Ryan
This is a fun look at Liath Luachra's past before the events of O'Sullivan's Fionn series.
Amazing.
I've been a fan of Dick's for a long time (ever since a university professor of mine used him to explain what Gnosticism is), and it seems like this short novel manages to sum up all of Dick's attitudes toward religion and spirituality in one nice little 200-page package. It's as much a parable of Gnosticism as it is anything else, but there's some nice visuals along the way as well. Time keeps regressing for our main character Joe Chip - he starts off in the futuristic world of 1992, but after surviving an explosion on the lunar colony, he finds himself and the world around him gradually sliding back in time to 1939. As he's traveling, however, two additional mysteries present themselves - Joe has to discover why his friend and colleague Runciter, who dies in the lunar explosion, is sending him messages, and also the secret of Ubik, a substance that seems to have been around since forever but which no one seems to understand.
Throughout the book, Dick breaks some of what are considered basic rules for how a novel should be structured, but he does it in such an artful way that it leaves you feeling unsettled, rather than disappointed.
Highly recommended for anyone who enjoyed the Matrix films (or their spiritual predecessor, Morrison's Invisibles series).
Overall, this was a pretty entertaining mix of Lovecraftian horror and pulp detective mystery. Rawlik managed to perfectly capture the aesthetics of Lovecraft's style, free of any of the baggage that the original stories contain. The opening was a bit rough - the story meanders a lot and it takes nearly the first third of the book to find its groove - but once it finds the story becomes a lot of fun.
The one real downside I would say the story has is that it's so full of obvious Easter eggs (references to not only all of Lovecraft's work, but other Victorian/gothic horror as well) that they become distractions from the work, rather than bonuses. In that regard it felt at times like a Lovecraftian version of Ready Player One.
The past, as they say, is a different country. The majority of this book is standard, kind of uninspired standard Canadiana - city person traveling to the backwoods, hoping to find themselves and solve the anomie of modern life.
Then there's parts where the woman's having sex with the bear, and those I just don't know about.
This marks another enjoyable installment of the Celtic Mythology series from Irish Imbas. The stories cover a fair amount of the same mythological content as the previous entries in the series, but manages to provide interesting and sufficiently unique modern tales about selkie, changelings, and other familiar topics.
Another interesting part of the book was O'Sullivan's opening essay on the differences between Irish Mythology and Celtic Fantasy (with his work being firmly in the former category). As someone who was raised in Canada by Irish immigrants, I've always been a bit aware of the distinction although I never really had a good, succinct way of distinguishing between the two. And I'll admit to liking some of the Celtic Fantasy that he scoffs at, but it was mostly for lack of better options. I'm glad to see that there are collections like this out there that are dedicated to showing more accurate versions of these classic stories.
There were some okay parts here - mostly surrounding Zahn's original characters (Thrawn, Mara, and Pellaeon). It was fun to get to see those characters again, especially as only one of them seems to have survived the switch in canon. But the plot was just kind of there, and the focus on the Rebel characters kind of made everything drag. I don't have that much interest in reading Luke at his whiniest or Han at his douchiest, but the placement of this novel between A New Hope and Empire kind of requires them to still be those people.
Yet another fun Torin Kerr adventure! Huff hits that mix that makes for a great military space opera: likable, relatable characters; intergalactic politicking; thrilling adventure; and a dark sense of humour that helps prevent the story from getting bogged down in the face of the violence that fills the characters' lives. I could easily read another twenty books like this, I like it that much.
The one downside to this book is that it's rumoured to be the last Torin novel - and it doesn't feel like that at all. The Big Yellow storyline gets resolved, obviously, but there's no sense of the ending of a story arc for Torin and the rest of Strike Team Alpha, which is a little disappointing.
An enjoyable, but fairly forgettable read. The basic plot of the ten issues in this collection were: Swamp Thing finds a small town somewhere in America where Weird Stuff Is Happening. After an exploration of the Weird Stuff (which could be anything from clockwork people, to autistic magicians, to alien hordes), there's a fight, some stuff gets destroyed, and Swamp Thing ends up [b:on the road 6288 The Road Cormac McCarthy http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21E8H3D1JSL.SL75.jpg 3355573] again. Later, rinse, repeat. I've been told that Alan Moore did some great stuff with Swamp Thing in the latter part of the 1980s, but Wein's material with the character is very stereotypically 1970s adventure/horror type stuff.
This was a really neat read! In each chapter, Shoalts looks at a different pre-confederation map of Canada, and the conditions under which it was created. The maps range from Leif Erikson's first map of Vinland to the maps of the Arctic produced by the Franklin expedition, so there's a wide range of material drawn from. With each map, Shoalts takes time to present the cultural and political reasons behind each map's development, in a manner that is welcoming and open to those without much Canadian history knowledge.
Due to the nature of the book, it's not without its limitations. The book relies heavily on settler sources (although it does acknowledge the role of Indigenous people in the development of the country), and the map-making conceit means that a lot of the political and cultural history that shaped the country is overlooked. If you understand those limitations going in, though, it's a real treat, because Shoalts' ability to relate the compelling and complex nature of Canadian history is incredible.
