Booklog
drorzel | November 1, 2015The hot SF release of the fall is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy, concluding the Imperial Radch trilogy. The first of these, Ancillary Justice won a Hugo two years ago, and the second, Ancillary Sword should've won this past year, because I really didn't like the Three-Body Problem.
The release of Ancillary Mercy generated a ton of buzz, to the point where, as I remarked on Twitter, I felt as if I were letting down some ill-defined "side" by not being more excited about it. But while I liked Ancillary Justice quite a bit (it's the rare book I've voted for the Best Novel Hugo that's actually won…
drorzel | July 4, 2015Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book-- 700-something "pages" in electronic form-- and contains yet another bid for "best first paragraph ever":
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
The rest of the book involves what follows on from that. Namely, the destruction of basically all life on Earth.
I should say up front that this was, on the whole, a very enjoyable book. In a lot of ways, it's what I…
drorzel | May 24, 2015As the Hugo nomination debacle unfolded, one of the few bright spots was the replacement of Marko Kloos's novel with The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, who is apparently a Big Name in SF in China. This got a good deal of buzz when it was released in the US, and I've sorta-kinda been meaning to read it for a while. Having it move onto the Hugo ballot provided a great excuse to finally crack it open. And given that I wasn't blown away by the other two non-Puppy nominees on the slate, or the one Puppy book that I had already read, I had great hopes this would redeem the category.
Alas, it was…
drorzel | March 29, 2015All the way back in 2001, I got started on the whole blog thing by beginning a book log. That's long since fallen by the wayside, but every now and then, I do read stuff that I feel a need to write something about, and, hey, the tagline up at the top of the page does promise pop culture to go with the physics...
I've actually been on a pretty good roll with fantasy novels over the last few months, hitting a bunch of books that I've really enjoyed, without any real duds. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the first of these, Django Wexler's The Thousand Names. This got good reviews, but it…
drorzel | November 24, 2014Spent the weekend in Florida getting together with some friends from college, which was a much-needed recharge for me at the end of a brutal term. It's probably fitting to ease back into routine with a return to my blogging roots, and talk a bit about a book. Specifically, the new William Gibson novel, The Peripheral.
I haven't actually read any reviews of this, because I don't really need to read reviews to know that I want to read a new Gibson-- he's that significant a writer. His work needs the proper context, though-- while I technically started this a week or two ago as bedtime reading,…
drorzel | October 16, 2014I enjoyed Caleb Scharf's previous book, Gravity's Engines a good deal, so I was happy to get email from a publicist offering me his latest. I'm a little afraid that my extreme distraction of late hasn't really treated it fairly, but then again, the fact that I finished it at all in my current state of frazzlement may be the best testament I can offer to its quality. This is a sweeping survey of what we've learned about our place in the universe over the last five hundred years or so.
Now, a grandiose description like that often portends a bunch of wifty philosophizing that poses grand…
drorzel | September 21, 2014My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Steven Gould's Exo (excerpt at Tor). This is the fourth book in the Jumper series (not counting the movie tie-in novel), and ordinarily wouldn't be worth much of a review, because if you haven't read the first three, this book won't make a lick of sense. If you have read the others, it's a worthy sequel, but three earlier books makes for a lot of backstory to explain in writing the book up.
It's worth noting, though, because it belongs to a sort of unofficial subgenre: books about Working Things Through. The story includes a huge amount of…
drorzel | September 4, 2014Three weeks in Europe means a lot of time on planes and trains, so I actually got to read some fiction for a change. I'm stuck in a meeting all day today, and need a morale boost on the way in, so I'll go back to my book-blogging roots and type up the books that I read:
-- Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land. Conclusion of the trilogy begun with The Magicians back in the day, and while it's a better book than the first one, if you didn't like the first book, you probably won't like this. Mostly because of the characters, who are very much a like-them-or-hate-them crew.
Personally, I think it's…
drorzel | April 18, 2014Astonishingly, in the last few weeks, I've actually found time to read some-- gasp-- novels. In particular, I finished two books that probably belong in the "Hard SF" genre: A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias and Lockstep by Karl Schroeder. Both Jim and Karl are people I've met many times at cons; I've enjoyed a lot of books by Karl, but this is Jim's first published novel (I think).
I'm lumping these together both because it's rare for me to get time to read, let along booklog stuff, but also because there's a sense in which they're complementary books: Both offer thoroughly fascinating far-…
drorzel | January 20, 2014I've gotten out of the habit of blogging about the books I read for fun here, mostly because I've gotten out of the habit of reading for fun. Not for lack of desire, but because between my job and the kids and the massive amounts of research reading for the book-in-progress, I haven't had time.
