Dave
I can't tell you how many times I've picked this book up, read the first few pages and tossed it aside.
Something about those first few pages is difficult to overcome and I know I'm not the only one. Maybe it's folks around my age (pushing 40) who all seem to uniformly find the same annoyance in a snarky, smart-mouthed protagonist that feels very contemporary (if not dated) for a fantastical setting that kills our interest. Or, for me, the sorta grimdark setting of the Tomb of the Ninth.
In a way, it felt like a Nick Lutsko Spirit Halloween video with no tongues in cheeks.
If I'm honest, I can't tell you why I picked it up again. It's been recommended to me dozens of times now, and I've unknowingly bought it twice in different formats. All of my desired library holds were a few weeks out, so I sorta just said, “fine, I'll try this again until one of the holds comes through.”
Sure enough, there was that beginning again where we meet the titular Gideon and it's the same cringe epic bacon guy sort of humor that made me hate ‘The Martian' in all of its glory. Along with a comically dark setting of some sort of tomb planet with shambling skeletons and dark dungeons. Sigh.
But, I kept going. This book gets hyped a lot for queer representation, and any cynicism about this sort of melts away because Gideon is absolutely queer, but done in a way where it's very matter-of-fact. Gideon is just Gideon, being queer is just a part of the character.
See, the thing is, Gideon is also really annoying. One of the drawbacks of having an obnoxious lead is you're gonna turn some people away. That's what happened to me. Then you start to see more of Gideon, and that everyone is annoyed by Gideon and a lot of the goofy, aloof behavior is a defense mechanism from a lifetime of trauma.
You really, really need to push past those initial annoyances, though, because once you do, everything opens up.
The story winds itself around in all sorts of interesting ways, the characters are all mashed together, pit against each other and forced to cope with their own shortcomings in unique ways and while there's a relatively massive bodycount for named characters here, never did I find myself wanting to put this book aside after the story got going.
In places, the diction can feel clunky in trying to illustrate this realm as a science fantasy one, especially considering Gideon is our anchor to things and Gideon's link to everything is comic books and skin mags. Still, the occasional five-dollar word is easy enough to gloss over considering how well everything else flows.
This is a special book and if you're like me and struggled with the beginning, it's worth pushing further into before writing it off.
Truly, this is an amazing novel.
You'll read a lot of reviews about it being slow-paced, or that it was “hard to connect with.”
This is a book about living with trauma, how people mentally compartmentalize abuse and how complicated it can be to have extremely flawed and manipulative parents.
I tend to fall victim to getting excited about books that I haven't read after I see gushing praise for them and this was one of those books.
Altered Carbon was pretty good, don't get me wrong, but I was expecting more out of it, which might be a bit unfair to the author. It was some pretty bleak noir, which I'm cool with, and the future that Morgan built that involved human consciousness being digitized and transferred between bodies was an interesting idea. Of course, it creates some problems as well and Morgan was able to handle those issues rather deftly, which I commend.
Something about the story and the characters fell a bit flat in the middle, everything there but just a bit subdued. I think it had a lot to do with the absolute glee and care that was put into the violent scenes about mid-way through the book that everything else afterwards felt flat in comparison. It was like you were shown just how good Morgan can be, then never lives up to that potential again until moving into the home stretch.
This was pretty good.
I think I was expecting a bit more out of this than was delivered. Perhaps that's on me? It does a good job of talking about strategies in dealing with online mobs, which is important these days.
The essential guide for running an email list.
When you promote your books you hear the following advice: run ads, write series and have an email list.
The problem here is that while good advice, each of those things require certain levels of investment and understanding. The email list and doing newsletters seems like the easiest thing, right? Well, when you start seeing your list ballooning up it seems cool. Hey, I've got hundreds more people on my list! Then you start sending and the unsubscribes grow, the open rate lowers, the click rate is a desolate hellscape.
What giveS?
Tammi's book helps to show that email lists aren't just for marketing, they're for building genuine fan bases and interacting with people instead of trying to sell them stuff. Everyone is trying to sell something these days, don't be that person.
Very obvious spoilers ahead for Gideon the Ninth and this book.
To go from the sort of obnoxious opening chapters of Gideon, where Gideon's sense of snark comes across as forced and obnoxious, to this book where you're begging for that signature snark again is really a feat. I put GtN aside at least two or threes times before it stuck for me, but when it did, that book hit hard.
Harrow the Ninth is not an easy book, by any stretch of the imagination. All the negative reviews decrying this book as a departure from the previous one and not as fun illustrate the point of the book.
