Ryan

This was ...okay, I guess? Enjoyable, but definitely the weakest point of the series.
The first book, Falling Free, had some interesting ideas, but suffered from a very sudden ending and a cartoonishly evil villain.
The other half, Diplomatic Immunity, was nice because it gave us a chance to revisit with Bel Thorne, who I'd always been fond of. I found the “mystery” rather telegraphed, though, and had hoped Ekaterin would have been in it more (I love her and Miles' banter).

This was a weird one to read. I've loved all of Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series, so this story, set in the same universe, seemed like a natural fit. And it was a good story, definitely, but it didn't have the same feel as the Song, aside from the ending. And, with it set a century before the other books, all of the house alignments are different, and the political landscape is radically different as well.

Taken on its own, however, the tale of Dunk the Lunk from Flea Bottom, and how he became Ser Duncan the Tall, is an interesting if not overly remarkable tale told by one of the masters of modern fantasy.

I was of two minds when it came to reading this: on one hand, the only other M:tG book I've read was really, actively terrible. On other other hand, though, Alara was the current set when I started getting interested in Magic again, and I really liked it as a setting.

Alara Unbroken felt a bit disjointed at first, but that made sense given the book's setting, which is a plane of existence that's been fractured into five “shards”, with each shard being home to a different type of magical energy. Now, though, the shards are being manipulated by evil dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas, who wants to steal their energy to something something (take over the multiverse, I think? It's not clear exactly).

This was a pretty fun read. The characters are all fairly archetypal (Ajani the reluctant hero, Rafiq the grizzled veteran who's too old for this shit, Bolas the scheming Bond villain), and the story is fairly straightforward, but Beyer keeps it moving along at enough of a quick, enjoyable pace that you don't really notice how archetypal everything is until you're thinking about it afterwards.

Wizards (the company that produces Magic) has been trying for the past few years to bring the whole concept of “planeswalkers as characters” to the forefront of the game, and stories like this do a good job of making those cards interesting. So it's enjoyable on a meta/transmedia level as well.

Revenge of the Vinyl Cafe is one of those books that holds no real ‘surprises' in it - if you're familiar at all with Stuart McLean's writing, either read on CBC Radio or in the previous VC books, you know what you're going to get: A series of poignant and sometimes hilarious stories about Dave, a record store owner, his wife Morley, and their two kids.

The lack of surprise doesn't detract at all from McLean's gift as a storyteller. He's capable of taking these tiny moments that seem completely innocuous and turning them into grand adventures, and can bring an audience to tears or laughs over the course of a simple paragraph.

If there's one set theme to these stories I would say it's about how important stories are to the human experience. Sometimes this is made explicit, like in the story with Dave trying to read his library's only copy of Goldfinger, but sometimes it's more subtle.

One of the things that make small presses an interesting part of the publishing world is that, because there are less people involved with them, they tend to have more of a unique style. I'm not sure what a “Random House book” is, or a “Penguin book”, but if you tell me there's a new Apex horror book out, I have a rough idea of what I'm getting into, stylistically.

Apexology is a good example of what the “Apex style” is - the twenty-odd stories here cover a lot of different sub-genres and nooks and crannies of the horror fiction that Apex publishes in their monthly magazine, but all have that Apex style of mindful transgressive dark fiction that the magazine's become so well known for.

Imagine a disease that kills you by rearranging the proteins that make up your brain, creating holes in it and turning your grey matter into a spongy, useless mess. It's incredibly tiny and hardy, making it almost impossible to detect, and resistant to most forms of sterilization. It can lay dormant within a host body from anywhere from two to forty years, and the only real way to know that someone's been infected is via autopsy.

This is a prion. And it's been behind several different diseases in the past century, most notably “mad cow” disease, but also associated diseases such as kuru, Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease, scrapie, and others.

In Fatal Flaws, Ingram manages to lay out the history and pathology of prion disorders, using prose that is technically sound but still easily accessible to a layperson, and manages to present the horrifying reality of prion disorders without seeming sensationalist.

He also paints a refreshingly honest picture about the realities of modern science, and how personality clashes, showmanship, and hubris influence what gets published and what gets attention paid to it. Too often public discussions of science try to show scientists as these demigods of rationality and logic, when really they are just people - smart, dedicated people, but people all the same, with the same feet of clay that the rest of us have.

The history of prion science, as Ingram tells it, is part Sherlock Holmes, part Indiana Jones, and part Michael Crichton. It's a great read for a non-expert with an interest in the field.

This was an interesting collaboration between two authors: my understanding is each took a character from another work of theirs and threw them together. Hijinks ensue, as they usually do in this type of story.

I have to say I enjoyed one half of the story a lot more than the other, but overall this was a fun, quickly paced novella designed to introduce you to the characters and their worlds. It definitely succeeded at that, and I'll be checking out more work by these authors in the future.

