William Smith
If you enjoy technology and history, don't let my 3-star rating stop you from reading this book. It had a couple of chapters that I found to be absolute gems.
My biggest critique of David Rooney's About Time is that it could've used more polishing and editing. The narrative waffled between how clocks impacted civilization and Rooney's personal viewpoint (almost to being preachy). I'd rather it had stayed unbiased but I do appreciate Rooney is an expert in his field and of all people he'd have insight to share.
I found the chapter “Empires” (clock #6) absolutely fascinating and wish more of the book had gone into the technical details this one did about time-syncing and navigation. And for the same reasons the chapter “War” (clock #11) had the same effect on me.
Would have enjoyed more technical descriptions of how clocks work along with the history provided.
That I'm writing a review is a positive thing. I liked this book. But while there were things I liked, there we other things that bugged me. I've marked none of this as “spoiler” because I'm not talking plot, but I discuss some things about characters and story points. Stop reading if you don't want to know any details — critical or not.THE COVERThe cover — probably one of the best cover art pieces I've seen in a long time — is gorgeous! And it's representative of the story, which I really appreciate. For the life of me, I can't find any reference to Tommy Arnold in the book, which makes me sad. He did a phenomenal job on this and the Harrow the Ninth cover too.However, the blurb on the front “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” is somewhat disingenuous. The lesbianism consists entirely of Gideon saying “she's hot” a few times or getting angsty at seeing a little skin. (And she's not even a necromancer.) I wasn't necessarily looking forward to lesbian sex, but it appears Tor decided to add this blurb to the cover simply for shock value alone. I don't think the concept of lesbianism really came from the author.Would I call this “epic” as the cover describes? Not really. Epics are sweeping and broad. Here, “epic” is used to mean “a handful of people from eight planets are summoned to the first planet”. There is history and a background to all of this, but it's not explored very much. THE WRITINGThis is [a:Tamsyn Muir 6876324 Tamsyn Muir https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1543423040p2/6876324.jpg]'s debut novel and for the most part, her writing is engaging and the storyline is well laid. But I did have a few problems with parts of it.The main character Gideon is 18, but she has the brashness and smart aleckyness of someone a few years younger. That's fine. Much of her dialog and attitude reflects that. It's what makes Gideon Gideon.But a lot of the writing itself has that same quality. Assuming the story takes place in the distant future (our distant future?), terms like “pizza face”, “DOA”, “a whole lotta nope” are really out of place. Does Gideon know what pizza is? Doesn't seem so based on the foods she's described, yet she uses the term once. Muir seems to include a lot of immature phrasing like that throughout the book and every time it made me wince because I suddenly felt I was reading an immature teenager's writing. It's there for shock and humor, but really displaced.SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALI'm trying to understand why the supplemental material at the end of the book wasn't simply incorporated into the book itself.Some of it contains the histories of the characters, which would've been useful while reading not afterward. Most of the peripheral characters remained flat and two-dimensional. And the character pronunciations could've been added to the Dramatis Personae at the beginning instead of telling us after the fact how the author intends names should be pronounced. At least I had most of those right without referencing the guide.If the author had chosen to spend time world-building, then this material might be interesting background information. But there was no world-building. Or sweeping character-building for that matter. There were so many characters and events, there simply wasn't time. But I did appreciate allowing Gideon to make direct connections with many of the characters to at least get to know them better.My rating for Gideon the Ninth was four stars. Had there been more depth to Gideon or attention to the world Muir created, it could've easily been five stars.
Amelia Pang's Made In China isn't an emotionally easy-to-read book, but it's probably the most important book I've read in a long time.
She does a thorough job taking one man's story, a struggle for human rights, from beginning to untimely end and making it accessible to someone like me. My takeaway is that everything has a price and everything has a cost. When the price is at or below cost, there's something very wrong and we need to pay attention to it and understand why.
I'm a consumer of goods, and, likely, most of them are from China. How much do I see around me that was made by someone who was imprisoned simply because my demand for a cheap product drove an industry to imprison people for free labor? I shudder thinking about it.
I appreciate Pang's investigation into the laogai camps and her explanation of what “reeducation through labor” really means. The last couple of paragraphs of her Author's Note detail just how much she personally witnessed to bring us this research and this story. I'm grateful to her for introducing me to Sun Yi.
