Remember when it wasn’t clear if Pynchon was ever going to write another book after Gravity’s Rainbow? Now he’s practically churning them out. The mammoth Against The Day was just published a couple of years ago, and now here’s Inherent Vice, which is — well, I guess you’d call it a hard-boiled detective novel, except […]
These are the first two books of Abraham’s fantasy series The Long Price Quartet; the final one was just published last month. They are technically fantasy, as I said, but it’s more fantasy in the style of Guy Gavriel Kay; they’re normal human character-driven stories set in a vaguely Asian-style culture that doesn’t happen to […]
I have an ambivalent relationship with William Vollmann. His first book, You Bright and Risen Angels, was a glorious spewfest, so unrestrained in its messiness that the “transcendental” table of contents was overflowing with promises of later chapters that the actual novel never even got to. After that he kept the logorrhea but dialed back […]
This was a free ARC from BEA; the actual book comes out in August. It’s an interesting idea, basically an adult fantasy book that is based on the experience of having read young adult fantasy books. It silently references the Harry Potter and Narnia books incessantly in a “good artists borrow, great artists steal” kind […]
After Mnemosyne reawakened my interest in Esperanto, I googled around a little and found that this book had been published just a few weeks ago and had gotten some good press. (By the way, someone has to do something about the “decent title: entirely too long subtitle” phenomenon; the full title of this is In […]
I have had an ambivalent relationship with China Miéville. Perdido Street Station was an awesome mess of a Weird fantasy book, with so much inventiveness stuffed into it that I could forgive its occasional failings. The Scar was just about as good, so I grabbed Iron Council in hardcover the day it came out… and […]
I am a sucker for modern takes on Victorian literature of the Charles Dickens / Wilkie Collins variety, Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx being for me the high point of said genre. The Meaning of Night got a bunch of very positive reviews and had a great first line (“After killing the red-haired man, I took […]
(See the previous discussion here for definitions and lists.) How could I have forgotten Michael Moorcock in my list? As far as I can tell he fits every criterion. All I’ve read is the first volume of the recent Elric rerelease, which unfortunately did not engage me at all, so I probably won’t be exploring […]
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I wasn’t going to read another Culture novel quite so soon, but a chess/go friend of mine told me that I had to read this, so I did. It’s about, no surprise, a world-class (I guess universe-class) game player, and, no surprise either, the massive political crisis he finds himself embroiled in. He’s introduced to […]
(Full disclosure: Matthew is a friend, and I reviewed an early version of the book. A couple of my suggested jokes even got into the final product.) Every non-fiction book these days needs a colon and a subtitle, and the subtitle of Hungry Monkey is “A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.” Amster-Burton […]