Booklog
drorzel | July 8, 2007I still have one Hugo nominee to read, but I needed to take a break between Glasshouse and Blindsight, so I rewarded myself with the latest in Steven Erikson's epic Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Reaper's Gale. We're still a few books behind in the US, so this is a gigantic UK trade paperback that I got as a birthday present.
There's really not much point in doing a highly detailed entry on this, because it's the seventh book in a series of books that average about 800 pages (this one is 907, not counting the character list and glossary). If you've read this far, you're obviously…
drorzel | July 5, 2007Looking back at the archives, I see that I never did get around to blogging about Jennifer Ouellette's Black Bodies and Quantum Cats, which I finished back in May. This is a particularly shameful oversight, as she visited campus in late May, and gave two excellent talks for us, so the least I can do is to post a measly book review.
Jennifer Ouellette (pronounced "Woah-lette," more or less, in case you were wondering) should be no stranger to regular readers of this blog, as I fairly regularly link to her blog, Cocktail Party Physics. If you're not reading it, you ought to be. And if you are…
drorzel | June 30, 2007My intention of reading all of the nominees for the Hugo Awards in the fiction categories hit a bit of a snag yesterday. I finished all the short fiction (novella, novelette, short story), and most of the novels, leaving only Peter Watts's Blindisght and Charlie Stross's Glasshouse. James Nicoll described Peter Watts as the sort of thing he reads when he feels his will to live becoming too strong, and the description of Glasshouse did not fill me with joy. Plus, my copy of Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson just arrived (a birthday present), and I'd really rather read that.
(I'll pause here for…
drorzel | June 24, 2007The other book that I've torn through really quickly this week is the sequel to Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. The first third of the sequel, Ragamuffin is freely available on the web page for the book, for those who are interested. I tend to find sample chapters frustrating, though, so I didn't read it until this week, when Kate brought home a hard copy.
Crystal Rain was Caribbean-flavored steampunk set on a lost colony world, where a war between humans and the alien Teotl has left both groups stranded on the planet Nanagada with very little technology. The war is still being waged, though…
drorzel | June 24, 2007There are lots of other books in the booklog queue, but this one is due back at the library today, so it gets bumped to the front of the list. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's probably the most widely discussed of the books waiting to be logged...
In case you've been hiding out in a cave that no book reviews can penetrate, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Michael Chabon's new novel about a Jewish homeland in Alaska. In this alternate history, the founding of Israel went catastrophically wrong, and the Zionists were driven into the sea by Arab armies. Lacking a home in the Holy Land, a…
drorzel | June 5, 2007Blown Away is the sixth Frank Corso novel from G. M. Ford, featuring the exploits of an intrepid investigative reporter and true-crime author with a knack for getting involved in spectuacularly bloody crimes. As the sixth book in a mystery series, you pretty much know what you're going to get.
At least, it looks that way for most of the book. Really, the only reason this book rates prompt book-logging is the ending, which is all I really want to talk about here. There's just no way to do this without massive spoilers, which I will put below the fold-- if you've read the other Corso books,…
drorzel | May 22, 2007I'm taking the unusual step of tarting up a booklog entry with a cover image, just for the "Advance Reading Copy-- Not For Sale" box on the cover. A few weeks back, when Kate and I were in New York, we dropped by the Tor offices to meet Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and I was admiring the cover on the book display in their front office.
"Actually, we just got a box of the ARC's in," Patrick said. "Do you want one?"
I was a huge fan of Spin, so of course I said yes. And I was almost halfway through the book before we left The City the next afternoon...
Axis is a slightly indirect sequel,…
drorzel | April 30, 2007You might not have noticed, but John Scalzi has a new book out. The Last Colony is the third book in the Old Man's War series. It's narrated by John Perry from Old Man's War, now happily married to Jane Sagan from The Ghost Brigades, and working as a colonial administrator on a planet called Huckleberry. At least, that's what they're doing until an old acquaintance from the military turns up to ask them to take over running a new colony, the first to draw its colonists from already established human colonies, rather than third world countries on Earth. Predictably, this creates a somewhat…
drorzel | April 30, 2007The Skinner is another book in the same Polity universe as Gridlinked, though it appears to be more or less self-contained. It doesn't share any characters with the other book, though it does share bits of technology and a general attitude to the world.
The book is set on Spatterjay, a planet with a complex and improbable ecosystem that's designed to allow the author to construct ridiculously gory ways for the characters to suffer and/ or die. The dominant creature in the world is a "leech," that infects its prey with a parasite that confers a sort of immortality. People who are bitten by…
drorzel | April 20, 2007Since I'm going to be voting for the Hugos this year, I feel obliged to actually read as many of the nominated books as possible, and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim was readily available, so I picked up a copy and read it a little while back.
The novel mixes two plot threads, one in a near-future setting, the other in medieval Germany in 1348, just before the Black Death. The modern thread concerns a couple of academics, a physicist studying new theories of time and space, and a historian looking into the mysterious abandonment of a place called "Eifelheim" in Germany. The medieval thread tells…
drorzel | April 1, 2007I stopped by to support my local independent bookseller yesterday, and was immediately confronted with a dilemma: A big display of signed copies of White Night by Jim Butcher, the new Dresden Files novel. The signed part has nothing to do with the dilemma-- I'm a reader, not a collector-- the dilemma was that I haven't been buying these in hardcover, and it's only out in hardcover. But I've really been in the mood for a Dresden Files book lately, especially since the Rob Thurman book mentioned previously turned out to be so unsatisfactory.
