CBR10BINGO: And So It Begins My favorite book series is Iain M. Banks’s Culture. Each book offers a self-contained story of its own time and place within the vast universe of the Culture. Sure, it’s helpful to have the incremental, accumulated knowledge of the Culture that comes from reading multiple books, but you don’t have to keep track of characters and timelines. I also appreciate series like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Vandermeer’s Southern Reach that are really just one long book broken into […]
People don’t want to listen to their thoughts, so they fill the world with noise.
In my ongoing quest to read all the Newbery Award Winners, I decided to read the most recent addition to the list. Hello, Universe won the Newbery Award in 2018, and boy am I under the impression that 2017 was a bad year for children’s books. It’s not a bad book, per se, it’s just not great in the way I’ve come to expect Newbery winners to be. It was a very fast read, even for a children’s novel, and it contained about a short […]
Dead Man Upright: An Elegy for Derek Raymond
I read this one for the Cannonball Run Bingo, category: “This is the End.” It is the last book in the Factory Series. I first came across Derek Raymond’s work on a list of unheralded dystopias. He had written his A State of Denmark in the late-60s in response to British politics of that time. I liked his voice as a write but couldn’t connect with the main character and so I set the book aside. A few months later, I discovered the “Backlisted” podcast, where a […]
Utopian ideas in a dystopian space
On its face, The Queen of the Tearling is your standard young adult fare – a young queen, a handsome and mysterious love interest, emerging magic, a kingdom that must be saved. I’m not dismissing YA novels when I say this, but the Tearling series is so much more. These books are suitable for high schoolers, but also eminently rereadable and enjoyable for those of us celebrating our ten+ year reunions. Think late Harry Potter range. But the good ones. Kelsea Raleigh has known her whole life […]
If you read the first book, don’t read this book. Imagine your own ending. #CBRBingo
No question, this is the weakest book in this series by quite a large margin. Before I read it, I saw the sharp drop in the ratings for it, and I almost couldn’t believe it. The first two books were solid, what could possibly be so bad about this one? Well. Those ratings make sense now, because this book was aggressively incompetent. What were cute and comforting levels of predictability in the first two books became clichéd and eyeroll-worthy in this one. The problem, I […]
“Excellent!” I cried. “Elementary,” said he. #CBRBingo
Project: Catch Up On Review Backlog, review #4 out of 11 Of the four Holmes books I’ve read so far, this one has been my favorite. Even my least favorite stories are solid, and there are several that are excellent. For context, these stories were all published between 1892-1893, at the height of both Conan Doyle’s and his famous hero’s popularity. Conan Doyle was growing extremely tired of his creation, and he wanted to write other, newer and more challenging things (he did, almost none […]
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