Ryan

I've been taught, as most people no doubt have, to “Never judge a book by its cover”. So even though I cringed a little at the title and cover art of this short story collection, I picked it up because I really liked the first book in the series (“Witch Way To The Mall”) and liked the idea (stories featuring Vampires in suburbia).

Unfortunately, the contents of the book failed to exceed the low expectations that the cover/art gave me. There were two or three stories I liked throughout, but for the most part the authors failed to do anything interesting or innovative with the concept. And each of them might have even been okay if you were reading one vampire in suburbia short story, but putting them all together made the entire endeavour feel bland and uninspiring.

Brilliant.

Flatland is a quirky little novella about a square, living in Flatland, a country comprised entirely of two dimensions. Mr. Square is content to go about his polygonal existence, until he has a revelation of the Third Dimension, and meets a sphere.

As the title implies, though, this is a story of “many dimensions”, so it's not just that: it's also a rather funny satire of both religious revelation and Victorian social culture, looking at social stratification and the belief in innate differences of class and ability and lampooning them.

Where things get really interesting, though, is that a century later this whole thing also stands for a perfect metaphor for where modern physics is at. I have, I confess, had a really tough time understanding string theory, and its reliance on extraspatial dimensions. So the protagonist's resistance to the third dimension really resonated with me, and I think that even if I'm not closer to understanding string theory, I can at least see a little better where its proponents are coming from.

An incredibly dry book about a very interesting concept - that the rise of English as a global/international language is, ultimately, going to be the death of English as a unified language. Which is kind of tragic, as long as you're willing to accept the postmodern premise of it.

I'm starting to think that Runaways would have benefited from being a creator-owned series, as no one other than Brian K. Vaughan seems to get what makes the characters interesting and unique, either as a group or as individuals.

Without comparing this to the earlier volumes in the series, I guess this one was okay. Terry Moore's a great writer, and the plot is interesting enough (subliminal magic turns plastic surgery recipients into zombies), but as I said originally, it doesn't hold up to the earlier parts of the series.

Expanded universe material can be tricky sometimes. It's one thing when it's stuff that extends a story, like Dark Horse's Buffy comics or the New Jedi Order novels, but stuff that takes place before or during the thing it's based on is difficult; if the story's important enough for me to want to read about it, then why is it something that never gets mentioned by the characters elsewhere?

That's the case with this book. Vader stops a coup attempt within the Empire, with Palpatine killing a lot of the conspirators himself. That's pretty much the entire story; not only are you not really given anyone to cheer for, but you know the conclusion of the story before it begins. There's no real surprises or twists in the plot, and you don't really learn much about the characters within it. I'd have to recommend giving this one a pass unless you're the most hardcore of hardcore SW fans.

A murder investigation with as many suspects as there are witnesses. A femme fatale with icewater in her veins and sex appeal that she knows exactly how to use. A down-on-his-luck private investigator trying to make good on a promise to a client. In a lot of ways Who Censored Roger Rabbit seems like an assortment of cliches of the hardboiled detective genre, and then you pause for a second and realize that one of the main characters is a 6 foot tall bunny rabbit. It doesn't feel exactly like satire or parody, but more like an absurdist, screwball take on an old genre.

You might be thinking that you're familiar with Roger Rabbit, because you've seen the Disney film. The two are absolutely nothing alike - the character share the same name but the characterization is completely different, the plot's completely unrelated, and the tone and style is completely different as well. It's almost baffling how completely different they are from each other; I like each for what they are, but don't go into this thinking you're getting anything like the film.

One of the biggest differences, and one that I found most entertaining, was the character of Roger. Sounding like Annie Hall-era Woody Allen, Roger's a neurotic mess, and his play and banter off of Eddie Valiant's hardboiled straight man is good for a lot of laughs throughout the book.

Derivative works have a bad rap, and it's one I'm not sure is entirely deserved. This is, quite definitely, a derivative work, and fully admits that it is so; Faust is name-checked multiple times throughout, and there are parallels to The Devil and Daniel Webster as well. In being so derivative, though, it's still an instructive tale, and you're left with the feeling that Mitchell is trying to say something here about the Canadian identify. The European Fausts desired knowledge and power, and Webster wanted prosperity - Willie MacCrimmon, on the other hand, is willing to put his soul in the hands of the devil just to get a shot at the Brier.

