Remember back in CBR5 when we all read Wool and Shift and Dust (also known as the Shift Omnibus) and we all loved them and couldn’t stop talking about Hugh Howey? That trilogy was smart and exciting and we were all fired up about this new name in dystopian sci-fi. A guy who had self-published and made a success out of himself. The story was inspiring and the books were great. We even did a book discussion over on Pajiba, and I truly thought we would be hearing a lot more […]
I’m Back!! back back back back back!!!
I should say that I have let way too much time lapse since I read both these books. Coming off my high on Wool, the first of a three-part series by Hugh Howey, I was very eager to get into the other two and bought them both pretty much immediately. My memory on some of the details are spotty, but I’ll try to keep this about my feelings regarding the two books. (Possible spoilers ahead for people who haven’t read Wool. In which case, you should totally read […]
Dystopian fiction, just the way you like it
I wanted to read Wool (2013) by Hugh Howey after I saw it in an airport bookstore, but I had to read it when it became the next book for my book club. I’ve read what feels like a little too much dystopian fiction lately but this one looked intriguing and I was looking forward to it. The entire population is kept safe from the toxic environment outside by a huge, underground silo, falling 150 floors into the ground below. The population is divided clearly into […]
Thank God it was so short
I should really know better than to choose books just because they’re on sale, but The Plagiarist lured me with the $2 audiobook price tag. Lesson learned. Whatever you do, don’t listen to the audiobook version of this story. The narrator was so incredibly annoying that it couldn’t help factoring into my enjoyment of the book. The Plagiarist is a novella about Adam Griffey. He’s a plagiarist, but not in the traditional sense of the word. He teaches English by day and at night he […]
Separation made my heart grow colder
Two years ago I read, and loved, Wool, the first book in the Silo Trilogy. I bought the follow-up on Kindle. And then… I just never read it. Until a month ago, when I really took notice of it just sitting untouched in my Kindle library and thought, dang, I should really read this book! So with that in mind, understand that by sitting on it for so long, I lost all of my interest and I couldn’t get it back, and that’s possibly causing me to […]
The Way Out
It’s been a long time since I was so thoroughly sucked into a fictional universe as I was with Wool. Honestly, that’s what I miss about fantasy, historical fiction and sci-fi books — while the writing may be good, it is rare that I would feel totally enfolded into the history, the context and the world that an author creates. I think the last time that happened was with the first book of the Chaos Trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go. Hugh Howey does this for […]




