Derek
I honestly don't know what happened with this book. I kept thinking I'd read it (after all, I'd bought it and put it on my e-reader), but apparently I'd only read an excerpt (probably on tor.com), so I took far too long to get around to really reading it.
Fortunately, it hasn't gone stale in the m...
An interesting, if short, look at a very different way of life.
How would society look if we bonded as foursomes, not pairs? Practically, I think humanity would die out, but nothing in Le Guin's story actually says that the people described are “human”, and perhaps they're a species where it makes sense.
The second volume of the Guardian's trilogy suffers something of the same problem as the first.Again, it starts with a prologue nearly two-decades after the beginning of the story, but at least this time, the end of the novel is roughly at the same time (actually a few days later than the prologue).But it's the story of Robert the Bruce (he of the spider, and “if at first you don't succeed, try, try, again—I think that's all they teach you in Sassenach school) and we never even see the beginning (well, perhaps the very beginning) of his first, unsuccessful, uprising—not “rebellion”, which the characters in these tales would point out suggests some legitimacy in Edward's rule of Scotland—let alone the second (which succeeded).Most interesting, I thought, was how well Whyte created the character of Rob Bruce, who was only mentioned in the first book as a ne-er do well libertine at Edward's court, and how Whyte reconciled the views of him in the two stories.Now, I have to wonder who [b:The Guardian 15925 The Guardian Nicholas Sparks https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388195339s/15925.jpg 810630] of book 3 is? It seems unlikely to be either Bruce or Wallace (as they are not “Guardians” in the sense its been used so far), but there's absolutely no hint from the blurb...ETA: turns out the central character of the third novel is Andrew Murray
Everything I've read says that this is a trilogy, and I'm having trouble figuring out how Whyte can wrap it up in three books.
This first volume follows William Wallace. The prologue begins with his execution, then we go back to see the life that led up to it. About as much is known about Wallace's early life as about Christ's, so Whyte has a lot of room to speculate, and he does it very well and believably.
Of course, there's a background history that is well-documented, though not much taught to we Sassenach's, so it was all pretty new to me, and interesting.
The frustrating part is that the story ends before any of the events that we probably all know from the movie Braveheart—which, of course, is also before the execution in the prologue—so what happens in the intervening years?
Still, I feel I know more, and with much more balance, than I knew before of Edward I's imperial ambitions in Scotland than I learned in school.
Gladstone is an author who's been getting a lot of good press recently, and I've been on the fence about reading him. The problem is that I'm not much into (read: really can't see the attraction of) paranormal fantasy. And “A Kiss with Teeth”? I was over vampires thirty years ago... Then I read Amal El-Mohtar's review: Rich and Strange: “A Kiss With Teeth” by Max Gladstone and I was hooked. What do you get when Dracula meets Buffy and they fall in love? Well, in Gladstone's story, you get a half-vampire child with problems in school, and a couple whose marriage is as predictably hum-drum as any in history. Can you imagine Dracula as an accountant, and Buffy as a housewife? No, unless you're Max Gladstone reading this review, or you've already read [b:A Kiss with Teeth 23209523 A Kiss With Teeth Max Gladstone https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1410981739s/23209523.jpg 42752742], I don't believe you can. Fortunately Gladstone did. The story is told from Vlad's viewpoint. Vlad makes a great deal of the fact that he's had to slow his life to a snail's pace to fit in as a normal human father, but it clearly never occurs to him that acting as a normal wife and mother is no easier for the vampire hunter. And, while he hints that he doesn't expect his child is quite normal (his teacher suggests having Paul tested for ADHD, and Vlad doesn't refuse but he obviously thinks that it might raise more questions than it answers), Vlad neither does anything to verify it nor does it occur to him that being a “normal” seven-year old boy is as hard for Paul as being normal is for his parents. As the best vampire stories have always been, this is a story about interpersonal relationships, not vampires.
Better than the previous outing in the Virgil Flowers series. Funnier and more believable.
Virgil is trying to get an assistant DA onside, and the DA says: “If we go to court, we like to have things pretty well wrapped up.” Virgil replies “Dave, I've been doing this for quite a while. You don't want them wrapped up, you want a gold-plated guarantee, because otherwise you're afraid you'll screw up your conviction stats.”
Plus ça change... In Canada, it's completely different, but the results are the same... US DAs might prosecute a losing case because it's politically necessary, but here the Crown attorney has no need to bolster conviction stats because they're not elected, but they still refuse to prosecute if they think they won't win.
Sandfor has a way with a simile. ‘The woman with a minimal flesh wound “screamed, “I'm dying, I'm dying, where's the goddamn ambulance.” She sounded like a blackboard being run through a table saw.”'
Another solid entry in Pattison's Inspector Chan series.
In this case, I read more for the fascinating descriptions of Tibet than for the mysteries, but the mysteries hold their own.
I read this immediately following [book:Bone Rattler], which Pattison sets in his own country's history, and I find I prefer his take on Tibet than the history with which he is probably more familiar.
I had a lot of trouble with this, and nearly gave up on it.
In short, there's a lot of racism, and I'm not entirely convinced it's all the racism of the characters. The protagonist, Duncan McCallum, is a convict transported from Britain to the New York colony in 1759, and he has the prejudices one might expect of someone completely unfamiliar with the American natives. But as his vision is expanded and he learns how little he originally knew, there's too much of the “noble savage” in the natives he later meets (and for that matter in the only black character) for me to be comfortable.
