The characters are strong with varied personalities, all quite proactive and entertaining. There's a bunch of wheelerVery engaging writing, I thought.
The characters are strong with varied personalities, all quite proactive and entertaining. There's a bunch of wheeler-dealering, interesting politicing and family stuff, and the set up "the collapsing empire" presents an interesting problem.
System collapse always creates extremities that are rich with story - here the collapse isn't the traditional war or even an environmental crisis (at least not the traditional sort).
There's a swipe at the topic of how resistant humanity is to inconvenient truths, but it's not the main focus or particularly preachy. It was a fun story, well put together, that I burned through in a week of bus trips back and forth from the hospital where my youngest has spent seven days after puking black exorcist style.
My only complaint is: (view spoiler)[it makes no sense that the current emprox and previous emprox didn't see the obvious importance of End as the only habitable planet and secure it -- the idea that the baddy annexes it with a tweet in the moment of her arrest ... stretches credulity (hide spoiler)] .
But I enjoyed it a lot - even more than Old Man's War because the quality remained high to the end.
I've known about this book for a long time and recently I spotted a brand new unread copy on our bookshelves just as I was heading off for a break by I've known about this book for a long time and recently I spotted a brand new unread copy on our bookshelves just as I was heading off for a break by the sea. So I nabbed it, and now, a week or so later, I've finished it. That's fast for me.
I was immediately struck by the quality of the writing. Atwood is a writer's writer - she understands how to use language to its full effect and how to arrange the words on the page so they do more than we expect of them.
Then there's the idea. Then there's the story.
For me, it had a 1984 vibe. Not the same, not a copy, but another book that presents an extreme world that is also frighteningly possible. Another book that doesn't handhold by simplifying the issue or the characters. And another book that whilst offering this horrifying vision also weaves a very real human through it, complete with the flaws and frailties that will echo in its readers.
I thought it was particularly powerful in that along with the more passive main character we're given her "radical" (relatively) friend, Moira, and her mother, both of whom are far more rebellious risk-takers, and both of whom are eaten up by the machine along with her. They help satisfy our unreasonable craving for the main character to draw on the more genre-fiction playbook and be proactive, violent, enterprising. Instead, she stands in for what I (& probably you) would do in awful circumstances - which is hunker down, try to survive.
The book immediately breeds an anger in the reader, an anger about what is being done, and a rage about the fact that those doing it are getting away with it. But with the turning pages, whilst that doesn't go away, you also see that literally nobody in the system is actually happy. Everyone is suffering to some extent in the jaws of the machine that a minority have created (even that minority themselves - though less so). It's a stand in for all such extremes, whatever form they come in. Allow paranoia free rein and it won't be long before it turns your way.
Anyway: it's a book whose fame and success is well deserved, and if you've not given it a read ... do it! It works on every level - not least in showing what a real person goes through in such circumstances and how many levels we exist on, how full of contradictions and wants and fear we are. Awesome writing.
I'm thanked in the back of this book for my "sage advice, encouragement and support".
More accurately this should read: "for nagging, badge OUT TODAY!
I'm thanked in the back of this book for my "sage advice, encouragement and support".
More accurately this should read: "for nagging, badgering, and nagging".
This is Luke Scull's first book for 10 years. Dead Man's Steel came out a LONG time ago, ending the Grim Company trilogy.
The book's cover declares "James Herbert meets Silent Hill". I don't know anything about Silent Hill but I read James Herbert in the 80s. The Fog and The Rats for sure (written in the 70s). The Herbert vibe is strong in the first half of the book. The story hits the ground running and keeps the pace up. We're moving from scene to scene, PoV to PoV, as the 'bad thing' happens to a sequence of people - which for me is core horror.
Since we discover the "main thing" really early on, I'm going to say what it is. If you feel this might be a spoiler ... bail here!
. . . .
Animals go mad and try to kill people. The book dives into the traumas and problems of the main character and is not a superficial murder-flick of a book, but the many and varied scenes of animals chomping people are entertaining in an increasingly schloky way. The nearby Safari park ensures that we're not limited to murder-dogs, murder-cats, and murder-cows (which are seen in Herbert's The Fog!).
Another very mild spoiler is that if I'd written the "James Herbert meets Silent Hill" line, I would have put "James Herbert meets Catriona Ward", Ward being a successful author of psychological horror.
The tone of the book changes as it develops and it requires a degree of faith in the author if the animal attacks start to feel a bit much.
