Review – The Zombie Survival Guide

Posted December 16, 2014 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks

If I were more secure in my ability to be humorous and keep it up throughout the review, doubtless I’d review this book with the same serious tone it takes: this theory about zombies is intriguing, this one is confirmed by personal experience, this one is ridiculous, etc. Since I’m not particularly funny, I’ll refrain. It takes a deft touch to do it at any length, and I don’t think Max Brooks really succeeds here. It becomes just a boring catalogue of things — some of it is interesting, like various ideas on how to defend different types of buildings, different ways to arm yourself for best effect, etc. But because it’s modelled very closely on the survival guide genre, it remains mostly interesting to that crowd. I’d be interested to see a survivalist’s reaction to this book, actually.

Now, I’m not going to deny I have a zombie survival plan. It goes like this: “Find my dad as soon as possible. Ensure he is armed and we have food, water, and a stock of books. Let Dad protect me. Survive.” And yes, I’m that confident: my dad would survive a zombie uprising, and he’d put a bullet through my head before he’d allow me to turn into a mindless zombie. Draw whatever conclusions about my family you wish from that…

There’s some joke here about me getting into a mindless rage because I don’t have enough books vs. turning into a zombie and how you tell the difference, but I suck at humour, we’ve established this.

Anyway, the best part of this is the section of historical records of outbreaks, and that only where they’re more creative. By a certain point, they become repetitive, and the conspiracy theories are obvious without the point needing to be laboured. I’m sure there must be real records that you could use as evidence for past zombie uprisings, but I don’t know if Max Brooks incorporated any – that would require having the give-a-shit to look up each incident he mentions, and I don’t have it.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted December 16, 2014 by in General / 12 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is “Top Ten Books I Read in 2014”. This one you can probably predict if you follow this blog, but I won’t leave you guessing. Also, links don’t show up on my theme very well, so I’ll just say now that all the titles are links to the reviews I wrote earlier in the year.

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Yep, you probably predicted this one. I just loved it to bits — I’d have happily gone back to page one and started all over again right away. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but it was pretty perfect for me.
The King of Elf-land’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany. This is definitely not new to a lot of people, but it was new to me. I think I’d read one of Dunsany’s short story collections before, but not this one. It’s a lovely mythic/fairytale-like world. In style and the like, it’s not like the more typical modern fantasy, but that doesn’t put me off at all.
We Have Always Fought, Kameron Hurley. I haven’t read any of Hurley’s fiction yet; she may even be a writer who appeals to me more as a commentator than as a creator, since I did start God’s War at one point and put it down again. But I loved this collection of her essays. She very much deserved her Hugo.
My Real Children, Jo Walton. Again, probably predictable. I loved the characters in this — the sheer range of them, the ways small circumstances could change them. It was quite upsetting on a personal level because of the mentions of dementia, but the fact that it had the power to upset me only made me like it more.
The Movement: Class Warfare, Gail Simone. I think this is a pretty timely comic. This sums it up, from my review: “[T]his is a group of young people getting together against injustice. Not supervillains: injustice. Crooked cops who beat poor people and POC because they can. The whole system of privilege and disprivilege. It’s a team of heroes for the Occupy Movement, for the 99%, for the disenfranchised.”
Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge. Read this all in one go on a train journey and resented every interruption. There’s a great atmosphere to this book.
Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Perry. I’ve always been fascinated by Stanley Milgram’s experiments, and this was a great way of delving into them — looking at it not from Milgram’s point of view, not looking at the results, but at the people he used in this experiment.
What Makes This Book So Great, Jo Walton. This is kinda cheating, in that it’s a book chock full of the books Jo Walton likes. Not limited to a top ten, of course, but I have a feeling it could furnish the whole contents of this list.
Spillover, David Quammen. Fascinating stuff, with some very obvious conclusions that apparently still need to be said. We are destroying habitats, forcing animals closer together and closer to us: we’re creating the perfect situation for a pandemic. It’s going to happen again, as it’s happened before, and we’ve just got to hope it isn’t something exotic and deadly. Even the flu is bad enough when it sweeps the world.
The Broken Land, Ian McDonald. This is the only book in this list I didn’t give five stars. But it’s stayed on my mind the whole time, and the issues it examines aren’t temporary ones that’re about to go away.

