Derek
This was both riveting and disappointing.
By page 80, I was becoming frustrated, as murders were occurring at a rate that would put Cabot Cove, Maine, to shame, and there were numerous apparently unconnected threads, with no hint of connection.
Not long after, the story started to become interesting as it became clear how the various events were interconnected, but it really took too long to get there - most people will give up on a book before I do.
There are two things that I can't stand in mysteries and thrillers: outrageous coincidence - where events don't seem to have cause and effect, they're just placed together for the sake of the story; and the way heroes in these stories feel they have to risk life and limb doing things that would be far more easily and effectively handled by the police. It came as a very pleasant surprise that our hero, Glen Garber, isn't a gung-ho vigilante. When it becomes clear to him (in part because of good counsel from his lawyer) that his wife's death may not have been an accident, he talks to - and convinces - the police. His actions are not unreasonable and he doesn't act as if he assumes that trained professionals can't be as effective as a motivated amateur!
However, in the end the whole story is bogged down by an incredible overcomplexity - relying on that personal bugbear - the coincidence. There is not one killer, but three!: one's a professional killer, who is leaving so many bodies it has to draw attention to a business that wants to remain unexamined; one is a victim of blackmail who's prepared to kill again in a manner that will expose the very thing the first murder was supposed to hide; and the third, an obvious sociopath in hindsight, kills anyone getting in the murderer's way, via extremely convoluted and contrived methods - yet the killer is supposed to be extremely well organized and can't even get rid of the most obvious evidence. Give me a break...
A fun, quick, read about a generation ship en-route to one of the Centauri stars (I don't think it was ever stated which) that runs into difficulties on the way (don't they always?) It's aimed at a younger audience, but the ethical issues confronted by the crew are as serious as any in more adult literature.
Really fascinating discussion of memory, and how to improve it - and there's not a novel concept there! The techniques Foer describes using in his quest to win a US Memory Championship are over 2000 years old, but most of Western society have forgotten them.
The techniques work - I can still recall the whole shopping list his coach had him memorize - but what I haven't learned is how to determine what I need to remember. I certainly don't need to know jar of pickled garlic, tub of cottage cheese, peat-smoked salmon, 6 bottles of white wine, 3 pairs of socks, 3 hula hoops, snorkel, dry ice machine, email sophia, skin-toned cat suit, elk sausage, Paul Newman film, director's chair, megaphone, harness & rope, barometer.
Excellent pseudo-historical fantasy. Set in “Carce”, which isn't eve a thinly disguised Rome of the Empire period, The Legions of Fire blends Greco-Roman and Norse mythologies in a heroic fantasy of Apocalypse-averted. I'd just finished [b:Lord of the Isles 252589 Lord of the Isles (Lord of the Isles, #1) David Drake http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515B6B5PRSL.SL75.jpg 244765], and was disappointed that, for all the great reviews it's received, I didn't find it up to the standards of his SF work. This book certainly meets, if not surpasses, those standards.
I was a bit disappointed. I came to Drake via his military SF, beginning with [b:Redliners 714616 Redliners David Drake http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1290067181s/714616.jpg 700871], and have read pretty much everything he's written in the genre, as well as the writings of his frequent collaborators [a:David Weber 10517 David Weber http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1227584346p2/10517.jpg] and [a:Eric Flint 8688 Eric Flint http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1207232691p2/8688.jpg] - the holy trinity of military SF. This book was an enjoyable read, and an original concept, but ultimately not, in my opinion, up to the standards of his SF.Still, I'll read the next book in the series!
Clark does a pretty good job of maintaining the style of John Wyndham - it's not difficult to go straight from Wyndham's [b:The Day of the Triffids 530965 The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1283043614s/530965.jpg 188517] to [b:Night of the Triffids 812874 Night of the Triffids Simon Clark http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178624365s/812874.jpg 798810]. There are a few anachronisms - surprisingly more than in the original book, which you'd expect to be more dated. How on Earth can a Post-apocalyptic society, which doesn't even have a stable energy supply, develop reproductive technology that's not only decades ahead of what was possible at the time of Day of the Triffids, but ahead of what's possible in 2011?The science is pretty sketchy: evolution is Lamarckian, rather than Darwinian; and fertility drugs lead to identical twins, triplets, etc; but on the whole it's a well-written sequel and an engaging story.
