YouKneeK’s 2019 SF&F Overdose Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of my 2019 thread! :) Here’s my usual introductory info:

• I read mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a heavier emphasis on fantasy.
  
• I tend to read slightly older books versus the newest releases.
  
• I hate spoilers. Any spoilers in my reviews should be safely hidden behind spoiler tags.
  
• I prefer to read a series after it’s complete, and I read all the books pretty close together.
  
• I’m 43, female, and live in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA in the U.S where I work as a programmer.
  
• My cat’s name is Ernest and he’s a freak.

2019 Reading Index

Clicking on the Date Read will take you to the post containing the review.

   Date Read/
 # Review Link	Title				Author(s)		
 1 2019-01-04	Fool's Quest			Robin Hobb
 2 2019-01-12	Assassin's Fate			Robin Hobb
 3 2019-01-17	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
 4 2019-01-19	Oryx and Crake			Margaret Atwood
 5 2019-01-22	The Year of the Flood		Margaret Atwood
 6 2019-01-26	MaddAddam			Margaret Atwood
 7 2019-01-29	The First Fifteen Lives of	Claire North
		Harry August
 8 2019-02-03	Snow Crash			Neal Stephenson
 9 2019-02-06	Brown Girl in the Ring		Nalo Hopkinson
10 2019-02-11	The Thousand Names		Django Wexler
11 2019-02-11	The Penitent Damned		Django Wexler
12 2019-02-17	The Shadow Throne		Django Wexler
13 2019-02-18	The Shadow of Elysium		Django Wexler
14 2019-02-25	The Price of Valor		Django Wexler
15 2019-03-02	The Guns of Empire		Django Wexler
16 2019-03-08	The Infernal Battalion		Django Wexler
17 2019-03-10	Deathless			Catherynne M. Valente
18 2019-03-15	Doomsday Book			Connie Willis
19 2019-03-19	To Say Nothing of the Dog	Connie Willis
20 2019-03-23	Blackout			Connie Willis
21 2019-03-29	All Clear			Connie Willis
22 2019-04-02	Haze				L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
23 2019-04-06	The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms	N. K. Jemisin
24 2019-04-10	The Broken Kingdoms		N. K. Jemisin
25 2019-04-16	The Kingdom of Gods		N. K. Jemisin
26 2019-04-17	The Awakened Kingdom		N. K. Jemisin
27 2019-04-19	Three Men in a Boat		Jerome K. Jerome
28 2019-04-21	Othello				William Shakespeare
29 2019-04-24	Sea of Rust			C. Robert Cargill
30 2019-05-01	Spinning Silver			Naomi Novik
31 2019-05-05	The Long Earth			Terry Pratchett and 
						Stephen Baxter
32 2019-05-06	Nimona				Noelle Stevenson
33 2019-05-09	Night Watch			Sergei Lukyanenko
34 2019-05-12	Day Watch			Sergei Lukyanenko
35 2019-05-14	The Day of the Triffids		John Wyndham
36 2019-05-18	Leviathan			Scott Westerfeld
37 2019-05-22	Behemoth			Scott Westerfeld
38 2019-05-25	Goliath				Scott Westerfeld
39 2019-05-27	A Canticle for Leibowitz	Walter M. Miller Jr.
40 2019-06-02	Karen Memory			Elizabeth Bear
41 2019-06-05	Alphabet of Thorn		Patricia A. McKillip
42 2019-06-12	Under Heaven			Guy Gavriel Kay
43 2019-06-18	River of Stars			Guy Gavriel Kay
44 2019-06-22	The Night Circus		Erin Morgenstern

Here are the year-to-date reading stats that my Access database is currently giving me.

General Reading Stats
My average pages per day is a bit higher than usual so far. I’ve enjoyed the majority of what I’ve read this year as seen by my high average rating in the next section, so that’s probably a contributing factor. I imagine it will drop off some as the year progresses and I get tied up with work projects and probably some business travel.


Star Ratings
My typical yearly average ratings are usually in the high 3.x’s, so I’m probably over-generous with my book ratings to begin with, but so far this year they’ve been even higher than usual. Like I mentioned above, I’ve enjoyed the majority of what I’ve read this year. From finishing up Robin Hobb’s Elderlings series, to Atwood’s MaddAddam series, to Django Wexler’s The Shadow Campaigns, and most recently Connie Willis’ Oxford Time Travel series, I’ve enjoyed all the series books I’ve read. I think my least-favorite book so far this year was Snow Crash and even that one wasn’t bad, it just didn’t do much for me.


Decade Published
This graph is fairly boring so early in the year. I do always enjoy seeing what my median publication year is currently at, though. Right now it’s at 2011. The most recent book I’ve read this year was published in January 2018. It’s very rare for me to read any books published in the current year.


Genre/Shelf Tags
This is the chart that always justifies my thread title. Most of what I read falls under either fantasy or science fiction. Fantasy always has the higher number, often three times as high, so this year’s numbers are unusually close. I tend to gravitate toward fantasy series but mostly read standalone science fiction books, so this year I’m trying to fit in some of the science fiction series that I never seem to get to. I expect fantasy will still be significantly higher than science fiction by the end of the year based on my reading plans, but maybe not by quite as much as usual.


Authors Read
These pie charts are also pretty boring this early in the year. I have several new-to-me authors planned, so hopefully the “Authors Read for 1st Time” chart will look better by the end of the year. It’s unusual for me to have read more female than male authors, probably because I’m often reading a lot of older and/or more mainstream SF&F books in my quest to catch up on everything I missed in my early years. Keeping them equal isn’t something I make any significant effort toward; I mostly just read what I want to read regardless of who the author is. Despite that, it’s an easy metric to track so I track it for curiosity’s sake. My awareness of the numbers does probably influence my choices sometimes. I have some more female authors planned for the year, but I also have a lot of male authors planned. I expect the males will “win” the pie charts as usual in the end.

Happy new thread - happy new quarter!

>3 YouKneeK: Average rating of 4? I've never gotten that high in my entire LIFE! sigh.......

>4 quondame: Thanks!

>5 BookstoogeLT: You’re a lot more adventurous than I am with the lesser-known and/or indie authors, though. Plus I’m probably too generous with some of my ratings. When I think back on various books I’ve read I rarely think I should have rated them higher, but sometimes I think I should have rated them half a star lower.

I’m about halfway through Haze now and I think it’s safe to say that whatever rating it ends up with will be under 4, so that should “help” lower my average a bit.

Happy new thread! I hope you have lots of good reading this quarter.

>7 Sakerfalcon: Thanks!

Congrats on a great first quarter.

>9 mattries37315: Thanks!

Review: Haze by L. E. Modesitt Jr.



Haze is a standalone science fiction book by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. When I first started the book, it seemed like it was going to go in a direction that I would enjoy reading about. However, I ended up not caring for it much at all and was a bit bored by it. This is one of those occasions where I probably would have been better off abandoning it, but I’ve never been good at that and it’s not a terribly long book.

The story is set a few millennia in our future. Our existing governments are long gone and the ruling organization is the Federation. They’re in charge of everything, but there are a few rebel/splinter groups. Humanity has ventured into space and colonized other planets, but they haven’t discovered any aliens. The entire story is told from the third-person perspective of Roget, an agent for the Federation who gets sent on various missions, ranging from an undercover mission to investigate a murder on Earth to a mission to a mysterious planet to penetrate the haze surrounding it and make contact with the life forms on the planet, if any exist.

Roget was neither very interesting nor very likeable. He kind of bumbles along, reacting to things and doing what he’s told as best he can, all the while thinking Deep Thoughts and obsessing over the painting of a dog. I’m being a little melodramatic; there’s more to the story than that, but I personally didn’t get much out of it. There’s one point where Roget thinks something that I found quite offensive. This doesn’t really spoil anything about the plot, but I’ll put it in spoiler tags for those who don’t want any advance preconceptions. Roget finds out that a woman he’s been working with for a couple days is in a lesbian relationship, and he thinks to himself that this explains how the woman has been able to maintain a professional relationship with him. And I was like, “Excuse me?!” As a straight and single female who works in a field that’s still considered mostly male-dominated, I have no problem maintaining professional relationships with my male colleagues. Talk about arrogant. I don’t know, I don’t usually seem to get offended that easily at things I read in fiction books, but that one evoked some anger. I don’t think it was necessarily the author’s viewpoint so much as a method of reiterating what he’d already conveyed about the low status women have in Federation society, but it certainly didn’t do anything to make me like the main character more.

The story is very political, with lots of discussion of different ways to handle different political concerns. I often enjoy stories with political intrigue, but there wasn’t really any intrigue here and it wasn’t very nuanced. There were times when I was interested in the story and curious about what would happen next, but over-all this was an easy book for me to put down. I also felt like some things were a little too repetitive or over-explained. We flip between two timelines a few years apart, and I kept trying to guess what the major connection between them would be. Unless I missed something, there really wasn’t much of a connection aside from showing us the events and thought processes that led to Roget’s final actions.

There were glimmers of promise in the story, but it mostly fell flat with me. This was the first book I’ve read by the author, and I do plan to try some of his fantasy work eventually.

Next Book
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. I really enjoyed her Broken Earth trilogy (read in early 2018) and her Dreamblood duology (read in late 2016). I believe this series was one of her first published works and I’ve seen some mixed comments on it, so I’m trying to moderate my expectations based on that. I expect I’ll enjoy it more than my last book in any case!

With regard to your commentary on star ratings. I figure it really makes sense to have higher star ratings when we are picking books to read that we assume we will like. Not necessarily that we are easier with ratings, but that we know ourselves and choose to read what we like.

Well, it's true for me, certainly.

>11 YouKneeK: I've often thought of picking up a Modesitt book over the years but never actually got around to it. Guess if I do in future then it won't be that one.

Looking forward to seeing what you think of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms as I haven't tried any of Jemisin's work either but do have the starter books for a couple of her other series waiting on the tbr shelves for me.

>11 YouKneeK: I'm not really sorry that this didn't work out for you. When you try Modesitt again, I'd go with the Corean Chronicles or the Imager Portfolio series.
I must say that I did laugh at your spoiler. Not because it got you upset but because it rings so true from a man's perspective. Every man thinks he's the center of the universe and God's personal gift to women. That is just how most of us are wired.

Anyway, I hope that Jemison's early work works out for you.

>12 majkia: I think that makes a lot of sense. I like to avoid finding out too much about the books I read so it probably applies a little less to me, but I am still picking books from my favorite genres and I often rearrange my reading plans based on what I’m in the mood for and/or what I guess the books on my list might be about. I was also thinking that my series-reading tactics may play a role in my higher averages. If I like a series, I keep reading it all in a row. Since I’m likely to enjoy the subsequent books, I get a streak of highly-rated books. On the other hand, if I didn’t like the first book then I stop reading it and only have one lower-rated book. I usually rate my series reads pretty high whereas the standalones are more of a mixed bag ratings-wise.

>13 AHS-Wolfy: Yes, I don’t think I would recommend Haze for a first attempt of Modesitt! I’ve been very impressed with everything I’ve read by Jemisin so far. Her Broken Earth trilogy (starting with The Fifth Season) is probably my favorite. The story has stuck with me well, and I really liked some of the things she did with the story structure although I’ve also seen that those same things were a turn-off for other readers.

>14 BookstoogeLT: Haha, I’m now going to be looking suspiciously at all my male colleagues. ;) I’ll keep those other Modesitt books in mind for future attempts, thanks!

>14 BookstoogeLT: That is just how most of us are wired.

Speak for yourself. There are quite a few of us with low self-esteem.

>11 YouKneeK: Yikes! I don't have any Modesitt in my TBR and had always wondered about him. Maybe I'll wait for you to try another of his works before I make a decision.

>11 YouKneeK: etc I've only ever read one Modesitt, adiamante, and I really didn't enjoy it that much. I remember the premise as interesting but that the execution was less impressive.

I read and disposed of The Magic of Recluce years ago. It didn't inspire me to try any others in that series let alone any other of his series. I think I considered it on a par with Terry Brooks's Shannara series, which was another early cull from my library.

>16 jjwilson61: edited

Just not worth it....

>17 Narilka: It may be a rather long wait! ;)

>18 Busifer:, >19 Maddz: After reading some reviews and discussions about Haze, I’m under the impression it was one of his more polarizing books. Based on your reactions to some of his other work, though, it sounds like part of it might just be his normal writing style.

>11 YouKneeK: Can't say I'm really surprised. Try the first of the Imager series and see what you think. The Recluce series always fascinated me because of his strong focus on law vs. chaos instead of good vs. evil, but even that got old after a while, even if it was a little gimmicky to start with; it was still interesting.

>14 BookstoogeLT: Did you try to make a joke?? :)

>23 Karlstar: Not at all. I was being very serious.

Now I'm interested. What was it about it that would suggest me joking? Your own experience, your view of group dynamics, etc? I'm guessing you don't agree and I'd like to hear the what and why, as I wrote from what I've experienced and from what I've seen of others. Please elucidate :-)

>21 YouKneeK:, >14 BookstoogeLT: I was taking a look at the Imager series, which does seem to be better-rated overall, and skimming some reviews of the first book since I’m not likely to remember any spoilers by the time I ever read it. I came across a review on GR that said the main character only exists to be lectured about government and to eat very detailed meals. That made me burst out laughing because it sounded exactly like the main character in Haze. Somebody in the comments said that could stand for 95% of his books. I’m starting to suspect the author might just not be for me, although I will probably still give him one more try eventually.

>25 YouKneeK: Yeah, Modesitt is OBSESSED with his characters eating. I remember in one of the Recluce books where he even described one of the horses eating.

>14 BookstoogeLT: >23 Karlstar:, >24 BookstoogeLT: I'd say that it is not so: when it is it is a matter of culture, and often a generational thing.
Many young (15-25 yo) men in Sweden would take it as a joke or as an insult, while the 50+ segment is more likely to actually think it for real. When they do a lot of people ridicule them.
I am, of course, talking from my Scandinavian perspective. As soon as we go abroad we meet this attitude quite regularly, even if degree and prevalence vary both between countries and within them.

My main point is that it is not universal, hard-wired, but a socialized behaviour. And some cultures are more keen on male dominance than others.

Not that any of you had asked for my opinion. However, to deal with culture and relative normativity is, to some extent, and I decided to not keep quiet ;-)

>26 BookstoogeLT: Oooh… horse food. Now there’s a reason to read a book! :)

>27 Busifer: Within my own experiences here in the U.S. I have seen a few people like that in the workplace, both male and female. Really though, I can’t say I’ve known very many, but I don’t know what’s going on in the privacy of people’s heads and there is likely some obliviousness involved on my part. I think sexual harassment policies also would discourage people from flaunting those attitudes in a way that could cause offense, so I probably see less of it than there is. I saw evidence of it more often when I worked in Ohio as a buyer/planner in a manufacturing facility than I have working in IT here at our corporate offices in Atlanta.

>27 Busifer: Thanks for butting in :-) It is fun to get a different perspective, because as you note, it differs from culture to culture. What I found interesting, and seems to be more and more prevalent even here in the United States, is how the difference is magnified between generations. More of the Millennials, and post-millennials (do they have an official monniker yet?) seem to be more and more similar the world over with less cultural differences as communications has broken down a lot of that.

>28 YouKneeK: Yeah, that one was a real low point in the Recluse Saga for me. I still recommend the Corean Chronicles over anything else by him.

>29 BookstoogeLT: I certainly have heard enough about lace potatoes in Modesitt's book. Don't any of his people go for a good curry? I think the first Imager is my favorite fantasy of his, though I do like The Soprano Sorceress.

>30 quondame: That is funny you mentioned the Soprano Sorceress. I hated that one even more than his Imager series :-D
To be honest though, I suspect a lot of it had to do with me not caring 2 figs for music in general.

>31 BookstoogeLT: With music I have a love-hate relationship. I can't sing or play, and while my hearing isn't good I sure can hear sour notes. I've loved dancing, and like various sorts of music and musical performances, but don't want it on while I'm reading or on the computer.

>29 BookstoogeLT: The generation after Millennials is Generation Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z

>32 quondame: I like easy listening style stuff (Enya, Amethystium, etc) but even then once a month is good enough for me :-)

>33 Narilka: Thanks! I had no idea. Makes me wonder if we're going to start all over at "A" again in a couple of decades ;-)

Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin



The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first book in N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy, and it was also the author’s first published book. I have read and greatly enjoyed her other series, Dreamblood and Broken Earth. This book maybe wasn’t quite as polished and didn’t have quite as much depth as her later works, but it still grabbed my interest from the first page and held it through the end.

Yeine’s mother was the daughter of the most powerful king in the world and would have been his heir, but she married a man from a distant barbarian land and abandoned her home to be his wife. When Yeine’s mother dies, she’s summoned by the grandfather she doesn’t know and informed that he is naming her his heir. The catch is that he’s also named two other heirs, her cousins, and there can only be one in the end. The palace is also populated with real gods who people can see and talk to, and they have their own agenda. The story goes off in a somewhat different direction than one might expect from that premise, but I don’t want to spoil anything.

The story is told from the first-person perspective of Yeine and it’s intentionally told in a somewhat disjointed fashion for reasons that become clear as you get further into the story. In some ways the writing style reminded me of The Fifth Season, although the story itself is very different. This is a complete story with everything resolved by the end, so I’m curious to see where Jemisin takes things in the second book. The ending was a bit different from what I had expected and I had somewhat mixed feelings about it, but I wasn’t dissatisfied by it either.

Looking back on the book, the story maybe didn’t have a ton of meat to it. A lot of time is spent with Yeine obsessing about both her past and her future and her relationships with some of the characters. I didn’t always think Yeine’s actions made a lot of sense, although I did sympathize with her. There were some characters who were more interesting to me that I would have enjoyed seeing more of. I was very much entertained while I read, but it wasn’t quite as compulsive of a read as the books in her other two series were for me.