A look at an important period of Canadian history, one that sadly gets often overlooked (I know my own scholastic looks at Canadian history jumped from “Voyageurs” to “Confederation” and then skipped right ahead to “Vimy Ridge” as if nothing worthwhile had happened in between).

As much as 1867 was the year Canada became a country, the era that Laurier oversaw is equally important to our concept of nationhood, so it was very interesting to see that presented from a source not that far removed from the material.

This was an incredibly fun read. Slapstick zombie comedy has always been something that I've enjoyed, and Karina Fabian has put a lot of that in here, in this story about zombie exterminators gathering for a conference when, you guessed it, a bunch of zombies show up. It's refreshing to read a story that doesn't assume that the arrival of zombies would just mean the end of humanity, and the society that Fabian presents remains similar enough to our own that the entire zombie experience becomes a surreal comedy looking at environmentalism, reality television, and the price of fame. Recommended to all fans of the undead.

Kind of a logical progression from the last volume. Kirkman's developing Redmond as a character mostly in terms of seeing how other people define him, which gives us an interesting perspective. The crime itself is less interesting, but the character stuff makes up for it.

To start, a confession: I only discovered Murdoch through the television show, and am now starting in on the books (of which I mistakenly thought this was the first). As such, that's my frame of reference going into this.

The book was very different from the show I've grown to love - some characters are missing, others are very different, and the tonality of the entire story is completely different. Enough that it feels like a completely disconnected story from the Murdoch Mysteries television show.

And yet, I loved it in its own quirky way. The depiction of 1890s Toronto is gritty, without becoming anachronistically noir, and Jennings puts an amazing amount of detail into understanding the social structure and mentality of characters of the time period, without making it obvious or pointing out the differences.

The mystery itself - why a member of the Toronto constabulary would commit suicide during his shift, in an abandoned house - it's well told, and actually is a ‘mystery', rather than a thriller that you're able to see coming from a mile away, which is nice.

Scott Summers and his wife Jean are enjoying their honeymoon when they are dragged 2000 years into the future by their daughter from an alternate timeline, Rachel. She needs them to help raise Nathan, Scott's son from an evil clone of Jean, who had been kidnapped by one of Rachel's disciples to protect him from the ageless mutant Apocalypse, and to stop him from completing the genocide of the human race. Their best bet of doing so involves Stryfe, the evil clone made of Nathan before he was infected with Apocalypse's techno-organic virus. Scott and Jean stay with Nathan for ten years, never revealing who they are.

If this seems needlessly convoluted and angst-driven, well, welcome to the world of 1990s X-Men comics.

By the end of the story, Scott, Jean, and Nathan team up to kill Apocalypse, stopping his genocide of the human race, and then our two heroes are sent back to their/our time, where they learn that only two hours have passed since their disappearance into the future. Which ties everything up in a nice little package that ensures they can never speak of these events again, and don't have to worry about any pesky “character development”.

The cover proclaims this to be “The Sixth Sense speed-written by Chuck Palahniuck”, which gives it some pretty big shoes to fill.

Lawrence Pearce manages to fill them. Hikikomori is a Japanese term for people who are extremely reclusive and isolate themselves from society, rarely if ever leaving the house, and Pearce tells the story of a British Hikomori; Jared, a young man who is despondent after his fiancee Sarah is killed in a mugging, and who retreats from the world to find an imaginary girlfriend in his apartment. Someone that he can be with without being hurt.

As the same time, Hikikomori is the story of Melissa, a young woman with a history of Disassociative disorder who moves to a furnished flat in London, only to find it haunted by a ghost, who pines for his lost fiancee Sarah.

These two realities are introduced separately, but overlap, with only one of them being real - and the deftfully-told story keeps it ambiguous, so you're not sure who is real, or who is alive.

Hikikomori is a ghost story, but also a story about loneliness, and isolation, and how easy it would be, in the modern world, to become a ghost - you don't even need to die to become one.

A fun little story about a girl who can talk to ghosts, and her attempts to navigate a zombie apocalypse. Jessup's slightly surreal sense of humour helps to keep the story interesting and entertaining throughout.

A couple of years ago I read [b:Ender's Game 375802 Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) Orson Scott Card http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1214413570s/375802.jpg 2422333], and it almost ruined the X-Men for me. I saw a lot of parallels between the way the adults in EG were training the kids and Xavier's Danger Room, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. As much as I still loved the idea of a school filled with mutants learning to use their powers, molding them into superheroes didn't hold any interest for me. Which is why I'm glad I read this. There isn't anything new in terms of the base story (“Kitty Pryde learns she has mutant powers and goes to Xavier's”), but instead of being a superhero story it recasts everything as high school drama with interpersonal conflict between the students. An interesting twist, and one that would have resulted in a much higher rating if I didn't absolutely hate the artwork. I get that they were trying to go for a more Japanese-influenced story to appeal to the kids who don't read comics but do read manga, but it was just horrible, with Henry McCoy ending up looking like a giant ball of fur and Kitty suddenly gaining giant Pikachu ears whenever she got embarrassed.