Of course, I make the occasional exception, and when one of my very favorite SF authors comes out with a new one, that's a great reason to read a little fiction. Robert Charles Wilson isn't the most prolific author, but he's consistently excellent, and always thought-provoking, so I was very happy to…
drorzel | September 3, 2013I started out blogging about books, way back in 2001, but somewhat ironically, I rarely post anything about books any more. My free time has been whittled down to the point where book blogging is time taken away from other stuff, and it's never been that popular here. I post reviews of science books that publishers send me, but fiction has mostly fallen by the wayside. As has fiction reading, to a large extent.
I did have a run recently of books with some elements that resonated with my own book-in-progress about scientific thinking, so I figure that's a good excuse to bring them in. The…
drorzel | March 10, 2012I've gotten out of the habit of booklogging recently, which is sort of a shame, because it means I've also gone back to the problem that led Kate and me to start booklogs in the first place: people ask what I've been reading recently, and I can't remember... As a sort of corrective to this, though, here's a post lumping together short comments on my three most recent reads: Karl Schroeder's Ashes of Candesce (excerpt at Tor.com), Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising (excerpt at Tor.com), and Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point (which isn't a Tor book, so they didn't do an excerpt).
Ashes of…
drorzel | August 20, 2011I've heard a bunch of good things about Dan Wells's John Cleaver series (a trilogy at the moment, consisting of I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want to Kill You, but the ending of the last leaves an opening for more, should he want to write more), but I somehow didn't expect them to be quite as strongly in the Young Adult category as they are. It's a bold call, but it actually works pretty well.
The set-up here is that the first-person narrator of the series, John Wayne Cleaver, is a sociopath with all the usual traits of a serial killer in the making: pyromania, frequent…
drorzel | August 14, 2011Lev Grossman's The Magicians never got a full entry to itself, but as I said when I mentioned it in this round-up post, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a magical school novel about recognizable American teenagers attending Brakebills, a sort of liberal arts college for the wizarding set, somewhere in the lower Hudson valley (presumably near the Lake of the Coheeries). It's not to all tastes, but it resembles my actual college experience a lot more than most other magical college novels, so I enjoyed it quite a bit.
It's essentially impossible to say anything about the new sequel The Magician…
drorzel | August 7, 2011While future historians will undoubtedly remember August 7th primarily as SteelyKid's birthday (it would be irresponsible of me to encourage people to go edit the Wikipedia date page accordingly, wouldn't it?), there was another locally important event on August 7th, some years earlier: August 7th, 2001, saw my first blog post ever, the inaugural post of my old book log The Library of Babel, so long ago it was hand-crafted HTML with no item permalinks-- scroll all the way to the bottom to see the first entry.
It's a little hard to believe that I've been doing this blogging thing for a decade…
drorzel | July 31, 2011One of the problems with a long-running series is that it accretes backstory as you go (unless, of course, you go the Rex Stout route and just pretend that time doesn't pass for the characters, even when you have the client in a later book being the son of a character from one of the earlier volumes...). This is particularly troublesome for the sort of series in which the characters become more experienced and powerful as they go along. After several books, it starts to become difficult to find credible threats for your protagonist to face.
For the 13th volume of the Dresden Files, Jim…
drorzel | July 29, 2011I'm not a huge Mieville fan, but the descriptions I read of Kraken sounded like good fun. As I like fun books, and a fun book written by China Mieville seemed sufficiently improbable that I just had to see it, I picked it up a little while ago, and read it over the last week or so while biking to nowhere or waiting for SteelyKid to go to sleep.
The book follows the adventures of Billy Harrow, a biologist working for the Darwin Center in London, who was responsible for preserving the giant squid they have on display there. It's the pride of the collection and a big tourist draw, so when Billy…
drorzel | June 12, 2011I've heard a lot of buzz about The Quantum Thief-- see, for example, this enthusiastic review from Gary K. Wolfe, so I was psyched when it finally became available in the US a little while back. Of course, the down side of this sort of buzz is that it's almost impossible to live up to the promise.
the thief of the title is one Jen Le Flambeur, who is in prison when the novel starts. But not an ordinary prison-- the Dilemma Prison, in which infinite replicas of the minds of the imprisoned find themselves in little glass cells which open to reveal one other prisoner. Each of the prisoners has…
drorzel | August 18, 2010We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann's pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn't read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode-- wildly overstating the awesomeness of pre-Columbian cultures, and exaggerating the evil of the European invaders (Neil's recorded some great stuff, but the lyrics to "Cortez the Killer" are pretty dopey). It came up several times recently in discussions elsewhere, though, and seemed like it would make a nice break from the…
drorzel | August 14, 2010Tongues of Serpents is the nth book in the Temeraire series started with His Majesty's Dragon (in the US, anyway), and another "Meh" review from me. In this case, this is probably less to do with the book itself than with the fact that I am not really in the target demographic for this book.
The series, for those who aren't familiar with it is basically Patrick O'Brian crossed with Pern: our chief protagonist is William Laurence, a sailor in the Biritsh Navy in the Napoleonic Wars who captures a dragon's egg, and inadvertently becomes the human captain of Temeraire, a Chinese Celestial dragon…