Next Book
The Broken Kingdoms, the second book in this series.

Review: The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin



The Broken Kingdoms is the second book in N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. It’s set about ten years after the first book and, like the first book, it tells a complete story with a beginning and end. It mostly focuses on different characters, but some familiar characters from the first book show up too.

The story is told from the first-person perspective of Oree, a woman who can see gods, godlings, and magic but is otherwise blind. On a few rare occasions I thought she seemed to know things that she should not have been able to know without sight, even with her other heightened senses, but for the most part I bought into her blindness and sometimes felt, in a mental sort of way, kind of blind myself for not knowing exactly what was going on around her when she couldn’t see. Her ability to see magic and magical beings was a bit convenient though, since those things were often around during key action points in the story to help her see.

This book had more humor than the first book, or at least I laughed out loud more than I remember laughing when I read the first book. I enjoyed the first book a lot, but I enjoyed this a little more. I thought the story had more meat and the main character behaved in a more relatable way. I gave the first book 4 stars, but I’m giving this one 4.5 and rounding down to 4 on Goodreads. I look forward to seeing where she goes with the third book.

I have a few spoilery comments about the ending…
At first I thought the ending was going to be too bittersweet for me, but the author added a bit more sweet to overwhelm the bitter at the very end. Finding out she was pregnant was really a huge cliché that I should have seen coming, but I actually didn’t anticipate that at all and was surprised when Oree revealed it and we learned that it was her unborn baby she was telling her story to. Her hopes for what the future might hold were a large part of what helped make the ending more enjoyable for me.

Next Book
The Kingdom of Gods, book three in the above trilogy. There’s also a novella set after it that I’ll likely read.

Review: The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin



The Kingdom of Gods is the third book in N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. Like the first two books it tells a complete story, although I think the background from the earlier books adds more depth that one wouldn’t get if they jumped straight to this book for some ungodly reason. If I were a godling, I’d be the godling of Reading Series Books in Consecutive Order. :)

The story is set several decades after the last book and the main character is a godling that we’ve met before, but he’s new as a POV character. I’m going to put his name in spoiler tags for those who want to be surprised: Sieh, the godling of childhood, sometimes called the Trickster. Although he did some things that I didn’t like and could not respect, he was often a fun voice to narrate the story and I did like him quite well by the end. I thought there were a few slow spots, but it mostly held my interest. In fact, until I finished and started updating my notes, I completely forgot that it was 200 pages longer than each of the previous two books. It didn’t feel longer to me.

For most of the book I was planning to give this a solid 4 stars, or possibly 4.5 and round down to 4 on Goodreads, but the ending made me very happy. And then, in my edition anyway, it was followed up with a short story called Not the End which takes place after this third book but provides some closure to the second book. It was a bit sappy, but it made me happy too. And then that was followed up with a glossary that totally cracked me up. Clearly the author made the mistake of letting her main character get a hold of it! So after all of those smiles at the end, I decided to rate it at 4.5 stars and round up to 5 on Goodreads.

I have a few more spoiler-filled comments, mostly about the ending.
At the beginning of the book, Sieh said something about how he wasn’t going to play any tricks about who he was writing to, and then made snide references to how we found out who the narrators of the previous two books were writing to. Near the end of the book after Sieh died and Shahar took over the narration, I thought Sieh had actually played the cruelest trick of them all and I wasn’t very happy at all. But I was all smiles by the end of the Coda.

I think with every book in this trilogy I’ve reached the almost-end feeling unhappy about how things were clearly going to end, only to find that the author still had one more trick up her sleeve that at least partially turned things around for me. I still had mixed feelings about the final endings of the first two books, but I really liked the end of this one. The short story at the end made me feel happier about the second book also, especially given the misinformation that Glee had intentionally given to Sieh during book three.

Next Book
The Awakened Kingdom, a 250-page novella that I believe is set after the above trilogy. After this, I’ll have finished the series and will be moving on to other things.

>37 YouKneeK: Almost 1500 pages of Jemisin and still going in for another 250. Keep it up trooper, the United Book Corp needs more men and women like you!

>38 BookstoogeLT: Ha, this is more like shore leave since I enjoy her writing. :) So far the novella is only moderately entertaining compared to the others, though.

>37 YouKneeK: Uh oh, the "Although he did some things that I didn’t like and could not respect" part makes me wonder if I should avoid this.

>40 Karlstar: It depends on your tolerance for capricious, god-like characters who overreact to things and don’t consider or care about the impact of their actions on the mortals around them. :) He does mellow out a bit as the story goes on.

Review: The Awakened Kingdom by N. K. Jemisin



The Awakened Kingdom is a novella set about 300 years after the third book in N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. It’s told from the point of view of a very young godling who is only a little over a month old. She visits humans for the first time, on the same planet where the previous books took place, and learns a lot about life in general and about herself.

This was cute, but it was my least-favorite of Jemisin’s work by a good margin. The main character has a very bouncy, hyper voice that made me cringe sometimes. It fit her age and her personality and her experiences, but it was a bit much for me. The message was also not terribly subtle. I kept getting flashbacks to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Angel One”, which was not at all a favorite of mine.

Nevertheless, it still held my interest and I did like the main character despite her childish voice, especially as she gained more knowledge and some maturity. I liked the way she looked at things, and I liked how hard she tried to do the right thing. It was also a very fast read. The Amazon product page claims my edition is 250 pages, but there’s absolutely no way. I checked the page counts for other editions and most of them show 124 pages. That’s in line with the amount of time it took me to read, so I’m going with that for my personal records.

Next Book
Now I’m going to do my classic reads for the second quarter, starting with Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. My decision to read this was inspired by the references to it in Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog, which I read recently.

I hope you enjoy Three Men in a Boat!

>43 MrsLee: Thanks! I've only had time for a couple chapters so far, but I've enjoyed what I've read. I particularly enjoyed the prescription the doctor gave to the main character. :)

Review: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome



Three Men in a Boat was originally published in 1889 and was one of my classic selections this quarter. I try to read one or two classics per quarter in the middle of what is otherwise a steady diet of SF&F. This particular choice was a more spur-of-the-moment decision, influenced by the references to it in Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog.

It’s quite a short book at around 185 pages and chock full of amusing anecdotes. It doesn’t have much of an actual story to it. Three friends decide to spend a fortnight traveling by boat up the Thames river for health and relaxation. This is literally the extent of the plot. There are no mysteries or twists and turns or anything like that. It also takes a while before the trip commences. The first two characters finally get into the boat after about 25% of the book, and the third man finally makes it into the boat after about 40%.

Even after the boat trip begins, there are many diversions as the characters reminisce about past events that they experienced or heard about. The narrative flows in an almost stream-of-consciousness manner as one anecdote leads to another and then to another before the author returns to the “present” to briefly describe a little more of their boat journey.

The lack of a story kept me from getting very engrossed, but I did laugh a lot while reading it. Most of the anecdotes were quite funny, although some of them were a bit slaptick-ish. The author had a humorous, sarcastic writing voice that I enjoyed and he was full of observations about human nature that modern readers can still easily relate to. I’m rating it at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Othello by William Shakespeare. The timing worked out well; I should hopefully be able to read this over the weekend and have time to follow it up right away with a movie adaptation. Amazon has a Branagh version available to stream, so I’ll probably choose that based on past experiences.

We read Othello when I was in high school, but I remember absolutely nothing about it except the title. That’s the main reason I chose to read it this year. I think this was the last Shakespeare selection we were required to read, by which time I had already decided I didn’t like Shakespeare, so I probably didn’t go into it with a great attitude. Whether I like the story or not now remains to be seen, but I’m bound to get more out of it than I did back then.

>45 YouKneeK: Glad you enjoyed 3MiaB; I must admit it’s been years since I read it. Oddly, my sister and her family live in the Windsor area and Thames-side walks were a feature on family visits.

Re Othello, didn’t Paul Robeson do a film adaptation? I seem to remember Lawrence Olivier also doing a version too, although it may be politically incorrect now as I think he blacked up. One thing to remember is that Moro in Italian is Black and was a nickname for several Italian families. I think either one of the Visconti or the Sforza families (Dukes of Milan) was nicknamed Il Moro.

>46 Maddz: When it comes to that, what about the prominent Italian politician, Aldo Moro, who was "liquidated" by the Mafia?

>47 hfglen: Gosh, that takes me back. I remember the headlines at the time, and doesn’t one of Timothy Holmes’s books have a similar storyline?

>48 Maddz: Dunno, as I've never heard of the author. By the way, the link offered by the touchstone seems to me to be bizarrely wrong.

>46 Maddz: Paul Robeson was famous for being the first black man to play Othello at a famous venue in New York, but I am not sure that his performance was ever filmed.

Shakespeare definitely intends Othello to be understood as being black. Apart from many references to his skin colour, there is the passage whsre he explains how he wooed Desdemona by impressing her with his history - which includes being captured and enslaved as a child, then rising through battles and wounds to his current eminence.

>46 Maddz: I didn’t really pay too much attention to what other adaptations there were once I found the one I wanted. I skimmed through them, but I don’t know many actors so most of the names I saw went in one eye and out the other.

>50 -pilgrim-: I’m a little over halfway through the play now and Othello’s skin color was made (repeatedly) clear from the beginning, although I did read it in the introductory info first. But I think probably the point Maddz was making in terms of political-incorrectness is that Olivier was a white actor who used makeup to appear black for the purposes of the role.

>51 YouKneeK: Yes indeed. But I thought from the discussion of Moro as a surname, Maddz was also suggesting the Othello being "Il Moro" might have been a nickname for his family rather than a reference to his race.

>50 -pilgrim-:, >52 -pilgrim-: As I said, I was relying on memory. I’m currently away with limited Internet access (basically my phone) so it’s difficult checking things out let alone typing.

Othello wasn’t one of the plays we did at school - I think it was an A-level text in the 1970s and I did science at A-level. In any case, Shakespeare recycled stories from different sources for his non-historical plays. I’ve now checked the Wikipedia article and yes, the Robeson Othello was never filmed (but was released as audio) but the Olivier was.

>49 hfglen: Yes, that is well wrong. Try Timothy Holme instead!

>52 -pilgrim-: I wasn't intending any criticism, just expanding on the subject. I have only a phone with me here too, so I appreciate the problems!

Like you I did sciences at A-level, but I joined the A-level English class" trip to Stratford to see Donald Sinden play Othello. A great actor, not a great performance (he descended into scenery-chewing madness too rapidly, in ny opinion), but it did feel uncomfortable to see a man with such a quintessentially patrician English physiognomy "blacking up".

Still, we are in Shakespeare's world, where women were played by men; I suppose this was how the author himself would have expected Othello to be played. But maybe not blacked up? I suspect the plethora of referenced to Othello's skin colour in the text may be to remind the audience of something not actually visible to them.

>54 -pilgrim-: According to the Wikipedia article, it’s thought Shakespeare may have been influenced by the Moorish embassies to QE1. IIRC, the term ‘Moorish’ was used to refer mostly to North Africans (especially the Berber population) rather than Sub-Saharan Africans (remember the line in Romeo & Juliet about a pearl in an Ethiop’s ear?)

>55 Maddz: Just what I was about to write.

I will say though that both the island of Corsica and the island of Sardinia has flags sporting a version of moor that go some time back, and that version is pitch black. I'm no expert on the history of the region, but I seem to remember these moors as a heritage from Aragonese heraldry (14th century), with an added St Georges cross on the Sardininan flag.
There's a 13th century version of the Corsican flag that has a very brown moor, though.

My guess is that "the Moor" (il moro) was used as a nickname for anyone who was perceived to have a dark complexion, regardless of actual skin tone or descent, or, in Shakespeare's case, perhaps simply as marking someone as being "not from here".

I've got several Moor head livery buttons, so I was interested to do a bit of research. It appears to reach back to St. Maurice, from Egypt, who led a Roman legion of Egyptian Christians. They were deployed to Gaul and were all executed by Emperor Maximian for refusing to offer sacrifice to the emperor, or alternatively, to harass Gaulish Christians.

Review: Othello by William Shakespeare



Othello was the Shakespeare tragedy that I chose to read for this year. I liked it reasonably well. I still didn’t like it as well as Hamlet, but I did like it better than Macbeth. Much of Othello is made up of characters plotting and carrying out those plots via dialogue, so it was more readable as a play than something like Macbeth where much of the story is action that isn’t shown on the page.

It does seem like, at least of the plays I’ve read, there are a lot of very similar themes, plot devices, and character types across the plays. The details of the stories may be different, but there are a lot of similarities. I’ve now read 4 Shakespeare plays in about 17 months, so I figure this makes me an expert. (Yes, I’m joking.) The familiarity of those themes made the story feel predictable and occasionally a bit tedious. I also get very frustrated with characters who believe the worst about somebody without tangible proof and without giving the other person a chance to explain themselves. Additionally, I had some trouble buying into the gullibility of Othello and some of the other characters. Aside from that, the story was very easy to follow and held my interest well. Given that this is a Shakespeare tragedy and I knew there would be many deaths by the end, I amused myself by predicting who would die and how.

When I finished reading the play, I immediately followed it up by watching one of the movie adaptations, the 1995 Kenneth Branagh version. When I did this with Hamlet, I enjoyed the experience but came away feeling like the version in my head from reading the play was slightly superior. In the case of Othello however, the movie was very much an improvement over my reading of the play. The actors played the characters far more convincingly than I had read them myself, especially Iago. Seeing how earnestly Iago spoke to the people he was deceiving made it easier to understand how they were deceived. I also felt Othello’s torment much more strongly through the actor’s portrayal of the character.

So, three stars for the reading experience, but I would give it 3.5 if not 4 stars if I were rating it based on the combined experience including the movie.

Next Book
Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill. I don’t know anything about the book, but one friend on GR gave it 5 stars and another one abandoned it at 23%, so that makes me curious.

>57 2wonderY: I'll be short on the Moor issue, but I want to add that the Christian world also tagged the North African-descendants on the Iberian peninsula Moors, which means that during the middle ages "Moor" could be anyone from that part of the world, as well.

>58 YouKneeK: I think Shakespeare at his best was shrewd at portraying power and power balances, and what power do to the ones that try to wield it. How would you rate Othello against, say Henry IV through VI, or Richard III? I've always thought that I should read Othello, but I must admit that I'm more intrigued by his Histories than his Tragedies...

>58 YouKneeK: I've been enjoying your Shakespeare journey. It's been so long since I read or watched Othello I don't remember it very well. Not that I think I'll be rereading the plays any time soon :)

>59 Busifer: I haven’t read any of the histories yet. I have very few Shakespeare plays under my belt. I avoided the classics after completing school and it’s only in the past few years that I’ve started trying to fit them into my reading again. So far I’ve only read Hamlet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello. I also still remember reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream pretty well from high school, and I’ve seen The Comedy of Errors performed as a play twice but haven’t read it.

>60 Narilka: One nice thing is that they’re extremely fast reads because there are so few words on a page. I remembered them as being long and torturous in school, but I guess it’s just because we spent so long studying them. :) Even with reading nearly all the additional content and all the footnotes in my editions, and re-reading several passages for clarity, I can easily finish them in a day or two.

>58 YouKneeK: I noticed you haven't really mentioned the editors, etc contributions. Is that because they are pretty much invisible (good in my books) or because you just ignore their intrusions? I'm nearing the end of Howard's End and the intro by some hoity toity out of touch with reality english lit lover absolutely infuriated me. I almost didn't even bother starting the book I was so pissed off. Thankfully, it is a Barnes&Noble edition so the notes IN the book itself are pretty much explanations for things that don't matter (like the name of a painter when a painting is mentioned). My shakespeare journey has been without editorial oversite and I know I'm missing stuff but overall I'm much happier with that.

So I'm just curious what your experience has been.

>61 YouKneeK: I really recommend the histories. To me that's were he really excelled.

I only studied Hamlet in school but definitely get the "tortuous" aspect. We too spent long hours on a slim set of pages; put me off Shakespeare until I started fraternising here at the Dragon.

>62 BookstoogeLT: All the Shakespeare plays I’ve read have been Folger editions. Their Hamlet edition worked well for me, so I’ve just stuck with them since then. The additional content has seemed pretty standard to me. Nothing particularly enraging or uppity that I’ve noticed. :) The discussions of the play are moderately interesting, but I skip the sections about Shakespeare’s life and works in general because they appear to be repeating the same content in each edition and I don’t need or want to read it every time! I could take or leave the supplementary sections, but I do like the annotations.

Although the text has a lot of annotations, each one is usually very brief, mostly confined to one or two words to help clarify meanings. I’ve found them helpful, or at least not so intrusive as to be a hindrance. While reading, I have the play open on my Kindle and the annotations open on my tablet and I keep them side by side. This lets me quickly flick my eyes over to the corresponding annotations without really interrupting the flow of my reading. I like having it all in front of me; it’s distracting and slows me down if I have to click on links to open the annotations, especially since that covers part of the text.

The annotations do seem increasingly obvious to me as I’ve gotten more familiar with his writing, but some of them are still helpful to me. I particularly appreciate the explanations for familiar words that have a different meaning from what modern readers would expect. Many of those are obvious from the context, but there are things I would have misunderstood otherwise. One phrase that amused me in Othello was, “He says he will return incontinent”. Incontinent here means “immediately”. I incontinently guessed that this word didn’t mean what I thought it did, but I’m not sure I ever would have guessed it meant “immediately” if not for the fact that the character in question had just recently said he would “be returned forthwith”.

I do think I wouldn't suffer much confusion if I ignored all the extra material altogether, though. When I read older material without commentary, I usually find that everything sorts itself out eventually through context.

>63 Busifer: Thanks, I was considering starting the histories next year since I’ve hit all the tragedies that I was most curious to read. I’m not entirely decided yet, but it might be a good idea since I'm starting to find the themes in the tragedies repetitive.

>65 YouKneeK: I suppose the repetitiveness lies in the performance aspect; did you not see the same thing in Homer? As in Homer, it’s likely to be a mnemonic device for the actors.