The end result is a gruff, short, frightfully funny novel that pits Willie and his compatriots against Satan's own curling rink, made up of Macbeth, Judas, and Guy Fawkes, as well as Old Nick himself. Mitchell was passionate about curling, and it shows through the text, but I think this would be an entertaining read even to those who are unfamiliar with the Canadian Gentleman's Game.

Another of the Red Panda tie-in novels. One of the patterns I'm noticing is that Taylor seems to use each book to explore a different aspect of the Panda, with this one focusing on his ‘mystical' powers of hypnosis and mind control.

There's not really much more to be said about the Panda beyond what I've said in the past - the character and series are a great update to the classic radio dramas of the Shadow, and manage to stay true to them while at the same time leaving behind some of the more unfortunate attitudes tied to those old stories. It's also interesting to see how Taylor used the narrative of a novel to explore things that could only be hinted at in the radio drama format.

Continuing directly from the events of [b:Convent of the Pure 6284926 The Convent of the Pure Sara M. Harvey http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266615948s/6284926.jpg 6468961], Labyrinth features half-Nephilim warrior Portia Gynoy as she ventures into the underworld to rescue her ghostly lover, Imogen, from damnation.It look me a little to warm to this one - I thought the relationship between Portia and Imogen was one of the strengths of the first book, so to have Imogen mostly absent here felt a little unusual. Once I was able to accept the story on its own merits, though, I found it to be an fun, visceral, sensual adventure story. The plot is an old story (one of the oldest, really), but but Ms. Havery tells it well enough that you stay entertained throughout, and it fits the novella length perfectly.

Halfway through the Vorkosigan saga now!

This was a very interesting collection of two novels and a short, written years apart from each other but which take place near each other inside the series chronology, and which have some very similar thematic elements.

Cetaganda features Miles and his cousin Ivan on a diplomatic mission to attend the funeral of Cetaganda's Empress. Miles being Miles, he of course gets caught up in a web of intrigue and murder while there.

Ethan of Athos contains no Miles at all - rather, it focuses on Ethan, a representative of an all-male planet who has to replace a shipment of frozen ovaries that his society needs for the next generation to be born. Along the way, he gets ... caught up in a web of intrigue and murder.

Both novels were very fun reads, but for fairly different reasons. Cetaganda because Miles is an absolute treat of a character, a whirling dervish of chaos and quick-thinking who defies all expectations of him. Athos was fun, though, precisely because Ethan is so different from Miles - he's not a tactician or spy, so seeing him awkwardly work his way through a Milesesque scenario provided a refreshing take on the series and helped me appreciate Miles more (even though he's entirely absent from the novel).

The main connection between the books, though, is that while both of them focus on societies defined by their technology (gene manipulation in Cetaganda, uterine replicators in Ethan), the technology itself isn't the focus, but rather how those societies, and their members, are changed by them, while still remaining fundamentally human. Both are very interesting thought experiments, but the action setting of them help avoid them from getting bogged down or overly philosophical.

Fantastic end to the series. Kate and Daniel come to grips with the mess of things that they've made, and work with the other new gods to find a way to fix things.

One of the things I especially appreciated about this novella was the way Lafferty expands on the concepts introduced in the previous volume, Wasteland - not only the airborne city Meridian and its twin, Lathe, but also the different gods that were introduced. Their archetypes will be familiar to anyone who's studied Greek mythology (or, probably, to anyone who's read enough DC comics), but they're infused with enough personality and idiosyncrasies that you don't see them as divine archetypes but actual, real characters, which is something that's often difficult when writers are writing about divinity.

There's also a climactic, apocalyptic battle against the primordial force of chaos that threatens to destroy two worlds. Let's not forget about that.

If you're interested, and/or if you're a fan of Gaimanesque fantasy, I'd say give the series a read, but don't start with this volume.

Two nation, both alike in dignity, at war with one another.
Two princes, both with great power, struggling against the demands of empire and destiny.
Between them, a princess who may hold the key to ending the war, if she can figure out why the Black God visits her, and torments her family.

Full review at
http://readbyryan.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/the-black-gods-war-2

short version: I loved it. One of the best books I read in 2011.

I like urban fantasy. I like heist stories, and I especially like stories about gambling. This book, then, was right up my alley.

Two college kids go on a spring break trip to Vegas, hoping to use their newly-acquired skill as wizards to hit some big jackpots and make themselves rich. Seems like a safe bet, until they realize that there are other wizards already in Vegas, and that by doing so they're getting themselves caught in the middle of an epic magical conflict.