Also, Pattison seems to know a lot about Tibetan culture and as much as one might expect of an American about American history and culture, but I have a really hard time believing his English characters...
Well, I've been waiting through two books for this, and it was worth the wait. We know from the very beginning of [b:The Lies of Locke Lamora 29588376 The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1) Scott Lynch https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1458646334l/29588376.SY75.jpg 2116675] that his lost love, Sabetha, is central to ... well, everything. So finally, we meet her, and she is everything we expected. Naturally, when they do finally meet, they're manouvered into being on opposite sides... The story takes place in three disjoint periods. We see the earliest days of Locke Lamora's memory, when he first meets (and loses) Sabetha. Then there's the framing plot, in which Locke and the Gentleman Bastards (including the found-again Sabetha) are performing the play which give the novel its name, The Republic of Thieves, during which Locke and Sabetha become lovers. Finally, we have the latest installment of Locke's, and his sidekick Jean's, lives in which they're coerced into an odd political contest where they have to rig an election. Even though it would cost him his life, Locke might still have refused until told that Sabetha is working to rig the election the other way. So far, the series isn't losing any steam.
Fun, quick, read, but in need of editing. A few too many misused words (the sun can no more peak over the dawn horizon than it can peek at noon); and what seem to be glaring errors about military life; plus the annoying English officer who uses phrases I've only ever heard in Canada and the Irish character whose brogue is transliterated atrociously. That, along with some sometimes wooden descriptive prose, make it a little hard to submerge yourself in the story. On the other hand, the relationships between the characters are well written.
The really annoying thing though is the complete lack of women with any agency—or even interest. In a cast of dozens, there are exactly five women. They're all beautiful—and they're all nurses (well, strictly, army medics, but you get my point...)
My wife has a fascination with Scandinavian mysteries that is completely beyond my comprehension. I mostly find them too bleak to tolerate, but so far I've enjoyed Jo Nesbø's “Harry Hole” series, and I read them as fast as they get translated into English (which is for some odd reason not in the order they were published in Norway...).
This isn't a Hole novel. And that's a good thing, because it's much better. In my opinion, this is Nesbø's masterpiece. A tightly written police procedural, where you get all the clues you need to solve the crime, but probably won't see the light until nearly the end of the story. I loved every moment of this one.
This is the second of Hurley's books that I've read. [b:God's War 119227 The War God's Own (War God, #2) David Weber http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1321607664s/119227.jpg 1229397] was very well written, but just a little too disturbing for me—religious war and very squirmy biological science are both places I don't really want to go. [b:Mirror Empire 20646731 The Mirror Empire (Worldbreaker Saga, #1) Kameron Hurley http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1399920947s/20646731.jpg 39939919] was much more to my taste, even though the different cultures are definitely intolerant of each other's religions and the biological science (or magic, in this case) is surely just as squirmy. But the religious differences, here, are really cover for politics (they all have differently named gods, but you can't help thinking that the name is all that changes), and we don't get to see much of the squirminess of the biology. On top of that, it's an epic fantasy in the best traditions of epic fantasy. I could easily imagine the series rivalling [a:Steven Erikson 31232 Steven Erikson http://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1219169436p2/31232.jpg]'s Malazan Book of the Fallen for complexity—which might be a turn-off for some, but just makes me want more.
Overall, a really good first novel. It could (and should) have been a good deal tighter (that is, shorter!) but that's bad editing more than bad writing. Some things were thrown into the story with little obvious reason, and no back story, and there were a few things that seemed quite scientifically weak for an author who was an astrophysicist before he was an author, like “It was Coriolis force, of course: the same fictitious force which curved wind vectors into cyclones on the surface of a rotating planet” — except there's nothing ‘fictitious' about it: a physicist should be aware that Einstein explained all about accelerating frames of reference almost a hundred years before Reynolds wrote this. I do understand his point, but it's part of what needed to be cut, because it offers nothing to the plot and is arguably wrong. Still, I enjoyed it more than the first Reynolds book I read, and I'll definitely finish the [b:Revelation Space 89187 Revelation Space Alastair Reynolds http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1405532042s/89187.jpg 219037] trilogy.
Simply amazing. Jo Walton hasn't disappointed yet, and this one's a gem.
It's a fairly simple premise. Man wakes up from what he thinks is a nap, only to find that he's actually dead and what he thinks is “him” is a computer simulation.
Along the way, Walton gets in some geek jokes – when Matthew Corley wakes up he's reading an article about “computer replication of personalities of the dead” and he thinks its BS because “simulating consciousness in DOS or Windows 3.1 is inherently impossible” – and at least one dig at the publishing industry – when Essie's boss considers that the company made lots of money on her last biography “though only a pittance for Essie...”.
I loved “the word computer has been obsolete for decades and has a charming old fashioned air, like charabanc [I had to look that up] or telegraph.” That's not really “speculative fiction”, as computer is already disappearing. We use “pads”, “tablets”, “phones”, but rarely computers.
Even more, I loved the reaction when Essie and Matthew (the simulation) first see each other. Matthew died in the 1980s, and Essie's in 2064. You just know there's going to be culture shock, but naturally, neither of them know just what it is that's going to be so shocking.
But all of this beautifully tight writing is just keeping you interested as Walton leads up to a conclusion that is, in hindsight, utterly predictable – but that I predict you won't predict...