This was an interesting read, but not one that I can really say that I loved. Reading it, you can definitely see how influential it was on other detective stories of the era. I think the serialized nature of its publication hurt it a bit, though? There were lots of cliffhangery moments, especially in the second half, and they eventually became trying rather than intriuging. If you're already a committed fan of 19th century detective stories you'll want to make sure you've read it, but beyond that you'd probably want to give it a pass.
A series of murders rocks an oil rig the size of a small city, just as new owners take over the business. A bodyguard - one of the few people in society to no longer have biological implants - works to solve the mystery of the murders to keep her client safe.
This feels like a collary to Gibson's Law (“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”). Usually that's thought of in terms of geographic location, but in Company Town Ashby looks at how that it's also true across social class. There's a lot to process here about ideas about how different types of labour are valued, how technology impacts our relationship to each other and ourselves, and how the future looks increasingly like a utopia for those that can afford it, and a dystopia for those that cannot. It is a Big Ideas book, and Ashby's thoughts on those ideas seem interesting and hopeful and terrifying. The downside to being a Big Ideas book is that the plot suffers from clarity at times, especially in the last act, but overall this was a great read and definitely influenced my thoughts on a few issues.
This is a wonderful souvenir of The Mercer Report, and is a must-own for people that were invested in the show. The book is 80% transcripts of Rick's rants on the show, with enough behind-the-scenes stories mixed in to give it some added value.
If you weren't a watcher of the show, but have any interest in Canadian politics, it's probably still of interest? Rick's rants always got to the heart of the political issues, big and small, affecting Canadians, and reading them in reverse chronological order is like stepping back into recent history. Social media has made following politics into a bit of a goldfish bowl, where people forget what things were like even a few years ago, and it's nice to have a document of what they used to be.
The entries in here were just like Beaverton articles - headlines that make you chuckle, and then articles that aren't quite as funny as the headline, but short enough that you don't really notice. Overall a short, fun read if you're interested in Canadian history.
This was a fun urban fantasy about ghosts and zombies in Seattle. It didn't quite have the novelty as the first in the series did, but if you like urban fantasy and 90s grunge, this is a worthwhile read.
This was a fun little snack of a read. The gambling parts were fun, Anna's struggles are realistic and understandable (even if some of her choices were infuriating), and the mystery was engaging.
A fairly interesting social history of some of the giants of the Canadian snack food industry (Old Dutch, Hawkins, Ganong, and the like). A little on the dry/academic side, but interesting to see the impact of those companies on the communities that they inhabited, and the relationship that people develop between food and childhood memories.
This was a fascinating read for me because I lived through this period - it was the time at which I first started paying attention to politics - but so much of the underlying context was unknown to me then. If you're looking for a well-written summary of domestic US politics in the 1990s, this does that well.
Equally fascinating, though, was how much the culture has changed since then - not only with regards to how differently Clinton's impeachment would be treated in the social media age, but with how commonplace the idea of the US political parties working together was in the early 1990s? Newt Gingrich's remaking of the Republicans, and the ways the Democrats responded to it, seems so ingrained in everything now that it's hard to see a way out. Kornacki doesn't provide any thoughts on how to do that (and it wouldn't quite fit with the story that he's telling to do so).
Even more depressing, though, is thinking about how those ideological changes have become so apparent here in Canadian politics as well.
Torin Kerr, almost single-handedly, saved the entire Confederation from intergalactic war. An Ancient Peace asks the interesting question of how you move forward from that (both for the characters, and for the series in a metatextual sense).
For readers new to this series (it's labelled as part one of the Peacemaker series, but is really a continuation of the five part Confederation series by the same author), An Ancient Peace might be the most fun you'll have with a book this year. For entrenched fans of the series, it's more of what you already loved, with just enough of a new direction to keep things interesting.
For more thoughts on this book, visit https://northerntomorrows.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/an-ancient-peace-by-tanya-huff/
This was a much quieter and more introspective short story than we usually get from the Liath Luachra series, and to be honest it was a welcome variation. As much as I appreciate the action-based storytelling that we usually get with this character, it was nice to get something that focuses more on exploring and expanding our understanding of the protagonist. In many stories, having your mysterious, enigmatic warrior character become more familiar and open makes them less interesting, but O'Sullivan manages to avoid that with his version of Liath Luachra. I look forward to continuing to read more adventures with this character, now that I feel that I have a better understanding of her.
This was a fun read - trope-y in a way that makes it seem like a greatest hits of noir detective stories. If you're someone who likes detective stories as a genre, but doesn't read a lot of them, you'll probably dig this. For the more entrenched noir fan I could see it becoming a case of familiarity breeding comtempt, though? Regardless, the banter between Jack and Trixie is always fun (and that level of fun matched by the dual narrators in the audiobook version)
This is obviously very niche in terms of who would be interested in it - you need to not only be a Senators fan, bit also a history lover. Luckily for me, I am both of those things, so this was an enjoyable and fairly comprehensive look at the team's history.
This was a smart little satire of religious syncretism, recasting characters from Journey to the West as the wise men who visited Bethlehem a little over 2000 years ago. Fun for what it was.
An interesting look at a version of the Klingon empire that might have been, but which later stories have unfortunately written out of continuity.