I was very disappointed. It's not that the book is badly written - it isn't - but I thought I was reading a “what-if-European-civilization-had-never-developed” novel, but really it seems completely irrelevant that the Europeans were wiped out in a plague. Instead, it's a series of vignettes about life in other parts of the world, that seem like they could have occurred with or without Europeans present.
My favorite post-apocalyptic future.
Gordon Krantz, wandering minstrel, running from bandits, stumbles on the body of a postman, complete with his last bags of mail. He initially takes the mail merely as a way to gain entry to the few remaining guarded communities, to trade mail for food, but he's a dreamer and he's already aware that rebuilding civilization requires powerful symbols for people to believe in, and it occurs to him that the Postal Service - both mundane and powerful in pre-war civilization - is such a symbol. From there, in every community he passes, he establishes a postmaster, and links back to the communities he's already encountered.
It's a heartwarming story about the power of dreams, symbols, and our need to be part of society. In Brin's worldview, patriotism is not the last refuge of scoundrels.
Enjoyable as this book was, I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd read it before. It's [b:King Rat 68498 King Rat China Miéville http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1304351757s/68498.jpg 1870961] (Miéville's, not Clavell's!) without the really gross eating habits. Disappointing - especially since it's not as good a book as King Rat, even with 7 years more experience.
A seriously depressing look at a society that has decided it has no future, and so will make absolutely no attempt to create one for itself.
After nuclear war devastates the Northern Hemisphere, the radiation from dirty bombs slowly migrates south, and at the beginning of the story, Melbourne, Australia, estimates it has 3 months left to live. The Cobalt isotope in the bombs has a half-life of 5 years - surely somebody would be trying to last out the worst of it underground, but not only do they not try, they don't even seem to consider and discard such ideas.
“This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper” ([a:T S Eliot 18540 T.S. Eliot http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1203003844p2/18540.jpg])In Northern Siberia, Makepeace Hatfield is the last survivor of a colony of American Quakers who've moved to Siberia, with the Russian government's blessing, to establish the sort of community that English Quakers came to America to create.We're never told exactly what has caused the total collapse of civilization, but we do know that global warming is involved - the growing season in the Arctic is increasing - and that there have been wars, but it doesn't seem to have been a global war. In any case, the Quaker settlements are destroyed not by war or disease but simply the pressure of migrating refugees.Having lost everything, Makepeace is on the verge of suicide when a plane flies overhead. Thinking this is a sign that civilization still exists somewhere, Makepeace sets off to find it, encountering murder, hatred and slavery along the way.There is no redemption here, not even a sign of any thriving survivor communities, and only the suggestion that the world will eventually peter out with a whimper, and yet the tone remains (vaguely) hopeful.
A beautifully written book that goes nowhere.I finally gave up on this at the halfway point. I never quit on a book, and I'm afraid I have to blame GoodReads for giving up on this one - since I found GR I have more books than I can handle on my list!The story centres on a number of characters in New York City, in the first half of the twentieth century, but of course it's not quite New York as we know it. One character, Hardesty Marratta, is guided to New York in his search for a perfectly just city. Well, neither the New York that we know, or the one of [b:Winter's Tale 386298 Winter's Tale Mark Helprin http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1298746375s/386298.jpg 1965767], is a “just city”, and nowhere in the first half of the book do we get even a suggestion of how it's going to become one (though at least two characters seem to have had visions of it). In fact, it's stated more than once that the poor and the downtrodden are serving a higher purpose. Yuk.After page 349, I gave up and skipped to the epilogue. I guess they find it, but I no longer care. Having read, and loved, [b:Memoir from Antproof Case 87989 Memoir from Antproof Case Mark Helprin http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171121418s/87989.jpg 2206997], I was totally disappointed by this - even though the fantastic, magical/realist nature of this tale is far more to my usual taste in reading. I can only hope that the fact that this book was written 13 years earlier than Antproof Case means that it failed only because he needed more practice.