>66 Maddz: I was talking about repetitiveness across different works. The Iliad has tons of repeated phrases, but that seemed like an integral part of the epic poetry. Within other types of works, I see that kind of repetition as being either an artistic choice or a device to evoke humor, depending on the type of work it is.

I was talking about things found in multiple Shakespeare works, like the evil character who plots against the good character for power and/or revenge, the innocent girl who gets caught up in the middle of things and is completely bewildered, the naïve character(s) who believe the lies they’re told and immediately over-react, etc. Just like some more modern authors tend to repeat similar character types or events throughout their unrelated works, making their stories feel more predictable.

>67 YouKneeK: Ah, I see what you mean. I suspect though it’s a feature not a bug, in that the players would be doing repertory so would have 2 or 3 plays on the go simultaneously which means using stock characters as it’s easier to remember (and if you forget the specific lines it’s easy to ad lib).

Some years ago I co-wrote a convention freeform (a political LARP) and using stock characters was easier on the writers. Having stock characters made it easy to assign motivations and abilities, and to ensure everyone was in a plotline.

>68 Maddz: Haha, I now have an image of an actor trying to address somebody by their character name and getting the names all mixed up from different plays. But it does make sense that stock characters would also greatly simplify things for the writers and actors.

Review: Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill



Sea of Rust is a standalone science fiction book that was a little different from anything I myself have ever read before, although I’ve heard it may have some similarities to Asimov’s work which I haven’t yet read. I really enjoyed this.

It's an artificial-life-takes-over-the-world story, but the robots have already won the war. The story begins 15 years after the last known human has been killed. We do get some flashback chapters that tell us how things came to be the way they are, but it’s a comparatively small part of the book. Now the artificial lifeforms have their own war going on. The large mainframe computers who were instrumental in defeating the humans are trying to absorb all of the individual robots into a Borg-like collective, so the individual robots are constantly on the run with failing robot parts and diminishing supplies.

The story is told from the first-person POV of a robot named Brittle. She’s full of shades of grey when it comes to morality. She does some pretty rotten stuff, but she still manages to be a sympathetic character. One tiny thing that I really loved about this book is that the chapters are numbered in binary. Considering that the story is being told to us by a robot, I thought that was perfect. It was a little bleak at times, but definitely not the bleakest thing I've ever read.

For the most part I was engrossed by the book, but it gets pretty action-heavy at times and this was one of those books where the action didn’t always hold my attention well. Some books do and some books don’t, and I’m never quite sure what makes the difference. There were also a few niggling things that I didn’t completely buy into. One was the emotions of the robots. Guilt, friendship, anger, etc. It was never explained how they developed this, and I don’t think an artificial lifeform developing sentience would automatically mean they develop human emotions to go along with that. I also wasn’t completely convinced that it should be that difficult for them to get supplies. These are pretty intelligent creatures; they ought to be able to reverse engineer their parts and figure out how to make new ones. I think the idea was that the mainframes were using their facets to maintain control of the necessary resources, so I mostly let that pass, but I was still occasionally bothered by moments of skepticism.

I have a couple brief comments for the spoiler tags:
I really enjoyed the twist where we found out the robots had engineered the downfall of humanity to get rid of them so that the universe could survive over the long-term. I found that whole explanation for what was done and why they did it interesting, and I hadn’t seen that coming at all. I had bought into Brittle's explanation of past events as much as she had.

I was not surprised when Brittle turned out to be the Judas Goat. I was convinced of that the moment she started talking about it, before she even mused that she herself could be one.

I would like to leave you with a thought that you may have heard before: There are only 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Next Book
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I’ve wanted to read this for a while, and the group I’m in over on GR is reading it for May so this seemed like a good time to slip it into the schedule. I’ve seen some mixed reviews for it, but I enjoyed both Uprooted and her Temeraire series so I hope to enjoy this one at least somewhat.

>70 YouKneeK: that twist part, that is why I didn't bother with this book or this author. That is the ultimate hubris on display. I wouldn't enjoy it all.

I have to admit, I laughed at your joke. Not sure if that is a good or bad thing :-D

>71 BookstoogeLT: When I was checking the work page to see if you had a review on there, I was predicting that you would have given it a low rating if you had. :)

Laughing at the joke may qualify you for geek status if you would like to claim it. I recently bought a t-shirt with that joke on it. I think wearing the joke probably makes one a geek whether they formally claim that title or not…

>72 YouKneeK: Yeah, I'm ok with my geek/nerd status. I play and collect Magic the Gathering after all :-D

I love the idea of that joke being on a t-shirt.

>70 YouKneeK: I'll be interested in your take on Spinning Silver. I've read the same Novik books you note, and I just finished SS. It may be the antihistamine meds I was on, but gosh, it seemed to go on forever!

>70 YouKneeK: This has been on my radar though I've yet to pull the trigger. Even with you're review I'm still undecided. I hope you enjoy Spinning Silver.

>35 YouKneeK: Glad to see that you gave a decent rating to this series. I've been avoiding it because I thought I heard people grumbling that it wasn't as good as The Broken Earth series. Maybe I'll put it on my back back burner.

Hope you enjoy Spinning Silver. As >74 2wonderY: said I did think it was just a wee bit too long, but I loved it anyway.

>70 YouKneeK: That's a joke only a geek could love. Its always funny!

>77 Karlstar: And we do. :)

>70 YouKneeK: - I'm surprisingly tempted by this, I like clever books as long as the author can tell a story alongside the originality.

>74 2wonderY:, >76 clamairy: Just when I was sitting down to read Spinning Silver yesterday, a work issue came up. I never managed to read more than a couple paragraphs, so I have no initial impressions yet. However, if I have to read the rest of the book at this pace, I’ll likely think it’s going on forever too. ;)

>75 Narilka: The group I’m in on GR read Sea of Rust last year which was how it got on my radar, but I didn’t join in at the time. I caught the book on sale later which was what motivated me to try it. I do wish in retrospect that I’d read it when the group did because it would have been an interesting book to discuss.

>76 clamairy: Regarding Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy, it may have helped that my expectations were a little low from hearing those same grumblings, but I thought it was a well-written and enjoyable read, better than a lot of other books out there, even if it wasn’t quite as amazing as Broken Earth.

>77 Karlstar:, >78 -pilgrim-: I think I was a latecomer to the joke as I only remember first hearing it a couple of years ago, but it’s stuck with me since then.

>79 reading_fox: I did think the author told his story well. I’d love to hear what you and/or >75 Narilka: think of it if either of you do try it! I don’t know too many people who have read it.

>80 YouKneeK: I have a copy of Sea of Rust somewhere, but it never made it to the top of my TBR pile somehow.

>81 -pilgrim-:
::Points over -pilgrim-‘s shoulder::
Hey, what’s that?
::Slips Sea of Rust to the top of the TBR pile.::

>82 YouKneeK:
*snurfle*

Review: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik



Spinning Silver is a standalone fantasy novel that plays quite a bit with fairy tale themes, while still telling its own unique story. The main fairy tale that it pays homage to is Rumpelstiltskin, in a very loose way. There are elements that are inspired by that tale, but it is really a completely different story. There are also small references to other fairy tales. The first character we’re introduced to is Miryem, the daughter of a moneylender who lends money and then never asks for it back. When their resulting poverty affects her mother’s health, she decides to take some action of her own.

The format of this is different from anything else I remember reading in that it has multiple first-person POVs. It starts off with just a couple, but I counted about six by the end with some having more pages than others. I had read reviews warning of this already, so I went into the book prepared. I could see how it would be very difficult to follow in audio, but I really didn’t have any trouble reading it in a text format. On the other hand, I didn’t feel like the format enhanced the story versus just telling it in multiple third-person POVs. To my mind, the main distinguishing characteristic of a first-person POV is how it restricts the reader’s knowledge to only what that character knows, adding an element of suspense and sometimes confusion as the reader tries along with the main character to figure out what’s going on. With multiple first-person POVs, the reader’s knowledge is no longer restricted. Much like with a third-person multi-POV story, the reader can see the different things going on with different characters and imagine how things will connect and result in a cohesive story. I guess the first-person POV adds a little more intimacy to the tone, but I’ve always found characters equally compelling in either POV if they’re written well.

Anyway, for me I don’t think the POV choice really affected my opinion about the book one way or another, aside from occasionally wondering at the choice. The story held my attention well while I was reading it, but I never felt completely engrossed by it. Her other standalone fantasy, Uprooted, sucked me in much more strongly. I can’t really say why I enjoyed this one less, though. It was a good story, I liked the characters, and I was pretty much satisfied with the end. I did have a lot of outside distractions while I was trying to read it, so that likely impacted my enjoyment.

Next Book
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, the first book in the Long Earth series. I’ve had this on my list for a few years, and I’ve even scheduled it to read a few times, but I’ve never felt very enthusiastic about reading it so I keep swapping it out for something else. I’m not even sure why. This year I’m determined to knock it off the list. Worst case, if I don’t like it enough to want to read the whole series, I can free up some space on my schedule and finally stop seeing it on my TBR list.

>84 YouKneeK: I thought the multiple first person POVs provided a Rashomon effect. Not a strong one, but an extra dimension.

>85 quondame: I haven’t read that one. Sometimes I imagined that the characters were all sitting around a table at some point in their future explaining what had happened to other people, with each person jumping in to tell their part of the story at the appropriate point.

>86 YouKneeK: It was recently on sale at Amazon.co.uk but the edition suffered from some formatting issues (probably because I generally convert to epub). As it happens, Rashomon (the film) is not the same story in the book. It's in the same collection, but it has a different title.

>87 Maddz: That’s unfortunate about the formatting.

>86 YouKneeK: I first saw the movie Rashomon when I was quite young, and it's retelling the same rape/murder through the eyes of the murderer, the wife, the (dead) husband, and a bystander, left a permanent impression. The 4 versions were all quite different and self serving, which is what is referred to when Rashomon is used as descriptive. It isn't my favorite movie with Toshiro Mifune, but it's way up there.

>89 quondame: That sounds rather interesting, actually. It seems like I've read something with a similar style, with the same portions of a story being repeated from different POVs, but I'm drawing a blank on what it might have been.

>84 YouKneeK: Glad you enjoyed it :) I have Uprooted in my TBR still. I really need to cycle it in one of these days.

>89 quondame: As Seven Samurai was retooled into The Magnificent Seven, Rashomon became The Outrage. I'm not claiming that Star Wars really was a remake of Hidden Fortress, though Yojimbo did become A Fist Full of Dollars.

>91 Narilka: Thanks! It will be interesting to find out what you think of Uprooted. Just going by the discussions over on GR, it seems like a lot of people who didn’t like one of the books really liked the other one, although there were also several of us who liked both but still favored one of them.

Review: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter



The Long Earth is the first book in a five-book science fiction series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. The main premise is that humans have discovered that it’s possible to “step” to a seemingly-unlimited number of alternate earths, all of which appear to be pristine wildernesses with no humans to be found. Many people take advantage of this discovery for a variety of purposes: to start new pioneer colonies, to exploit resources, to enjoy solitude, and to just explore.

I thought the premise was interesting, and there were interesting ideas throughout, but the execution was often dull. My interest was all over the place while I read it. Sometimes I was caught up in the story, other times I was completely bored, and everything in-between. It wandered off into side stories a lot, but sometimes it was the side stories I enjoyed more than the main narrative. Most if not all of the side stories did tie into the main narrative eventually.

This book didn’t feel like a complete story by itself. Several questions are answered, and others are hinted at, but this is clearly just the beginning of a longer story. I didn’t enjoy the first book enough to continue, though. Alternate universes are a science fiction trope I usually enjoy, but this one didn’t work that well for me.

Next Book
Last year I tried my first graphic novel when I read Watchmen. Those who were around to read that review may remember that I had mixed reactions to it, both story-wise and format-wise. A while back I bought Nimona on sale, so I’m going to attempt my second graphic novel next. I suspect this one will prove simpler for somebody like me, a not-very-visual person who finds it more of a struggle to extract meaning from pictures than from words.

>94 YouKneeK: Thank you for that review, which articulates my dissatisfaction with that series. At various times I've had all five out of the library in the hopes of finding one I could finish, and in which I could discern Sir pTerry's hand. No luck.

>94 YouKneeK: Well, at least you now get to knock a whole series off your tbr :-)

>95 hfglen: It’s good to know I’m probably not missing out on anything by not trying to push through the rest.

>96 BookstoogeLT: Ha, yes, I took some serious satisfaction from deleting those other four rows on my reading schedule spreadsheet. :)

>94 YouKneeK: Your mention of The Long Earth upthread, and Pratchett's name, made me order the audio. You're right - it is all over the place. I may continue to listen, or I may move on to more shiny titles.

>94 YouKneeK:, >98 2wonderY: I received a copy of The Long Earth as a present a long time ago. It has never been able to hold my attention long enough to get through it. It is heartening to know that I am not alone.

>98 2wonderY: The story does get a bit more focused as it progresses. Oddly, that was when I started getting the most bored. If you do continue on with it, I'd be interested to read what you think of the rest!

>99 -pilgrim-: It does seem like there is a pattern developing here with people who have read or tried to read this book.

Review: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson



Nimona is my second attempt at reading a graphic novel, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than my first attempt. This is a fast read with very simple, straight-forward pictures and not even very many words. It probably would have been a better choice for my first graphic novel than Watchmen was.

The story opens with a young girl named Nimona imposing herself on a supervillain named Blackheart and insisting that she become his sidekick. She’s very gung-ho and bloodthirsty about the idea of helping Blackheart with his evil plans. We soon learn that there’s more to her than meets the eye as she shows off her shapeshifting abilities, but there’s more to Blackheart than meets the eye, too.

When I first started it, it seemed a little too young and “cutsie”. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it. It really grew on me as I kept reading though, and it had more meat than I initially expected it to have. I loved Blackheart nearly from the beginning, but Nimona was really annoying to me at first. Her behavior made more sense by the end, although I thought her story could have been fleshed out better. We’re given enough information to get the gist of it, but there are a lot of gaps.

I very much enjoyed the character relationships, and also the light humor sprinkled throughout. It wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, at least not for me, but I did smile or chuckle a few times. The artwork seemed a little odd to me, but I did appreciate its simplicity that made it easy for even me to follow.

Next Book
Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. I bought this book on sale 2.5 years ago but haven’t yet gotten around to trying it. Some of the discussion about it in my previous thread made it sound more appealing to me than it had previously, so I’m curious to try it now. Worst case, if I don’t like it, I’ll be able to knock another series off the list.

>101 YouKneeK: Glad your second GN was a much better success. I'm not a Watchmen fan anyway, so the fact that you didn't absolutely love it warmed the grinchly cockles of my heart.

Now. I AM a huge fan of the Night Watch series. My enjoyment grew through the series though. I was very offput by the first book as I wasn't used to the switching between first and third (or second, I can't remember) points of view for the prologues and the short stories.

>102 BookstoogeLT: LOL :) I’ve only had time to read the prologue and the first chapter of Night Watch, about 25 pages, but so far so good. I’m pretty interested in it and looking forward to sitting back down to read more of it. I’ve read a few other books that played around with having different POV styles in the same book, so I don’t think it will bother me much.

>94 YouKneeK: from my review "I'd only advise reading this if you're fan of Baxter's writing. I'm not." I finished it, but didn't have any inclination to read any of the others. I couldn't discern much of pTerry's voice in any of it, and had issues with the whole iron non-transfer thing. Statistically yes the history of earth is mostly forest and Silence, but it was dull to read about.

>104 reading_fox: It sounds like we had a similar reaction. I don’t think I’ve read any of Baxter’s work before.

My interest spiked at the section where the police are discussing the law enforcement angles, especially on Earth prime.

Yeah, the iron non-transfer makes no sense. So smelter operations in those worlds should be more valuable than anything.

>106 2wonderY: I enjoyed the parts that discussed how criminals were using stepping to access previously inaccessible places, and the prevention methods. The criminal element might have made the foundation for an interesting thriller/mystery story.

Edited to put the following in spoiler tags as I can't really remember when this came up in the story and I don't want to spoil anything. It's a minor part of the book anyway, but just to be safe!

The discussions about creating laws to restrict stepping were a little more bizarre to me. I recognized that the authors were trying to make a political statement, but I didn’t find it believable within the context of the story. Even if they banned electronics parts from being purchased without a license or something, people could disassemble any of the many electronic devices in their homes for parts. Restricting potatoes would be even more pointless because they could easily be grown/harvested on the many other earths and brought into Datum.

Review: Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko



Night Watch is the first book in a six-book series. I would consider this to be urban fantasy. It’s set in Moscow and focuses on “Others”, people with special abilities who walk among non-humans unrecognized, usually picking a side between the Light and the Dark and working in organized groups toward the goals of their chosen side. Since both sides seem primarily concerned with maintaining a balance, the lines between them are a little blurry. Rules are in place to keep conflict between the two sides from escalating into a war. If somebody strikes a blow for the Light, then the other side has the right to strike an equal blow for the Dark.

The structure is a little different; it consists of three individual stories. Each one tells a complete story, but follows the same main character and builds on the previous stories. This book was originally published in Russia in the late 1990’s. I read an English translation, of course. The only way I could read a Russian book in its original language would be if it were transliterated into the English alphabet and if it consisted solely of the word “nyet”. I enjoyed getting some sense of Russian culture through the book, although it wasn’t a very strong sense because the story focused mostly on the fantasy elements and very little on the day-to-day lives of normal people.

I didn’t always feel like I understood the motivations of the characters. I always had some sort of a “wait, what?” type of reaction at some point during the climactic events of each story. It seemed like characters took the long way around to work toward their goals, and the main character was often ineffective. The main character’s actions made more sense than anybody else’s since we were in his head, but even his actions didn’t always make sense to me. He was a likeable character though, a bit bumbling and confused, but well-meaning.

