Books 'n Stuff

I've been out for some time, been very slow reading (I should have finished both of these books a month ago), but I've been taking a break. I am now returned, to read and review, again.

The Hobbit will be finished shortly (probably tomorrow night, because although there isn't much left, its late and I have to work at 6 am). I still have no idea how to review a book like this. Everyone has read it, or seen the movies. I'm obviously not shining any real light on a new perspective of this book, but I will attempt a review anyway.

I'm about halfway into my other book (which should take me much less time to finish). If anybody has been wondering where I've gone to, my apologies.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. -Kahlil Gibran

Still $2.99 HERE

Synopsis: Three novellas stories of how minor gods interact with humanity.

Age of Anansi: The African trickster god, Anansi, recruits a vessel to ride along on for a convention of trickster gods, all of whom are competing for trickster bragging rights.

Age of Satan: While attending a boarding school, Guy Lucas is bullied and abused. A fellow classmate persuades him to perform a Black Mass, after which he is hounded for years by the powers of darkness.

Age of Gaia: Barnaby Pollard is a super rich energy mogul...and then he meets the woman of his dreams. And nightmares.

I was seriously not impressed with most of this. Age of Anansi felt exactly like Lovegrove read American Gods (Neil Gaiman) and thought "I think I can do this better." No. No you didn't. The ending was a serious disappointment as well. It wasn't tricky or smart, it was just sad.

Age of Satan: It starts out promising, there's a point about a third of the way in that is just hella dark, but it never builds on it. In fact it completely drops off after that. By the end of the book it reads like an ad for atheistic Satanism, which I'm just not down with. I'm a softcore atheist and I've never seen the need to mix satanic bs or philosophy in with it. So bad ending, as well.

Age of Gaia: This was the only one of the three that I came close to liking. It wasn't particularly engaging, the protagonist is kind of arrogant, abit of an asshole, but the book also tries to paint a victim perspective on him, which I found novel. I liked the ending which turned the tables around in an interesting way.

I wasn't terribly impressed with The Age of Zeus, the first book of Lovegrove's that I read, I probably shouldn't have tried Age of Godpunk. I do like the premise though, I guess thats what keeps drawing me back, even if the execution is crap.

Synopsis: A really smart guy, who never forgets anything, is hired to evaluate a research project in the desert for safety.

I really liked this book. I had a good guess going in where the story was going to go and it more or less went in that direction. Its hard to say what I really liked about this. Its good at being a page tuner, and the concepts are fairly creative (though it has a lot of parallels with Stargate; something even the story itself notes). The protagonist, Mike, seems a bit generic, though I did think a number of the support characters were well developed.

I'd happily read a sequel to this, and the end is clearly set up for it, so its likely we'll see one sooner or later.

...that I don't really have much in the way of female authors on my bookshelf. Margeret Weiss is up there with the Dragonlance stuf but she's paired up with Tracy Hickman anyway, and there's really no one else. So my first thought was a name I swear I'd heard on a podcast, but who turned out to be a researcher for something post-Holocaust non-fiction. Nope.

So I made a trip to the bookstore and finding something suitable proved in fact much more difficult than I anticipated. Most everything I saw from female authors was either a) romance, or heavily leaning that way, or the sort of throwaway novels I try to stay away from. My immediate thought was Ann McCaffrey, or possibly Mercedes Lackey. McCaffrey's old Pern novels would probably fit the bill fine amd Mercedes Lackey is a good standby as well. But after some thought I realized who fits the bill better than anyone else: the matriarchal, reigning queen of fantasy Ursala Leguin.

So that said I picked up A Wizard of Earthsea. I considered The Left Hand of Darkness, but it was tradepaper and I don't want to spend the extra bit of money. Also, I have the third book in the Earthsea series already and I'm looking to eventually read the rest.

Synopsis: A radio astronomer at a remote observatory makes a discovery of alien proportions.

I wrote out a whole review about this book....and then my connection gave out when I hit post...because I'm cabled in tonight and FUCK. So I'm rewriting this again and trying to figure out what I wrote.

