Deborah Harkness knows a lot about a lot of things. Her depth and breadth of knowledge on things ranging from wine to Elizabethan England to brewing tea is certainly impressive, but the amount of detail crammed into these books sure does make for some slow going. The All Souls Trilogy is about a world in which witches, vampires, and daemons (in this case, daemons are humans who are more than us regular folk–musical prodigies, artistic savants, financial wizards, scientific geniuses–or sometimes drug addicts or mentally […]
Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it […]
God bless busybody community matriarchs, and all that sail in them.
More, please. More, more, more. I just love me some Peter Grant. And fair warning to the reader who may be interested in this series: this book, Broken Homes, which is Book 4 of the “Rivers of London” series, isn’t the strongest of the bunch. But it’s still a delight and a treat, and I will fight anyone who isn’t a fan. Listen, I have five more “Dark Tower” books to read in the next five weeks, but I still just checked out Foxglove Summer […]
Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation.
Oh boy, did I miss Peter Grant while I was taking my super fun journey through the last four heartwrenchers. It felt like I was waiting FOREVER for Whispers Under Ground to become available at the library. Peter Grant is a delight. He is the perfect not-very-straight straight man for all the madness in this fantastic world of Ben Aaronovitch’s creation. I keep reminding myself as I read these books that for all of Grant’s self-deprecation and insistence that he’s a terrible cop with bad […]
The one where Rachel goes on an ill-advised banshee hunt
It has taken me three years to circle back to the first book from The Hollows series I found at the library. I unwittingly checked out and read a page from White Witch, Black Curse before realizing it was the seventh in the series! The completist that I am returned it. I finally started with book one in 2014. I’m probably the only one spacing out this series over so many years. 😉 ****Major spoilers for previous books in the series to follow**** Rachel Morgan has been through the […]