Much like the computer game Myst, the reader is set down in the middle of an unusual world known as the House. Piranesi, one of two inhabitants, has extensively explored and mapped this world, including its seasons and tides.
The reader immediately thinks, “What or where is this?” But not Piranesi. This is his world as he knows it.
I found myself questioning whether I wanted to finish this book around page 50 (a fifth of the book) because the story was simply mundane. Piranesi doesn't question his world and his journaling was about his bland and banal existence. These were the hardest pages to read because their content was so repetitive. I was slogging through them.
Eventually, we learn there's a secret to discover and mystery to unfold. I'm happy I pressed on because reading was very quick and entertaining from there forward.
I haven't read Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but having read favorable reviews and this her newest work, I'm looking forward to it.
First encounter stories are a genre themselves within science fiction. They generally follow a pattern of two beings, alien to each other, overcoming their differences to become friends while being chased by one or more adversaries. Axiom's End is such a story, but it's still engaging.
The protagonist Cora is somewhat along for the ride throughout the book with plot points and other characters directing her what to do next. She lacks control over most of the situation where she encounters an alien who needs her help whether he realizes it or not.
Ampersand, the alien on the run, was really well-conceived and I appreciated the conversations over what makes two or more races “alien” to each other. Ellis did a good job explaining why we shouldn't want to learn an alien's language and the problems that can cause. I would've appreciated much more of this mindful thought-provoking type of discussion.
Throughout the book is a sub-plot about Cora's father, which never really comes to fruition for me. All the elements about her father could've been removed from the book and not affected the story.
The story is probably best suited for young adults or those who wouldn't normally dive deep into science fiction. The writing is straight-forward, which I appreciated, and doesn't bog down in technical detail.
Although Dark Age Ahead was published more than 15 years ago, it amazingly predicted some of the conditions we're seeing today that can lead to a new dark age. The table of contents alone is as relevant today as it was then.
1. The Hazard
2. Families Rigged to Fail
3. Credentialing Versus Educating
4. Science Abandoned
5. Dumbed-Down Taxes
6. Self-Policing Subverted
7. Unwinding Vicious Spirals
8. Dark Age Patterns
And I found the first chapter detailing the millennia long Dark Ages following the fall of the Roman Empire absolutely fascinating! I started taking a pencil to the pages and marking notable sentences or paragraphs. It made me very excited to read the rest of the book.
However, the remaining chapters were no where near as engaging as Chapter 1. Much of Jacobs' writing pursued rabbit holes that I'm sure were relevant to the topics she wanted to discuss, but they quite frequently referenced her hometown of Toronto to illustrate certain points. Had she diversified her examples among several cities, I wouldn't have received the impression she was lamenting the decline of her city.
The book also includes an additional 50 pages of “Notes and Comments” at the end. I started to read them but didn't find a coherence to them. They really were just notes and comments but the main body of the book referenced them infrequently. Trying to relate them back to her discussion (again, greatly about Toronto) just didn't interest me. I feel that I abandoned a large chunk of the text that may have had some interesting tidbits. Wish these had been incorporated better or not at all.
I'm taking chances reading a forward-thinking books written 15-20-25 years ago and hoping they'll be relatable to me today. I'll continue taking chances, but this one just didn't relate to me the way I'd hoped.
The Book — An Homage is a pleasant read.
It's a collection of very short essays, each three pages or less, about different aspects of books — new, old, damaged, incomplete, annotated, gifted, signed, etc.
It's not terribly insightful and actually documents the reflections of just a single book lover and collector. If you take the time to read it in the voice of its older German author sitting back in his chair reminiscing slowly about his experiences with books, it takes on a slight charm too.
He had a couple of comments that I appreciated. The first in regard to burned books and a short discussion of Fahrenheit 451:
Wherever books are burnt,
When all is said and done,
Men burn as well.
I believe that the read book maintains its value because it's a visible, tangible document of one's life as a reader.
You'll rarely hear me say I can't put a book down (mostly because work), but with a four-day weekend, I plowed through A Canticle for Leibowitz.
This is a cautionary tale about the centuries after World War III (written less than two decades after entering the nuclear age) when a second Dark Ages has fallen on the world and a monastery has taken as its mission to preserve what it can of history and knowledge. What's poignant about that is the monks don't understand what they're preserving. They just know they must preserve it for the future. Even though it was written more than 60 years ago, its reads like a contemporary best seller. Amazing how timeless the writing is!
