Zeno's Library

The Walking Dead: Miles Behind Us

I honestly appear to have nothing whatsoever to say about this.  I enjoyed it - as zombie stories go, this one is unfolding nicely so far.  But there's not enough story as yet for me to be able to review it properly.  Next time I pick one of these up I'll be reading two volumes worth, so perhaps then I'll have something to say.

Still, so far, so good.

Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett

With only a very few exceptions near the beginning of the Discworld when the story was still finding its feet, every Pratchett book I have encountered has a) made me laugh hysterically and b) left me with an immensely satisfied feeling after I finished reading it.  I will probably never understand quite how he manages to make (for instance) a book about soccer (sorry, "football"), full of silly wordplay and ludicrous hijinx, resonate so entirely with Life, the Universe, and Everything, but here it is all the same.  Of course, it's only a book about soccer if one focuses exclusively on the surface of things.  In an equally accurate and substantially more true sense, it's a book about pervasive and constricting social expectations, about the difficulty and rarity of true self-determination, about racism in its simplest forms - and at least a dozen more things.  In short, it's a Terry Pratchett book, and what on earth are you waiting for?  Go read the thing, for crying out loud.

Oh, and also, if you haven't already, read this.  Then, if the situation fills you with the same sort of helpless, despairing fury as it does me, go here, or here.

The Thunderer, Felix Gilman

I'm not going to mince words:  I thought this book was appallingly boring.  I mostly read it over the course of a series of baths, and on more than one occasion I cut my bath short when I'd really planned an extended bubble-bath soak, because I wanted to stop reading this book and go do something else.  Now, in an effort to exhibit some fair-mindedness, I think it is at least possible that had I read it in a less piecemeal fashion, it might have achieved some degree of momentum and felt less like an uphill slog the whole time, but I'm not at all certain I would have ever got to the point of actually liking it.

I had the sequel to this on my to-read list, a dozen or so books down.  I've moved it down another 30 or so, and maybe by the time I get to it I'll be feeling more charitably inclined toward the universe in question.

Song of Susannah, Stephen King

Quite frankly, I think I'm running out of things to say about this series, given that specifics on pretty much anything that happens here, in book six, would be remarkably spoileriffic.  I will point out in passing that the number of times I've seen an author write himself in to a book as a character - and make it work - is vanishingly small, but wow, did it ever work here.  Far from shattering the book's illusion, it actually left me toying with "what if"s about its version of reality, and coming with remarkably few demonstrable holes in it.  This is both remarkably cool and surprisingly creepy, by the way, in a way that probably won't fully make sense to people who haven't read it.  (And on a more objective note, King's not afraid to put his book-self through the wringer, is he?)

Looking very much forward to the concluding volume, but also very much not.  I'm not really ready not to have more Dark Tower story ahead.

Random Magic, Sasha Soren

See Alistair's review of this book here.

I confess I was somewhat less overwhelmingly charmed by this book than was my husband.  In fact, I had a great deal of difficulty getting through it, because while the plot and characterization and twisty little side journeys are all as pleasingly eccentric as Alistair's review led me to believe they would be, my tolerance for puns is quite low, with the exception of the occasional very-clever specimen, and this book is absolutely littered with the damned things.  Scarcely a one of the ludicrously-short chapters went by without my giving a heartfelt groan and having to set the book aside for some several minutes to recover.  Now, this did wonders for my general productivity during the span of time in which I was reading this book, but did not serve to speed my progress through the pages.

In summary, I think I'd have to say that the book was incredibly disappointing.  It had tremendous promise, and taken as a whole I really did enjoy it.  However, I really think it could have been great, had its author not spent quite so much effort trying to look clever by means of excessively-florid wordplay, and instead simply relied on the strength of the actual cleverness that the book is built from.

Oh, and as a mostly-irrelevant aside, I don't know where this book may have been stored before it was shipped to us as an Early Reviewer copy, but it smelled so strongly of patchouli upon arrival that even now, months after the fact, when I flipped through it in a quick re-familiarization, it was able to give me a headache.  Yikes.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Predators and Prey

I'm afraid this Buffy-continuation may be losing some of its appeal for me.  By no means all of it has fled, don't get me wrong; the "what happens next" curiosity is a strong motivator.  But I think these graphic novel collections are too short and too infrequent to sustain critical mass, plot-wise.  Perhaps I should start letting three or four of them accumulate between readings.  ...yeah, right.  If I possessed the patience of a saint, perhaps.  Well, re-reading should provide a similar effect, right?

Still, in this collection, we have Harmony being Harmony, Andrew being Andrew, and Faith being Faith, so it's not all bad.  There's also about zillion evil stuffed animals, and (finally!) a resolution of the Magical Morphing Dawn plotline.  I liked what I read, it just all seemed a bit a) slapdash and b) rushed.  And very, very little metaplot development appeared to be present, either.  Still, as I keep saying, it's better than no Buffy at all, and I'm a very, very long way away from giving up on the continuation.