22nd January, 2008
More Crap
Expanding your knowledge of middling and craptastic fiction, I read it so you don’t have to… ah, screw it. Here’s a couple more crappy books I’ve read recently.
Storm Front by Jim Butcher.
What did I like about this book? Well, I liked that it was a hair over 300 pages long. And, well, that’s about it. A crappy mystery novel with some fantasy thrown in, I was thoroughly unimpressed. Flat characters engaging in attempted overly clever dialogs, after the first few chapters, I was eagerly awaiting the end (and not because I wanted to know who the murderer was).
2/5 gogs.
The Sundering by Walter Jon Williams.
I need to stop believing that reviews on Amazon are written by sane people. From Amazon: “Superior Space Opera!”, “More Originality in a Different Space Opera”, “Solid Space Opera… This series reminds me of the space operas by Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds with a slightly more manageable cast of characters…” Well, shit, guess I should have read the fine print.
I gave the first book in Williams’ Praxis series 3 gogs, but this book read like the crap that the aforementioned Hamilton can spew forth. This book really soured my feelings for the series and I’m not sure if I’ll even check out book 3. Skip it.
2/5 gogs.
Posted at 2:22 pm | Comment (0)
15th January, 2008
The Future is Now.
Two books; one set in the very-near future, one set today, both eerily familiar to me.
Halting State by Charles Stross.
Our first book for today is set a few years into the future and essentially is a technological whodunit that is probably going to be filed under sci-fi for its speculative nature (even though aliens, stellar travel, etc. are all glaringly absent). Stross has continued to mature as a writer and I think I enjoyed this book more than any others he has previously written. (In the very least, I rank it alongside with Accelerando).
As I mentioned, this book contains some speculative fiction, something that Stross does very well when he wants to, and there were numerous moments in the book where I had to pause and think to myself “didn’t that happen in real life?” (As an aside, Stross has posted some life-imitating-art moments on his blog). Good stuff.
4/5 gogs.
Spook Country by William Gibson.
Now on to the latest work by William Gibson. It seems like every time he writes a new book, the story is set in a time that is closer and closer to the present day. Either that, or he’s still placing all his stories in the same time and the world is just marching toward the future that he describes. ::creepy::
Regardless, this book is chock-full of of references to the real world and its happenings. Someone has even put up a website documenting these things. All I can say is apparently Gibson frequents the same sites as I do, because reading this book was like reading a description of my browsing habits for the past couple of years. Despite these eerie/creepy/GTFO-of-my-head-Gibson moments, I rather enjoyed how he spun it all together and came up with a believable and fun-to-read story.
4.2/5 gogs.
Posted at 10:11 am | Comment (0)
4th January, 2008
The Baker’s Boy
The Baker’s Boy by J.V. Jones.
Huh. I’m not exactly sure how I stumbled across this book, although, sadly, it appears that I actually bought it at some point. I have no idea why, but I did. And then it promptly sat around in my book pile long enough for the pages to yellow. And I actually only started to read it over the holidays because I had read everything else in the house at least once before. Are you getting the feeling that I wasn’t much thrilled by this fantasy novel? Very astute of you.
In brief, don’t bother reading this. Contrived, predictable, downright boring; all these words apply to this book. OK, it wasn’t completely horrible, but there is plenty out there that is much better. Give it a miss.
2/5 gogs.
Posted at 2:17 pm | Comment (0)
