[Books] February-April reviews

Last Updated on Wednesday, 22 May 2013 11:32 Written by Kadomi Wednesday, 22 May 2013 11:32

Yeah, so much for posting my reviews monthly. But I am back on track with blogging and hopefully back on track with reviewing.

Last year I did not reach my goal with reading 40 books so I scaled down for 2013. But I have been enjoying reading so much that I am more than on track for a higher goal, so up to 40 it went. I really hope I will reach this goal this year. My reviews will be a bit more compact, and I will include a link to each direct review written right after I finished the book.

February

• Jackdaws by Ken Follet – This one came highly recommended by my SO who is a big Follet fan but for me it was just a 3 star book which on my scale means average, but nothing special whatsoever. It’s one of Follet’s WWII novels, about an unlikely group of British agents in 1944 trying to prepare the scene in France so that D Day will be a success. Too much build-up for the action, and flat characters failed to work the magic on me.
• Cycle of Hatred by Keith R.A. DeCandido – You can barely call this a book, it’s so short. It’s on my to-read list to read all the Warcraft tie-in novels because with Cataclysm that was the only way to get all the lore. Thankfully that’s not been the case with MoP, but I still want to read. The book itself almost read like fan-fiction. Setting’s after WC3, about trouble between Theramore and Orgrimmar, and Jaina and Thrall trying to sort this mess out and to find out who the Burning Blade are. 2.5 stars, rounding up to .
• The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan – Another goal of my list is to re-read all the Wheel of Time books and read the ones I haven’t read yet, now that the series is finished. I first read this book in the 90s, and my ‘re-read’ was to listen to the audiobook while commuting. World-building’s great, the female characters are still aggravating, and the whole Fellowship of the Dragon vibe I get from this book is too derivative of Tolkien for me to find it exciting.
• Elizabeth I by Margaret George – Now and then I enjoy historical fiction, and I heard that the Tudor books of hers were good, so I went for this one. Incredibly slow-paced, this book is certainly not the full story of Elizabeth’s reign. It starts right before the Spanish Armada is supposed to invade and then covers the late years of her reign. Lovely prose, and I was moved by Elizabeth’s fear of death and aging. What else happened? I’d be hard-pressed to tell you. And yet, I enjoyed it well enough.

March

• The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss – After a month of average books, I had high hopes on this one. They were only partially met. TLDR summary: I expected an excellent sequel, and only got a good one. I worry that Rothfuss will not be able to tie this series up in a way that will remotely satisfy me. And yet, the writing is fantastic, and the plot isn’t. tinged with bitterness, hah.
• The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Countdown by Claire Ridgway – Free Kindle book at the time. There were so many references to her mother Anne Boleyn in Elizabeth I that I wanted to find out more than I remembered. This book is non-fiction and provides a timeline to Anne Boleyn’s execution. I enjoyed it.
• Enclave by Ann Aguirre – Dystopian YA novels are all the rage, and Enclave is another one, the first book of the Razorland series. Our heroine this time is Deuce, a young huntress of the underground enclave underneath the former New York. I liked the underground moments best, but Deuce eventually moves to the surface. There are zombies. There are the standard tropes of YA fiction, like love triangles. Not anywhere as good as Hunger Games, not as good as Divergent, but still a decent read. 3.5 stars rounding up to
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell – I loved this book so much. For me it was outstanding historical fiction. It details the story of Jacob de Zoet, a Dutch clerk come to the colonies to make enough money to be able to marry his fiancee at home. In 1799 he is sent to Dejima on Nagasaki Island, the single place of trade between Japan and the outside world. Colorful, with fascinating insights into the Edo period of Japan, I truly felt for poor Jacob, stuck far far away from home, and his hopeless love for Orito, the Japanese translator, and her fate.
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon – Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, this book topped off an excellent month of reading. I loved it so much that I cannot recommend it enough. Historical fiction, love story, drama, horror, all mixed into one. Set in Barcelona after the end of WWII, the 10-year old Daniel is gifted a book by an author called Julian Carax. He falls in love with the book and tries to find out anything possible about the mysterious author. Over the course of the next 8 years, he learns the truth, which puts him and those he loves in danger. Go read this book now!