I think my biggest complaint about the book would be the constant and repetitive musings on morality as it related to the actions of the Light versus the Dark. In the first story when I was still learning about the setting, it was interesting to learn about the choices that the sides had made, why they had made them, and consider whether their choices were ultimately more or less harmful than alternate choices. But then in the second story the characters continued to muse over more-or-less the same things, and it started to get tiresome. By the third story, of which at least half seemed to consist of more repetition of these same thoughts, I had reached the “please make it stop” point. I liked the way the story had this moral gray area, but I didn’t need its existence beaten into my head so much.

Aside from those complaints, it was a quick read that held my attention well. I enjoyed the concepts introduced and I liked the stories and the characters. I’m not sure if the setting can sustain my interest for a full six books, but I liked the first book well enough to try the second. I’m rating it at 3.5 stars and rounding up to 4 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, the second book in this series.

>108 YouKneeK: I haven't read these (yet), but I did enjoy the two movies I have seen. The books are on Mt TBR, (along with what seems like millions of others).

Semi-spoilerish comments on the structure of the movies here.

>108 YouKneeK: Glad you enjoyed it at least this much. I was thinking i had read it back in '17 but looking at my review it was a wee bit longer. I've always enjoyed the Russian viewpoint of life (at least in books) so that aspect always appealed to me instead of turning me away. I can't remember if the moralizing goes on for the series but I do know that you're going to see Anton mature as a character and a person so don't worry about him staying a flat mouthpiece for the author.

How'd you find the musical lyrical thingy? That drove me batty and I just ended up skipping all the songs in the rest of the series, no matter if they might have a clue about the plot or not. I just didn't care! :-)

>109 ScoLgo: I might have to check out the movies next time I’m in the mood to watch something. If the books ever find their way out of your TBR mountain, I’d be interested to read what you think of them.

>110 BookstoogeLT: There was a good bit more moralizing in the first chapter of the second book, although this time it was from somebody on the Day Watch so at least it was a slightly different perspective. I’m still holding out hope that it won’t get as repetitive in this book, but we’ll see.

I read the music lyrics, but I didn’t really get anything out of them. They mostly seemed to reiterate the feelings the main character was having, which I already understood without the lyrics. Maybe it was supposed to add more weight to it, but it didn’t work for me. I usually don’t care much for songs or poetry inserted into stories, though.

>109 ScoLgo: Oooh, a TV series? That seems better than films. I just hope Sergei Lukyanenko keeps authorial control...

>112 -pilgrim-: I wouldn't put too much weight on that. A random poster with no link or data making assertions 2 years ago? Sounds more wishful thinking to me. Of course, if it happens, I'd definitely give it a go.

I’m about 80 pages into book 2. I'm not sure if this is a spoiler or a stylistic choice, so I'm going to put it in spoiler tags to be safe. I suspect it's a stylistic choice, but it seems so strange that I wonder if it isn't actually going to turn into a plot device.

So many characters have the same first name as other characters. There were the two Anton’s that the author drew our attention to in Book 1, but I’ve counted at least 5 other sets of characters that the author didn’t call our attention to. They’re clearly different people, so now I’m wondering if this is somehow going to prove to be part of the plot, or if the author just did it in an attempt at realism.

I'm enjoying the story quite a bit so far, though.

>114 YouKneeK: Could it be a light-side/dark-side flag?

>114 YouKneeK: It may be an artifact of translation.
I have noticed that recent translators have a tendency to simplify Russian names.
Russians may be addressed by their surname, patronymic, contracted form of patronymic, forename plus patronymic, nickname, or a whole range of diminutives of the forename, which vary depending on degree of closeness, how much they like each other, and degree of emotion in the situation - so that the same person is called different things by different people.
And Western readers in the past have often been confused, not realising when the different names mean the same person.
So modern translators often transform all references to a given person into the standard form of the forename (thereby removing a lot of information about the interpersonal relationships).

Russians have a smaller pool of names to choose from. In reality, in an environment where there are several people with the same forename working together, they will settle on different diminutives. But if all names are being reduced to the standard form, those distinctions may be lost.

I have not read Night Watch in Russian. But perhaps in Russian all these Antons are Antonya, Tonya, Tosya, Antya and Tosha?

That does not preclude an intentional symbolic link between them though, of course.

>115 Maddz: Given the theme of choices and consequences maybe consider as indications of outcomes of other paths our Anton could have chosen? (I really don't remember!)

>116 -pilgrim-: Although the books are around, they’re Paul’s and I’ve never read them. If they turn up in a Kindle deal, then I’ll probably get them because these days I’m more likely to read epubs. I was thinking about the films when I made that comment and had it in the back of my mind there was some dualism happening in the storyline.

>117 Maddz: I too remember the films far better than the book (I have not yet read. the later novels.) The primordial struggle between the Light and Dark Others is a major theme, and the plot of the films pretty much reduces to that, but there is a lot more going on in the book.

A lot of times several book characters have been conflated into a one for the purposes of the film. Major spoilers:In the book there is more than one Woman, and the Boy is not Anton's son, for example.
This gives the film a simpler symmetry.

The simplification was probably necessary to fit the time constraints of a film. Also a lot of characters come from Russian pagan mythology; they are not given a backstory in the film because those would be known to a Russian audience. I have watched Night Watch twice, once in English and once in Russian. The viewings were several years apart, but I have the strong impression that the English language version had been edited to remove a lot of references to characters' mythic pasts. Certainly it made a lot more sense on second viewing!

>115 Maddz: Initially it seemed coincidental that most of the pairs seemed to consist of one character from the Night Watch and one from the Day Watch, but then the last couple pairs I’ve noticed have broken that pattern.

>116 -pilgrim-: Very interesting info, thanks. The translated books do still reflect different methods of address, and I saw something similar but not as pronounced a few months ago when I read Deathless. I haven’t found it too confusing to recognize that the different forms of address are for the same people because it has been pretty obvious from context, but I haven’t been very clear about what the rules are. I’ve just been operating under the general impression that addressing with a diminutive reflects a closer relationship but not always affection, and addressing with a two-part name reflects respect, or at least recognition of authority. I find it impossible to keep track of all the different forms of address being used for the same people, so most of the simplification has been happening in my own head as I mentally translate from the diminutives to the regular forename.

I’ve rather given up trying to keep track of the duplicate names at this point, but I’ve noticed more in my continued reading. And I’m now up to three Olga’s. Most of the duplicates seem to be very minor characters and/or characters who get killed off.

>118 -pilgrim-:, >119 YouKneeK: Paul did comment that the first 2 books were more like anthologies than novels.

>120 Maddz: They each have three stories in them rather than one long story. In the first book, the stories built on each other and followed the same main character. In the second book, I’ve only read the first two stories, but they didn’t seem related to each other at all and have followed different main characters.

There may be some ranting and raving in my review for the second book. I just finished the second story. I was greatly enjoying it, until I got to the end. Then I closed the cover of my Kindle with harder-than-necessary emphasis, stomped over to my computer, and sat down and typed up a page of annoyed notes for my review. Such notes don’t always end up in my reviews, but I think at least some of them will this time.

Review: Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko



Day Watch is the second book in the Russian Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko. Like the first book, it’s split up into three stories that build on each other to tell a larger story. Unlike the first book, each story focuses on different characters.

I had a lot of mixed feelings while reading this. First of all, one of my biggest complaints about the first book had been all of the repetitive musings on morality. In this book, I’m happy to say there wasn’t very much of it. There was a little in the first story, but it was from the perspective of a character on a different side of the conflict than the one who did all the moralizing in the first book, so it was relatively interesting and this time the author didn’t make the mistake of repeating the same thoughts all throughout the rest of the book.

I enjoyed the first story up until close to the end. I enjoyed seeing things from the perspective of the Day Watch, and I liked getting in the head of one of the characters who had been a villain in the first book. However, I was very annoyed near the end when Alisa and Igor “fell in love” after one day of wistful glances from a distance, an awkward conversation, and then a night full of sex. And then this is followed up with the “tragic” duel between the star-crossed lovers after they learn who each other really is. It was supposed to be tragic, but I would have had to buy into the relationship first. With so little development, either on or off the page, it wasn’t even a relationship in my book.

Then I really enjoyed the second story, until I got to the very end. There was a lot going on and I enjoyed speculating how it would all tie together, and I was particularly interested in what was going on with the main character. Then I got to the end, and it seemed like everything in the story had been a manipulation to restore the balance of power between the light and the dark in the most unnecessarily and unrealistically convoluted manner possible. So I was annoyed again.

Then there was the third story. Up to this point the first two stories hadn’t appeared to be directly related, but the third story started shedding more light on events in both stories and tying things together into a larger plot. So I thought maybe I judged too soon at the end of the second story and I started getting interested in the big picture all over again. The end of the third story wasn’t as annoying to me, but I still felt like things were over-plotted when considering the final revelations. I had a similar reaction to the stories in the first book also.

So how do I rate this? I think I’m going to give it 3.5 stars like I did the first book, because I did enjoy most of my time spent reading it. This time though, I’m going to round down to 3 on Goodreads. I debated whether to read the next book. The stories are enjoyable, but I’m repeatedly dissatisfied by the endings. I was tempted to read “just one more book”, but I suspect my reaction to the third book would be similar and I’d get to the end of that book feeling just as undecided as I do now. If that pattern continued, I’d likely find myself at the end of the entire six-book series feeling horribly annoyed. :) I’ve therefore decided to move on to something new.

Next Book
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Wyndham before, and I’ve had this on my Kindle for over 2 years.

>122 YouKneeK: I read Day of the Triffids as a set text in school. It is not my favourite by John Wyndham - I rate Consider Her Ways and Others and The Crysalids as even better - but I recommend it.

>123 -pilgrim-: I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but I think I would have enjoyed this far more than most other classics we were assigned if we had read it in my school.

>122 YouKneeK:, >123 -pilgrim-: You know to me John Wyndham is very much something I read as a teenager from my local library. He was one of the few explicitly SF authors they had (along with Arthur C Clarke, Keith Roberts and Fred Hoyle.

I reread The Day of the Triffids fairly recently; it was a UK Kindle Daily Deal a couple of years ago. I thought it rather dated now and of course most people know it from the film which has a completely different ending. Don't get me wrong, it's still very readable; you just have to relate it to the time it was written. I got some Keith Roberts in ebook last year; re-reading The Inner Wheel made me wince a bit.

>123 -pilgrim-: My favourite Wyndham is one of the stories in Jizzle. I find old school short stories more readable nowadays than novels; they're less obviously dated. Unfortunately, most near future SF from the 40s - 60s has been badly overtaken by events and scientific progress; I mean, let's face it - we're past 1984, 2001 and 2010; has any of that come to pass?

>125 Maddz: I have yet to read any of those “year” books, although I have read a couple Clarke books in recent years. I do also have vague memories of reading Animal Farm in school, so I know I’ve read Orwell, but I’m pretty sure I never read 1984. So, so much to catch up on!

I think dated technology doesn’t bother me too much from older books, mostly because I expect it. Occasionally it will make me laugh and sometimes it starts to bother me if it’s really pronounced. It’s also easier for me to ignore if it’s in a field that I don’t know much about anyway, like agriculture or genetics. I do really like it when the book is set in the time when it was written like The War of the Worlds, because then nothing feels jarring. Maybe aliens didn’t actually invade earth in the late 1800’s (although apparently some people thought otherwise!), but I can imagine I’m reading a story about something that happened on some alternate earth and be content with that.

Actually, I think I’m more likely to have trouble with more recent books from the 80’s and 90’s, where many of the technology references feel normal enough but other things feel really dated. It also bothers me more if I think the author ignored technology from their own time that should have affected events in their book. Like Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book, published in 1992, in which she completely ignores the existence of not only cell phones, but even answering machines. She has characters waiting by phones for fear of missing an important call, or asking other people to stay by the phone for them all day and write down any messages.

>126 YouKneeK: Yes, I agree about early SF - especially Victorian and Edwardian - feeling less dated than more modern SF. Marcus Rowland's Forgotten Futures RPG uses old public domain SF as settings and everything comes across as alternate history like Space 1889.

I wonder if it's to do with memory, especially one's own memory - if you've lived through that era yourself, it feels incredibly jarring. Cold War SF is from one's parent's memory. Another thing could be setting - if it's set on Earth, then the tech differences are glaringly obvious, but something in space or on an alien world is less so.

>125 Maddz: Now that's a collection of his short stories that I wasn't aware I'd missed; I'll have to look out for them! Thank you.

>125 Maddz:, >126 YouKneeK: 1984 was another of my school set texts. Apparently Orwell didn't have a time frame in mind when he wrote the novel; "1984" was his publisher's idea: to make it 'contemporary' by reversing the (then) current date (publ. 1948).

>127 Maddz: The memory theory makes sense. I also agree that older science fiction set away from Earth is less jarring.

>128 -pilgrim-: That’s interesting about the title of 1984, I didn’t know that!

I made it through about 33% of Triffids last night. So far I’m still enjoying it quite a bit. I’ve seen the book talked about often enough that I knew it had something to do with apocalyptic plants, but I had managed to avoid absorbing any other plot details. The blindness introduced in the first chapter was a surprise and adds an extra dimension to the story that I wasn’t expecting.

About older SF I think I'm fine as long as the topic/s are timeless. For example Caves of Steel is quaint in so many ways, but his discussion on humans vs robots, or AI, are still as valid. In other cases the plot hinges on something or other that is so unrealistic, or plain stupid, from our present horizon, and those books fare best if kept in the memory vault.

They ARE interesting when they can be used as specimens of their time, demonstrating what was then "common sense", but mostly that's not why I read, so I rather skip those parts.

(In other cases the tempo drags. I love Left Hand of Darkness but has never managed to win over anyone who I have enticed to read it during the past 10-12 years. As late as two years ago I was met with "I can see why this was once an important book, but...")

>130 Busifer: You’ve listed two more books that I’ve had on my list for a while and still haven’t gotten to. :) The Hainish Cycle is one of the series choices I’ve been strongly considering for next year, but I haven’t made my mind up for sure yet. I already have three of those books on Kindle including Left Hand of Darkness.

In 2020, I’m planning to read a few of what I think of as medium-length series. I never seem to get to them because I usually pick one large series per year and then read smaller series and standalones the rest of the year. The only series I’m pretty firmly decided that I’ll at least try is the Kushiel series because I’ve been wanting to get to that for a very long time. I’m tentatively thinking I’ll pick two each of medium-sized fantasy and medium-sized science fiction series.

>122 YouKneeK: Bummer. I have to admit, I was hoping you'd enjoy these enough to read the whole series. But since you didn't enjoy these enough, I'm glad you didn't force yourself onward. I love book quitters! ;-)
I'm trying to remember when he moved from a trilogy of short stories to just novel length stories. I can't remember if it was book 3 or 4. Either way, too late for you.

best of luck with the Triffids. I enjoyed the movie as a pre-teen but when I read the book in '11 I was very underwhelmed. Never read another thing by Wyndham since :-)

>131 YouKneeK: Regarding Le Guin's Ekumen books & short stories... I would not consider it a series in the traditional sense. Each book and story is pretty much a stand-alone. There are tenuous connections here & there but they are not critical to the enjoyment of each tale.

It is also worth noting that, if you are at all concerned with reading order, then you have the choice of by publication date or by internal chronology. For instance, the fifth book published, The Dispossessed, is actually first in the internal chronology. However, it's probably not the best one to start with.

I suppose the best suggestion might be to follow Ursula Le Guin's advice.

Wikipedia also has a complete list of Hainish novels & stories.

>132 BookstoogeLT: LOL, thanks. Maybe someday I’ll even learn how to quit mid-book. I actually kind of liked the three-stories-per-book format, especially seeing how it all started to tie together by the last story. I just had issues with most of the endings. I guess a single-story book would only have one ending to annoy me, but it might be a bigger annoyance if I felt the same way after reading the whole book.

>133 ScoLgo: Thanks for that info. The complete list of short stories with the collections they’re in is particularly helpful; I hadn’t yet done any research on that. I’m not sure yet if I’ll make the effort to read the short stories, but knowing what collections they’re in would make it easier. I had read that bit from Le Guin before, so I was aware she didn’t consider it a series and that the reading order was flexible. I do like to read related books closely together though, even when they stand alone, to better appreciate whatever connections they do have between them. My plan is to read them in publication order. It feels more natural to me to discover things in the same order the author created them. I’m not usually confused by non-linear books, so a non-linear set of books isn’t much more trouble.

>134 YouKneeK: You can't go wrong with publication order. That was the way I went through them around 6 or 7 years ago. I might do an internal chronology re-read one of these days.

I have managed to collect all the short stories and will put in a plug for The Birthday of the World as that volume contains quite a few Hainish stories. The non-Ekumen tales in that collection are also very good. The kindle version also comes up for sale on Amazon from time to time. It's currently $7.99 but I picked it up for $1.99 a while back. It's easily worth that, IMHO.

Whenever you get around to it, I will follow along here to read your thoughts on the books.

>133 ScoLgo: In some ways The Dispossessed is my favorite Le Guin. Not the one I find the most enjoyable, or even the most interesting, but the one that resonates with and sticks with me. Or maybe my favorite is the title story of Fisherman of the Inland Sea or it could be - I think it depends on my mood.

I join in on the recommendation of The Birthday of the world, but some of the stories in there are an exploration of previously visited worlds. Because of that I think reading Four ways to forgiveness and Left Hand of Darkness will give more of a full experience.
The stories do stand on their own as well, but I thought you'd want to know.

I also enjoyed Worlds of Exile and Illusion, but it has been a long while since last time so I don't know how it has aged.

As >136 quondame: says The Dispossessed is a very good book. Pretty hard to read, though, so not recommended as a first UKL.

And on >131 YouKneeK: Caves of Steel is an extremely fast read, written in the times when a 400 page novel was a, um, novelty. Could be read as a palate cleanser between heavier works.

