Derek
I'm not sure what I like most - Camilleri's stories, Stephen Sartarelli's translations, or Sicily, but it's always a joy to pick up a new Inspector Montalbano story. In fact, I know I'd hate to actually live in Sicily - it's far too hot for me - but Camilleri makes you want to be there anyway.
The Montalbano books always make me wish I could read Italian - not because I distrust the translation, but because I love it! When Montalbano's assistant, Catarelli, uses recognizable but mangled English idiom in Sartarelli's translation, I want to know what was said in Sicilian and the whole thought process that went into choosing an appropriate misuse of English. It would be far easier, I'm sure, to provide either a literal translation, or grammatically correct English, but Catarelli is supposed to be barely intelligible in his own language.
Won't read, won't rate...
First, we have a married couple working for a metropolitan newspaper where he reports directly to her. I'm sure it happens, but not often, because employers of any size don't let spouses report to each other - it's a recipe for disaster. Then, we have the managing director forcing the reporter to give up his sources and notes to a senior reporter: I'm certain that almost never happens, because you can't keep employees if you treat them that way. Finally, when we reached the point where she is prepared to sacrifice their relationship for a promotion - which I'm certain does happen - I decided I wasn't interested enough in the characters to read the story.
I was hugely disappointed by the direction this novel took after its prequel [b:Altered Carbon 40445 Altered Carbon Richard K. Morgan http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320538722s/40445.jpg 2095852] was so successful. The first book is a 26th century mystery, and a well-done mystery, too; this one is short on mystery and long on death and dismemberment. The epilog sounds like the ending of an [a:Agatha Christie 123715 Agatha Christie http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1321738793p2/123715.jpg] story, where Poirot gathers everybody in the parlour to explain the whodunnit to those of us too dim to figure it out. Unfortunately, it wasn't that I didn't figure it out, but that I never realized we cared (and, it seemed, our protagonist Takeshi Kovacs didn't much care either).I'll be reading the third book in the series, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.
My enjoyment of this book was damaged by the publisher's blurb. Why make such a big deal about how he's the Next Big Thing in “Hard SF”? I was continually distracted by the fact that this really doesn't qualify as Hard SF, which imo shouldn't be subject to “Clarke's Law” (“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”).
Anyway, I don't know that Rajaniemi makes any such claim for himself, and the story was novel and exciting. Unfortunately I also had a rather hard time keeping track of the characters. When people can shed bodies, or transform the ones they have, doppelgangers appear at random, and some characters may just be figments of someone's imagination; that's likely to happen.
Clearly the story is not over. We need to know how the Founders were established, and who they are; why many of the most significant nouns are Russian; who is “pellegrini” (notably not written as a proper noun); and, of course, who is Jean le Flambeau? I'm just not sure I'm up to the number of volumes it seems likely this is going to take...
I was a little trepidacious when I read Sagara's [I hate that she's filed under somebody else's name!] own comment that the book had intended to focus on the Barrani court but had ended up investigating the relationship between Kaylin and Severn. “Ack! Another YA romance!” Fortunately, it didn't really turn out that way. It didn't turn out that way to such an extent that I can't figure out why the author felt she had to mention it...
While I'm not thrilled by Sagara's writing, I am thrilled by the story. I love the mix of fantasy and mystery. Given that they're two of the three main genres that I read, it's a natural fit for me. I enjoy the views of the different races, and their politics (of which we see much, despite Kaylins professed dislike of politics), and hope to see more of the other races as the series continues.
A marvelous first novel. This review said “If [a:Michael Connelly 12470 Michael Connelly https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1406128068p2/12470.jpg] had put Detective Bosch in space (and cyberspace) he may have ended up with something like Altered Carbon (if he is lucky)”, which was a significant selling feature for me, and it lived up to its billing.On top of an excellent mystery, great action, and fascinating characters, Morgan takes a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at both interstellar empire and the nature of “self”.
An all-around better book than its prequel [b:Spin 910863 Spin Robert Charles Wilson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316636370s/910863.jpg 47562]. The pace is better, the characters more interesting, and there's almost no current-level technology to get wrong (though the inability to track cell phones was hard to swallow).
I'm glad I've read and loved so many of Sawyer's later books because it means this won't put me off...[b:Frameshift 264941 Frameshift Robert J. Sawyer https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394997124s/264941.jpg 256848] fails on so many levels. It's too complicated: we have three characters who look like Ivan the Terrible, of Treblinka death camp fame; we have a telepathic leading lady (and really, it isn't even necessary to the plot); a Nobel winning geneticist who can successfully clone humans in one try!; Police who are far too ready and willing to share information with members of the public; and another Nobel-wannabe geneticist who ties it all together.All of that might be acceptable, except that Sawyer frames it all as a traditional mystery and breaks my one absolute rule about mysteries: No Coinkydinks! Coincidence may be acceptable in a Science Fiction novel - if all else fails, you call it “quantum entanglement”; it's fine in a Fantasy, where you call it “magic”; but it's a complete violation of an author's contract with his readers in a mystery, where the reader needs to be able to deduce the culprit in the same way as the investigator. And Sawyer's mystery completely fails without coincidence.Don't even get me started on how the protagonist had to give an entry-level genetics lecture to his post-graduate research assistant, just so that the reader would understand very basic genetics...Ultimately, I'd have been thrilled to read a novel about the genetic research - and loved that part of the book; the Nazis & Nazi-hunters just ruined it.If you've never read Sawyer, don't start here!
