Kim Miller
Book 6 of The Suneater series. What a trip.
Elements of Hadrian's travels that were scattered through his overall story are coming together and he's beginning to understand what he's really been fighting for, and fighting against. Ruocchio puts his skill as a story teller on display here as he continues to drop Hadrian into ever increasing levels of danger. Each chapter reveals another undercurrent, another clandestine agreement between his enemies, another reason to continue into further danger. As the book closes we have a new understanding of the horrific nature of his task.
This series starts out strong and Ruoccio increases his muscle with each volume. It's as if he's re-writing the landscape of his genre and setting a new baseline against which others will be judged.
Book 6 of The Suneater series. What a trip.
Elements of Hadrian's travels that were scattered through his overall story are coming together and he's beginning to understand what he's really been fighting for, and fighting against. Ruocchio puts his skill as a story teller on display here as he continues to drop Hadrian into ever increasing levels of danger. Each chapter reveals another undercurrent, another clandestine agreement between his enemies, another reason to continue into further danger. As the book closes we have a new understanding of the horrific nature of his task.
This series starts out strong and Ruoccio increases his muscle with each volume. It's as if he's re-writing the landscape of his genre and setting a new baseline against which others will be judged.
Cabaret Macabre
This was my first Tim Mead book and the third in a series of this detective and stage magician pair-up. Set in 1938 it was a bit Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than a Midsomer Murders episode. Lots of twists, lots of victims, lots of guilty parties. And a surprise ending that told us that we should have been asking more questions all the way through.
This was the review I put on another site after a bit more thought:
Set in 1938 and mostly in a grand English country house it's like Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than Midsomer Murders. And also more over-contrived ways of killing people. And also more murderers than Christie ever needed. It's quietly funny, simply because of the way it pokes fun at the Christie world. The detective is partnered by a stage magician, one has the crime experience and the other knows how to understand misdirection and illusion. I took it kind of seriously at first but started to see the absurdity slowly building up by the halfway mark. And then he drops a very unexpected ending, and then he drops another even more unexpected ending, and then a third unexpected ending. He knows how to overkill.
This was my first Tim Mead book and the third in a series of this detective and stage magician pair-up. Set in 1938 it was a bit Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than a Midsomer Murders episode. Lots of twists, lots of victims, lots of guilty parties. And a surprise ending that told us that we should have been asking more questions all the way through.
This was the review I put on another site after a bit more thought:
Set in 1938 and mostly in a grand English country house it's like Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than Midsomer Murders. And also more over-contrived ways of killing people. And also more murderers than Christie ever needed. It's quietly funny, simply because of the way it pokes fun at the Christie world. The detective is partnered by a stage magician, one has the crime experience and the other knows how to understand misdirection and illusion. I took it kind of seriously at first but started to see the absurdity slowly building up by the halfway mark. And then he drops a very unexpected ending, and then he drops another even more unexpected ending, and then a third unexpected ending. He knows how to overkill.
Being a Monty Python fan and also a fan of Gilliam's movies, I came to this book with a positive mindset. Gilliam's work on Python meant that his animations held the screen but he didn't appear in person, so he was something of a mystery for a long time. This memoir fills out a certain amount of that mystery. From his childhood in the US to his work with Mad magazine to manipulating his excursion through the military to his adopting of England as his home, this is an overview of the story of the man.
He also traverses many of his movies with anecdotes of their making and reception. The difficulties of bringing his weird Pythonesque humour to the US market get a lot of air as he struggled to be taken seriously as a movie maker. The illustrations in the book increase through this portion of his story and his story board pics show something of his visual process.
He speaks of how his daughter was instrumental in keeping him on track when the US market wanted to trim down his more outrageous ideas, and to continue through a disaster such as when Heath Ledger died while filming Dr Parnassus. I think she was also the push for him to get this book completed. We owe her a beer next time we see her in the pub.
Afterthought. One of the funny things is how the book ends. He acknowledges 'all the people along the way who pushed me forward...' and he lists about a thousand actors over several pages. Yep, I counted them. Well, I copied them all into a word processor and halved the word count.
Being a Monty Python fan and also a fan of Gilliam's movies, I came to this book with a positive mindset. Gilliam's work on Python meant that his animations held the screen but he didn't appear in person, so he was something of a mystery for a long time. This memoir fills out a certain amount of that mystery. From his childhood in the US to his work with Mad magazine to manipulating his excursion through the military to his adopting of England as his home, this is an overview of the story of the man.
He also traverses many of his movies with anecdotes of their making and reception. The difficulties of bringing his weird Pythonesque humour to the US market get a lot of air as he struggled to be taken seriously as a movie maker. The illustrations in the book increase through this portion of his story and his story board pics show something of his visual process.
He speaks of how his daughter was instrumental in keeping him on track when the US market wanted to trim down his more outrageous ideas, and to continue through a disaster such as when Heath Ledger died while filming Dr Parnassus. I think she was also the push for him to get this book completed. We owe her a beer next time we see her in the pub.
Afterthought. One of the funny things is how the book ends. He acknowledges 'all the people along the way who pushed me forward...' and he lists about a thousand actors over several pages. Yep, I counted them. Well, I copied them all into a word processor and halved the word count.
Cabaret Macabre
This was my first Tim Mead book and the third in a series of this detective and stage magician pair-up. Set in 1938 it was a bit Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than a Midsomer Murders episode. Lots of twists, lots of victims, lots of guilty parties. And a surprise ending that told us that we should have been asking more questions all the way through.
This was my first Tim Mead book and the third in a series of this detective and stage magician pair-up. Set in 1938 it was a bit Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than a Midsomer Murders episode. Lots of twists, lots of victims, lots of guilty parties. And a surprise ending that told us that we should have been asking more questions all the way through.