This one had a lot going for it - it's one of the first steampunk novels, and combines Arthurian legend, Atlantis, and the novels of HG Wells. As one of my favourite podasts says during the sponsor breaks, “I like ALL of those words!”

It might be that I'm so fond of all of those things that I didn't enjoy this as much as I might otherwise have - it's a fairly well-told story, but it felt like all of the different elements of it were just being thrown together for the sake of throwing them together, rather than having an organic reason behind it.

Enjoyed this one just as much as I did the last. It had a lot of the same humour, lighthearted storytelling, and cozy action that the last one did, but the case Deuce was expected to solve was completely different, so it felt fresh. His home situation was different, too; he's still a stay-at-home dad, but this time his wife is days away from giving birth to another child, which put an interesting time pressure on the case.

Moxie Mezcal styles herself as a purveyor of “postmodern pulp fiction” - I'm not well-versed enough on postmodernism to discuss that side of it, but this really is pulp fiction in a classic sense. Murder, obsession, and amateur pornography: this one has the same chilling and thrilling elements that some of the classic pulps did, but updated for a modern audience and told through a slick, punk-rock style.

A bit of personal perspective on this: I grew up in a fairly politically aware family, and while I was alive while Trudeau was prime minister, I was too young to really have any personal memories about that time. So all of my knowledge of Trudeau comes second hand.

Growing up, there were two basic truisms about Trudeau that I was taught: my Albertan family taught me that he was a traitor to Canada for selling out the West to benefit Quebec; after I moved to Ontario, I was taught that people in Quebec thought he was a traitor to Quebec for the October Crisis. An interesting mix of perspectives.

Federalism and the French Canadians comes before all of that, but context is key to understanding the writing here, I think. Trudeau's later actions stand in stark contrast to his decentralizing, “provinces first” attitude displayed here, and it's also necessary to remember that he was writing before both the Quiet Revolution and Reaganism/Thatcherism, which make some of his ideas seem a bit outdated.

While some of the ideas might seem outdated, a lot of them are depressingly current - the sections on Quebecois alienation and on the provincial government there seem like they could be applied today to most provinces, for example.

On the surface, Young Junius seems like a fairly simple story - 14-year-old Junius Ponds has his brother die, and vows revenge against the drug dealer that murdered him. It's a dark, abrasive coming of age story that is almost like a YA version of Scarface.

At the same time, though, Harwood uses that story to make a larger point about the karmic circle of violence - or, rather, the downward spiral of violence, rather than a circle. Junius' brother Temple is killed, which spurs Junius to action. The acts of violence that Junius commits spur others to violence of their own, and at the end of the story, what do we get? A bunch of dead people and an apartment building being torn down from the inside. It's not just Junius, either - we see the same thing being perpetuated with Rock, Marlene, and C-Dub.

Harwood has a very cinematic style to his writing here, much as in his Jack novels. There's still a Tarantino element, but it feels like he watched some John Singleton movies as well when preparing for this. That's not a criticism, but I feel it does provide a good description of the style he uses here.

I disliked the first half of this book for reasons entirely beyond its control.

So, this book came out in 2009. A few weeks ago, in 2013, the company that makes Magic put a new commercial online featuring Chandra, the main character from this story. In that commercial, Chandra was played by one Ms. Felicia Day, playing her in the manner of a typical Felicia Day-type character (think of her slayer on Buffy, her hacker on Supernatural, or Codex from the Guild for reference here). Total onscreen time for Felicia Chandra: about 10 seconds.

Book Chandra is nothing like a Felicia Day character, and I have irrationally chosen to hold that against her. It doesn't help her that she's not much of any kind of character, and we're not given much reason to identify with her beyond “Hey, here's that character from those cards from that game you like.”

Things pick up in the second half, when Gideon shows up, but overall the story remains a bit underwhelming.

This was an exciting, engaging thriller looking at terrorism and war, privacy and security. I was very light on character development, to the point where I was confusing characters at times, but well-paced and tightly-plotted around an intriguing premise. The art was fantastic, as well - lots of experimentation with colour and different art styles, but always in service of telling the story rather than experimentation for its own sake.

I spent a large chunk of my teen years reading cheesy vampire novels and watching old sci-fi movies. So I'm sort of the built-in audience for this. And it was a fun read!

Really funny satire that starts off being about the comic industry in the early 1990s, and ends up being more about the love/hate relationship between comic book creators and their fans. I don't know if someone who wasn't a comic fan would enjoy this at all, but I thought it was hilarious.

A great heist story is like a magic trick - all the elements are in front of you, and it's seeing them put together in a way that you weren't expecting that makes the trick great. Thief of Thieves takes a lot of classic heist elements and weaves them together in a story that's thrilling, sexy, and intriguing. Very highly recommended for fans of the genre.