[b:Greg Egan 8679156 Novels by Greg Egan Books LLC http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1280418793s/8679156.jpg 13551168] is one of my favorite “hard science” SF authors, but in this one I felt he missed the mark. It wasn't until page 160 - half way in - that I finally figured out where he was trying to go, and even then he never tried to develop his hypothesis to its conclusions. Animals are mutating: Why? We learn “how” - the mechanics - but nothing of underlying causes, and the final conclusion seems like a cop-out. Somehow it seems that only an Australian writer would have needed to set part of this novel in Toronto. Sure Egan was writing in 1999, but why would a guy in his late teens in Toronto of the 2020s have to worry about his guardianship of his younger sister just because he's gay? Maybe still in Oz, and maybe his age would still be a barrier in Toronto, but we got over the gay issue years ago.An enjoyable story, but not up to the standard of [b:Distress 156781 Distress Greg Egan http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223643478s/156781.jpg 151293].
The probably-last book in the Millenium trilogy is another great read.
The characters are interesting, and you love the good guys, hate the bad guys, just as you should. It's a fascinating insight into both a political and legal system that are almost unbelievable to North American readers. The bad guys - in this case, a secret group inside Sweden's equivalent of the CIA - are practically pussy-cats compared to CIA black-ops people that we've read about in American fiction (and perhaps non-fiction, too). The whole story is based on the premise that the spooks are protecting a troublesome Russian defector, and covering up an increasing number of his crimes, long after the cold war has ended and he is no longer of any value to them (if he ever was). A fictional American agency would surely have put a bullet in his head a decade earlier, but the Swedes can't even imagine doing that.
On top of that, Sweden apparently has honorable and trustworthy politicians! It would warm the cockles of my heart, if I knew what those were...
The only downside to the story is knowing that there is a fourth book, and that it will likely not get published as Larsson's family claim the rights, but his partner has the actual text.
It's a silly rating system we have here. Three stars means “I like it”, but the truth is I don't like it. Not that that's a bad thing! This is not a story to be liked - there's no “happily ever after”, and there probably hasn't even been any “happily-before”. It's disturbing - and that's a good thing!
It's short - and that unfortunately isn't my cup of tea. I've never been a fan of short stories, but this story is a pretty good example of a short story anyway. In the short medium, far more must be left to the reader's imagination than in a novel: what did happen to the world? what are Munies? how does it end?!
That last prevents me rating it higher - I like stories to have a beginning, middle and end (very pre-post-modern of me...) and this has no beginning or end. Now, if the author told me the rest of the story - I'd be all over it.
Do you believe in conspiracy theories? If you don't yet, you will by the time you finish this book!
Initially, I was a little put off by the technical details of the book (not the story, which is fabulous, but the editing). The editing left a little to be desired: too many adverbs, and use of Americanisms like “gotten” that, while perfectly correct in American English, and to be expected in conversation, are typically removed by editors so that it won't grate on a non-American reader's inner ear.
However, just a few pages in I stopped noticing. This is a story that picks you up by the throat and shakes you. It's not a matter of whether you put it down - it won't let you until it's finished with you!
Captain Daniel Ash wakes, in the middle of the night, to find his wife dead and his daughter ill. Not much later, he's told both his children are dead - and the roller coaster ride of revenge and redemption begins. I don't even have children, and yet I felt the emotion of hearing my family is dead: the loss, the denial, the anger. Who's made them sick? Why? Someone is out to get them - and you! Unlike the biblical End times, if you aren't already on the list of the saved, you never will be.
Set on an Earth very like ours (they do have a Mona Lisa and an Eiffel Tower), but slightly behind us technologically and with some different biology (particularly creatures of the air), [a:Oppel, Kenneth 4159904 Oppel, Kenneth http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s Young Adult series is still highly entertaining to this adult. It does require a pretty extensive suspension of disbelief, though, to believe that pedal powered ornithopters and Icarus wings can work.