A short novelette about Hadrian in the years he spent on Jadd. A prince of another star system approaches the ruler of Jadd to seek an alliance. He's brought gifts, genetically engineered birds who can sing with human voices. Some of them have hidden talents, and the prince himself has a trick or two up his sleeve.
I didn't think this the best of Ruocchio's short fillers. There's a lot of description of beautiful plumage but his gift of telling stories of political intrigue is not having its best showing in this one.
A short novelette about Hadrian in the years he spent on Jadd. A prince of another star system approaches the ruler of Jadd to seek an alliance. He's brought gifts, genetically engineered birds who can sing with human voices. Some of them have hidden talents, and the prince himself has a trick or two up his sleeve.
I didn't think this the best of Ruocchio's short fillers. There's a lot of description of beautiful plumage but his gift of telling stories of political intrigue is not having its best showing in this one.
This novella follows on from Ashes of Man and is the best of the novellas in the series. It tells the story of Lorien Aristedes after he engineered the rescue of Hadrian.
It begins with Lorien already having been tried and entered into his sentence. The book starts out dark and gets progressively darker as Ruocchio strips Lorien of his dignity and ultimately his humanity. As Lorien is ground into the dust by his circumstances and the people around him the inner surety that has carried him in previous episodes also retreats from him. He is thrown into suffering and forced into performing actions that he would never have countenanced in his former life.
Next to Kingdoms of Darkness, this is the darkest story of the series so far and totally compelling. It was a two session read for me, and had I started it early in the day it would have been a single session to complete. It confirms to me that Ruocchio is at his best in longer form stories rather than shorts.
This novella follows on from Ashes of Man and is the best of the novellas in the series. It tells the story of Lorien Aristedes after he engineered the rescue of Hadrian.
It begins with Lorien already having been tried and entered into his sentence. The book starts out dark and gets progressively darker as Ruocchio strips Lorien of his dignity and ultimately his humanity. As Lorien is ground into the dust by his circumstances and the people around him the inner surety that has carried him in previous episodes also retreats from him. He is thrown into suffering and forced into performing actions that he would never have countenanced in his former life.
Next to Kingdoms of Darkness, this is the darkest story of the series so far and totally compelling. It was a two session read for me, and had I started it early in the day it would have been a single session to complete. It confirms to me that Ruocchio is at his best in longer form stories rather than shorts.
This is my first Jasper Fforde and I think an early work of his. I took it up as I was looking for something comedic after a heavier read and this appeared popular. I had trouble for much of it. Fforde is trying so self-consciously hard to be clever and witty that the imaginative story suffers for it. I was prepared to cut him some slack and continued and it improved from about the half way point.
It's a time travel novel where somebody is going back into original manuscripts of classic novels and removing characters. Thursday Next is the agent who is tracking down the bad guy. Her weird name is only one of many such unfunny puns. Other people are Sturmey Archer and Bowden Cable, both items of bicycle engineering. Yep, painful, no?
There are two themes running through the story. One is an ongoing discussion between Next and other characters about who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare. It's an oft repeated discussion point. Second theme is the story of Jane Eyre, especially the ending that people did not like. I hadn't read Jane Eyre but it sounded false to me.
As the book came to an end Fforde's finest humour came to the fore. The real author of Shakespeare's plays becomes known, although only to Next. And the ending of Jane Eyre is resolved to everybody's satisfaction in a great plot twist.
This is my first Jasper Fforde and I think an early work of his. I took it up as I was looking for something comedic after a heavier read and this appeared popular. I had trouble for much of it. Fforde is trying so self-consciously hard to be clever and witty that the imaginative story suffers for it. I was prepared to cut him some slack and continued and it improved from about the half way point.
It's a time travel novel where somebody is going back into original manuscripts of classic novels and removing characters. Thursday Next is the agent who is tracking down the bad guy. Her weird name is only one of many such unfunny puns. Other people are Sturmey Archer and Bowden Cable, both items of bicycle engineering. Yep, painful, no?
There are two themes running through the story. One is an ongoing discussion between Next and other characters about who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare. It's an oft repeated discussion point. Second theme is the story of Jane Eyre, especially the ending that people did not like. I hadn't read Jane Eyre but it sounded false to me.
As the book came to an end Fforde's finest humour came to the fore. The real author of Shakespeare's plays becomes known, although only to Next. And the ending of Jane Eyre is resolved to everybody's satisfaction in a great plot twist.
WPHPO
I think this is the debut novel from Bauer. It's the first of a series in a 'destroyed world' type of story. Climate change is freezing the world into a new ice age, only some people escape. The book suffers from having everything explained in terms of numbers: how many people can fit in this spaceship, how large a volume needs to be to hold this forest, how much space needs to be given over to food manufacture, etc. He has a wide array of characters drawn from around the world who face orchestrating a rescue in the face of a rapidly advancing catastrophe.
It seems that Bauer is looking for hard scifi but his process gets in the way. I'll watch out for the second book as i would like him to succeed, the world needs more Aussie authors.
I think this is the debut novel from Bauer. It's the first of a series in a 'destroyed world' type of story. Climate change is freezing the world into a new ice age, only some people escape. The book suffers from having everything explained in terms of numbers: how many people can fit in this spaceship, how large a volume needs to be to hold this forest, how much space needs to be given over to food manufacture, etc. He has a wide array of characters drawn from around the world who face orchestrating a rescue in the face of a rapidly advancing catastrophe.
It seems that Bauer is looking for hard scifi but his process gets in the way. I'll watch out for the second book as i would like him to succeed, the world needs more Aussie authors.