The gambling/Vegas bits were a lot of fun - I almost wish Forbeck had focused exclusively on those, rather than adding in the Epic Fantasy Elements; those bits don't feel out of place, but they don't necessarily add a lot to the story.

The only drawback I found was that Jackson and Bill, the two main characters, are both a bit stupid, and the plot hinges at several points on them making stupid decisions, which gets a bit frustrating at times.

On the whole, though, this was a very fun read, one that fans of the genres being mashed up should really dig.

Celia Krajewski is unsure of how long she has to live. None of us do, really, but for Celia the matter is a bit more pressing, as she's recently discovered she carries a gene for a rare mutation that will eventually destroy her mind. She has an out, though; she can place her body in statis, transferring her mind and personhood to a bioandroid body so that she can continue living until a cure is found.

Death always demands payment, though, and Celia's attempt to cheat it comes with the cost of her marriage; her wife refuses to see Celia as the ‘real' Celia, claiming that to be with her robotic body would amount to infidelity. This starts Celia questioning exactly how human her new self is. Eventually, she starts to hurt herself, to remind herself of her humanity. To her surprise, she finds that she starts to like the pain. And that she's not the only bioandroid who feels that way.

While the science fictional elements of Machine are absolutely essential parts of it, they are not the central focus of it; instead, Pelland wisely chooses to focus her story on Celia's attempts to retain a feeling of humanity as she starts to lose many of the relationships with others that define who we are; our romantic relationships, friendships, hobbies and career choices are so often a part of our self-definition that to be stripped of them can remove that feeling of humanity from any of us, if only momentarily; to be stripped in that way while inside a biomechanical body that only reinforces those feelings of nonhumanism.

Beyond the character study of Celia, Machine also has some interesting things to say about the interplay of individual rights and collective good. Given the subject matter of the book, it would be very easy to think of Machine as a book that would argue that individual rights are always paramount, and the first-person narration that Celia provides definitely seems to support that. “Body autonomy”, as it is phrased in the book, is understandably important for all the mechanical characters, and it is the realization that she lacks that that drives Celia to make some of the choises that she does in the course of the story. However, as first-person narrators are inherently unreliable, it's important to look beyond Celia's opinion and see what's actually happening. The reality that we can observe when we look beyond Celia is that all of the crises that Celia faces throughout the book stem from others using their own bodily autonomy – their ‘free will', to use a somewhat loaded term – without regard to how those choices will impact others. The regularity with which that occurs doesn't seem to be coincidental, but rather seems to be a statement from the author on the need to balance one's own self-discovery and actualization with the knowledge of how that will affect others around them.

The human characters in Celia's story are fascinating and self-contradictory. Most of those that recognize that there is still humanity in her, or at least claim to, refuse ultimately to treat her as human, instead objectifying her and using her as a tool for their own ends. Within the moral framework of the story, this objectification is somewhat defensible – it could be argued, after all, that they're operating with the same desire for individualistic autonomy that Celia desires – but it is still ultimately counterproductive and serves only to increase Celia's feelings of separation and otherness from her new body.

Machine was, at times, a hard book to read. The emotional power of Pelland's writing left me breathless at a few points, and the depths that Celia is willing to go to prove her remaining humanity to herself will no doubt be shocking to some readers. The tragedy that sits at its core makes it a very rewarding read; Jennifer Pelland manages to put a very human and humanistic face on a subgenre that at times tries to flee from those descriptors.

(note: Apex Publications provided a copy of Machine for review).

Every once in a while I forget how much I dislike modern Marvel. This time, it took a cover filled with a bunch of characters from back when I was really into Avengers - the Shooter/Stern years, to be specific.

What follows is a book that's borderline incomprehensible unless you've read the larger Chaos War storyline AND which requires you to already have an emotional connection to the characters, because this book doesn't provide you with any. Recommendation to avoid unless you have 20+ years experience with Avengers - but of course, if you have that, you'll likely be underwhelmed by the plot.

Pretty good resource for the beginning teacher. Didn't really cover anything that wasn't also covered in the class I was reading this for, but a well-written introduction to the discipline.

Pack member Nick is in trouble - he's being blackmailed. What bothers him, though, is that it's tacky, shoddy blackmail.

This was a fun, short read. I've liked Nick since the beginning of the Otherworld series, and his approach/solution to his problem here is definitely idiosyncratic; not the type of approach any of the other Pack members would have taken.

There's also some self-referential fun being poked at paranormal fantasy novels. If you're a fan of Armstrong's other wolf books I'd recommend giving this one a download.