>130 Busifer: was that me? It's certainly an attitude I share. I've not really got along well with any of her non-earthsea novels, other than the opening trilogy of the Hainish cycle Rocannon's world but was quite impressed with many of the Hain short stories.

There's still many I haven't read.

>135 ScoLgo: Oh, that’s good to know The Birthday of the World goes on sale sometimes. I probably haven’t noticed it before because it wasn’t on my radar and I try to only buy books on sale if I had already intended to read them anyway, as a way to keep my TBR list under control. I just added it to my eReaderIQ watch list so I’ll catch it if it goes on sale again.

>136 quondame: Haha, favorites are difficult. I tend to have that reaction to just about any topic I’m asked to pick a favorite of.

>137 Busifer: Good info, thanks!

>138 Busifer: One of my holdups with getting to The Caves of Steel (aside from the sheer impossibility of reading everything I’m interested in) is that I understood it to follow after the other I, Robot books and then eventually lead to the related Foundation series. So I have this in my mind as part of a 17-book series of 6300+ pages. That page count puts it in the range of a “medium-size series” in my eyes, so it’s a candidate for next year’s picks, but not as high on my list as some others. Maybe if I do the same thing again in 2021…

>139 reading_fox: Her only non-Earthsea novel that I’ve read so far is The Lathe of Heaven which I had mixed feelings about. I loved the premise, but I had issues with the execution.

Caves of Steel stands perfectly fine on its own, no pressure to read further. I have read the Foundation books (ages ago, and I can't see me doing it again, ever) and can see no real connection other than that they are set in the same general universe. No need to read them just to get to know what happens with character A or B. Only reason to read all of it is if you find that you enjoy the style and the universe and want to stay in it a bit longer.
(I did think The Naked Sun was better than Caves, and they are more of a "series" (same protagonist) with Sun as no. 2, and both are fast whodunnit-type stories.)

>137 Busifer: My understanding is that Worlds of Exile and Illusion is an omnibus of the first three Hainish novels.

>140 YouKneeK: I'm in the midst of reading Asimov's 'Robot' novels now. Just finished Robots and Empire a couple of days ago. As >141 Busifer: says, while each book builds more into the universe from the earlier books, and many of the characters do re-appear, each volume remains a self-contained mystery/adventure.

I also agree that the Foundation series is pretty much a separate thing from the Robots series. Asimov wrote Robots & Empire later in his career as a sort of bridge piece between the two series but I doubt he began the Robot short stories early on with that idea in mind.

Though I won't be re-reading the Foundation series at this time, I do plan to dive into the trilogy written by Mark W. Tiedemann next and will follow that with, Have Robot, Will Travel, then the Roger Macbride Allen and Mickey Zucker Reichert trilogies. Fourteen books seems like enough in this particular universe for this year! ;)

>142 ScoLgo: Yes, it is. When I got it there were no way to acquire them each, so the omnibus edition was a nice choice. They're all quite slim on their own, so the actual printed book isn't that fat of a volume either. To me they felt more like novelettes than full size novels.

And I fully agree with you on Foundation vs Robots.

>139 reading_fox: Hah, no! It was a colleague who reads mainly fantasy but who wanted something interesting for her all female reading group. They mostly read non-genre fiction (contemporary relationship drama; how is that NOT a genre?), and she came to me with a shortlist of books that she was considering when it was her turn to suggest their next read.

>140 YouKneeK: The Lathe of Heaven is about the only F&SF book of Le Guin's that I've only read once and have little desire to re-read. But I remember bits of it better than most books by other authors - though that maybe because of the wardrobe used in the dramatization, which was brilliant (the wardrobe, not necessarily the dramatization.)

What >141 Busifer: said. The robot stories are really my favorite of Asimov's writings, minus my rage at his treatment of Dr. Calvin, and I think his greatest contribution to the great dialog of SF.

>141 Busifer:, >142 ScoLgo:, and >144 quondame: Thanks all of you for the Asimov info! I do still stubbornly prefer to read related books together, even if it’s only the setting that’s related. My definition of a “series” is very broad. I usually feel like I get more out of the experience that way, at least in terms of what matters to me in my reading. Worst case, I could always change my mind and decide to space them out further than I normally would whenever I start reading them.

On the topic of books that I’m long overdue to read, there have been a few conversations about Dune on various threads here, in which everybody’s comments have convinced me that I can and probably should just read it as a standalone for now. I bought it for my Kindle a couple months ago when it went on sale. Anyway, there’s a good chance that some people from the group I’m in over on GR will be reading it in either July, August, or September, in which case I plan to read it with them. I’ll know for sure if and when it will be read later this month. If it doesn’t win the vote I’ll probably go ahead and fit it in on my own anyway, so odds are good that I’ll finally shed my Dune ignorance before the end of the year.

As far as The Day of the Triffids goes, I’m still enjoying it far more than I had expected, although not without quibbles. It’s also still possible that I’ll hate the ending and become soured on the book in general as a result. I ought to finish it tonight, but probably be too late for me to have time to write a review until sometime tomorrow.

>145 YouKneeK: I would agree, with qualifications, about reading Dune as a standalone. It is both a tour de force in world creation and a cracking good adventure story, which comes to a satisfying conclusion.

The sequels are rather different. Dune Messiah is definitely the weakest. They don't work as well, simply considered as stories. In each one, Frank Herbert explores the consequences of aspects of the universe he has created in Dune. I can often be found complaining that authors have obviously not thought through what would be the actual consequences of their "neat plot twist"s - Herbert is the opposite of that. Each sequel looks at such consequences: Dune Messiah considers the real impact of prescience, Children of Dune looks at the uses of extended life and cloning, others address the economic and societal impact of the ecological changes made (for example).

It is harder to find a protagonist to identify with as the series goes on and the millennia pass. Whether you enjoy the sequels depends on how much you were wondering about such questions.

The sequels, and prequels, by his son and collaborators, are, in my opinion, completely forgettable. They have the lack of narrative focus that characterises the later books, but are aimed at the pure "adventure" level, with no underlying ideas to compensate.

>145 YouKneeK: DUNE!

Oh yeah....

edited to add:

I concur whole heartedly with >146 -pilgrim-:, even while I really enjoyed the sequels. They're not for everyone and the prequels are complete trash and a shameless money grab by a man who lived in his daddy's shadow and a hack writer who can't write (not a fan of Kevin J. Anderson just in case you couldn't tell ;-) )

>147 BookstoogeLT: Just to be clear, I enjoyed the sequels too.

(And I was being polite, but don't actually disagree with anything that you said regarding the prequels!)

>146 -pilgrim-:, >147 BookstoogeLT: Thanks! :) My theory is that if I really like Dune and am interested in trying the sequels, then someday down the road I can always do a quick re-read of Dune and follow it up with the sequels when I’m willing to devote more space to it in my schedule.

>149 YouKneeK: Among all the books I've only read once, Dune is rather memorable. Of course there was the movie etc and the impact that Dune had on SF and how much a part of the SF fan culture it became.

I always remember discussing Dune with my late father (he of the Sven Hassell habit) and he exclaiming 'But it's Arab culture!'.

>146 -pilgrim-: Excellent summary of why the 2nd and 3rd books don't live up to the first, in terms of memorability. They are still well written and good books, just not at the level of the first.

For what it is worth, I'm still a big Foundation fan and the Robot books too! The story collection The Complete Robot is one of my favorites.

Review: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham



The Day of the Triffids is a classic, standalone science fiction book published in 1951. I enjoyed this a great deal more than I expected to. Although I went into the story as blindly (ha) as I could, I’d read enough reviews over recent years to solidify the idea in my head that this book was about apocalyptic plants. There’s some truth in that, but there was more to it than that.

In the first chapter, we learn that there was some sort of light show in space that people believed was debris from a comet. Everybody who watched it, which was the vast majority of Earth’s population because it was an impressive sight, ended up blind the next day. Society completely broke down, and things were complicated by a recently discovered type of new carnivorous plant that grows very tall, can walk, and can fatally sting people.

I did have some quibbles with parts of the premise as well as other things. I’ll put more about that in the spoiler section at the end of my review. However, I enjoyed the story enough that I was willing to overlook the quibbles. The blindness really added an interesting element to the post-apocalyptic story for me. It made the story feel different from other apocalyptic books I’ve read, and it added some different types of things to think about and some different moral dilemmas.

The main character is Bill. He narrates the story and is one of the people who escaped blindness, but it would have been really interesting to also read from the perspective of one of the people who went blind. Bill was pretty likeable, as were some of the secondary characters. I also liked that there were reasonably intelligent and self-sufficient women in the book, which isn’t something you always see in the classics. There was a huge emphasis on women as baby-makers which made me roll my eyes a bit, but I also understood that babies would be pretty important in humanity’s survival over the long term, especially since they would replenish the seeing population.

I discovered after it was too late that the American Kindle edition has about 11,000 fewer words versus the original, in addition to Americanizing some of the words, despite the product page not saying it’s abridged. I verified that my edition was definitely the modified version. It felt like a complete and coherent story, but I was really disappointed to learn that I had missed out on so much text! I wouldn’t want to re-read it again right now even if the full version fell out of the sky and landed in my lap, especially since this means I would probably be really busy getting my roof and ceiling repaired. But maybe someday I’ll seek it out and read it.

I have some more comments that need to go behind spoiler tags:
I’m not at all a scientific or medical expert, so maybe this would make perfect sense to somebody who isn’t me, but I didn’t buy into the entire world becoming blind. Maybe some of the missing text would have explained everything. Bill believes the blindness was actually caused not by the lights themselves, but rather by the destruction of numerous rumored viral warfare weapons orbiting earth, possibly due to being hit by a comet. His idea is that one of those viruses is what caused the blindness. Could a released virus from a position orbiting Earth really enter Earth’s atmosphere? Maybe debris from the container carrying the virus did, but there was no mention of falling debris that I remember.

Assuming it were possible for this virus to make it to earth, wouldn’t it then have affected everybody and not just the people who saw the lights from the weapons being destroyed? I guess all the people we read about who didn’t go blind had been indoors when it happened, so maybe they weren’t exposed and the virus died quickly, before they ventured out. On the other hand, it seems like the virus might still get in through open windows and ventilation systems and such.

If the lights themselves caused the blindness, I’m not sure that would make any more sense. After all, it isn’t night everywhere in the world at the same time. I guess it’s possible that the show lasted long enough that all the parts of the world got to see it during their night time, and the more limited communication technology of the time prevented people in earlier time zones from hearing about it in time to prevent their own exposure. We’re never really told how long it took for the people to go blind after seeing it, but the implication is that they watched the light show, went to bed, then woke up blind. If it were a direct result of the lights, it seems more likely it would have affected them more quickly, and affected people who started watching earlier before those who started watching later, allowing more people to escape exposure when they realized what was happening.

Yikes, that was a lot of rambling about whether the world could all go blind at once. :) My only other real complaint was that some of the characters believed the triffids were intelligent and that the noises they made were communication, yet nobody ever even once mentioned the idea of trying to learn to communicate with them. Such an endeavor probably wouldn’t have made sense in the context of the book, because there may not have been anybody with the skills or opportunity to do so when survival was pretty difficult even without the triffids, but I expected something to at least think about the idea even if nobody had the time or ability to try it.

Next Book
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. I don’t know much about this one, but it’s one of those books I’ve had on my Kindle for a long time and never seem to get around to. I’ve heard it’s more on the YA side of things, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing depending on how it’s written.

>153 YouKneeK: I always took it as "handwavium" as why everyone went blind. It just 'happened" due to authorial fiat. How dare you question that! ;-)

If we ever all go blind and plants start eating us, I'll vote for YOU to start trying to communicate with them :-)
Of course, it makes me wonder what this book would look like if it was written today. Dang, that actually sounds really cool.

>154 BookstoogeLT: LOL, handwavium is the only theory I’ve heard so far that I can’t think up any arguments for. :) I want no part of trying to communicate with the scary plants, but I’d be willing to utter the obligatory “Gee, I wonder if it’s possible for somebody to figure out how to communicate with them” line and then let other people work on that problem!

I saw there was a sequel, The Night of the Triffids written by a different author about 50 years later. I was moderately curious, but I had planned in advance to ignore it. Now I'm a little more curious.

>154 BookstoogeLT: IIRC, the light show did go on for several nights.

It has been a very long time since I read it, but I seem to remember more explanation than you have given. I wonder whether those were the parts that got cut: either because the "science" of it now looks too dated, or because the editor decided those parts were boring?

(I remember how Jules Verne used to be criticised for writing good adventure stories with poor science; later it was revealed that he wrote a lot of scientific explanation, but it bored his first translators, so they just omitted them.)

>156 -pilgrim-: It seems very likely that the parts that got cut out could have shed some light on the things that I felt weren’t explained well. Someday I'll have to read the full version and see if it changes my perspective.

In the version I read, the light show just went on for one night. In the first chapter, Bill was in the hospital with bandages over his eyes when the light show started. Then he woke up the next morning and nobody came to tend to him which was when he discovered everybody was blind. There was never any mention of him having to avoid looking at lights in the sky during the subsequent nights, although I guess that could be part of what was cut. But I think he discovered Josella on that first day of blindness, and I know they found an apartment to stay in the same night they met which was when Josella saw the beacon coming from the University Tower. So the light show must have been over by then or they wouldn't have been looking in the sky. Of course, it's always possible that some days were cut out in-between those two events in the version I read.

Re the virus angle, IIRC there was some notion at the time that viruses could survive inter planetary journeys by hitch-hiking on comets. I think it may have been Fred Hoyle who was one of the proponents. I also seem to recall some speculation it was literally the light show that caused the blindness via an invisible ray of some kind burning out the optic nerve. I agree it was probably the weakest part of the book but I guess Wyndham didn't want to write yet another post nuclear war book.

What you may have had was a film novelisation - the Kindle version I have is badged as a 'books into film' series. Without a paper copy, I can't tell whether it's been abridged or not - it's been years since I read a paper version.

>157 YouKneeK: I am relying on memory here, but IIRC:

Bill had been in hospital for some time with his eyes bandaged.Did you get that his eye injury came from a triffid sting, as he had been working at a triffid farm? This is set in the early days of the NHS; it would be quite usual for an unmarried man to do his recuperating in hospital. He misses out on the light show, for how ever many days. But the first he knows that something is wrong is when the staff don't turn up in the morning. Luckily he was due to remove the bandages that day...

I think that it was optical nerve damage. But it wasn't "Look at the pretty light...Arghh, I 'm blind!"; damage is done, the blindness follows shortly.

I agree that the "how" of the light show causing blindness was not particularly well done.

>158 Maddz:
Doesn't the "viruses on comets" theory post-date Wyndham?

>158 Maddz: Bill thought the blindness virus came from viral warfare weapons already in orbit around Earth, put there by mankind itself, originally intended to be deployed to a targeted area on Earth if hostilities escalated. What I’m skeptical about is whether it’s possible for a virus already in orbit around Earth to survive entry into Earth’s atmosphere in order to reach and effect the population, if the weapon is accidentally detonated in orbit rather than being intentionally deployed somewhere.

I don’t think this version was a novelization, but I haven’t seen the movie so I could be wrong. This link is the one I found explaining the difference between the versions and also how one can tell if they have the cut version. https://triffids.guidesite.co.uk/versions.php

>159 -pilgrim-: Yes, the explanation of Bill’s injury was definitely provided in my version, along with much detail on the subject going back to Bill’s childhood experiences up through his adulthood occupation. However odd it would have been, he did spend his injury convalescing in the hospital. He goes into some detail about his annoyance with the sponge baths every morning and other hospital routines he’s become accustomed to, the traffic patterns he hears through his window, and he knows exactly what’s supposed to happen at what times. He can tell what time it is despite his bandages because there are clocks with audible chimes somewhere in the vicinity. That implies he’s been there for some days fully conscious, long enough to learn the routine.

I skimmed through the early parts of chapter 1 again. Going by the above link, it looks like the only text missing in chapter 1, about 585 words, happened after Bill removed his bandages, when he was exploring the hospital. Bill tells the reader that it’s May 8 when he wakes up, the day his bandages were supposed to be removed. Later as he’s trying to figure out why the schedule is so messed up and where everybody is, he says, “You’ll find it in the records that on Tuesday, May 7, the Earth’s orbit passed through a cloud of comet debris.” Then he talks about having to spend the evening before in bed listening to everybody enjoying the spectacle that he couldn’t see.

It does say that in California there had been some green flashes noticed “the previous night”, which I would take to be the night of May 6, but nobody took the reports very seriously. I had forgotten that part. So it sounds like the show was just getting started maybe late on the 6th and then lasted through the 7th, being over by the 8th. Long enough for everybody on the planet to have seen it during their nighttime. But I don't think we're supposed to believe the light show itself caused the blindness based on the things Bill said later in the book.

>160 YouKneeK: You may have misunderstood me: I was saying that convalescing in hospital like that would have been normal in those days, although certainly not now.

I don't remember how the blinding related to the light show, whether directly or by being exposed to something else through being outside then. My point was more minor (and addressed the question of why people to the west were not forewarned): that the blinding was not an instant result of having looked at the light show (in the way that looking at the sun directly would be).

That link to the comparison site was fascinating. I definitely read the longer version, I remember Fedor and the theft from the laboratory. (Also I had never heard of a "polliwog" before!)

FWIW, my school copy appears to have been the 1970 Penguin edition:

>153 YouKneeK: Have you read any Westerfeld before? He definitely writes for the YA audience, but he tackles some meaty subjects. If I recall correctly, Leviathan was just pure fun steampunk. But unlike most of his other series, I didn't pursue the rest of it.

>84 YouKneeK: Your experience with Spinning Silver was very similar to mine. I felt like it grabbed me just as hard as Uprooted had to begin with, but then it failed to hold my attention as well by the 3/4th's point. I think it might have been just a tad too long. I do enjoy her unusual re-tellings very much.

