This is the third and final book of the Mistborn trilogy, the first two books of which I talked about earlier. It mostly delivers; there are lots of interesting and surprising revelations (both regular plot ones and ones about how the world works) and things come to a suitable climax. One thing Sanderson does really […]
I needed to kill a couple days before the final volume of Mistborn showed up, so short stories seemed like just the thing. Plus of course Wodehouse is about the most readable author on the planet, so I ended up plowing through all of them quickly. Which is not really the best way to experience […]
This was high up on the list of Books I Really Should Have Gotten Around To Reading By Now. (The next highest book on the list is probably Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.) All I really knew was that it was about a hermaphrodite, which indeed it is, but there’s actually a bit less of that […]
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
To recap, Spewers are artists who are incredibly prolific awesome at their best but with a nonexistent quality filter largely intuitive in approach, as far as I can tell even the best works are big messes (in a great way) rather than tightly constructed jewels apparently wide-ranging in genre but with enough tics that their […]
I don’t like reading series until they’re finished because I want to know that I can read all of the books in a row. This is mostly due to my lousy memory; when I get to book 3, I don’t want to have to either reread books 1 and 2 or muddle through not remembering […]
This novel won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and unsurprisingly it was great. The narrative voice is quite in-your-face and virtuosic, which I could understand turning some people off and judging from the Amazon reviews it did, but I dug it. It jumps around in space between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic and in time […]
I didn’t really discover pulp fantasy until a couple of years ago. Fantasy fiction these days tends to be epic fantasy or urban fantasy. Epic fantasy is where heroes save the world from Great Evil, preferably over the course of three or more books; as you might have guessed, Tolkien is the unwitting root of […]
I discovered Catherynne Valente through her Orphan’s Tales books, which were an amazing blend of beautiful poetic prose and cerebral puzzle-box structure. If I make a Top Ten list at some point they’re going to be contenders. Palimpsest is her newest novel, and it is once again full of beautiful poetic prose, though my left […]
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
I already have far too many books like How Chess Games Are Won and Lost, holistic tomes that attempt to somehow improve your chess game across the board by dispensing a couple hundred pages of advice. But this one has gotten a bunch of great reviews, so I gave in. It’s actually a very good […]
#3 in the list of books that have been sitting on my bookshelf for too long. I bought this a while ago and I can see why: it has lots of positive blurbs. Yet the reviews on Amazon are pretty mixed (average of 3.5 stars). Who’s right? In this case I agree with the Amazon […]