlier he accepts personal testimony as definitive without apparently back-checking the facts, and later he has to send evidence to Scotland Yard for analysis, which surely any competent lab could have handled in Hong Kong.
Still, if you're not overly worried by a few little incongruities, the story is fascinating (and scary - more for its depiction of China, and what China's growing economy means for the rest of the world in the future, than for the actual criminal acts that are ostensibly being investigated.
Much better than the second book in the series, [b:Broken Angels 279561 Broken Angels (Takeshi Kovacs, #2) Richard K. Morgan http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320423643s/279561.jpg 1775843], and almost as good as the first.In the first book, Takeshi Kovacs is a disillusioned ex-military killing machine, practically forced into a life of crime because no other avenues of employment exist once he's left the military. He's given a chance to redeem himself in a largely legitimate job as a private investigator, and it seems he might be able to find himself a niche. In the second book, he's back to the military as a mercenary - whatever happened to the disillusionment? What happened to him after the end of the previous story? We never find the answer to either question (though there's a small hint in this book), and it's frustrating that the reader is introduced to one Takeshi Kovacs in the first story, and then a seemingly different one in the second.In this last book in the series, Kovacs hits rock-bottom, but at least this time we're told the source of his anger (the Real death of his former lover and her daughter). Kovacs puts his powers to Good (or at least, as reasonable an approximation as he's capable of!) and ultimately there isn't reformation or redemption - after all, could the reader possibly believe it's that simple for a man like Kovacs - but there's the promise of the possibility of redemption.
I've always enjoyed Forward's novels, but somehow missed this one.
Near-future Science Fiction must be one of the hardest genres to write, because it is so easy to guess wrong, and have your readers laughing at what you thought life would be like in the next few years. So I was astonished by the accuracy of Forward's predictions. For a novel published in 1984, dealing with fields in which scientific knowledge has advanced so far in the intervening four decades, it's astounding how much he's got right!
Bravo!
I loved [b:Wolf Hall 6101138 Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall, #1) Hilary Mantel http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1336576165s/6101138.jpg 6278354] and waited anxiously for my local library to get a copy of this sequel; so I was a little taken aback when a reader on an unrelated discussion group said how much she'd disliked Wolf Hall. With that, I read [b:Bring Up the Bodies 13507212 Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall, #2) Hilary Mantel http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1330649655s/13507212.jpg 14512257] in a slightly different light.I still loved the book, but I have to admit the writing style is unusual, and could be distracting. It's almost first person: everything is told from Thomas Cromwell's point of view, and nothing happens without his presence, but “he” usually refers to Cromwell himself. It's almost as if Cromwell is personally telling a story in the third person. This sort of thing usually makes my brain hurt and causes me to throw the book across the room (though, of course, I'd never do this with a library book!), so I can understand why someone else might find it unreadable.Beyond that, you probably need to be a fan of the Tudor period of history, and probably Henry VIII in particular. It seems that practically all of the characters are named with variations of Thomas, Richard or Henry. That's not Mantel's fault: these are all historical characters! I wouldn't be surprised if certain minor characters got left out of the story purely because they would add yet another Tom, Dick or Harry (and I guess it's no coincidence that “every Tom, Dick and Harry” is English idiom for “everybody”). This, and the generally turbulent politics of the period, lead to a storyline that has to be extremely confusing if you don't at least understand the church politics of the time (Reformation), the major houses of the English nobility, and of course, Henry's serial monogamy.Those issues surmounted, it is a brilliant book. It's not intended to be a history, so no doubt license is taken with actual events, but it presents a fascinating and thrilling, possible, retelling of the events of Henry's reign — from the beggining of his dissatisfaction with Anne Boleyn to her execution and the coronation of Jane Seymour.If you have trouble with the history, check out the equally good TV series The Tudors, which is historically quite accurate, and covers the same ground (particularly season 2) from different viewpoints.
A very odd book, in almost every way. Surprisingly, I didn't find the fractured English (changed grammar and spellings intended to demonstrate the way language might change over a thousand or more years) to be a serious impediment. If anything, it forced me to actually pay more attention to the whole story, and I will remember this book long after I've forgotten many an easier read.
Still, it's just a gimmick. When you get right down to it, nothing much happens. We have a world destroyed by nuclear war; a post-apocalyptic populace slowly moving from a hunter-gatherer society to a farming one; and power-hungry men trying to recapture the glories of old. But the powerful are trying to regain the knowledge of atomic energy without going through coal and steam first (they don't appear to be even smelting their own iron, just reclaiming old stuff from dumps). It's doomed to fail, and at the end of the book nothing has changed.