This is gonna be a really interesting week to check out other people’s lists; I’m looking forward to this! Make sure you link me to your list if you comment. I’ll always visit and comment back.

Tags: books, comics, DC, Frances Hardinge, Gail Simone, Ian McDonald, Jo Walton, Kameron Hurley, non-fiction, SF/F, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Legion

Posted December 15, 2014 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Legion, Brandon Sanderson

I reread this novella to remind myself of the character(s) and the exact events in it in preparation for reading Legion: Skin Deep. I remember loving it a lot the first time; this time, maybe because I was already familiar with the character of Stephen Leeds, it didn’t work quite as well for me. I ended up focusing more on the plot, which is relatively silly — someone compared it to Dan Brown, and actually, I can kind of see that. The plot itself isn’t that important, though; it’s how the characters deal with the problems, and how Stephen’s multiple aspects work together and how they manage to affect the real world. I think the refreshing part is that Sanderson doesn’t try to fool us any with going back and forth on whether the Aspects are real; he starts off right away with the premise that they’re not.

I’m not totally sure that Sanderson got the diagnosis for Stephen right, though. There’s nothing wrong with Stephen’s perceptions, he just parcels them out between his ‘Aspects’ and deals with everything in that fragmentary way — he talks about being schizophrenic, and yet he still knows where to draw the line between reality and his delusions. Despite the fact that he says he doesn’t have a multiple personality disorder, that seems nearer to the mark to me.

Anyway, looking forward to the sequel, although it worries me slightly that people mention it going deeper into science-y stuff. As you can see from my doubts about Sanderson’s medical research, I’m not convinced by his attempts to pin this down too firmly. He’s famous for his fantasy worlds, and deservedly so; I’m happy with contemporary fantasy, and yet very similar science fiction that doesn’t adhere to what we understand of science drives me bonkers.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Brandon Sanderson, SF/F, short stories

Review – The Language Wars

Posted December 14, 2014 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Language Wars, Henry Hitchings

In theory, this is a subject I’m really fascinated by. The whole idea of ‘proper English’, all the classism and imperialism and prejudice caught up in it, and the way people’s attitudes to language have developed. However, turns out that either the minutiae of who wrote which grammar/dictionary/book about etiquette and when isn’t that interesting, or Henry Hitchings has a really boring prose style. Or, well, both of those things. I felt like there were a lot of facts, but not much analysis to go with it; some chapters felt like they were just lists of who wrote what about grammar and when.

I was hoping for other stuff about proper English, more about the imperialism — there’s lots of scope for that without even leaving the United Kingdom, with the suppression of the Welsh and Irish languages, and there’s hints about the struggle between US and UK English. Overall, though… if that was addressed, the deadened prose style made me miss it.

It’s still an interesting topic, but this particular book had a soporific effect on me.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction

Stacking the Shelves

Posted December 13, 2014 by in General / 12 Comments

It’s been a quiet week, despite the great temptation caused by people’s end of year lists. Like Tor’s Reviewer’s Choice, oh man. I gave myself a limit, though, and I stuck to it.

Ebooks

Daughter of Mystery and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet were from best-of lists — possibly even the Tor one I linked. Legion: Skin Deep, I actually picked up two or three weeks ago but forgot to include back then. Mea culpa.

For review

A somewhat random choice from Bookbridgr!

Library

Someone in my book group said they wouldn’t rest until I read more of Brubaker’s work, so, tahdah. I thought I’d make sure they could rest. Crow Country was a somewhat random choice between that, Badgerlands and Otter Country; I feel in the mood at the moment to read about Britain’s indigenous species.

Anyway, that’s it for me. Anyone else been getting anything exciting? Or are you saving all the excitement for Christmas?