The book's main focus - behind a facade of berserk shi tzus and psycho squirrels - is an examination of the main character, writer John Sharrock, his relationships and issues. There's a faint Stephen King vibe in the central character being a writer. Mr King does this a number of times to great effect.
Scull has a difficult needle to thread between the 80s horror entertainment of animal attacks and the psychological side of the equation, and the tilting of the balance between them. Part of that difficulty is the fact that each reader will plot their own path through the tale regardless of the steers that the author gives them. Some will spot what's going on by page 7 and others will doggedly follow the headline even when the clifftop is 100 yards behind them Wile E Coyote style.
For me it worked very well. I had a great time with the zoo-full of killings, and I rode the curve as the focus shifted.
Great to see Luke back in the writing saddle. A very entertaining return. Can't wait to see what's next.
[image]
My stupid dog, Ruby, approves. Mainly because she doesn't know about all the animal-related carnage between the covers!
Having DNFed two books in quick succession - one massively popular, one a little known self-published book - it's great to be reading soimage: [image]
Having DNFed two books in quick succession - one massively popular, one a little known self-published book - it's great to be reading something that I'm actively enjoying.
Finished!
Another fine book from Shauna Lawless. The four Gael Song books so far have maintained an excellent standard and have been extremely readable from start to finish.
If I say that despite a 150 time gap (not so disruptive when your main characters live for ~500 years) book 4 delivers "more of the same", it's not meant in a discouraging way. More of the same excellence. The style and dilemmas are similar, and beautifully painted for us. The background has changed somewhat - still Ireland but now the Normans are spilling over post conquest of England and are mixing things up.
We have some of our old characters and some very engaging new ones. Youngsters from book 3 have grown up into formidable adults. There are twists and surprises. There's incipient romance mixed with brutal violence. There's the life of women of the time contrasted with the life of men, and there's the overlap and interaction both at societal levels and personal ones. Plenty of myth-based magic in the mix too.
It's great stuff and if you've not jumped on this series yet, then do so!
It's hard, when you come to a book that has a well established reputation as a work of literary greatness, to hold any other view and feel that you arIt's hard, when you come to a book that has a well established reputation as a work of literary greatness, to hold any other view and feel that you are not an ignoramus failing to see what the clever people have seen.
I'm not a student of literary fiction, I've no higher qualifications in English literature. I do consider myself to be someone who thinks about writing at a somewhat deeper level than average - but I'm not setting myself up as someone you should listen to.
About a year before reading this book I read a book (Little, Big) that has a very similar structure (multi-generational family living in the same house over 100+ years) and similar style. Crowley's book is viewed as literary fantasy rather than magical realism, but it's hard to fit a page between the two of them. Magical realism gets a special gold pass where academics are concerned though - fantasy is trival, but magical realism is deep...
I've got similar feelings about both Little, Big and One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are both beautifully written in many places, and both tell rambling tales that dip in and out of the many characters' lives, and these rambling tales are fairly easy to read and fairly entertaining. But past that ... they didn't do a lot for me.
One Hundred Years covers many generations and the character names are very similar from generation to generation. This may be making a point about nothing changing and circular time, but it's hardly required and very tiresome to read.
One Hundred Years concerns many characters who to me don't feel like real people. They have extreme, erratic, personalities that don't feel consistent with themselves or each other. I'm sure they are being used to illustrate various points ... but ... I find it very distancing.
One of the main characters is a paedophile and a warmonger, a good number of them are seized by manias of one sort or another. There's incest, rape, and a metric ton of obsession.
The magical part of the magical realism drifts in occasionally as weird events or elements in the story and also as marvels that the wandering gypsies bring to town. Early on we see a functional magic carpet flying around - a hundred years later we spent time with a pilot of regular aircraft. The consequences of the magic are swept away so that most of the magical elements feel more like absurdism.
I'm sure that a number of the events and family dynamics and developments in the town/country are metaphors for South American politics in the first half of the 20th century / latter half of the 19th. That's something I know essentially nothing about, so it was lost on me. I'm sure that this was a far more clever and insightful book for the original audience (Columbians in the 1960s).
I like to read characters that feel more real and whose motivations are clearer. I like subtle treatments of such characters so that in their interactions insights into the human condition that are too ephemeral for direct attack with words can be revealed in a more nebulous manner.
Extreme absurdist weird characters can't do that for me. Clearly they can do something for the many readers who hold this work in great esteem.