April

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – Expected to love it, but was left completely cold by it. Interesting, but I wasn’t moved by it. A dystopian society of religious nuts in the Republic of Gilead that lead their lives by following the Old Testament. Our protagonist is a handmaid, which means she is a vessel to be impregnated by the male head of house instead of the barren wife. The glimpses at the society were interesting, but I think she’s done better writing since then.
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon – This book came highly recommended. I had seen it labeled as time travel story, which I had been looking forward to a lot. Unfortunately it’s more of a historical romance novel, and romance is just not my genre. It is 1945, and Claire is vacationing in Scotland with her husband. She stumbles through a circle of stones and ends up in 1743, just before the Scots rise up with Bonnie Prince Charlie. Meets a dude Jamie, falls in love, marries, has lots of sex. I did not like Jamie, and I could not connect with Claire. If you do not enjoy romance novels, stay away.
• The Book of Cthulhu by Ross E. Lockhart – An antholoy of short stories based on the Cthulhu Mythos. Some stories were awful, some were quite good. None were outstanding. Some stories really made me uncomfortable, but I consider that a hallmark of good Lovecraftian stories.

[Books] January Reviews

Last Updated on Saturday, 9 February 2013 01:03 Written by Kadomi Monday, 11 February 2013 02:30

So that this blog doesn’t end up being one book review with not much else in it, I have decided to talk about my read books in a monthly summary post. Hope that works out!

I didn’t meet my Goodreads goal of 40 books last year so I went with 35 this year. I am however quite convinced that I might make it 40 this year, if January is any indicator. I managed to read four books in January, though some of them were favorably short.

I started off with Feed by Mira Grant. Highly recommended by many of my friends, I had been looking forward to it for quite a while. I loved the play on RSS Feeds on the cover. I had incredibly high expectations, and I have to say they weren’t really met at all, sadly. The setting is in 2040, many years post Zombie apocalypse, which seems to be its own genre now. The three main characters are Georgia Mason, her brother Shaun and Buffy Meissonier. They are a team of high profile bloggers in a world where blogging is the prime source of reliable news, their site called After The End Times. Georgia is a newsie, a news blogger, her brother is a so-called Irwin, poking zombies with sticks, and Buffy is a fictional, releasing poems and other fiction. The team gets the opportunity to join the up-and-coming Senator Peter Ryman during his presidential campaign, as exclusive bloggers. Though the campaign is very successful, it is overshadowed by incidents involving zombies, like a huge-scale attack in one of the towns the campaign stops at. The bloggers keep digging up dirt, and are soon deep in the middle of a conspiracy in regards to the origins of the zombie apocalypse. It sounds more exciting than I actually found it. The story is mostly told from the first person perspective of Georgia. As newsie, I kinda found the story through her light-sensitive eyes very dry to the point of boring. The whole presidential campaign read more like a political thriller a la The Pelican Brief or any other Grisham, and not like the exciting horror story that I had expected. Maybe I am raw from the Obama campaign in 2012, and it’s more enticing to read as American, but I for one kinda don’t care about American elections that much, at least in not so much dry detail. In the latter parts of the book, things finally start to happen, and that’s where the book hugely improved for me. I originally gave it 3.5 stars, but in retrospect, thinking back, I really didn’t like the whole package that I got, making Feed an average to me.

Next up, we have Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay. I actively avoided Kay since hating on his Fionavar Tapestry books that I read in the 90s. Just not my style of fantasy. In the meantime he seems to have changed his focus to historical fantasy, the fictional retelling of history in fantastic worlds. Under Heaven is one such book. It roughly follows the events of the An-Lushan rebellion in the late Tang dynasty in feudal China. Our protagonist is Shen-Tai, younger son of the famous General Tai who had won a great victory for his people, the Kitai, but regretted the price of lives that the biggest battle took. When the General died, Shen-Tai went off to officially mourn him, by burying the Kitai and Taguran dead at the site of the battle, away from civilization, for two years, bringing peace to the ghosts there. As reward, the Tagurans award Shen-Tai a present of 250 so-called Heavenly Horses. Horses are prized greatly in the Kitai Empire, and none more than the Heavenly Horses. In one instant, Shen-Tai is transformed from humble young man to important member of the Empire, in danger of assassination and of being used in political plots to gain access to those horses. Political intrigues eventually lead to the downfall of current Emperor, and Shen-Tai is at the heart of it all as it happens around him. I really enjoyed this book even though it didn’t quite match the Asian mythology profile that I had been aiming for. Characters were interesting, and I enjoyed Shen-Tai and his younger sister. Villains fell a bit flat, Wen Zhou being a somewhat boring character. Still, I enjoyed it, and I am mildly excited that Kay is going back to this setting sometime later this year.