>94 YouKneeK: Yup, same reaction to The Long Earth as well. I listened to it, and it seemed rather flat to me. (No pun intended.) I was happy enough to blame Baxter for the parts I didn't like, because after reading his Evolution some years ago I thought I could tell which bits were his fairly easily.

>153 YouKneeK: Loved this one, too. Don't think I found as much to quibble about as you did, but I was trying to take into consideration that it was fairly old by post-apocalyptic lit standards. Since then I've read his The Midwich Cuckoos and The Chrysalids. Both are quite good, but I would give the edge to The Chrysalids. After reading Triffids I watched a hilariously bad movie version that I can only recommend if you are slightly twisted and enjoy awful movies.

>163 clamairy: Yeah, I just gave up on The Long Earth. There were a couple of characters I would have liked to follow more, but there didn't seem to be any firm focus. When the family abandoned their son who couldn't 'step' I bailed.

>160 YouKneeK: That's a useful site - unfortunately, the Kindle edition I acquired is the US version. I'll have to look out for the UK edition. EDIT: It's on a £1.99 deal on Amazon.co.uk; along with The Kraken Wakes.

>159 -pilgrim-:, >161 -pilgrim-: Here's the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia. The idea has a long history, so it's entirely possible this is what Wyndham was riffing on. Hoyle et al were later in the mid 70s. That edition was my original paper edition.

>161 -pilgrim-: Ah, sorry, yes, I did misread “usual” as “unusual”. I agree it wasn’t an instant reaction. In the book, people watched the light show, went to bed fine, and woke up blind. That was part of what didn’t make sense to me about the theory that the lights themselves caused it, because why would there be an incubation period for something that was purely on the visual spectrum? Bill’s virus theory seemed the best explanation, but I had trouble with that one too for the reasons noted. But all my quibbles didn’t prevent me from enjoying the story, it was just something I mused about while I was reading and then got carried away about when I was writing my review.

That bit about the polliwog surprised me. I don’t know if it’s a regional thing and maybe other people in the U.S. use the term polliwog, but I know exactly what a tadpole is and I would have had to look up a polliwog. I think I’ve heard the term before, but I didn’t know what it was.

>162 2wonderY: No, this will be my first time reading Westerfeld. I didn’t get a lot of reading time yesterday, only about 40 pages, but so far my first impression of Leviathan is good.

>163 clamairy: I haven’t yet tried any of Baxter’s solo work, but I’m far more reluctant to do so now. I don't have him on any of my lists anyway. LOL, I think I might pass on the hilariously bad movie. :) I will have to try reading more Wyndham at some point, though.

>164 2wonderY: Oh, I forgot to mention that in my review, but that part made me so mad.

>165 Maddz: I’m glad you were able to get a hold of a good edition!

>163 clamairy: I was given a copy of The Long Earth a while back, but could never get really into it. It seems I am far from alone in this!

I too prefer The Crysalids. - and his short stories.

The BBC did quite a good TV series of Day of the Triffids in the early eighties (although they struggled with the special effects for the triffids, on their budget); the 1961 film is indeed dire.

>165 Maddz: Very interesting, thank you. Yes, it was Hoyle that I was thinking of.

>167 -pilgrim-: Yes, dire... but in a good way. I love awful vintage SciFi flicks. They're so bad that they're wonderful.

>163 clamairy: The only good parts of Evolution were the dinosaur bits, and then the part in the distant future.

>163 clamairy: I've just finished Spinning Silver (from the Hugo packet) and the reading experience was bad because we were given a pdf. I kept loosing place in it and it came across as disjointed. Oddly, the other pdf in the Best Novel packet - The Calculating Stars - was a far smoother reading experience, so I don't know what the issue was.

>164 2wonderY: Re Baxter, I've recently finished Alternate Histories which is an omnibus of the Time's Tapestry and Northland series. Both I thought went on for too long, especially Time's Tapestry. Structurally, I thought Weaver (book 4) would have been better as vignettes within the other books, loosing much of the everyday life in occupied UK (to me, that came across as padding). By the time we got to Weaver, I'd lost track of the various effects of the different prophecies.

>166 YouKneeK: Polliwog is from the Northern UK, probably Yorkshire. It features in Venetia which is how I knew the word. We used to visit Yorkshire when I was a child, but I don't recall Aunty Moore using the word - probably because we visited in summer. I only visited in spring when I was doing my masters in Leeds in my 20s so wouldn't have gone tadpole hunting. What I remember is fishing for crayfish with bacon rind.

>169 Maddz: Were you using a tablet? I'm not a fan of book PDFs. There are several free websites that convert pdfs to ebook files, but I haven't tried that. I have used them to converted epubs to mobi files with good results.

>166 YouKneeK: Butting in here (because for the most part I haven't read the comments on The Day of the Triffids because I haven't read the book yet) on the blindness comments. I looked up photokeratitis, which is damage caused by sun, snow or some human made lights. It says the symptoms come on well after the damage has occured, so seeing a pretty light, going to bed and being blind in the morning is not beyond the realm of reason.

Also, I am from California, polliwog and tadpole have been inter-changable words to me. I love them both, as well as the creature which bears the name. :)

>170 clamairy: Yes, I was - my iPad mini 2. I'd only downloaded the packets last Sunday evening and ran out of time to log them and fiddle around in Calibre before loading them onto my eInk reader. I should get time this weekend depending on how much I end up doing in the garden.

I'm currently ploughing my way through The Weird and wanted a change. I ought to read my ER stuff first, but I could access these on the train so I went for it.

I do dislike pdf for novel-length reading; short form is OK, but much longer than a review paper is a real pain, especially if there is no bookmark function or a proper ToC.

>171 MrsLee: Oh, that is awesome information, thank you! I looked it up and I see it’s usually temporary and doesn’t always involve vision loss, but I agree that it does at least put the idea of a delayed blindness resulting from a light show in the realm of possibility. I can live with that. :)

>173 YouKneeK: One more thing. In the article, it said there was a worse situation of actual burning of the retina which occurs when we stare at the sun too long. It is permanent blindness, also delayed. Don't do it. Just don't.

>174 MrsLee: Yes, that was the version that was inspiring my understanding of the situation in the first place. It can even happen through cloud cover as it is not just the visible part of the spectrum that does the damage.

Cases often happen after a total eclipse; because the total illumination level is low, someone incorrectly assumes that looking at the corona will be safe.

Review: Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld



Leviathan is the first book in a young adult steampunk trilogy. Although it does have a young feel to it, and the story is straight-forward and a bit predictable, it was actually a vey fun, light read. I haven’t read a lot of steampunk, so I hadn’t read anything quite like this story, and I think that helped keep me interested.

The story is set right at the beginning of World War I on an alternate version of our Earth where technology has developed a bit differently. DNA was discovered earlier, leading to the creation of genetically engineered “beasties” such as living war machines that function a lot like hot air balloons, and lizards that can be used to deliver recorded messages. Other countries have spurned such creations as unnatural and have instead developed “mechanikal" creations such as war machines as tall as trees, with legs that can walk or run more efficiently over rough terrain than something with treads.

The story alternates between the third-person POV of two main characters who are around fifteen. Alek is an Austrian prince whose family is at the center of the conflict that kicks off World War I, in a similar manner to the real war. Deryn is a British girl who disguises herself as a boy to join the British Air Service. Both characters were very likeable. Deryn is spunky and fun, maybe a bit too good at everything that matters, but easy to cheer for. Alek has lived a more protected life and makes a lot of mistakes, but his ability to acknowledge those mistakes and try to do better made him a character I could appreciate and sympathize with.

This was just a light, fun read, perfect if you’re in the mood for something that isn’t very demanding. I imagine teenagers and possibly some younger children would also enjoy it. It has some war-related violence that isn’t described in any particularly gory detail, but otherwise I didn’t notice anything that I would imagine many people finding objectionable, either for themselves or for their children. I’m not always the best person to gauge that kind of thing, though.

This first book doesn’t have a proper ending. It doesn’t end on a cliff hanger in the sense that anybody’s life is in immediate peril at the end, but there were a lot of plot threads left hanging. I plan to continue on with the series. I’ll be traveling next week for a business conference, so something lighter like this may actually be perfect timing. I’m much more distracted while reading in public, at airports, on airplanes, etc., and more tired than normal in the evenings once I get back to my hotel, so simpler stories are often a good choice for me when I travel.

Next Book
Behemoth, the second book in this trilogy.

>176 YouKneeK: I really enjoyed that series a lot.

>176 YouKneeK: I'm not normally into steampunk but that sounds fun. Hope the series stays enjoyable.

>177 quondame: That’s great to hear. I was hoping the whole series would stay as good.

>178 Narilka: Thanks! It really is pretty fun. I forgot to mention it in my review, but there’s quite a bit of humor also.

>176 YouKneeK: That was quite an enjoyable series for me so happy to see it's having the same effect on you. I rated the 2nd & 3rd books as slightly higher than the 1st.

>180 AHS-Wolfy: Oh good, I’m glad to see another confirmation that the whole series stays enjoyable! :) I started the second book last night and was immediately sucked back in. It’s a good thing I have a bunch of stuff I have to get done today to restrict my reading time or the rest of the series might not last me for much of my trip.

Review: Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld



Behemoth is the second book in the YA steampunk trilogy, Leviathan. I really don’t have a lot to say about this book, because most of what I said in my review of the first book still applies. Despite a fairly young tone, the story remains interesting, fun, and light, and it has proven to be a good travel read.

I forgot to mention this in my last review, but there is quite a bit of humor as well as some nice banter between characters. This book does add in the inevitable angsty relationship stuff, but it doesn’t overwhelm the story. It was also pretty obvious that this was coming from the third chapter of book 1, when Deryn was introduced and we found out she was a girl pretending to be a boy. At that point it’s easy to guess that with both a male and female main character, and especially in a YA story, some sort of attraction was abound to develop, and that Deryn’s disguise as a male would add complications and angst. I failed to predict the commoner vs prince angst, which was a major oversight on my part, but there’s that too. Still, I really like both characters and I enjoy their friendship and the banter between them, so I’m not letting the angsty stuff bother me too much.

I look forward to finding out how the trilogy concludes.

Next Book
Goliath, the final book in this trilogy.

I'm going to look for these Westerfeld books. I really loved his Uglies series and the standalone Peeps. I like how his characters seem so interesting and engaging right from the start, and the settings are entertaining.

>183 Darth-Heather: I hope you like them if you find and read them! Your description of his writing definitely matches up with what I’ve experienced in this series. I’ll have to check out some of his other work someday.

>183 Darth-Heather: There is a sequel (of sorts) to Peeps (aka Parasite Positive) called The Last Days though many reviewers don't like that one as much as the first book.

The only other Westerfeld I've read (and enjoyed) is the only non-YA book I think he's written, The Risen Empire. It's a space opera originally released as a duology but later combined into one volume though confusingly published under the same title as the first in the duology.

Review: Goliath by Scott Westerfeld



Goliath is the final book in Westerfeld’s steampunk Leviathan trilogy. The entire trilogy was a fun, mostly light adventure story with likeable characters and a good dose of humor. This series worked very well for me as reading material while traveling for a business conference. I was very tired for most of the week due to a not-ideal travel schedule combined with a time zone change, and this was entertaining without being too demanding.

I was pretty satisfied with how the story was wrapped up. I did think it had a little less of the fun adventure that the previous two books were chock full of, becoming a little more introspective. It didn’t hold my interest quite as consistently as the previous two, but I still enjoyed it. I’m going to give this one 3.5 stars and round up to 4 on Goodreads.

I have some spoilery comments for the spoiler tags…
I was glad that Deryn’s gender reveal happened fairly early in this book so that there was time for Alek’s reaction and adjustment to play out more realistically versus everything feeling too rushed at the end. On the other hand, that did ramp up the angst a notch and the period of conflict that created reduced the camaraderie between them for a while which was a large part of what I had enjoyed in the previous two books and I think led to this book feeling slower to me. I enjoyed their friendship and their teasing insults, and I didn’t exactly dislike their romance, but I wasn’t as invested in it.

Next Book
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

>186 YouKneeK: I'm really glad you read this trilogy. now I don't have to wonder about it. Hope the travel stuff is done for a bit, as you'll need some oomph to make your way through Leibowitz.

>187 BookstoogeLT: No interest in reading the Westerfeld trilogy?

Ha, I’ve only read the first chapter of Leibowitz, but I can see where some oomph may be required. It does seem to have a strange sort of humor, though. I laughed at the end of the first chapter when Brother Francis revealed what he thought a Fallout Shelter was -- a shelter for a legendary monster known as a “Fallout”.

Happily, no more travel is planned. Today has been the Day of Naps, but I expect I'll be back to a normal energy level by tomorrow.

>188 YouKneeK: I always got a ya vibe and several key words in your reviews were warning enough. I suspect I'd end up ranting a lot. That and steampunk has never appealed to me.

Leibowitz has been long enough for me (it was '03 when I read it) that I can remember almost zero details. Nothing but vague impressions but strong enough ones that I know I don't want to re-read it to write a more detailed review :-D

>189 BookstoogeLT: I’ve read a few more chapters and it’s gotten quite a bit more interesting to me. The nap I took after Chapter 1 probably helped. :) It’s also much more humorous than it appeared to be when I first started it. At least, I think it’s supposed to be humorous. It’s making me laugh anyway.

On the downside, I’m having to read a physical copy since I couldn’t find it as an e-book. I’m having a great deal of difficulty telling what time it is because the stupid book won’t display the clock at the top of the page. I keep scanning the tops of the pages searching for it before remembering I have to look over at my phone. Reading before bed will likely be an annoyance also as I won’t be able to read with the lights relaxingly dimmed like I normally do. The trials of an e-book addict. ;)

>190 YouKneeK: It’s available in the UK as an ebook:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Canticle-Leibowitz-S-F-MASTERWORKS-ebook/dp/B00QFLKN0A/...

Which makes a nice change for us UKans.

>191 Maddz: It looks like it’s been available there for a few years, too. At least not everybody in the world has to suffer through a physical version if they prefer not to. ;)

I think I’ll not be doing much reading in bed until I finish this book. I had to read laying the wrong way around last night so I could see the pages, and it was still a bit of a strain on the eyes so I only managed a few pages. My bedroom isn’t properly equipped for reading physical books at night. I don’t have any reading lamps on the nightstands because I got fed up with the cat attacking them in the middle of the night and I never used them anyway. The overhead light puts out a good general light when it's at full power, but the book itself blocks that light from reaching the pages if I try to read in a normal position.

>190 YouKneeK: Yeah, the perils of paper! I'm reading an old paperback at lunch at work (O Jerusalem!) and my goodness, do I miss being able to up the font like I do on my kindle :-D
That and I broke the spine because it was so old and it is such a thick book. Sigh...

>193 BookstoogeLT: Yes, the font size can be another frustrating problem! Fortunately, the font size in the book I’m reading now is comparable to what I use on my Kindle, maybe even a bit larger.

>193 BookstoogeLT:, >194 YouKneeK: Why does it seem to be be that degree of "interesting-ness" is inversely proportional to font size used?!

>190 YouKneeK: Enjoy Canticle for Leibowitz! I re-read that one a couple of years ago and it was worth it.

>192 YouKneeK: Unfortunately, being a Gateway title means it’s unlikely to ever be on sale. Gateway do sales occasionally (and I’ve been a bit surprised their edition of Dune has been on sale recently a couple of times), but in general their sales are few and far between and discounts are minor. Like you, I have a paperback edition, but it’s been years since I read it. I think I came across the sequel when it came out, but being temporarily strapped for cash, didn’t get it, and when I could afford it, couldn’t find it.

>195 -pilgrim-: Haha, I really can neither confirm nor deny that as a shared experience because I’ve read almost exclusively e-books for over a decade, with maybe a couple exceptions per year, so I only occasionally experience the small font sizes. Before e-books, my eyes were young enough that I didn’t really notice.

>196 Karlstar: Thanks! I’ve recently finished Part I of III and so far I’m completely undecided as far as what I think of it, but it’s holding my attention.

>197 Maddz: The paperback edition I’m reading was borrowed from the library because I prefer not to purchase physical editions. I had read that there was a sequel, but reactions to it didn’t seem that great at the time I researched it. I decided that, at least for now, I’ll just read the original and leave it at that.

Review: A Canticle of Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.



A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic that was published in the late 1950’s. I had really mixed feelings about it. It was funny and yet depressing, interesting and yet also boring at times. I think I enjoyed it best in the earlier parts.

The book is split up into three stories that take place over hundreds of years. When it begins, we quickly learn that we’re in a post-apocalyptic setting. Earth had long ago destroyed itself with war, and much knowledge was lost because the survivors blamed science and scientists and tried to destroy both. The setting is mostly centered on an abbey dedicated to a scientific martyr named Leibowitz, and “Memorabilia” is reverently collected and stored until the day when mankind is willing and able to use it wisely. The Catholic religion plays a heavy role in this book.

Although the story has a serious tone, and is really rather depressing, there’s also some humor, especially in the first story. It was kind of a subtle humor sometimes, or maybe it was just unexpected due to the tone. Sometimes something I had read a sentence or two ago would belatedly hit me and make me laugh out loud.

I enjoyed the first two stories, but didn’t care for the third one as much where the story more often took a backseat to the philosophizing. In general I think this is one of those books where the main purpose was the message rather than the story. That can be problematic for me because the message is usually one I’ve already heard and/or read many times as was definitely the case with this book. Of course, that’s probably largely due to the influence of this very book, but for me, reading it decades later, the story needs to be that much more enjoyable to counteract the familiar message.

One comment for the spoiler tags: I was expecting some sort of scene at the end with Benjamin/Lazarus/whoever-he-was to provide some additional closure. He was a constant throughout the book as well as being there at the very beginning, so I expected him at the very end too. I guess what I was really expecting was some sort of reaction from him about Rachel.