I feel disappointed that I can't fully share in whatever it is that books like Little, Big & The Wind-up Bird Chronicles and this one do for other people. But to me they are gently entertaining, confused, somewhat random, and largely opaque.
I collected The New World novella and three short stories so that it was a large enough collection to warrant hardcover and paperback editions.
[image]I collected The New World novella and three short stories so that it was a large enough collection to warrant hardcover and paperback editions.
[image]
This is a collection of four Jalan and Snorri stories, one novella and three short stories.
All of the stories have previous appeared as ebooks or in other anthologies.
The collection
The New World - A novella in which Jalan and Snorri travel to America. The Hero of Aral Pass - The story of how Jalan came to be known as a hero. A Thousand Years - A tale from Snorri's youth. Three is the Charm - A story from Jalan's dissolute past.
Buehlman is an excellent writer - in my opinion he's a cut above the great majority of successful writers out there. I love his prose and the way he aBuehlman is an excellent writer - in my opinion he's a cut above the great majority of successful writers out there. I love his prose and the way he animates his story. He's an efficient writer who leans into (wonderful) dialogue to do a lot of the heavy lifting. He can do in 10 words what many writers will waffle for a paragraph to do half as well.
This book is in large part the works of Hieronymus Bosch brought to life.
[image]
A compromised, world weary knight and a mysterious child cross plague-wracked France on a mission related to the newly expanded battle between heaven and hell.
That makes it sound rather familiar - the angels vs devils set up spans many eras in fantasy literature - I've just finished Sandman Slim which is exactly this in 2000's Los Angeles. And I've read an angels vs devils in medieval France fantasy before too - Son of the Morning. And of course, the combination of crusty old(ish) man and a child who slowly unwinds him, is pervasive in many genres.
HOWEVER, Buehlman made it something I was eager to read. This is allegedly horror, but could have been marketed as dark/grimdark fantasy. There's lots of dying, from plague, from devils, from chopping with swords, and it's gory. There are quite a few devils who are entertainingly scary, there are the tortures of Hell and the tortures men inflict on each other. Good, bad, and indifferent people die. It's not a gentle book.
But our two main characters have charisma and won me over swiftly. Along with the horror and the adrenaline, there are genuine moments of emotion - the final one hitting me hard.
It's an excellent book. I feel that The Blacktongue Thief is more excellent still, and The Daughters' War even better than that. But I had a blast reading this one.
Buehlman doesn't, in this book, keep a tight point of view, his writing wanders (against modern advice) from one head to another. But these "rules" are to help writers who need that help. Buehlman is good enough to twist them to his own ends.
Two tiny gripes: (i) I felt they ran out of donkey meat way too quickly. (ii) I personally find it hard to buy into worldbuilding where a benvolent god sanctions torture.
It has a lot of the noir detective vibe in it - as if Kadrey were in part channelling Raymond Chandler.
TheThis was an easy, quick read that I enjoyed.
It has a lot of the noir detective vibe in it - as if Kadrey were in part channelling Raymond Chandler.
The main character has that interesting, witty, world-weary voice that is both something you've heard many times before but also fun.
The whole book is rather like that.
If this were the first angels vs devils with human proxies urban fantasy I'd read, I would be blown away by the originality. But it isn't. It's a well trodden path previously walked by famous writers like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, and reflected in many films and TV series.
As such I found it to be an admirable addition to a subgenre that I've grown rather weary of. Though perhaps when the book came out in 2009 I was far less tired of the foul-mouthed hard-smoking hard-drinking angel-spawn in a leather jacket with a sawn-off shotgun trope and would have thrown down 5* rather than the 4* I'm still giving for quality of execution.
Both Scarface Claw and the eponymous Hairy Maclary himself are object lessons that should be required learning.
All of us will run into Hairy and ScarfBoth Scarface Claw and the eponymous Hairy Maclary himself are object lessons that should be required learning.
All of us will run into Hairy and Scarface during the course of our lives, and many of us will be one or the other or both, even though we may not know it until the years have put those times sufficiently far into the rearview mirror.
It is, in some sense, a retelling on the small scale of Augustus De Morgan's 1872 doggeral
"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on; While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on."
Which in turn was said to have been inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726).
And holds echoes of Breugel the Elder's 1556 work Big Fish Eat Little Fish. The wisdom of which was echoed by the great Qui-Gon Jinn (1999).