In Brave Men Run, Matthew Selznick looked at the Donner Declaration, where it was revealed that metahumans walk among us, and how that declaration affected a young man named Nathan Charters. This sequel/supplement doesn't feature Nathan at all, but is set in the same world, and looks at the impact that the Donner Declaration has on the lives of different people in the months following it.

Two things stood out to me when reading this book. The first is the sheer collection of talent in the book: I know they're not all necessarily well-known outside of podcast/new media circles, but you've got Lafferty, Axelrod, Lowell, and Hutchins all in one book? Amazing. Especially as, while each leaves their own distinct mark on the story they've written, there's an overall feeling cohesion to the universe that they're working in that unifies the stories.

Secondly, this is a really good collection of character-driven fiction. Superheroic powers are involved, but they never take centre stage, and the stories are all more about how these people are affected by the powers they receive (for good and ill). It's refreshing to read something in this genre that focuses in that direction.

Mozart's Blood is a story very much in the vein (if you'll pardon the pun) of Rice's Vampire Chronicles series - it presents a vampire, Octavia Voss, who is a tortured soul that ponders the morality of the taking of human life, and who is introspective and reflective of the long, preternatural life that she's lived.

The twist to this that makes Mozart's Blood worth checking out is that Octavia is a soprano, as is author Louise Marley. This adds a certain level of complication for Octavia, given that operatic audiences eventually start to notice when their singers don't age, and also adds a delicious level of subtext to the book. I found myself enjoying the backstage drama and description of an opera in progress significantly more than the preternatural elements (including a rather forced-feeling connection to Mozart that gives the book its name).

It's decadent, it covers a lot of thematic material that other vampire stories have covered, but I would say that this is still an essential read in the canon of any fan of vampire fiction.

Identity has been, in many ways, the central theme of the Vorkosigan Saga - how people define themselves, and how they can create prisons for themselves by letting others define themselves.

So of course, at this midpoint in the series, Bujold takes two of the central characters, Miles and Simon Illyan, and has outside forces strip their cherised, hard-fought-for identities away. Of course, identity is not the type of thing one can really survive without, so both men have to mourn their old lives, and then find new ones. In Miles' case, especially, building his new/old self takes time, and pain, and very nearly blood, making it more like a traditional birth than one from a Betan uterine replicator.

There is, of course, also a mystery/adventure plot to keep things moving along, and Miles gets to take on a new role (if not quite a new identity). Those parts were entertaining to read, and it's always a pleasure to watch Miles work his way through knots so Gordian that you can't even tell there's a knot there, but those parts by themselves would not be enough to make Memory a classic - it's instead the relationship between Simon and Miles, and watching them put themselves back together again, that made it such a satisfying read.

I almost missed this one, because it wasn't included in the CD of omnibus editions I received as ebooks, but I'm quite glad I didn't - it's an essential part of the Vorkosigan canon and quite literally changes everything.

This was a fun quick read. Prince of Tennis uses a lot of the tropes and artistic choices that a lot of shonen manga uses, but it's about tennis, which creates an ironic feel to the whole thing.

Read through a few chapters to see if I could use this with a student who's struggling with math. I can't, but not because of any shortcomings of the book; he's just far outside the target audience (45 year old construction worker, rather than high school girl).

If you are a high school girl, though, and are struggling with math, I could see it being a useful book. McKellar is great at describing concepts in a way that's simple, without being simplistic, is never pandering or patronizing, and has lots of metaphors that I think teenagers might find useful (describing variables in terms of a blind date, for example, and explaining order of operations with pandas).

A fun reimagining of a Doyle classic in a steampunk milieu. In this version, Mycroft Holmes is a femme fatale, Watson a cyborg, and the Bruce-Partington Plans instead the plans for Nemo's Nautilus. These changes made for a fun trip, and I enjoyed the changes made to the source material for the most part (especially as I am a firm believer that the world needs more Mycroft Holmes). It falls off the rails a bit in the last act, when it becomes something of a summer action film rather than a Victoriana story, but this intersection is definitely worth a read if you regularly travel through the avenues of its ingredients.

Some interesting ideas, but it didn't really expand on any of them enough to really hold my interest.

Ridiculous sexploitation story about a young woman with Disassociative Identity Disorder, and all three of her alt personalities are world-class fighters. I'm not saying it wasn't fun, overall, but it was so full of crazy fight sequences and T&A (and P, I suppose) that I was shaking my head a few times as I read it.