This isn't a fun book, it's a book about loss and grief. It's about what we do when we're overwhelmed by grief and try to soldier on so we'll look strong instead of coping. There's some thematic overlap here with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind where Harrow is so overwhelmed with the death of Gideon so one of them could survive, and for her being the survivor, that she literally has a rival necromancer in Ianthe (both now Lyctors, sort of) do an experimental procedure to rewrite Harrow's mind and change their shared history so Gideon was never there. Instead, it was Ortus, the failed cavalier, who took her place.
Thusly, we see Harrow interacting with the remaining lyctors while carrying Gideon's longsword with her and haunted by “the body,” which is intended to be the body within the Locked Tomb she disturbed as a 10-year-old that led to the death of her family. While interacting with her fellow lyctors and ‘God,' a name named John, of all things, we see how Harrow is not considered a full lyctor because she didn't properly absorb her cavalier like the rest did.
... we know that she did, which was how she defeated Cytherea in the previous book, but in this book everything is different.
The book is split into two different narration styles. One in third, the other in second person. Yeah, that's right, a bulk of this book is in the dreaded second person. In part, because Harrow isn't telling her own story. She is being told her story.
A part of me thought “dear god, this is really going hard on this artificial memory and the allegory” because a solid 65% of this book is told like this. We don't even have glimpses of whatever the “real” is until about 60% and the final act of the book features things finally split between Harrow stuck in “the river,” a surreal part of the afterlife, while Gideon awakens and takes over Harrow's body.
While we go through this book knowing that Harrow is off, what we get a clear view of is how “God” and his lyctors work. They're dysfunctional, bitter and all hate each other, plus one named Ortus (no relation, really) is trying to kill Harrow. The mysteries unfold slowly and we spend a lot of time with the husk of Harrow knowing full well she's hurting so bad that she'd rather allow herself to be this husk of an undead immortal being than live with the guilt of knowing she lived and the only person who ever cared for her sacrificed herself to land in this position.
When Gideon “returns” it's impossible not to be excited. Think about that. I went from thinking this was the biggest piece of twee shit in the world to cheering for the return of Gideon in all her awkwardness.
By the time the book was over I ordered the hardcovers of both (I read them via library copies, more people should use the public libraries that are available to them) in a heartbeat.
I really wanted to love Ancillary Sword, but sadly it just didn't click for me. It wasn't for lack of effort. In a way it was frustrating because Leckie's prose can be quite amazing at times.
The first book, Ancillary Justice, was universally beloved and won just about every scifi book award that there was to win. I understood what people saw in it, but there was so much in the book that frustrated me. Leckie showed her skills as a tremendous world builder (as everyone has noted), but sadly the characters were a bit lacking.
Leckie set out to fix that in the second book by having it mostly a long character study of Justice of Toren/Breq, the corpse AI that lost her ship that served as her central hub sentenced to a life in a human body. Her tale of vengeance led to a climatic face off in the first book and this one picked up directly after and at times it was hard to grasp where the plot was heading.
It wasn't due to depth or complication but instead because of the pacing and what the main focus of the book turned out to be. Leckie has proven to be a slow starter, in fact, I almost put down Ancillary Justice until I got to about the 40% mark when it picked up, with Ancillary Sword it probably didn't pick up until somewhere near the realm of 70%.
Her prose can be great, like I said, but at other times frustrating. Why is everyone gesturing? The word “gesture” appears in some form what feels like every page on both books and while I can understand that Breq is an AI who views things a bit differently, she seems to have a superior intellect and I'm sure can break down these gestures into more depth than just “she gestured agreement” and so forth.
Most of the book felt like something that most authors would have summed up briefly within a a few pages, a few chapters at most. Instead most of our time is spent with Breq seeing how the common people live. It was a valuable thing for the character to experience in her quest, undoubtedly, but the presentation and the events felt rather uninspired. There was also the fact that the reader was given no real insight as to what Breq was after throughout most of the journey.
There was similar insight missing from the first book early on, which made it such a slog to endure. I've seen a lot of people saying “well, I didn't understand it, but maybe I'm just smart enough.” Readers have to be unafraid to take authors to task on things like this. Ancillary Justice wasn't confusing because it flew over the readers' heads, but because there wasn't enough detail or insight into the characters to get the reader invested. This book was similar to that.
So if AJ was missing character development and had a fascinating plot, AS was missing the plot and saw a lot of character development. Hopefully Ancillary Mercy pieces it all together because I truly want to love these books and Leckie's writing, but there are just a few little things that make these books more of a chore than they should be.
The Dagger and Coin series is probably one of the more memorable fantasy series to be released in recent memory. While there were times in the first book where I felt like it was a bit too similar to previous, well-known series, I'm glad that I stuck with it.