Anyway, Contact does not have a problem with pacing. It's slow and steady, almost from start to finish. And when I say slow, I mean slllllllooooowwwwww. Your gonna hear about everything you have no interest in. This is includes the protagonist's childhood, school life, college days, relationships with friends, colleagues and her love life. Also religion. Your gonna hear about religion, more specifically about how science attempts to deal with it.

Basically, everything your not interested in while the plot line that is interesting plays out.

Thats Sagan's game here. He's written about an amazing scientific discovery and he's going to go through everything that surrounds it. Whats more he's not pulling any punches to make it more interesting. The book is slow, stodgy and generally abit dull

It's this way because thats how the scientific process is. While scientific discoveries may be fascinating, or lead to other things that are, the scientific process itself is often tedious, slow and dull. Sagan was writing this to be true to science and thats very clear. But if it was ever meant to make it interesting to anyone, it's a failure.

The other thing is that he puts forth several agendas in the book. These include SCIENCE IS AWESOME! and women's rights to later on trying to address the gap between science and religion. I don't mind any of these agenda's, but I would have appreciated it he would have kept them out of the fiction.

General rating: 3 1/2

Epic rating: 1

Synopsis: On the Steel Breeze is the second book of Alastair Reynolds' Poseidon's Children trilogy. Geoffrey, the protagonist from the first book, Blue Remembered Earth, is gone. Referenced, not seen. Humanity has a new version of physics they are messing around with (disastrously) and have launched a series of huge spaceships towards the planet Crucible with the aim of exploring and colonizing it. Chiku, our new protagonist and apparently the last of the Akinya bloodline, has split herself into three people via cloning technology. Each clone is identical and their memories have been synced so that no one can tell who the original is. Chiku Yellow (they all have colors to differentiate them) stays on earth, Chiku Green goes on the push to Crucible, and Chiku Red is sent on a mission to deep space to discover what happened to their great grandmother Eunice Akinya.

Reynolds doesn't seem to be very good at pacing. Much of this book was fairly slow. Its muddling around, its not totally clear whats going on, and I think he was trying to use some sort of adventure-mystery kind of thing to lead up to the more interesting stuff. I don't really think it worked. Arachne wasn't really a huge surprise, and neither was she a particularly great villain. An almost sympathetic villain, actually, and thats not a good thing. Good villains usually need to be someone I can actively hate on.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, the pace picks up considerably, things get interesting and I liked the book alot more after that. It jusst takes about 300 pages or so to get there.

Another thing to mention is that Reynolds apparently doesn't like elderly people. In the future everyone routinely gets a kind of 'prolongation therapy'. People regularly live to 300 or more years old. One character is denied this therapy as punishment for a crime, so he is doomed to grow old. The character whines a number of times about how he is becoming a 'horror', 'awful', and my favorite 'walking nightmare'. Really? The character is getting old Reynolds, he's not changing into Cthulu.

OtSB is a little more grimdark than BRE was, and thats where Reynolds really shines, so I can say I like it better than BRE. Its not terribly epic, however. 3 stars at best for epic.

General rating: 3 1/2

Epic rating: 3

Holy crap this book has grabbed me like nothing has in a while. It hasn't been exactly what I expected, but its still been a hell of a page turner.

Synopsis:

Look your guess is as good as mine as to what this book is about. It doesn't have much of a unifying theme (even the authors say that), so I'm kinda at a loss to say what it is about exactly.

I'm not really sure what to say about this book. An economist who doesn't know anything about economics (he says this in the introduction) takes questions, pulls them apart, and analyzes data troves to find answers that seem unrelated. The best I can figure is that he's a pattern analyst with an unusual way of looking at data. Between each chapter there are short excerpts from a New York Times article written by the book's other author mostly about how great/brilliant the first author is. *headscratch*

That said he does pose interesting discussions on several different oddball topics. The only unified theme to the book, however, seems to be turning conventional wisdom on it's head.

General rating: 3 1/2

I started Clash of Kings a couple years ago after finishing Game of Thrones, but never finished it, as I didn't like the way the book was going. Its considerably slower than GoT was, and the summer weather here doesn't help, but I think I'm just about caught up to where I was at with it. It will be a welcome thing when I do; I'm tired of retreading over the plot.

