I blame the internet. Earlier this year I was telling my roommate about a run of books I was in that were great, but sad. She’s dubbed my year as “The Depression Readings”. I mean, to a certain extent this is fair. I have read Burial Rites, The Black Country, Tell the Wolves I’m Home and The Age of Miracles in a 6 week period. That’s a lot of heavy reading, emotionally. So, at some point she decided that it was her mission to bring […]
Ray, If Someone Asks Are You a God, Say “YES!”
With trade news regarding a TV series (or miniseries or whatever it’s been decided to be) of American Gods popping up, I decided it was time for me to reread Neil Gaiman’s book. Mostly because none of the discussed character names really rang any bells and if pressed, I couldn’t have really summed up the plot other than anthropomorphic gods trying to get by in America, a godless land. Eh, kind of close? My pea brain’s inability to hold onto plot details for more than […]
Like an old familiar nightmare you’d forgotten you used to have.
I think probably the best way to describe what it’s like to read the Abhorsen trilogy is to compare it to a snowball rolling down a very, very large hill. We are all familiar with this metaphor–it basically implies that the thing being compared metaphorically moves faster and becomes MORE on the way down, whether that thing is the plot or your emotions as a reader, or both. Abhorsen is like this, but also THE SNOWBALL IS ON FIRE. Sabriel introduced the world, the characters (most of them), […]
Is this secretly a parable about student loans?
Back in the late 2000s, vampires were all.the.rage. I’m glad that tide has turned, even if The Hunger Games has spawned a lot of dystopic fiction that depresses you and makes you feel that the earth’s doom is imminent. I’ve read Divergent, hated Insurgent, and never finished Allegiant. So I am curious to see how Joelle Charbonneau’s trilogy will stack up overall. As a first book in a trilogy, The Testing is fairly engaging. Cia Vale has graduated from her formal high school education in […]
Like sands in the hourglass, these are the Games of our Thrones …
Both book and television spoilers lurk within … A Dance with Dragons, the fifth novel in George R. R. Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, was published in 2011, after a five-year gap between it and the previous entry, A Feast for Crows. The series started with A Game of Thrones in 1996. The series has had an interesting evolution. Originally intended to be a trilogy, Martin soon realized that his fictional world of Westeros and beyond was expanding and would require first, four, than six, now […]
Steampunk Austrians and the Biopunk British
With accompanying illustrations by Keith Thompson, Leviathan is a young adult’s Steampunk mechanics vs. Biopunk Darwinists tale set within an alternate history of the initiation of World War I. And at the end of it I was thinking, “that’s it? That’s where you leave me?” only to be pleasantly surprised to discover that Leviathan is only the first in a series of novels (how I wasn’t aware of this before, I’m not sure) that I definitely plan on continuing with when I am able to. […]