Abraham's writing is clean, accessible and smart, which continues forward into The Spider's War. After getting to watch all of the characters grow and deal with the world around them, this was their last act. While there were a few moments midway through the book where I found myself not particularly interested in some of the brief interludes, it wasn't a big deal.
Things came together well, were interesting and each character had their own challenges to overcome along the way.
What really stuck with me was the ending for Geder. Geder was a complicated character in many ways. Geder had a horrible temper and had done some truly terrible things, but he was still carrying out most of his worst acts while under the control of the spiders. That being said, he was so easily manipulable because of these flaws. When he died it was clear that he felt that he was doing the heroic thing, that he wanted to be remembered as a hero instead of a fool and a villain, but the reality was that he was avoiding having to face his own actions and Cithrin. Deep down inside he had to know that Cithrin would reject him again, or he was at least afraid of it. Instead he got to die believing that he was a hero who was going to kiss the girl and have a happy ending before his heroic (and completely unnecessary) sacrifice. He also didn't have to face all of the people that he had wronged or have to help out in any of the hard work to repair the world that he had so horribly ruined. So his final sacrifice was his final act of cowardice and instead of everyone mourning him as a hero like he wanted, they simply shrugged it off. That was really tremendous, because Geder was such a pivotal character that we knew was conflicted and that deep down inside he wanted to be good, but he didn't get a heroic ending, he didn't get redeemed, he died as he lived instead.
A great ending to a great series.
This is one of those books that's hard to summarize.
There's not much meat on the bones when it comes to story or characters. There's not much that changes or really pulls you in. For some readers, the idea of reading a page or two description of a strange, remote city will be enough to stoke their imaginations.
The book is Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in a conversation. Khan has tasked Polo with visiting his empire and reporting back his findings, even though he has an atlas with each city meticulously detailed via images already. Polo perhaps never leaves or goes to these places, instead tells tales of far away lands that may or may not exist. A good number of them have women's names.
That's it. There's no conflict, very little dialogue and only really the two characters. While short, this book took me a while to read. The first 50 or so pages flew by, then the rest crawled by. In a way, it reminded me of the first time I read Moby-Dick in college. That whole middle section about the whale? I skimmed and skipped my way through it to finish the book in time, knowing full well it had its purpose. For a lot of this book I found myself skimming, knowing I could always return to it later and perhaps will take more away from it when I'm in a mood to read meticulous descriptions of strange details.
Not to say the descriptions aren't great. A particular favorite of mine was the city suspended by a net, everything strung up and hanging, knowing eventually the net would break and the city would be gone.
There's a lot of artistry in this book, even if there isn't much story. There's a lot of metaphor to be gleaned from it as well. Khan, a conqueror who rules over a vast kingdom that he'll never get to see or know, to the point where Polo admits to most of his descriptions just being of his home city he misses dearly, or that he's making everything up to appease Khan. Still, Khan holds out hope. Polo is a captive who wishes to see these far off lands and can't, while Khan is a conqueror who supposedly has all of these things at his disposal but will never visit them.
There are times, especially in the chapters with women's names, where it seems abundantly clear it's very much about a woman. The woman he can't penetrate deeper into the heart of and only knows the exteriors of. Gee, wonder what that's about. There's also talk about death, from cities of the dead, cities with dualities or that are broken up into two, Khan and Polo muse if they're alive or dead and there's even a chess board that has irregularities that Polo is able to explain to a curious Khan.
Like I said, there's a lot to unpack in this dense little tome about the world, human nature, love and more, you just have to be in the right mood for it.
There's a lot to say about this book. I went from enjoying it to not enjoying before landing on very much liking it.
Throughout reading this, I couldn't separate it from the atmosphere of the Pedro Costa film, Casa de Lava, which was also about an isolated island, death and isolation. While they were both very different, they align mood-wise quite well.
I noticed a lot of western talk about the book centered on it being “Orwellian,” a term I've grown to loathe in its overuse. I'm not sure this book was about big, sweeping statements or warnings about society as much as it was about the concept and process of creating art and coping with trauma.
Focusing on the “memory police” themselves doesn't quite connect the book's main narrative with the sub-narrative of the novel the main character was writing.
The novel was a woman who was defined by her typing and relationship with her abusive, controlling typing teacher until she lost herself completely. The main narrative was a woman living on a dystopian island who's entire existence was tethered to two men; the first an old man that was a family friend and a father figure, the second her editor, who ran away from his family to live in her basement to avoid this “memory police.” The relationship is different but... Sort of isn't, too. She's disassociating from the world around her but he's the “captive” of her fading memories who seems to legitimately care for her and wants her to be what she was before, which she cannot do. He's living in a small, hidden room in her home, while the character in her book was living in a hidden room above a church without her voice.