Welcome!

I've acquired a fair sized number of new followers today, which is unusual for me, so I thought I would write a post and introduce this blog.

Epic Reads Blog is (mostly) for epic reads. Internet epic that is. The internet version of the word is difficult to define and doesn't really fit into any particular genre, so I just set it as something approximating 'totally badass!'

Unfortunately that isn't something that slotted to any particular genre, and it is difficult to pick out which books will be a good fit for the blog and which one's aren't. More often than not the theme of this blog is more a review of what is NOT epic. There are the easy one's to pick out of course; Tolkien, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin all very much come to mind when I think epic, but it can't all be that way sadly :(

Generally on this blog, I read sci-fi, with a bit of fantasy here and there. I'm also known to dive into classic literature from time to time and pretty much anything else that strikes my fancy, although its mostly sci-fi and fantasy.

I have been wanting to do more with this blog, however, being that I don't have an at home internet connection. I mostly write from internet cafes and free wifi points. The point being that its not quite as active as I'd like, but there's not much I can do about it right now. However, I do have some ideas about how to make it more active when things change. For example, for Veteran's Day or Memorial Day some year, I would like to do a lead up of biography posts of Medal of Honor recipients (cause honestly, if you read the citations nothing says badass more than some of these guys), but I just don't see it in the cards right now.

And finally I make it a point to follow everyone who follows me. I don't keep company with alot of other readers offline, so I don't have alot of other people I know on here. It can be hard to get people you don't know, interested in your blog and I always appreciate it when I get new followers. Thus I consider it a courtesy to follow people who follow me. Community building and all.

Unfortunately, at this particular wifi point some of your pages have been blocked for whatever reason, (curse words or some such probably; I don't care, but the library apparently does; btw I'm looking at you E.), so I'm going to have to add some people the next time I'm at a less restricted hotspot.

Anyway, thank you all, for following reading my reviews :)

Synopsis: A holy man of some sort, due to depart on a boat shortly, dispenses wisdom to townsfolk gathered to see him off on topics such as love, religion, beauty, and death among others.

This is Kahlil Gibran's best known work, and despite being so short (readable in about 1 - 2 hours) its very intense. Its the sort of book that if if you want to understand any of it, you have to slow down and read it carefully and think about what your reading.

He's very prosaic with his writing, there's a lot of old school classical charm to it, but the real value here is both what he says and doesn't say.

"And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds it's morning and is refreshed."

Synopsis: Several thousand years in the future humanity has colonized large parts of the galaxy, but has never encountered another sentient, starfaring race. Now two civilizations race to explore a galactic anomaly, a mysterious star that shuts itself off for every 215 out of 250 years, and to make first contact with the inhabitants of the lone planet orbiting it.

But these two groups have very different goals and reasons for making first contact...

I felt like this book had a lot of potential, but that some of it was ultimately a let down. Instead of a story filled with action gratifying the more obvious plot paths, we're given something much more subtle and deep, but also a lot slower.

On one side of the story we're given a slow, methodical, revolution centered on subterfuge. The other plot line revolves around the planet's inhabitants as the book introduces alien characters and sits with them for generations.

While I don't think it's 4 star material, Vinge obviously put a lot of thought into character development here, as many of them are sincerely likeable, while others are very effective villains. While she isn't seen much in the book Honoured Pedure in particular struck me as a great embodiment of rightwing conservative villainy.

One other thing to note, Vinge appears to be making a very, very subtle play at...something. In the context of the novel inhabitants of the planet spend most of their time in a kind of biological cryostasis, only being awake an involved with the world around them for the 35 years out 250 that their sun is active. Conservative members of the population dominate the planet, and believe that their young should be born and raised in a rigid alignment with that cycle. There's some stuff about souls and what not.

The human characters in the book regard these notions as bizarre, the same way an alien race looking at Earth might say "Half of you get your panties in a knot over gay people? Wtf" or "You believe in souls ahahahahahaha".

All in all an enjoyable read, but the ending dragged on and on.

General rating: 3 1/2

Epic rating: 3 1/2