So, as you can see, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy sits atop a centuries old literary tradition, and whilst not entirely derivative, having moved from fleas and fish to cats and dogs, it is perhaps less ground breaking than your average 4 year old might believe. But that's nothing that reading this review aloud to them can't fix.
I might be being a bit harsh with my 3* but I'm rating with Joe/Josephine Public in mind.
I enjoyed this book a fair bit. But I was also a schoolboy atI might be being a bit harsh with my 3* but I'm rating with Joe/Josephine Public in mind.
I enjoyed this book a fair bit. But I was also a schoolboy attending the school whose front gates were about 100 yards from the front door of the first ever Games Workshop. I spent much of my childhood haunting the place, buying lead figures, paints, D&D modules, fanzines, dice etc.
I met some of the people whose photographs are in the book.
Putting all that nostalgia aside, it's a very nice hardback with lots of relevant photos.
Is it a compelling telling of events if you weren't close to those events? Well ... three stars.
A couple of things that bothered me.
i) Some of the other parties involved in events (such as naming the place) strongly disagree with the recounting of those events here. Which takes the shine off it, because I'd like to know what happened, not just have one version of it.
ii) In the end, it's mostly about the corporate jiggling and juggling in the early days, with photos of staff and premises, and it's hard to find all that REALLY interesting unless you were literally working there and involved in the decisions.
Despite the author/s' best efforts, it really is quite dry stuff and it turns out that even *I* wasn't THAT interested in Games Workshop :D
I was disappointed by Games Workshops hard right into Warhammer, and by the subsequent rebranding of the shops as Warhammer stores. Fortunately the book doesn't give us much of that.
All in all, a nice coffee table book that will scratch at the nostalgia itch of those of us who where there in the late 70s / early 80s seeing the blue touchpaper lit.
We open with our PoV character heading off on a score of ships with the remnants of his people, and then immediately diveThis was an interesting read.
We open with our PoV character heading off on a score of ships with the remnants of his people, and then immediately dive into the events leading up to this point.
For the first two chapters there's no dialogue, and for some time thereafter there's rather little, I think I went through another 3 chapter bit where nobody spoke. Dialogue's a great way to engage readers and build character, so I did feel its absence. Later on, however, there are lots of conversations and everything seems to flow better.
Stuart makes a bold choice in his main character - our only eyes onto this world. Prince Othrun isn't your typical morally grey answer to heroic fantasy. He's actually very moral, but his morals are a gratingly rigid adherence to his Single God, combined with bigotry and intolerance for every other path and/or race. And this is in no way the author's prejudice or laziness - it's a choice. A bold choice because even though Prince Othrun is brave and pretty loyal, he's still quite hard to like.
Often when the main character is a bad person, the author levens this with a sense of humour or an engaging internal monologue. Othrun doesn't give us any of the former or much of the latter. However, the situation he's in is interesting and his unrelenting ambition / sense of entitlement, means that he tends to stir things up.
Given that we know from page 1 that disaster is going to strike and that our man and 1,799 of his closest friends are going to sail off into the wild blue yonder, we do spend a LOT of time having his homeland described to us, the beauty of the main city gets a bunch of pages, its history/mythology, the prince's lineage, favourite historical relatives, childhood and relations, all of them get to stride the page. And whilst it's heavier world building than I usually favour ... that wasn't my main concern. It was mostly the fact that all of it was put violently into the rear view mirror about a third of the way through the book. And whilst I appreciate the need to ground the character (especially a royal one) in their history/geography ... it did feel a bit much given this result.
Our prince now sails off to an entirely new geography with its own history.
It's interesting to see the proud prince of what was the most advanced & feared civilisation brought low and landing on a new sub continent that his homeland could have crushed, now as a relatively minor player amid many kings and kingdoms.
Stuart does a good job of showing us a war torn land where many minor kings vye for power. There is a ton of allying, betraying, fathers against son, uncles against nephews. I've been listening to a lot of "The Rest is History" on Youtube recently, and Stuart's world does feel very true to all the machinations of Europe in the 700-1300 period.
The plot becomes quite involved as betrayal heaps on betrayal, and our prince who wasn't planning to honour any of his deals actually becomes quite loyal to the royals who've helped him out.
The book ends not so much on a cliff hanger, as in the middle of complex developing action. And to be fair, I do quite want to know what happens next. In addition to the mechanics of various plans, there are mysteries surrounding a sword, a maybe-angel, and a female witch seemingly smitten with insta-love, though I hope it turns out to be something a bit more reasonable than that.