I was conflicted when I heard this was “a gripping and brilliantly imagined take on ... [b:Moby Dick 153747 Moby-Dick or, The Whale Herman Melville https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327940656s/153747.jpg 2409320]” (so it says on the cover blurb). On the one hand, Miéville at his best is one of the best writers on the planet. On the other hand, I hated Moby Dick (yeah, I gave it 2 stars - because one would have meant I couldn't finish it). On the gripping hand, I already panned [b:The Scar 68497 The Scar (Bas-Lag, #2) China Miéville https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320435192s/68497.jpg 731674] because it was too much like [b:Moby Dick 153747 Moby-Dick or, The Whale Herman Melville https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327940656s/153747.jpg 2409320]!It turns out Miéville is either mocking [b:Moby Dick 153747 Moby-Dick or, The Whale Herman Melville https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327940656s/153747.jpg 2409320], or he's explaining it in terms that make it easy for illiterates like me to understand! In any case, I find the book vastly more interesting than Moby Dick.Everybody knows that Moby Dick is not actually about hunting whales, it's about the sort of worldview that leads to monomania - about philosophy. In [b:Railsea 12392681 Railsea China Miéville https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1321409808s/12392681.jpg 17373771], Miéville turns this on its head: the massive animals hunted by railsea captains, those animals that in prior encounters have removed a limb or two from said captain, are known as Philosophies! Any captain worth his or her salt has a Philosophy (and one or more missing limbs).Despite being marketed as a Young Adult novel, I don't see it. The protagonist is, presumably, a youngish adult. Not so young that it seems inappropriate that he frequents pubs, though, and he could in any case be fully adult without anything changing.The world of Railsea is, as always from Miéville, finely rendered and quite unlike anything anybody else has written.
I've read this before, and remember it better. Not an awful lot happens, for a protagonist who was captured by the enemy in World War II, lived through the fire-bombing of Dresden, was captured by aliens in a flying saucer and kept in a zoo, and finally survived a plane crash that killed all but one of the others on board. Everything just skims the surface, and you not only don't get much of a sense of the real Billy Pilgrim, you couldn't care less if there is a real Billy Pilgrim.
It might have been that the plot was more contrived; or the antics not so funny; perhaps even the translation wasn't up-to-the-usual.
Or it might have been that I was on a camping weekend with a bunch of home beer-makers, and there was much sampling of product.
In any case, I didn't find this quite as enjoyable as the usual Camilleri.
At last, I'm finished. The problem was not the book, but that I was reading it on my phone. I've been on the Epilog for two weeks at least.
Even though the story ends on an upbeat note, it's ultimately rather depressing. Two whiz-kid inventors create a whole new way to do business. It's so new, it becomes known as “New Work”. So then how do you integrate that with the whole American Way: Doctorow's answer is that you don't, you can't, and corporate inertia will ensure that it never happens. Too bad - I liked the New Work.
Brilliant. Hard SF at its absolute best.
It's almost impossible to imagine a galaxy-spanning civilization in a universe still bounded by the absolute limitation of the speed of light, but Egan manages to do it, and do it well. Yet, the galactic civilization is almost a throwaway in this tale. The true story is about a microcosmic society in a hidden backwater.
The people of the Splinter (from the start, clearly recognizable as some kind of orbital habitat) are clearly post-apocalyptic, their science has fallen into disuse (to the degree that people know what multiplication is, but rarely learn it), and yet, faced with a threat to their future, they develop a knowledge of celestial mechanics, from Newton to Einstein, in less than a generation. That might seem hard to believe, but Egan makes it all perfectly reasonable - after all, a spinning, orbiting, object is a continually (measurably) accelerating frame of reference. Newton might have worked out Einstein's theories in such a place.
I have a background in mathematics, but my geometry is weak (I can work out geometry all the way up to 2 dimensions), and this was heavy on 4 dimensional geometry, so very hard work to keep track of. I always felt I almost understood it all, but it was absolutely worth the effort.
Ah...
After a number of less-than-expected reads, it's nice to get back to a series that's consistently well written. This is one of a long series that I had somehow missed when it was released 10 years ago.
Jack Reacher (who should, in no case, no how, ever be played in a movie by Tom Cruise - gag! spit! aggghhhhh) is as comfortable as an old shoe. You know how the story is going to play out, but there are still always surprises. Unlike so many mystery writers, Lee Child doesn't try to obscure his clues - he might as well come right out and say “Reader! Here's a clue”. So you know you've just been given a clue, and at the end of the story you'll say “I knew that was important”, and you'll have been right. But you still won't figure anything out any faster than Jack Reacher!