Zeno's Library

I read this (in two volumes, as in the Amazon links at right, but this is the UK version and so is one huge volume instead) 15 years or so ago, when the series it heads was much, much shorter.  I thought I'd remembered it fairly well, but given that I actually only recognized two scenes in the whole thing, both of which were in the first 100 of the 800 pages, I was apparently delusional.

Anyway, I was bored very nearly the whole way though, though it did pick up a bit in the second half.  Mostly, I think it could use a good going-over by an editor of the Tough Guide to Fantasyland school, but it was 25 years ago and I suppose I should cut it some slack.  I'll be carrying on with the series, though, so I suppose I can't have been that irritated by it. 

I almost didn't bother finishing this book, so there's a glowing recommendation.  But it never quite got to that point, and I did make it all the way through.  I didn't dislike it, on balance.  I didn't really care much about it one way or the other, though.  I'm not sure what I have to say about it, other than that it was a perfectly viable plane book, and whatever happened to Moon's ability to write good books?  She hasn't really done it in some time.  This is sub-competent space opera at best; not off-putting but never quite clicking, either.  I may or may not bother to keep reading this series.

(See my reviews of the first two books here and here.)

And at long last I get around to reading the conclusion of the Mistborn trilogy, in which we all learn that no assumption is safe.  Reveal after reveal cause the reader to reevaluate things learned in earlier books without making it feel like retconning, but rather as if the deeper meaning were there all along and the characters themselves had drawn incorrect conclusions about their world - which is the case, I'm pretty sure.  But even if it's not, and Sanderson himself changed his mind about The Way Things Work, he did it with such a deft touch that I can find no fault in it

Detailed analysis would be spoiler-ridden at least for the first two books, even if I managed to steer around spoilers for this book, so I shall refrain.  I'll content myself with this:  Before I read Hero of Ages, I thought Sanderson was one of the best fantasy authors I'd encountered in several years, and was looking forward with mild interest to reading his Wheel of Time conclusion.  Well, mild interest has become active anticipation, because while it's possible that no one can manage to re-gather all the scattered threads of that story, I'm now firmly convinced this is the best candidate for the job.

Book six, now, in the Great Wheel Of Time Re-Read.  So far there's been one pretty-good-but-a-little-wobbly book (Eye of the World) and four really solidly excellent books (The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising, and The Fires of Heaven).  This one is still pretty good, but it's starting to wobble just that little bit that makes it apparent upon this, my Nth reading through the series, that Very Soon Now the whole thing is going to come unstuck and flail about helplessly for, um, well, three to five books (depending on whether one counts Crown of Swords as part of the godawful phase or still just part of the lead-in, and also whether Knife of Dreanms climbs back ouf of the hole, which others imply it does, but I was too fed up with the series when it came out to bother reading it).

Gee, really makes me look forward to carrying on with the re-read, no?  But there's a new one due out in a few months, so I must perservere!

And yet another Dresden book.  I'm done wondering why I like these now, though I've figured out at least one the things I dislike about them:  I'm just plain over the hard-boiled-detective-always-on-the-brink-of-bankruptcy gimmick.  But I can get past that, because the books are fun.  I read this one on a transatlantic flight, and I can't think of a better thing for such circumstances.  They're engrossing and not even a little bit demanding, and next time I have a long flight I'm taking five of them.

I'm about to start on the next one in the series even now, actually (I got a bit behind in the booklogging), and I'm very much looking forward to it.

(See my review of the previous book here.)

I really love these books.  They handle story-as-story quite beautifully, and the way Fenoglio's created world has taken on a life of its own sounds disturbingly like things I've heard real-world authors say about their own created worlds having taken twists they hadn't forseen (though I strongly doubt any of them ever had their lives actively threatened by their creations...).  It's all very meta and incredibly awesome.  I recommend these books to all people between the ages of 10 and 15, and to everyone older than that who likes to think about the trappings of story and why they fit together the way they do.

