Tag book review

Entries 5 Total

Review of "Old Man series" by John Scalzi

Nov 27, ’10 4:08 PM

Scalzi is a real writer.

This is a review of the books Old Man's War, Ghost Brigade, Last Colony, and Zoe's Tale, all by John Scalzi. There isn't an offi­cial name of the series, but peo­ple refer to it as the Old Man series.

I guess I'm a tourist sci­ence fic­tion reader, in that I still care about things like char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and plot. I can cer­tainly enjoy explo­sions and melo­drama, and big ideas about the human con­di­tion are always wel­come, but some­times I want to sit down with a real meal. I want it all. For me, this series is a full, enjoy­able meal.

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Review of "Night Angel Trilogy" by Brent Weeks

Nov 22, ’10 8:26 PM

This tril­ogy is my new canon­i­cal exam­ple of a 1+2 tril­ogy. The first book is a self-contained story that exe­cutes well. Then the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion between pub­lisher and author occurs1.

"This is great! This will sell. But you know what peo­ple really like? Trilo­gies. Was this a trilogy?"

"Sure! I mean, yes!"

  1. Entirely in my imag­i­na­tion. ↩
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Review of "The Elephant Vanishes" by Haruki Murakami

Aug 12, ’10 3:03 PM

I'm embar­rassed to admit that I picked this book up on a whim. At the time, rec­om­men­da­tions from friends felt too famil­iar, so I asked the staff at Brook­line Book­smith to find me a good read, with the hopes of dis­cov­er­ing some­thing I wouldn't oth­er­wise find. At the time, Murakami hadn't hit big yet — for Lit­er­ary val­ues of big, that is, not Stephanie Meyer big. I owe that book­seller a great debt.

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Review of "His Majesty's Dragon" by Naomi Novik

Jul 30, ’10 1:26 PM

Brightly writ­ten, started off with ter­rific pace. Strong nar­ra­tive voice, strong tone that made the Napoleonic era feel real. Won­der­ful atten­tion to detail in the set­ting. Then sud­denly down­shifted into what I can only call the getting-ready-for-a-long-series pace. The end­ing was a com­plete surprise–not the con­tent, but: “Oh. Oh! So that must have been the end­ing. This trail­ing mat­ter is an appen­dix of some sort.”

This will prob­a­bly read bet­ter as part of an anthol­ogy, but this first vol­ume wasn’t a com­plete story. A lot of spun plot threads and side char­ac­ters intro­duced, but only the small­est sub­threads resolved. Hey, check out the excit­ing next chap­ter! Noth­ing wrong with that, but the book as inde­pen­dent entity suf­fers con­sid­er­ably for it.

I enjoyed the page by page read­ing, even the book-as-part-of-a-series, but I’m not on board for an open-ended series just now. Novik's up to six and count­ing. A lit­tle quick research on Wikipedia says that she plans to stop at nine. I’ll cir­cle back in ten years and see how that worked out.

Ama­zon link: His Majesty's Dragon

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Review of "Shadow and Claw" by Gene Wolfe

Mar 23, ’10 8:23 AM

I was aware before start­ing Shadow and Claw that it was not pedes­trian fic­tion. It is not some­thing to plow through, or relax with. It is an allegory-heavy, lit­er­ary, fan­tas­tic tale. Hav­ing said that, it's about a tor­turer who is exiled from his guild, ends up with a mys­te­ri­ous and pow­er­ful relic, and then sleeps with a lot of women and com­pares them. He also oils and bran­dishes his sword a lot.

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