Next Book
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. I think this will be my first time reading anything she’s written.

>199 YouKneeK: I read this when I was 19, and again when I was 40 because I remembered so little of it except that it was oddly funny. I enjoyed it much more the first time.

>200 clamairy: It does have quite a bit of meat to it. I imagine one would get more out of it in re-reads.

For those who have been keeping an eye out for news, this link has a (very) small bit of into about the Wheel of Time TV series in the works. Basically it’s just saying that the TV show may have significant changes from the books to make them work better for TV and that Sanderson thinks they'll be good.

I enjoyed the series very much, but I don’t think there’s any single aspect of it that I would be horrified to see changed, as long as the characters are likeable and the story is interesting and coherent. I may change my mind if I feel like a favorite character has been altered too much or if they’ve dropped scenes that I think are important to the overall plot, but right now I don’t feel like I care much.

Now if this were an adaptation of Hobb’s Elderlings series, that would be a different story. I probably wouldn’t even watch it because I’m so attached to the characters who live in my head that I wouldn’t want to watch any other interpretation of them that might influence how I see them.

>202 YouKneeK: I saw that news but it's virtually meaningless to me. I will watch it, though. I just realized Amazon has taken on both The Wheel of Time and that Lord of the Rings five season prequel. *gasp*

>202 YouKneeK: Without being snarky (though it will sound like it), who cares what Sanderson thinks? I want to know what Harriet thinks!
I figured if this ever made it to a screen version that there would be significant changes so that doesn't bother me. Honestly, I'll just be happy if they don't go the Game of Thrones route and stay away from nudity, gore/graphic violence and sexual perversions.

Besides The Tick (which I am loving) I'm not sure what else I've seen that is an amazon original. Oh, the Man in the High Tower. That just bored me to tears...

ps,
I LIKED the first 2 Harry Potter movies the best. Sigh...

>203 clamairy: They do seem to be planning a lot of fantasy lately. Although it’s a different type of fantasy, there’s also the adaptation of Good Omens. I thought it premiered tomorrow, but I just looked and it seems like they’ve already posted the first 6 episodes on Amazon Prime. I may give that one a try this weekend. I was lukewarm about the book, but the trailer looked like it might be fun and I haven’t watched a TV series in ages.

>204 BookstoogeLT: Yeah. In any case, I assume Sanderson feels the need to be diplomatic and positive about it, so I doubt he’d say much different even if he had major doubts about it. Is “The Man in the High Tower” a thing, or did you mean “The Man in the High Castle”? I think I watched a few minutes of the first episode once but didn’t make it all the way through. I hadn’t been crazy about the book to begin with so I’m not sure what I was thinking when I tried to watch it, but I quickly decided I didn’t want to.

>205 YouKneeK: Oops, you are correct. High Castle, not Tower. Alt-His has never appealed to me, so while I valiantly tried, I gave up after 3 or 4 episodes. I hadn't read the book and after the show, I know I won't bother :-)

Harriet was very vocal about choosing Sanderson so I'm just surprised I haven't heard more from her. She never struck me as the shrinking violet type. Maybe at this point she simply doesn't care anymore?

>204 BookstoogeLT: You don't remember the torture scenes, and all the gratuitous spanking of women?

>205 YouKneeK: Not the first 6 episodes - THE 6 episodes. It was planned as a mini-series, as reported by Gaiman himself.
I've not gotten around to watch it yet, I have chores to do :(

>207 quondame: I don't. Can you narrow it down to the book? At first I thought you were referencing the Sword of Truth, and sadly I DO remember scenes like that from that series :-(

For some reason I was thinking I had read Eye of the World just a couple of years ago but it turns it out it was back in '11 and I read the final book in '14. I am planning on a re-re-re-(you get the idea) read starting later this year.

>206 BookstoogeLT: That could be. Actually, when I first had your post. my initial reaction was “Harriet who?” until I realized she must have been his wife. Maybe nobody has gotten around to interviewing her yet (or she doesn’t want to be interviewed?) whereas Sanderson does interviews more often to publicize his work. I didn’t read the Reddit review, but I think it was more about his current writing and WOT just happened to come up in one of the questions. I went to the link and saw the word Mistborn plastered all over, so I backed away quickly since I've only read the original trilogy and didn't want anything spoiled.

>208 Busifer: Aaah, thank you for that clarification. I didn’t pay sufficient attention to any info published about it and thought it was going to be an ongoing series. Knowing it’s only 6 episodes actually makes me much more inclined to watch it since it won’t suck away spare time on a long-term basis if I end up enjoying it.

>210 YouKneeK: Yep, Harriet MacDougal (or McDougal, not sure which). She was also Jordan's editor as well as his wife and she got a lot of flack for allowing him to go so far afield with his descriptions and plot points. For some reason I was under the impression that she had sole rights to WoT, but Jordan must have sold the rights before kicking the can.

I did read the article and you are right, it was focused on Sanderson and WoT was just ancillary.

>209 BookstoogeLT: The scene that comes to mind is a dark friend who has failed and is being tortured in a basement, not one of the earlier books, but not one of Sanderson's. Also Faile being strapped naked to a board. All the Aiel and Aes Sedai disciplining scenes.

I've re-read and re-re-read earlier books pretty much before each new volume until around 10. But while JR/RJ wasn't into visiting brothels and killing off sympathetic but idiotic characters, there was a pretty high overall body count and rather a lot of lingering over just deserts.

>212 quondame: You bring up a good point, there are some pretty rough parts, especially in the prologues, when the Forsaken appear and their followers. I could live without all of that stuff, they could easily present them as evil without all the detail. I wonder when he says changes, does he mean things like maybe leaving out one of Matt or Perrin or one of them not being ta'veren? If they just want to start with Moiraine, which is essentially from New Spring, that's ok with me.

Does leaving out some of the rougher parts mean they should also skip the scenes of Rand locked in a box or constantly bleeding from his side?

>213 Karlstar: Considering the success of GoT, I think the gore will get done graphically. I don't like it, but I like the women beating on women less, much less. What I'm curious about are the goofy parts, where Rand, Perrin, and Mat each think one of the others knows his way with women.

>214 quondame: That was my opinion as well, that they would be more likely to ramp things up rather than tone it down based on the success of other violent shows.

I also agree about the goofy parts. I will particularly be watching for the actors to be tugging their braids, smoothing their skirts, sniffing, and muttering. I imagine they'll surely tone those over-emphasized parts of the story down, but I'll be a bit disappointed if we don't see such things at least once.

>212 quondame: & >215 YouKneeK:
That kind of thing is what I'm afraid of them focusing on instead of actually telling the best story they could. I'd forgotten how cruel the Forsaken, dark friends, etc could be.

I'll probably end up waiting to watch it until I've seen some reviews. I'm definitely not subjecting myself to visuals like in GoT...

>214 quondame: >215 YouKneeK: Lets hope they don't make it TOO much of a teen drama - even though they start out as teens and a lot of it is really teen drama. If they ruin it like Shanarra Chronicles, I'll be very disappointed. I had to laugh at your posts, there's so much muttering, braid pulling, hat tugging, etc I think it will be funny if they throw it in once just for fun. Once will be plenty!

>216 BookstoogeLT: Lets hope it doesn't go as far as GoT or Legend of the Seeker. I could have done without those parts. We re-watched the pilot of GoT and wondered why we ever watched another show.

>217 Karlstar: I only watched the first 2 episodes of Legend of the Seeker. Did they go as far on screen as the author did in the books?

Review: Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear



I went into this book blind, and it was not at all what I was expecting from the title. I was expecting a story about memories being altered or stored or something like that, possibly cyberpunk. Instead, this is a steampunk novel set in the 1800’s with a kind of semi-wild west feel to it. It had a pretty slow start, although it did pick up steam as it went on.

The story is told from the first person POV of Karen Memery. I guess the title is a play on words and maybe intended to reflect the fact that the book is about her memories of the events she recounted. Karen is a prostitute. Despite this, there wasn’t anything I would consider explicit. Her job and its lifestyle is more of a background that influences events rather than an active part of the story. On the other hand, this book probably sets some sort of world record for the number of euphemisms used per page, especially in the beginning when Karen is explaining her life as a “seamstress”.

I was sometimes a bit bored. Instalove was introduced early in the book and Karen obsessed over the object of her affections more than I wanted to read about. Some plot elements were predictable, and the identity of the serial killer was made obvious fairly early in the story. Maybe that was the intent so that the reader could shout “no!” every time the characters talked about it being the wrong person.

My other main problem was that the steampunk setting didn’t feel consistently implemented. There was some cool technology that basically only made an appearance to advance the plot, while the rest of the setting seemed uninfluenced by the fact that advanced technology was possible. I also didn’t really feel like I grasped some of that technology. I never understood the intended application of the wearable sewing machine that conveniently served as a suit of armor for busting out of a burning building and for breaking somebody out of jail, and the mind control machine was too hand-wavy.

On the other hand, I liked the voice of the main character, bad grammar and all, and I liked her despite my annoyance with her instalove obsession. That did get toned down a bit as the story progressed, or at least it became lest angsty, which helped. I also liked the other characters that she introduced, including the cat. Once the story picked up, it held my interest pretty well and I was interested in finding out what would happen. However, I didn’t enjoy it enough to continue with the related novella.

Next Book
Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip. This will be my first McKillip book.

>219 YouKneeK: Good review of Karen Memory. Alphabet of Thorn is well, somewhat spiky. Not what I'd recommend as a first McKillip, which would be Forgotten Beasts of Eld or The Book of Atrix Wolfe or even perhaps The Sorceress and the Cygnet.

>220 quondame: Or Winter Rose which was similar in tone to Novik's Uprooted, IMHO. Loved them both.

(Edited to add: I'm chuckling at the use of the word spiky. )
(Edited again to fix my bad tag.)

>220 quondame: Thanks. Spiky or thorny? :) I’ve read about 50 pages and so far I’m enjoying it. I suspect it’s going to end up being a bit more romance-y than I might like, but I’m interested in the setting and the characters and finding out more about the thorny words, and the writing style is very readable.

>220 quondame: and >221 clamairy: And thank you both for the additional McKillip recommendations. I’ve seen so much praise for her work that I’m sure I’ll give more of it a try eventually, regardless of my final opinion on the one I’m reading now.

To return to an earlier subject, I did watch two episodes of Good Omens this weekend – one yesterday and one today. I’m enjoying it quite a bit. It seems pretty true to the book from what I remember from reading it a little over a year ago. I think it may be putting a little less time into the parts of the book that I found less interesting and more time into my favorite parts (Aziraphale and Crowley), so that’s probably contributing to my enjoyment. The humor is definitely there, and it’s maybe toeing the “campy” line on occasion, but I’m looking forward to watching more of it. I don’t know if I’ll have time during the week, but probably next weekend otherwise.

>222 YouKneeK: I watched episode 3 today, I think it was the best this far, and I loved 1 & 2.
I would had binge watched all of it if it wasn't for husband, who also want to watch it, and so I'm pacing myself... hard as it is.
I loved the sort of historical retrospective in the first half of e3!

>223 Busifer: I’m glad to hear episode 3 is good! I’m looking forward to watching it. I was somewhat tempted to watch it yesterday after enjoying the second one so much, but I tend to get restless if I spend too much time watching TV so I was afraid I might burn myself out on it.

>219 YouKneeK: Sounds like one for me to avoid. Thanks for the review!

>225 Narilka: I’m happy to do my part in the TBR reduction efforts. :)

>219 YouKneeK: I hope you like Alphabet. You know how much I praise McKillip every time I read her books, so you know where I stand.
Funny thing is, while I enjoyed her stuff the first time around, it wasn't until this cycle of re-reads that I really began to appreciate and truly enjoy the word-smithing going on.

>219 YouKneeK: Alphabet of thorn is one of my favourite McKillip books. I hope you enjoy it and carry on to read more of her work.

>222 YouKneeK: & >223 Busifer: I am loving the show Good Omens. I watched through episode 5 last night, but now I have to wait until Friday night to watch the last. My sister is coming to help with mom, and she would not enjoy it at all. She never has understood my fantasy/dark side. :) I think husband is getting slightly interested, so I may watch it again with him. He gets a lot of the references that fly over my head, so that is good. For instance, Alistair Crowley is probably the inspiration for Crowley's name.

>199 YouKneeK: odd coincidence - the randomizer chose this for me to read this month. I will check out your spoiler after I'm done, but the non-spoiler parts of your review sound interesting so I'm hoping to enjoy it soon.

>227 BookstoogeLT: >228 Sakerfalcon: A McKillip book I did not know about! Thanks!

>231 Karlstar: She also has some young adult coming of age books (2 at least I think) as well as some urban fantasy novella/short story/anthology stuff. It is all worth tracking down in my opinion...

>227 BookstoogeLT:, >228 Sakerfalcon: Thank you, so far I’m enjoying Alphabet of Thorn a great deal! I’m just past the halfway point.

>229 MrsLee: I could see Good Omens being a good show to rewatch. There’s a lot of detail that goes by fairly quickly and would be easy to miss the first time around. That’s interesting, I never got the Alistair Crowley reference. I didn’t even know who he was until I just Googled him. I just thought Crowley was a common name for demons for some unknown reason because there is/was a demon named Crowley on Supernatural. (I haven’t watched Supernatural in several seasons, although I read the next season is the last one.) Maybe both characters had the same name influence.

>230 Darth-Heather: I can’t wait to learn what you think about it! In my case, I read it because a group I’m in on GR is reading it from June 15 – July 15. I got antsy because I had to borrow it from the library and my library doesn’t have many copies, so I ended up reading it way too early and now I’m impatiently waiting for people to start talking about it. :)

I'm so griped that Good Omens is a series and not a film, as I thought. Only because I'll have to wait to view it, as I am not TV connected. The previews are awesome. I went and listened to the BBC radio production of the book recently in preparation.

**drumming my feet in frustration**

>233 YouKneeK: Crowley from Supernatural IS the Crowley from lore. Not that I watch Supernatural anymore. I can only take so much of grown men acting like squabbling teen girls...

>234 2wonderY: Ouch, I’m sorry you have to wait! It’s on Amazon Prime, so you could watch it on a computer or a tablet, but if you don’t have Prime then I guess that won’t do you much good.

>235 BookstoogeLT: Haha, it does have some of that. I can’t remember now which season I stopped at. Maybe the 10th? That last thing I remember distinctly was watching the season with Amanda Tapping in it and being disappointed she didn’t have a more interesting role. I did enjoy the show for the most part, but I found it more and more difficult to return to it for each new season. It was kind of similar to my book series binge-reading issues – I felt like I had forgotten too much from the previous season by the time the next one started and I didn’t want to rewatch it to remind myself of the details. After the final season finishes airing, I might watch it through from the beginning. Then again, I might not. That’s a lot of episodes. If I do, I’ll have to pay more attention to Crowley. I’m rather deficient on demonic/occult/whatever lore knowledge. :) I pretty much just took the characters as they were presented and didn’t try to draw any parallels.

>229 MrsLee: There is a wiki I came across when I reread last year: https://goodomenslexicon.org/ . There's others as well, which probably go into more detail.

>236 YouKneeK: I suppose I could do a 99p Amazon Prime Deal when the show finishes, but otherwise Prime isn't worth it for me - 90% of my purchases are electronic downloads. We'll wait for the DVD or the BBC release.

>237 Maddz: It’s only 6 episodes and they’re all already up, at least on the U.S. site, so it probably wouldn’t be worth wasting the deal for that few episodes anyway unless there were other things you wanted to do with it.

>237 Maddz: Being a prime original, I doubt it will ever see a dvd OR bbc release. Just like Daredevil from Netflix never saw release in any other way :-(

It really annoys me that so many Netflix/Prime shows aren't released on DVD. I know I'm a luddite for not wanting to subscribe but I really don't watch enough to make it worth while. I'm still waiting in hope for DVDs of Alias Grace and the Haunting of Hill House to appear.

>237 Maddz: Good Omens is scheduled to be shown on BBC in the autumn. I think as they had some role in production that was part of the deal.

Review: Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip



Alphabet of Thorn is a short, standalone fantasy by Patricia A. McKillip. This was my first time reading any of her work, and I’ve seen comments in a few places that this was not necessarily the best book to start with, but I greatly enjoyed it. I guess I must have even better things to look forward to when I cycle back around to try more of her work.

The story is told from multiple POVs. One of the main POVs is focused on a teenage girl who was abandoned as a baby. She was taken in and raised by librarians in a castle where she works as a translator. A strange book written out of letters shaped like thorns falls into her hands, and she becomes obsessed with translating it. Another POV focuses on another teenage girl who has suddenly found herself the Queen after her father’s unexpected death. She is not what her people expect from a ruler, and nobody is sure if she'll be able to hold onto her crown or if her people will rebel. Most of the other POVs support those two POVs to some extent.

I enjoyed all the POVs. There were more than I expected from a book that’s only about 300 pages, but they were all interesting. I liked how a couple of the characters were so inexplicable to the people around them, and even to the reader at times, yet they were still intelligent and capable characters who just had their own ways of thinking about things and interacting with the world. I enjoyed how everything tied together at the end, and the build-up as the reader slowly starts to understand exactly what’s going on. I did think there were a few niggling logic issues here and there, but nothing too bothersome.

There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on about the style of the story. It somehow had the feel of an older, classic fantasy even though it was somewhat-recently published in 2004. It didn’t feel dated or full of tropes or anything negative like that, it just had a classic feel. In the beginning, I thought this book might end up being a bit too romance-filled for my tastes. There’s a romance of some sort in nearly every POV. However, somehow it didn’t end up getting on my nerves. There was very little of the insecure angsty type stuff that I get so tired of, and it didn’t use any other romance tropes in a way that annoyed me.

I’m rating this at 4.5 stars and rounding down to 4 on Goodreads.