Very good stuff.  Can't wait until Inkdeath gets to the top of the to-read list.

I really expected to like this book.  After all, I have very low standards when it comes to zombie stories, and this book was being fairly substantially hyped, so I thought it would surely meet the requirements.

Yeah, well, not so much.  Kudos, though, for having scientific zombies - especially prion zombies.  I hadn't encountered that one before, only virus ones.  In fact, I don't really have any quibbles with the zombie part of the story at all.  If there'd been more zombies and less of the idiot protagonist (and, for the love of god and all things holy, no damned sentence fragments - what is up with that, anyway?  There are sentence fragments in a distressing number of published works lately), I would probably have liked it just fine.  Unfortunately, the protagonist is a schmuck, and I am sad that he didn't get eaten by a zombie.  It's a first-person narrative, too, which means every second I spent reading the thing was spent immersed in the guy's head.  Ugh.  (Of course, I don't like first-person narratives at the best of times, which this definitely wasn't.)

I think this was a zombie book for the action-book reader, not for the zombie-book reader, anyway.  And while I like action movies just fine, action books are definitely not for me.  Explosions?  Gunfights?  Awesome on screen, boring as all get-out to read.  And zombie stories are supposed to have a visceral component (in a non-literal sense, I mean, though there's usually quite a bit of actual viscera around, too) - they're supposed to make you care about the people who are watching their loved ones turn into mindless killing machines.  A zombie movie isn't about how big the explosions are or how many rounds of ammo you use up (though zombie video games have a component of that), and they're not about mowing down crowds of nameless zombies, either (even though there's usually some of that, too).  They're about having to shoot your best friend in the head when he suddenly starts trying to take a bite out of your arm.  Zombies are a demoralizing and deeply terrifying threat.  This version of them was distinctly underwhelming.  For this and other reasons, the book was sadly lacking in the emotional impact department, though at least it did acknowledge that its protagonist was kind of lacking in the emotional department himself.

Anyway, it's not a bad book, and if I didn't have such a thing for the zombie sub-genre I probably would have been perfectly content with it, though probably still wouldn't actively recommend it (it's the goddamned sentence fragment thing, and I'm not getting over that anytime soon).  As it is, though . . . enh.

See my review of the previous book in this trilogy here.

I promise I'll try to avoid making this a habit, but as with my last post, my review of the previous installment pretty much goes for this one, too.  It's a mystery, it's a light fantasy, it's a Renaissance romp.  Something for very nearly everyone.  Go, ye, and read it.  And read everything else Dave Duncan has ever written, too.

See my review of previous book in the series here.

Well, it may have taken me a year to get around to reading it, but I enjoyed the second installment every bit as much as the first.  I don't actually have an extensive review on tap, I'm afraid - it's been too long since I finished it, and while it's far from a Generic Fantasy Product, it follows the epic fantasy forms closely enough to make a thumbnail sketch of its plot sound absolutely dismal.  I promise it's not, though.  I loved every minute, and I'm as burned out on the same ol' same ol' versions of epic fantasy as the next gal.  Good stuff.

Honestly, I don't have much to say about this that I didn't say about Ring of Fire earlier.  It's a fascinating concept, and I remain unsurprised that dozens of people want to play with it.  (I could wish that when they decided to collect the fanfic-class works for publication they had performed a rather deeper editing pass than they appear to have done, and eliminated the overwhelming proliferation of sentence fragments, but I suppose one cannot have everything.)

Some of the stories are excellent, a couple are good in concept but the writing is bad enough to have been a low-grade distraction throughout their length, and some read like chapters out of textbooks.  About par for the Assisti Shards universe course, really.  Still, I like the world enough that I'll keep reading, even these collections, which the smart money says will always be the lowest average quality of all the works in this particular shared universe.

Mildly recommended, but mostly for completists.

(As an utterly unrelated aside, with this review I am now caught up on my to-booklog pile for what I think might be the first time ever, and certainly hasn't happened more than once before if not.  Whee!)