What a story! I loved almost every line of this. There's a part early on, involving the Midnighters, that annoyed me to no end, but otherwise it's brilliant, believable and thoroughly engaging. I can hardly wait to start [b:Red Seas Under Red Skies 887877 Red Seas Under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard, #2) Scott Lynch http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1291336119s/887877.jpg 856785].
If this had been a mystery, I'd have thrown it at a wall (and given it's enormous size, probably hurt myself in the process). I despise it when a mystery author gives up on logic and relies on coincidence. It's more acceptable Up to about pg. 300, it was going great. I loved the basic premise of a gaming world optimized for, and encouraging, Chinese gold farmers; where the ultimate gold farmer hits on a way to extort money from other players. But then the mafiyeh get involved, which seems slightly contrived, until the global terrorists become accidentally tied up in the plot — which makes Russian mobsters in Seattle seem perfectly normal. Then three separate parties end up at the same place on US/Canada border, arriving from different directions for different reasons!. At least we could have called it fine deduction and make it a logical conclusion. The homicidal (but discerning) cougar is the finishing touch.My wife (who loved [b:Snow Crash 830 Snow Crash Neal Stephenson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320544000s/830.jpg 493634]) asked me, while I was still in the good part of the book, if it had a massive number of separate plot-lines. I answered honestly that there were just two. Unfortunately, they multiplied. Eventually there were at least five significant threads, and I was losing track (and I suspect Stephenson was, too) of exactly which of the characters should know each other.Please, Neal, stick to the SF you do so well, and leave thrillers to people who understand them.
Not the best Reacher book by a long shot. The plot is unbelievable, but even so I had the whodunnit dun at most halfway through the book. I realize that the novels show Reacher's own bias, so perhaps the reader can assume the FBI isn't actually as stupid as Reacher believes, but even accounting for this you would hope that your nation's top police are smarter than in [b:Running Blind 455925 Running Blind (Jack Reacher, #4) Lee Child http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174926706s/455925.jpg 694428].
I really didn't want to like this book. “Oh, another Harry Potter... another Twilight”. The latest must-read. Ho hum. Of course, sometimes books really are must-reads. And now, I must read book 2...(but you still can't make me read [b:Twilight 41865 Twilight (Twilight, #1) Stephenie Meyer http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1307515757s/41865.jpg 3212258]!
I run hot and cold for Greg Egan. When he's good he's great, and when he's not he's a chore. I have to admit that it's entirely possible that whether I think he's good or not is entirely related to my ability to understand (or at least to think I understand) what he's talking about. This is possibly the hardest SF I've ever read - and I loved it!
The only downside for me was that he essentially turned an entirely new universe — one that not only did not run on the same laws of Physics as our universe, but apparently didn't even have a single set of physical laws — into the Game of Life. I guess we could never really understand such a universe, but it seemed too simplistic.
Nice thriller, but the SF angle was all smoke and mirrors. We're told that a mad scientist is performing crazy experiments on human subjects, with amazing results, but there's less explanation of how it actually works than Mary Shelley gave us in [b:Frankenstein 18490 Frankenstein Mary Shelley http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311647465s/18490.jpg 4836639].
It's been said that if you're going to read this series, this is the book you should start with, which does nothing to endear [a:Brandon Sanderson 38550 Brandon Sanderson http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1201547425p2/38550.jpg] to me. The cast of characters is enormous, the back story is a few hundred millenia long, and there are four different story arcs. Most of the characters are different between the two books, but you still learn enough in the first book to help you through the second. I can't imagine jumping in with book II, and if you're reading this review, I strongly recommend you don't!This is Epic Fantasy, with great big capitals. It's no easy outing, and you may want to keep notes (remember there's a - too small - glossary at the back), but it's well worth the difficulty when you get through it.
Well, I'm completely astonished with the people who have trashed this book. Sure, it covers similar ground to [b:The Name of the Wind 186074 The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1) Patrick Rothfuss http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1270352123s/186074.jpg 2502879], but that's because he never finished that story. Surely, if you didn't want to read to the end, you wouldn't pick up the continuation?If, as at least one reviewer claimed, Kvothe spent 65 pages having sex with a “freakin' hot sex fairy”, shouldn't there have been more sex? While said reviewer was seeing sex, I was reading about the Fae, their realm, and how it interacts with ours.Kvothe is, by any definition, a “hero”. We're being told how he came to be a hero, and it necessarily requires heroic acts.I toyed with rating it a little lower, because I agree with the previously mentioned reviewer that Rothfuss is toying with his readers - but not in the same way he thinks. I couldn't care less that Kvothe won't tell us what happened when he was tried under the iron law, or about his shipwreck. What I really dislike is the way Rothfuss holds out on the details that he himself obviously thinks are important: who is Bast? Why is he dedicated to Kvothe (even knowing what “Reshi” meant might help)? Why does a man who has supposedly dedicated himself to the destruction of the Chandrian live as an innkeeper, “waiting to die”? But in the end, I finished very nearly 1000 pages in 4 days, and that says it all. Not as fast as I can read, but as fast as I ever want to read a really good book!
Now this, as opposed to [b:On the Beach 38180 On the Beach Nevil Shute http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg 963772], is how a post-nuclear-war novel of the late '50s should be. Not everything translates well to the 21st century, but it's believable for its time; it has a racial-equality subtext that would have got the author a great deal of hate mail in his day; and it encapsulates everything that is great about America (and some of the not-so-great).Shute's novel was about humanity crawling under a rock and giving up. Frank's details the lives of a dozen or so people figuring out how to cope — and in the process saving an entire community.