My personal highlight in January was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but I loved it. It’s the story of pretty much the worst marriage one could imagine. The first part of the book is told from the view of Nick, smalltown Missouri boy who moved to New York, was a magazine writer, and found the perfect wife, Amy. They fell on hard times, both losing their job, and then Nick’s mother fell sick, so they moved to his hometown in Missouri where he opened a bar with his twin sister. When the book starts, it’s their 5th wedding anniversary, and things don’t seem so well for them. When Nick gets to work, he gets the news that Amy has gone missing. When police looks into her disappearance all signs point at Nick being involved in her disappearance, possibly murder. Did he kill her or not? It’s hard to tell for the reader. It’s certainly obvious he bore her no love. So what happened here? I loved this book, despite its utter absence of characters being remotely likeable. Nick is quite douchey, for sure. It’s a book with a seedy, gritty underside, full of mature themes and words. As a psychological thriller I enjoyed it greatly. Hard to put down! I think it deserved it’s Goodreads award 2012 for best thriller. for me.

Last but not least, I read Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris. It’s his first novel from 2005, and has all the trademarks of a Sanderson novel: unique, interesting magic system, and skillful world building. As it is his first work, his flaws stand out more than they did in later books. Elantris is the name of a city that used to house divine beings. Normal people were transformed through an event called the Shaod, granting them magical powers that allowed them to turn dirt into food and heal the gravest of wounds and sicknesses. People worshipped them, until a catastrophe happened that took the magic away and turned all Elantrians in nothing better than lifeless zombies. The main character of the story is crownprince Raoden, Prince of Arelon, the country that contains the city of Elantris. He is taken by the Shaod, which means he gets locked into Elantris. He meets others inside the city, and begins with trying to improve the situation inside the city instead of turning into savages suffering inside. He begins to look into what could possibly have caused the loss of magic. On the outside, Sarene has arrived, Raoden’s fiance and now contractually bound widow. She discovers that the Fjordell Empire is trying to take over the country of Arelon by forcing it to convert to its state religion, Shu-Dereth, through machinations of the priest Hrathen. The different viewpoints ultimately mingle and end up in an exciting, action-packed climax. What is it with books like Feed and Elantris that start slow and then go all out? Characters are the big weakness of the story. Neither Raoden nor Sarene nor Hrathen are particularly memorable and unique, unlike the setting. It does make me nod with appreciation when comparing The Way of Kings with Elantris to see how far Sanderson has come. He will return to the Elantris setting, and I can’t wait what a more mature Sanderson will do with the world now. Though, really, instead of going to Elantris again, I really want the next Stormlight Archive book. Is that too much to ask? Elantris gets 3.5 stars from me, which rounds up to .

And that’s it for January. February will probably be a slower month, as I am slogging through a very slow historical novel right now.

Review: Full Dark, No Stars

Last Updated on Monday, 31 December 2012 12:51 Written by Kadomi Sunday, 23 December 2012 10:48

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this anthology. Some of his anthologies are hit and miss, and this selection was mostly hit with me. My two favorites were Big Driver and A Good Marriage. I thought both were pretty traumatizing and harsh, but also entirely realistic, if you look at the world today.

1922 was very bleak, and that fit the story very well, but it mostly left me cold because I didn’t like the protagonist. Which was probably on purpose. Last but not least, there was Fair Extension, which had an interesting premise, and played in Derry. I love hints about It’s Derry, and this story had them. It was a quick read, but not one of his most memorable stories.

I enjoyed this book, and what more could I ask for? I am a King fan, so this worked for me. People new to King would probably not have as much fun. If fun is even the right term.



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