The main character's last remaining thing is her voice after the old man is gone.
These relationships with men seem to be the binding threads to me, moreso than jackboots taking things away. R won't let her move on, the typing instructor only wanted to violate her until he found a new toy. It's easy to read the typing teacher as a part of the publishing industry, elevating a “fresh, young female voice,” controlling it until there's nothing left, then replacing her voice with another to repeat the cycle.
The role of the protag's mother can't be discounted, either. R wishes her to explore that relationship and the loss of her mother, who left behind memories meant just for her, but had to be interpreted by R. After they find the last of her mother's gifts and she gives the lemon candies to the old man, it sort of seals off a part of her history.
Yeah, like I said, lots to think about.
Last year I read ‘The Glass Hotel' and while I didn't love it, I liked it enough to decide to give ‘Station Eleven' a shot, considering it's reputation.
I don't regret reading this book, but that's not to say that I'm not critical of it. It was better than ‘The Glass Hotel,' which was a solid novel that had some nagging issues. Emily St. John Mandel's prose itself is great; existing in that territory where it's never in the way, clunky or overwrought, and in fact by all accounts good.
There were times where the very idea of reading this during an actual pandemic felt uncomfortable and prescient. Other times, it was bordering on tedious.
The bonds that tie this novel together are based around an actor from a weird little island in Canada. Yes, there was also a weird little island in Canada in ‘The Glass Hotel,' but whatever. Of course the author was raised on a weird little island in Canada, so there's that.
This actor turns into the “patient zero” in North America for a deadly pandemic, at least for this story's purposes, and somehow, everything is connected to him and his ex-wife Miranda's passion project comic book, Station Eleven. The comic is about Miranda's unease with the world, feeling uncomfortable and alone, with a lot of echoes of what happened in her life. After everything falls apart, a traveling symphony that performs Shakespeare as well becomes our anchor.
A part of what drags this down is almost a sense of predestination, where every character we follow is related back to dear Arthur, especially when it becomes clear about a quarter of the way through that's what we're witnessing.
That isn't to say there aren't moments of beauty in here, because there are. There are enough for me to bump this to four stars on here!
Man. I gotta say, it started off a bit rough, but it just improved so much. There is absolutely a “gimmick” in this book, but it's handled so deftly that it felt natural and left me wanting more.
Good but not great. I have no idea how I feel about this. I'll keep reading buuuut I also got these first four novellas for free from Orbit.
I'm getting Bill Bixby Hulk vibes here and that's fine. Murderbot has a ship friend now.
I'm deeply conflicted about this book and if I'd recommend it to someone else or not.
Beneath the surface here, there's a story about a man deeply conflicted after the death of his family. Our unnamed protagonist, or, “the writer,” confines himself to a literal purgatory within a decaying city in an abandoned hotel overlooking this dead city.
When faced with signs of life and rebirth, he turns inward, although he's bound by his duty as the city's lone reporter to document what he sees. From a woman and child, a politician, a gardener and other signs of life in a place he'd confined himself to under the idea of withering away with it until his demise, it's difficult to not see glimmers of hope through the dried chaparral.
Whatever the catastrophe facing this city and the world at large are remain unexplained, vague and at times, eye-roll-worthy with how blunt they are, metaphorically. Even as someone who agrees humanity has irrevocably damaged the planet and we're cruising towards climate disaster while refusing to take our collective foot off the gas for long enough to consider the outcome, it felt clumsy and forced.
This was a world that couldn't see beyond what it knew and never considered anything else. An apocalypse in slow-motion that got close to saying something about how to deal with it, but seemed gun shy.
The changes and growth of the lead character are subtle, so subtle they can easily be missed, but they are there. The plot doesn't have insurmountable odds to overcome and there's no hero. That's okay. There's no great awakening in our writer, or change of heart, just, like I said, a glimmer of hope he might change while the people around him are the ones moving in the positive direction.
I'm still ruminating on how to express my feelings on this book. Largely in part to me thoroughly enjoying it from start to finish.
There are very few books that nail atmosphere as well as this. An ethereal, surrealist circus, plopped into the middle of reality, while two rival magicians pit students against each other in a mysterious challenge against each other.
While this challenge that happens inside of the confines of this aesthetically unique and cobbled-together-through-magic circus, the core focus isn't these characters in conflict with each other, but instead in conflict with very real concepts. Their respective father figures force them into a potentially dangerous competition, removing their free will, just to settle an old score between a man and his father figure.