Tags: books, Brandon Sanderson, comics, SF/F, Stacking the Shelves

Review – A Face Like Glass

Posted December 12, 2014 by in Reviews / 8 Comments

A Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge
Review from November 24th, 2012

I’d never heard of Frances Hardinge before, and I have no idea how I came across this on the Kindle store, but I’m so very glad I did. It’s an enchantment of a book — I think I said something similar, recently, about Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and I can see the similarities there: the long games being played in both plots, the dazzling strangeness of the worldbuilding, the magic of it all. But at the same time, they’re very different stories: it’s just something about the flavour that’s similar.

A Face Like Glass is marketed as YA, but I don’t think you should see that as a discouragement. It’s not one of those YA books that slots neatly into the ranks of the YA books that’ve come before: it’s something wild and entirely itself. The same goes for the fact that I’ve tagged it as dystopia — it doesn’t follow the current dystopia tropes either. It felt like a breath of fresh air for me.

I got hooked on it from Amazon’s preview, which is worth a look: it’s a slowish start compared to the pace the book gets to near the end, but if you’re intrigued by it, you’re in for a wonderful ride. I loved every scrap of it, to the extent where I’m almost afraid to look for Frances Hardinge’s other books in case they aren’t as good. I love Neverfell and I love the bizarre details of the world and all the weird concepts like people being unable to perform expressions without learning them and…

Basically, it’s a heck of a ride. Best impulse buy of my year, up to and including my big plush Moomin. Possibly excluding only the ticket I bought to the screening of Avengers Assemble that got me hooked.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Erin Morgenstern, Flashback Friday, Frances Hardinge, SF/F

Review – Heart's Blood

Posted December 11, 2014 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Heart’s Blood, Juliet Marillier

When I first read Heart’s Blood, I really loved it, and at least part of that was because I finally found a Juliet Marillier book I really appreciated. I’m a little sad that I don’t think I loved it as much this time as I did before: things that were obvious to me then were painfully so now, and the narrator still seems like much the same as every other Marillier narrator.

On the other hand, there’s still plenty to enjoy: the imaginative treatment of the Beauty and the Beast story, which takes some pretty familiar elements and twists them just enough that they can still surprise you. I love the main character’s calling as a scribe, and her slow rediscovery of herself and how to stand up for her world. I like that it’s firmly rooted in the real world, for all the supernatural elements, and in history: this isn’t a disconnected fairytale, but one that takes place in a world that carries on around it. I liked Anluan, too; he works very well as a Beast character, because at first he does seem so awkward, so impossible, but he blossoms as much as Caitrin (Beauty) does.

There’s a lot of great side characters, too; all of the characters that surround Anluan and Caitrin are interesting, and really, there could be whole books about what exactly each of them is, what they did, who they really are.

Despite me saying that I didn’t enjoy it as much as before, I did enjoy it a lot. It’s a satisfying story, where good triumphs but not too easily, where struggles and setbacks feel real. The attraction and desire between Anluan and Caitrin comes naturally, and doesn’t cross the line into being too much of a fairytale — it doesn’t break the in-the-real-world feeling that the history and setting give the story. I love Caitrin’s development over the course of the book, and I love the way everything comes together at the end.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Juliet Marillier, SF/F

What are you reading Wednesday

Posted December 10, 2014 by in General / 4 Comments

I keep forgetting to post this lately — which is odd, since normally I love my routines. Still, I had it on my to do list for today, so fortunately, I didn’t forget!

What have you recently finished reading?
Heart’s Blood, by Juliet Marillier. Review goes up in the morning, I think; this was a reread, and I enjoyed it a lot. Though maybe not as much as I did the first time: some things were far too obvious on a reread, and I already predicted them the first time round.

What are you currently reading?
I’ve picked The Just City, by Jo Walton, back up. I stalled because I just felt like reading old familiar stuff (including Walton’s Tooth and Claw!) but I definitely want to hurry up and finish this. I’m also reading The Spirit Thief, by Rachel Aaron, which is light and fun. Comparisons to Locke Lamora and Vlad Taltos are quite unfair, given the lightness of it, though I can’t help but think of them… Non-fiction-wise, I’m also partway through Crow Country (Mark Cocker), which is kind of fascinating, not least because I didn’t know there was so much fascination to be found in the Corvid family, and also The Language Wars (Henry Hitchings), which is a little bit dry but still interesting.