Anyway, Stuart writes a good yarn with some fun fight scenes and a lot going on. If it sounds like your thing - dive in!
I first encountered Moore's work in the comic 2000AD back in the early '80s. He wrote some excellent and funny stuff for them (D.R and Quinch was my favourite).
And then there's Watchmen. Plus I've seen a number of the film adaptations of his work that he so objected to. And enjoyed them as well.
This was my first read of his long-form fiction. Moore's 71 years old and still plugging away, so there's hope for me yet. I don't have a retirement plan ... drinking seems like a poor hobby, and golf holds no appeal.
The Great When was a mixed bag for me, but much of what was in the mix was excellent, and none of it was bad.
Moore is a really fine wordsmith. He's dialled the language up to 9 on the literary scale here, and despite the fact that it's brilliantly done, that level of ornamentation and abstraction may just turn many fantasy readers off. People who thrive on plot and look for Brandon Sanderson levels of straight forward story-delivery prose, may stumble over Moore's work.
This isn't Ulysses level of barely penetrable prose, but it is approaching Salman Rushdie and exceeding the likes of Murakami Haruki for levels of linguistic complexity. His characters are very Dickensian, writ large. He's also funny in judicious amounts:
"Haltingly, Ada raised herself out of her chair with grunts and groans that made her seem like a forgotten triumph of nineteenth-century engineering."
Moore, in the acknowledgements nods to Moorcock and to Iain Sinclair for preceeding him with alternate / exaggerated Londons. He doesn't mention Neil Gaiman and his book Neverwhere, which seems a much closer and more obvious match -- but I guess Moore didn't read it.
The book centres on the idea of a (very distorted) mirror London, an underneath London, an 'upside down' London. One so wild and abstract that every visit to it reads like a dream sequence. I have to say that I don't really enjoy dream sequences. I don't enjoy prolonged abstract/symbolic description -- it has no grounding for me and rapidly becomes wearisome. Every time the characters in Zelazny's Amber books "ride through shadow", I'm tempted to skip to their destination. Maybe it's the difference between those of us who read the songs in fantasy books that have songs, and those that don't...
So, this is a point against the book for me. It feels like a fresh idea, but I've seen similar before, and this alternate London is such an LSD trip that I don't really enjoy any of the several ventures into it.
The time spent in "real" barely-post-war London is enjoyable. And this London is populated with some excellent characters with Coffin Ada coming top of the list and being responsible for this book holding the world record for number of times the word "cough" appears.
Another point against the book for me, and this is more of a genre thing, is the passivity and uselessness of the only point of view character. A bit like the main character in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (though admittedly less so), our man is moved around by the currents and events of the book and shows little initiative. He's mostly terrified. As I would be. And in literary fiction we're used to such characters - whereas in fantasy, we like our main characters to be more proactive and have more bite to them.
And the final point against the book, for me, is that it feels as if it ends about 75% of the way through - with the problems set up in the book dealt with in one way or another.
The remainder involves a twist that seems to come out of nowhere and serve no purpose other than to add to the wordcount.
So, to conclude: it's a book with wonderful literary prose, colourful Dickensian characters, a somewhat aimless plot about getting our MC out of trouble that he is randomly deposited in, some (for me) overdone dream-sequency visits to an alternative London that's reminiscent of (though more extreme than) some I've seen before, and a weird kind of stumble (for me) at the end.
So, depending on where you place importance in your reading, you will come away from the book with quite different opinions. For me, because I enjoyed the prose and the characters so much, I'm giving it 4*.
A fine book. Set in alternate reality modern(ish) times with TVs, aircraft etc but with the power in the hands of clans that have personal combat magiA fine book. Set in alternate reality modern(ish) times with TVs, aircraft etc but with the power in the hands of clans that have personal combat magics that make them the dominant force in the setting.
Constantly engaging with a great portrait of "crime family" dynamics in a non-western setting. Shades of The Godfather and other Mafia tales, but also very much its own thing.
The jade-based magic system is both simple and interesting.
I wasn't particularly moved on an emotional level but the story with exciting, entertaining, and had lots of fascinating detail both on the small scale (street fights, family arguments, training school scenes) and the large (nations vying for power, government vs clan interactions etc). And the story has great potential to expand.
This will have to be a brief review - finished the book while sitting up all night with my daughter in A&E. But definitely worth a read.