Lots of themes run through the veins of this novel, all woven in with a sense of wonder. You watch the characters learn, grow and become their own people with thoughts and ideas that don't align with the parameters of their challenge or the expectations placed upon them. Then there's the idea of collateral damage of the entire circus being merely a platform for this challenge, with real human beings pulled into the orbit of it and potentially tethered to the circus and the challenge without their consent.
It takes the growth of both Marco and Celia to see not just their feelings for each other, but for the wellbeing of the people around them for this growth to happen, something neither of their father figures could figure out.
Very engrossing, well-written book that I can't recommend enough.
The best novella in this series, by far.
If you cobble together the first, parts of the middle two and this third one you have a pretty great story with a compelling cast of characters.
It felt like the author had a good idea for the first one, wanted to do more but wasn't sure where to go yet. So we got the second installment, which was good, but didn't really do a ton for the story. The third one regained some focus and this one completed the story in a great way.
I'll definitely check out the novel in the series at some point.
Brian does a great job of describing AMS ads and is able to err away from the usual dry approach that a lot of these books suffer from.
He's also a great help with talking about these things and figuring it out with his community. The only issue is that, of course, AMS ads changed a lot this year, sadly. Not his fault.
Leviathan Wakes is a good book that could easily veer into being a really good book depending on how you look at it.
Goodreads doesn't do the half-star thing, so I'll say that I'm giving this 3 1/2 in heart, but four because three seems cruel. There were a ton of things that this book did right and left me feeling pretty good, while other parts were frustrating and a bit obnoxious.
Holden and Miller, our two protagonists, feel eerily similar throughout most of the book. In fact, at times it is hard to tell them apart other than their different ideals and world views. In the chapters where they were together I'd find myself wondering which character I was really reading because they felt so similar. Thankfully as the book wore on they really differentiated from each other, so that was somewhat forgivable.
I loved the premise and all, but I was pretty thrown off when “vomit zombies” entered the equation. I was ready to stop reading altogether if they were to throw away a great premise and solid characters for a space zombie book, but thankfully it was reined in and didn't lament too much on the walking undead. That's usually a sign of an (or in this case two) aware author.
Looking forward to reading further into the series.
There really isn't much to say about these books when you get this far. They are standard GRRM fare, and that is alright. If you are this far you've been roped in by the characters and want to know what'll happen to them. The only difference here is that the main characters it follows are some of the lesser characters or new ones. You won't find Jon Snow, Dany, Tyrion, Stannis, Davos, Bran or Theon. Instead the focus is on the recently likable Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Samwell, Sansa Stark, Araya Stark, Brienne and a few new characters.
GRRM essentially overwrote for the fourth book in the series, and instead of simply cutting it in half and leaving some cliffhangers, he chose to tell the stories of half of the characters, and the next edition is the other half of the characters. It is a giant pacing change from the previous two books, where everything kind of went to hell. This one is more the machinations of the non-warriors like Cersei and Jaime, the trials and tribulations of Samwell, Araya and Sansa as well as a few others. If you've come this far, you'll read this, it might just take you a while.
Chris Fox is one of the few voices in the independent publishing world that stands above the rest.
I had released my first book in my series a few years ago. Stuff happened and I didn't continue until now, although there was that nagging doubts about the shortcomings of said book.
This book was fantastic in helping me assess the problems, learn to live with certain things and take the right steps to make sure that I'm positioning myself better in this crowded market.
Mark is one of the first real ‘experts' on ads for authors.
This book gives a good idea how to start out with Amazon ads and it's interesting seeing Mark move into AMS while Facebook has always been his strength. A solid, quick read.
An interesting look in the Twin Peaks mythos, filling in some of the blanks left by “The Return” series.
While I appreciate those blanks being filled in, it does leave me wondering if they were left out intentionally or because of production restrictions.
The writing is okay, serviceable, not really inspired, which was a bummer. It was a fairly easy read that felt like a must-read for any Twin Peaks fan.
It's difficult to summarize or even explain why this book is so great, so I'm not going to go into painstaking detail, but instead just gush.
I expected very little from a book that I've heard people say is fantastic, but the cover and premise sounds hilarious and ridiculous, like a lot of dime store scifi novels that you see laying around. The reality here is that Dan Simmons is a truly fantastic writer who made something very special in Hyperion.
It has a lot of stuff that will appeal to hardcore scifi fans while making sure to have the story remain human enough to appeal to a broader audience. The Shrike is a fantastic take on the unrelenting evil, remaining mysterious throughout the tales we hear.