What will you read next?
Probably more of the Rachel Aaron books. After that, maybe I’ll finally get round to The Girl with All the Gifts (M.R. Carey), or maybe I’ll just reread The Goblin Emperor… Or start on something else by Sarah Monette.

Tags: books, Jo Walton, Juliet Marillier, Rachel Bach/Rachel Aaron, reading meme

Review – The Thief

Posted December 10, 2014 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner

I remember feeling somewhat ambivalent about this book the first time I read it, but I was sure it wouldn’t be that way this time: over the course of the other books, I came to love Gen and appreciate the world. Well, I still do love Gen and I appreciate the world, the set up for the twist that comes near the end of the book, the way Gen’s voice works as a narrator. But I still wasn’t that in love with the world in this book; I still didn’t get that attached to the characters. This is a series where I think the middle books are the strongest, but I was surprised that the familiarity of a reread didn’t make me appreciate this more.

One thing I do like is that while you might initially expect it to be something like pseudo-medieval Europe, based on the limited details you get at the beginning, it quickly becomes clear that this is a Greek-based world — although there’s plenty about it that’s unique, as well. I liked the fact that the geography of the place mattered a lot, too: where things are in relation to each other, how you get from A to B, where you have to pass through on the way.

This does set up a fun world, but this story still felt simplistic to me, easily guessed and so not as absorbing as I’d hoped.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Megan Whalen Turner, SF/F

Review – The Fellowship of the Ring

Posted December 9, 2014 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien

Sorry, J.R.R.: I am going to review the three volumes separately, but it’s really more of a running commentary of what’s on my mind. I don’t actually see The Lord of the Rings as three separate books; the volumes just provide a good place to pause and take stock. And there’s always a lot to take stock of, when you’re reading these books: Tolkien made sure of that. This isn’t the first time I’ve read them for pleasure since my Tolkien module during my MA, but that aspect of my reading is maybe a bit further behind me right now. Still, I can’t not appreciate the extra richness that reading gave me, the breadth of Middle-earth. There’s so much I want to know more about — the Barrow Downs, the world Tom Bombadil first walked in… and not as glimpses, but the way we see them through the eyes of the hobbits or other members of the Company.

One thing that’s easy to forget is the sheer scale of the landscape they cross. People complain that it takes whole pages to get anywhere, but rarely the opposite: that the whole journey between Rivendell and Hollin is done in a page, that Hollin is just a stop on the way to Caradhras and Moria, when again, there’s so much more we could know about Hollin. Two things contributed to me thinking about that this time: one, I play LOTRO. Now thankfully, Lath has a war steed now, so I can cover a lot of ground, but the first fetch quests in the Shire drove me nuts. So much running! And even that is necessarily scaled down, else you’d have to sit back and take literally a day to run across the Shire. Not ideal for an MMORPG. Secondly, I’m part of a Walk to Mordor challenge, and wow. The miles it takes us to get anywhere — we’re barely progressing faster than the Company did, despite the fact that we’re adding everyone’s miles together.

One thing I do feel is the lack of a real Welsh influence here. This is “a mythology for England” (or is it “of England”? I’ve forgotten the exact quote now), not Britain, and all the focus is on the Anglo-Saxon kind of world. You can tell me about the Welsh influences until you’re blue in the face, but what gets me about Tolkien’s world is that absence. The troubled Welsh background is pushed aside — perhaps there in the Dunlendings’ struggle with the Rohirrim, but it’s not like that is a major theme, or that they’re treated with much sympathy.

Which is fair enough, but it does make me sad that Tolkien didn’t fold those issues into his mythology. I would’ve liked to see more of those tensions, that complex history, echoing through Middle-earth as it still does through modern Britain.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, J.R.R. Tolkien, SF/F