The book is full of Latin references from Catholicism and The Bible that relate to the story, which forces you to slow down if you reference everything. Do it. It's worth it! Wish I hadn't found this full reference after I was halfway through the book!
https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/10/12/study-guide-for-walter-m-miller-jr-a-canticle-for-leibowitz-1959/
Dead Astronauts was my first Jeff Vandermeer read. I'm not familiar with his style(s) of writing and haven't read the predecessor novel Borne.
This is experimental literature — a term I picked up from researching this book midway through reading it. I connected somewhat with the story but not the delivery. It's written in a poetic style that seems intended to paint a picture with phrases, fonts and literary devices rather than using prose to take the reader on a journey or to a conclusion.
So much attention was paid to the mood and styling of the book that it neglected to go places raised by the story itself. Three astronauts are time traveling (or skipping between universes) to fight the Company, which we later learn created all or part of them in some way. Are they alive? Are they dead? Are they existing outside of time? How do these various iterations of the same place connect with each other? What's this number sequence we see repeated through different storylines?
Raise existential questions and I can go off and think about those answers myself. But raise plot questions posed in the story itself and I'd appreciate answers. Otherwise, I'm left wondering why I should care.
My least favorite aspect of the book is the use of various devices to present the story. It's written as poetry in the form of a novel. Sentences. Don't flow. Normally. This made me pay more attention to the format rather than the content. And it has lots of “It's a book. Not a book.” phrasing. Huh?
And the final few chapters include two or three sections that are nothing but the same few sentences repeated dozens or hundreds of times on the following pages. Maybe that's an effective technique to demonstrate how something begins to cycle until it becomes mechanical. But assuming the author wrote the book using a word processor, he likely wrote those first sentences and then copied and pasted to make the next several pages. If he's not going to take the time to write something, should I take the time to read it? Is the idea for me to simply skip through those pages after I “get it”?
There is a story here but it's not getting told. The author is instead trying to make it felt. Enthusiasts of poetry or experimental literature will likely appreciate this book far more than I did. I prefer a writing style that doesn't get in my way of comprehending the story.
Very little insight into remaking a struggling car company and a lot of hatred for Japan, the UAW, the media, government regulation, the environment, Al Gore...
Lutz puts a lot of opinion into his book, but most of his opinion about helping GM recover could've been summed up on 10 pages. The rest is disdain for anything not conservative or blame placed on external factors.
Klosterman is actually an intriguing writer, but his book of short stories left me unfulfilled. They're written almost like Twilight Zone vignettes, but the endings never complete the stories. They have no revelations, no twists, no poignancy, nothing.
Maybe the journeys are more important than the destinations, but the stories are written like a long road-trip through the Texas panhandle — I want to get to the end, but the end just stops in the middle of the road.
Inferno mostly reads like a tour guide through Italy and Turkey. So much of the book was about particular historical or geographical fact that eventually the story became extremely thin. While it may have been very well researched in fact the fact wasn't very well integrated into the plot beyond “Robert Langdon is here now where blah blah blah happened years ago or here's some information about the nearest landmark.”
One of the strangest books I have ever read.
Written just over 100 years ago, this book has that timely cadence and style of the era but is far beyond extraordinary in it's imagination than anything else that's contemporary. Is it gothic horror or science fiction?
A warning for the reader: it doesn't try to answer questions. It only takes you through the journey and allows you to make your own conclusions.
A good short piece for travel or a weekend.
Who doesn't like a good story about the search for an ancient Egyptian tomb with a curse attached? Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston are authors of one of my favorites series of books—the Pendergast novels. I'm glad to see Child continue their sense of adventure on his own. I enjoyed reading The Third Gate as much as reading Preston's' The Codex.
I really wanted to like this book. I really did. Of all people, Mark Russinovich should have been able to tap into his experience with computer security to write something really amazing. Instead he wrote something that was simply too full of clichés. He even went so far as to associate the events of 9/11 to the protagonist's past to gain sympathy from the reader instead of writing something that makes the reader care.
Zero Day was poorly written and the plot was poorly developed.
This is my second Harlan Coben book and, like the other, it never made me really care about the characters or the situation. I often criticize books for being over the top with the plot but Coben's books are equally underwhelming to me. The plot seemed to change mid course from the search to prove a man's innocence to... what? That wasn't really made clear until the end of the book. The conclusion had the typical double-twist, which is over-used, and it even included a semi-twist after that for a preachy ending.