As you can tell, I ended up buying it, and tore…
drorzel | March 25, 2007"Richard Stark," is, of course, the name that Donald E. Westlake uses when he wants to write books tat aren't funny. Ask the Parrot is the umpteenth Parker novel, picking up mere minutes after the previous volume, Nobody Runs Forever.
In that volume, Parker and a crew of other guys robbed a bank in western Massachusetts, and the job, as always, went a little bit wrong. At the end of the book, the cops are hot on Parker's tail-- trailing him with dogs as he flees up a hill into the woods. As this book opens, he reaches the top of the hill, and find a man there who offers to help him escape, if…
drorzel | March 24, 2007I stopped by the library the other day, just to see if they had anything new, and I happened across the graphic novel section, which actually had a fairly decent selection of collected comics. As I've said before, I balk at paying $20 for soemthing that will take me an hour to read, particularly if I don't know whetehr I'll like it. You can't beat free, though, so I checked a bunch of stuff out of the library to see what it's like. I'll collect them together here so as not to swamp the blog with separate comic posts.
100 Bullets I originally picked up just the first volume of this, and then…
drorzel | March 22, 2007This is actually Klosterman's first book, but the fourth one that I've read. As previously noted, I'm dangerously fond of his writing, so when I saw copies of a new printing of Fargo Rock City on a display in Borders, well, I had to pick it up.
To be perfectly honest, though, I was slightly apprehensive about this. It's packaged in a way that makes it sound like it will be a standard autobiography about his childhood in rural North Dakota, but while there are plenty of autobiographical elements, it's mostly a book of his usual slightly skewed pop-culture criticism, applied to 1980's vintage…
drorzel | March 18, 2007There's been a copy of Snake Agent at the local Borders for a while now, but it kept narrowly losing out to other books. On a recent shopping trip, though, I was buying enough stuff that throwing another trade paperback on the pile was just a small perturbation, so I picked up a copy.
The set-up here sounds like a cross between Jim Butcher and Barry Hughart: Detective Inspector Chen Wei is a policeman in Singapore, assigned to dealing with supernatural crimes. He occasionally descends into Hell to interview murder victims, he deals with demonic incursions into the regular world, and he tracks…
drorzel | March 18, 2007Back at Boskone, I went to a panel consisting of a number of revieweres recommending books that we might not have heard of. Toward the end, one of the panelists rattled off a list of authors writing urban fantasy (what he described as "Laurel Hamilton without all the porn"), and Rob Thurman was on the list. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Borders buying books, inclusing Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty (which I read out of the library when it came out in hardcover). Since I was buying that, I decided to look for something else in the Dresden Files vein, and picked up Nightlife, thinking that it…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Kate bought this a while back, and I picked it up a little bit before Boskone, because I wanted to read at least a little of it before the Mike Ford retrospective panel. I was a little disappointed that the panel didn't mention this or his other lesser-known works, but, hey, it got me to read the book...
The Scholars of Night is a Cold War spy novel. A consultant for an American intelligence agency stumbles across some old documents, which reveal a certain individual as a Soviet agent, and he is assassinated. His lover, code named WAGNER, is determined to carry through the last great…
drorzel | February 21, 2007I picked up a copy of the re-issue of The Armageddon Rag in the dealer's room at Boskone, mostly because Emmet O'Brien raves about it. This is, of course, a little dicey, because Emmet's a weird guy sometimes, but the premise looked fairly interesting.
The book follows washed-up author Sander Blair, founder and former editor of a counterculture newspaper turned major music magazine, who gets asked to write a story about the gruesome murder of a former rock promoter. The promoter in question was a real sonofabitch, but nobody deserves to be tied to a desk and have their heart ripped out, and…
drorzel | February 16, 2007I am totally mystified by the vagaries of the publishing industry. Karl Schroeder's latest novel, Sun of Suns apparently came out back in October, but I can't recall ever seeing a copy in a bookstore. I think I would remember it, because he's on my "buy immediately" list after Permanence and Lady of Mazes. And it's a Tor book, too-- their stuff is usually easy to find. I expect this "In print but instantly unavailable" crap from Ace, but Tor's usually reliable.
Anyway, I ended up getting this from the local library, and I'll probably buy a copy this weekend at Boskone. As I expected from the…
drorzel | February 15, 2007I read Guy Gavriel Kay's newest book, Ysabel a while ago, but I've been dithering about what to say in the booklog entry. I've been dithering long enough, in fact, that Kate beat me to it, so now I have to post something.
Kay is best known for a set of very loosely connected pseudo-historical fantasy novels, which re-cast important bits of European history in fantasy worlds. My favorite of the lot is probably still Tigana, but the "Sarantine Mosaic," consisting of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors is probably the most polished of the lot.
For whatever reason-- he can't have run out of…