Next Book
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay. I’ve read and enjoyed a few works by Guy Gavriel Kay. I’ve been fitting him in once a year in recent years and he was about due for a slot in my 2019 schedule. I plan to follow it up with River of Stars which I understand is set 400 years later in the same setting.

>241 YouKneeK: Excellent! Really glad you enjoyed this enough to rate it 4 1/2 :-) I think the romance here is probably the same level in almost every book she writes. For me, it is just at the right level, like Austen as opposed to Gaskell.

I just started The changeling Sea tonight and its pub date is '88, so McKillip has had some time to hone her skills, that is for sure. I hope you enjoy the rest of her books as well!

>242 BookstoogeLT: Which Gaskell? the one I remember Jane Gaskell, I don't remember as exactly romantic. I haven't read Elizabeth Gaskell.

>243 quondame: Ha, I didn't even know there was more than one :-) Learning something new every day.
I was referring to Elizabeth of Wives and Daughters.

>242 BookstoogeLT: Thanks! Alphabet is on the list of books that inspires most of my reading selections (which is why I chose that particular book) so I probably would have gotten to it eventually, but I don’t think I would have read it nearly this soon if your praise for McKillip hadn’t made me curious to try her work. :)

>245 YouKneeK: I'm a proud McKillip fan boy, that is for sure!

>241 YouKneeK: I'm so glad you rated this so highly as it's one of my favourite books!

>247 Sakerfalcon: It really is a great book!

>223 Busifer: I finally watched the 3rd episode of Good Omens today and you were right, it was very good! I enjoyed the historical bits in the first half of the episode a lot also.

I got home from work a little over an hour early today and I thought I could use that extra time to fit in another Good Omens episode without feeling guilty. And then of course shortly after I had finished watching that, a work issue came up and I lost 2 hours to that. :)

>233 YouKneeK: Aleister Crowley was quite well-known in his day. I remember being lent a biography of him many years ago. The story that I remember best was how he was brought in by British Military Intelligence to interrogate Rudolf Hess (given his interest in the occult)! The Beatles were a little obsessed with him too (as evidenced by the Sergeant Pepper album cover.

He seems to turn up quite a lot in fantasy nowadays.

He would probably be extremely chuffed.

>241 YouKneeK: Yup, yup. Need to get more McKillip in my life!
(I also need to start watching Good Omens.)

>249 -pilgrim-: Very interesting. It sounds like reading more about him would be an interesting experience at some point.

>250 clamairy: I hope you enjoy Good Omens once you start it! I finished it on Sunday and liked it a lot.

I finished watching Good Omens last week. I actually enjoyed it more than I did the book. It included all the bits that I loved, and skimped on the slightly heavy-handed "I'm making a point here" bits of the original.

It was also fun playing 'spot the update'. On the whole extremely faithful to the original, I was impressed how mobile phones were integrated into a story that was written when landlines and answering machines were the norm. And little touches, such as some one's assumption that World War III would start in Ukraine...

Neil Gaimam did an excellent job. I can't imagine an adaptation by anyone else working half as well.

>251 YouKneeK: It is. I would recommend the book that I read, except that it is so long ago now that I have forgotten both title and author!

>199 YouKneeK: I finished it! And agree with your spoiler. It seemed a bit of a loose thread left hanging. I really enjoyed this author's writing style; I think I was expecting it to be a bit dense and difficult to get into but found it easier going than that.

As for the message, my takeaway was mostly about humankind's propensity toward self destruction if not vigilant. I liked this quote: "How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? Perhaps by being materially great and materially wise and nothing else."

>252 -pilgrim-: I also liked the show quite a lot better than the book, for much the same reasons you mentioned.

>253 Darth-Heather: I’m glad you enjoyed it! That is a good quote.

Review: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay



Under Heaven is a fantasy-ish story set in medieval China. There are fantastical elements, and they do play a pivotal role, but they aren’t at the forefront. My knowledge of Chinese history and geography is nearly non-existent, but I believe this book is based on fictitious locations and characters while being inspired by real ones. I enjoyed most aspects of the story, but I did feel like it occasionally dawdled and sometimes I got restless with it.

The story starts off with Shen Tai, a man who’s honoring his dead father during his mourning period by burying the dead at a battle site his father had been a part of. There are ghosts there that are slowly laid to rest as he buries the corresponding bodies. He buries bodies from both sides of the battle, and his actions are at first considered strange and then admirable. The admiration has unexpected results that bring about major changes for Shen Tai. This doesn’t even remotely encompass what this story is about, but the dawdling aspect means that I can’t really describe the plot without giving away things that are revealed pretty far into the book. The story starts out as one type of story, then slowly morphs into a different type of story around the halfway mark. Meanwhile, there are also some chapters that tell Tai’s sister’s story, and that is yet another type of story.

I’ve read a few books set in China, but not very many of them, and I enjoyed reading about a different and less-familiar setting. I don’t know how accurate the author’s portrayal of Chinese culture from that era was, but it felt believable while also being quite a bit different from the cultures portrayed in most fantasy I’ve read. I was intimidated by the names at first. The beginning of the book lists a large cast of characters with names I was afraid I would never be able to keep straight. In actuality, I didn’t need that list. The characters were introduced slowly, and the spellings among the most frequently seen characters were different enough that I was never confused. For all the characters, the author always gave the reader enough information to remember who they were when they showed back up in the story.

I was a little distracted by the mixed tenses. Some POVs were written in present tense and others were written in past tense. I think it was mostly (only?) the female POVs written in present tense? I tended to forget about it until the present tense showed up and jarred me a bit. It did give those sections a different feel that kind of added to the atmosphere, but I’m not sure if that was the whole point or if I missed something.

As I said, the story did occasionally feel slow when it dawdled a bit over the scene-setting and history and such, but it was never boring. I enjoyed the story and I liked the main characters. I think I was also more satisfied with the ending than I usually am with his books, although I would have enjoyed knowing more about what happened with some of the characters. One of the things I enjoy most about Guy Gavriel Kay’s writing is how he writes characters and their interactions with each other. I plan to continue on with River of Stars which I understand takes place in the same setting but about 400 years later.

Next Book
River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay.

>255 YouKneeK: I really enjoyed Under Heaven, my impression of it was very similar to yours, I can't say if the background and characters are accurate, but they felt like it to me, I was definitely reading about a culture I'm not familiar with. I haven't read River of Stars yet, I'm looking forward to your review.

>256 Karlstar: I’m looking forward to seeing how things have changed by the time of River of Stars. I haven’t had a chance to start it yet, but I intend to after work today.

Review: River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay



River of Stars is a standalone follow-up book to Under Heaven. It’s set 400 years later, so it features different characters and a separate story and could be understood perfectly fine on its own. Events from the first book did have an influence on this book, and there are some references to characters and events from it. I enjoyed catching those little connections, but anything critical to the story is explained.

The story builds up slowly. It actually felt a little disjointed in the beginning until it started to become clear how everything tied together to provide necessary background for the meat of the story. The first book was political, but this one is much more heavily so. There are also some battles as conflicts escalate between the Kitai and neighboring tribes, but those scenes were kept fairly short. Fantasy elements play even less of a role in this book than in the first one, if that’s possible. There’s one pivotal moment involving a fantasy element, but the rest was just window dressing, and sparse window dressing at that.

I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much as the first one. It did seem to hold my attention more consistently, but the characters and the story in the first book captured me more than those in this book. The characters did grow on me eventually, and I was more invested in everything by the end, but it took me a while to get there. I continued to enjoy the cultural references and the characters and history that were inspired by real people and events in Chinese history, which is something I know very little about.

This book has a very ambiguous ending. You don’t know quite what happened to one of the characters at the end, you only know what people thought and what evidence they tried and failed to find. That annoyed me a bit. As I approached the end, I kept flip-flopping in my expectations of how things would end up. I was getting anxious to finally find out how it would end, and then I didn’t find out.

I’m rating this at 3.5 stars and rounding up to 4 on Goodreads.

Next Book
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I don’t know much about this except that I have the vague expectation from barely-remembered reviews that it’s supposed to be a bit creepy. This usually ends up meaning I won’t find it creepy, but you never know.

>258 YouKneeK: That about sums up what other folks have said, would you say 'ok' is a good one word rating? I'm actually looking forward to his new book, A Brightness Long Ago, despite the terrible cover.

>258 YouKneeK: I’ve not long read The Night Circus and wouldn’t describe it as creepy. It kind of gave me that impression at the beginning but the story soon took over. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

>259 Karlstar: 3 stars is typically “ok” for me, but 3.5 stars, especially if I round that up to 4 on GR, is something more. It had a depth to it that I enjoyed, among other things, but I wouldn’t be inclined to tell anybody they were missing out on something amazing if they decided to skip it. I’m not good at being concise, so maybe you can find a single word that sums that up. Somegoodqualitiesbutoptional? Does removing spaces make it one word? ;) I likely won’t get to his new book anytime soon, but I’ve enjoyed seeing reviews for it as they show up.

>260 haydninvienna: Good to know, thanks. I might be mixing it up with another book. I only had time for a couple short chapters last night, not enough to figure out where things are going, but I’m definitely intrigued!

>258 YouKneeK: I lost interest in the first 100 pages, enough to not pick the book up again, back when it was released. Since it has been my intention to pick it up again, for a new try. I keep pushing it ahead of me, though.

>262 Busifer: Funny, I did that too, but then I do that with many books. Once I re-started, I finished it pretty quickly.

>263 haydninvienna: I usually don't do that. I press ahead, or abandon forever. In this case I keep intending to pick it up again, but then I find something else that begs to be read... ;-)

>262 Busifer: A good friend gave this book to me, so I've tried to read it twice. But I'm terrible at reading from obligation. There are so many other books that suit me better.

>262 Busifer:, >263 haydninvienna:, >265 2wonderY: I’m just trying to figure out if you’re all talking about River of Stars (my assumption) or The Night Circus. I guess I cause confusion for myself by listing my next book in the same post as my review for the book I just finished. :)

>266 YouKneeK: I, at least, am speaking of River of stars.

>266 YouKneeK: I was talking about The Night Circus. I repeat, it started rather slowly but once I got going I finished it pretty quickly, and didn’t find it creepy.

>267 Busifer: I could see how one might lose interest in River of Stars in the first 100 pages or so. Although it did hold my attention, there was a point several chapters in where I was wondering where the heck the story was trying to go and if it would ever get there. In a different mood, I might have gotten frustrated with it.

>268 haydninvienna: Ah, ok. I’m only about 75 pages into The Night Circus now, but so far I’m pretty interested in it. I agree, there’s definitely no creepiness. I must have mixed it up with something else, or else I read a review from somebody who’s easily creeped out.

Ah. I was talking about The Night Circus as well.

>269 YouKneeK: I'm still holding the hope that the right mood will hit me ;-)

>269 YouKneeK: It's possible that you read a review that mentioned Something Wicked This Way Comes in reference to the Night Circus?

>272 Darth-Heather: I'm always confusing those two titles, although I've never read Night Circus. :) The former is definitely creepy in my book.

>270 2wonderY: Whew, now I’m clear on which book everybody meant! :) What if you donate the book your friend gave you and then buy your own or borrow it from the library? Would that make a difference? ;) Just joking, of course. I’d say trying twice is a more than fair effort.

>272 Darth-Heather: That’s very possible. I’ve never (yet) read Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern



The Night Circus is a standalone fantasy set in our world during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, although I often forgot that I was reading a book with a historical setting because it wasn’t a big part of the story. A magician named Prospero believes his young daughter shows great magical promise, and he challenges another magician to a competition. They’ll each train their respective young students and then see who’s the best. Throughout the story, we learn about the inception and growth of a special circus that mysteriously shows up in different cities around the world, is only open from sunset to sunrise, and then disappears as mysteriously as it arrived.

I really enjoyed this in the beginning. I was curious about the circus, interested in the plot and the young people being trained in magic, curious to understand more about the competition, and I enjoyed the imaginative descriptions of the circus, the midnight dinners, and other things. But then the aforementioned imaginative descriptions just went on and on. And on and on. And on and on.

It isn’t that the writing was dry or anything like that. It wasn’t. It just started to feel tedious, like each new addition was really just more of the same in a different guise. The plot didn’t have enough meat to it, and I never really gained much of an attachment to the characters despite my initial interest in them. It was also quite predictable. Early on, as soon as you learn that the second magician chooses a young boy to teach, you can guess at least half the plot.

It did start to pick back up in the last 25%, though. The plot came back to the forefront and finally started to move forward, and there were some other characters I was more interested in who started to play a larger role in the story. I liked the ending pretty well too, but I don’t think the story is going to stick with me for very long.

Next Book
Neuromancer by William Gibson.

>275 YouKneeK: Oh goodness. As soon as I clicked the spoiler and read it, I just rolled my eyes and thanked God that He'd spared me from reading this book ;-)
I'd seen enough reviews from when it came out to know it wasn't for me. This is just the final confirmation.

Sadly, I don't have anything good to say about Neuromancer either :-( It was the first, and last, Gibson that I read. I was expecting the Grand Daddy of Cyberpunk but what I got was something that made Snowcrash look like the best book I'd ever read, in comparison!

Goodness, I'm just full of cheer and happiness this morning.

>276 BookstoogeLT: LOL, yeah, and it went exactly where you would expect based on that spoiler, although it took a while to get there. The book was a weird mixture of good and bad. I’m not even sure if I’m glad I read it or if I wish I'd spent the time on something else.

I don’t have the greatest of expectations for Neuromancer. I bought it on sale a couple years ago and I've added it to my schedule a couple of times, but kept swapping it back out for something else. Sometimes those low expectations help me though, so we’ll see. At least it’s short!

>277 YouKneeK: I've always considered 3star books to be my mainstay, something that kept me from reading a bad book. In food terms, they're like bologna sandwiches. It does the job and doesn't taste horrible, but not something you look forward to. At least, I hope you don't look forward to eating bologna sandwiches. If you do, you need to go to some higher class restaurants!

>275 YouKneeK: I reread Neuromancer and some other Gibsons in the last couple of years, and have to say it now comes across as very dated. Unfortunately, a lot of cyberpunk suffers from near-future creep. I tried reading Synners last year, and gave up; I found the main character unsympathetic and it didn't hold my attention.

>276 BookstoogeLT: >279 Maddz: Same here, people sometimes ask me if I've read Neuromancer and my answer is always yes, a long time ago and I don't remember a thing about it and I wasn't impressed. Sure, it was ahead of its time and a new concept at the time, but even then I wasn't impressed. Snowcrash and Diamond Age are better. I see Neal Stephenson has a new book out, but I'm wary of even checking it out.

On Neuromancer: I would expect that one, and all the others - Count Zero, Monalisa Overdrive - to be extremely dated if read today. Likewise with Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties, all of which I enjoyed when they were first released but expect to be very disappointing if read today.

I'm a bit more positive that some of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's books would hold up a bit better, not least because they are set against an alternate history, and because he's more into the characters than the technological concepts. I'm still a bit wary about rereading any of them. I'd like for them to stay good ;-)

>278 BookstoogeLT: For me, a bologna sandwich would be the equivalent of a 1-star rating at best. ;) I’ve hated bologna since somewhere in the single-digit age range, although I admittedly have never tried it again as an adult. I think, if I were to translate my star ratings into sandwiches, I’d probably go with a chicken sandwich for the 3-star rating. It usually tastes fine but it’s nothing special, and I’d only choose it if nothing else on the menu sounded more interesting. If it’s dressed up with crispy (not limp!) bacon or some particularly tasty sauce, then it might get bumped up to 3.5 stars.

So far I’ve made it through 27 whole pages of Neuromancer and I only fell asleep twice. But I didn’t sleep as well or as long as usual last night, so there probably would have been a nap regardless of what I had been reading. I think I’m just not a big fan of cyberpunk, although I did really like the Nexus trilogy which is cyberpunkish and gave those books a consistent 4 stars. I liked Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom well enough to give it 3.5 stars and remember it with slight fondness despite thinking it had a stupid plot. The others I can remember reading were When Gravity Fails, Altered Carbon, and Snow Crash and I gave all of those 3 stars.

>282 YouKneeK: I'm not much for cyberpunk, either, though I loved some of the seminal works when they were first published. Grimwood's Arabesk trilogy is not exactly cyberpunk, though. I remember liking Effinger's Marid Audran trilogy, but not enough to ever considering a reread. I'm having Nexus waiting in some upper level of Mount TBR, though, so what you say encourages me to move it even closer to the top!

>282 YouKneeK: Oh, I like that, sandwich ratings! What is your 5-star sandwich? For me, much depends on my mood at the time. I can eat a bologna sandwich in the right kind of mood (a sort of despairing of the world, all hope is lost, I hate everyone) if it has white bread and lots of yellow mustard. Your description of a 3-star book/sandwich is perfect!

So, I had to google "bologna sandwich", because I had never heard of it before. I guess it's the equivalent of a Swedish cheese and ham sandwich: safe, simple, predictable, and the anti-thesis of exciting.

>285 Busifer: Yes, if the ham was processed into oblivion :-)

>283 Busifer: I would be very interested to learn what you think about Nexus if it does make it to the top.

>284 MrsLee: Sandwich ratings would never have occurred to me if not for >278 BookstoogeLT:. :) I’m not sure I could carry the theme all the way up to 5 stars, because I really don’t eat sandwiches that much to begin with. If that chicken were turned into chicken salad and put on a croissant, we’d probably be up into 4-star territory. But for 5 star? I don’t know. Maybe a portabella mushroom sandwich, if it’s prepared well? Do you have a 5-star sandwich?

>285 Busifer: Ham at least has a clear origin. I look at bologna as being more of a mystery meat, like spam, with a questionable taste. Hotdogs are also rather mysterious, but I at least like the taste of those.

>286 BookstoogeLT:, >287 YouKneeK: Well, yeah, but we really don’t have spam here, nor bologna sausages. The closest is maybe falukorv, but it’s contents has to be clearly declared so not so mysterious... and seldom used on sandwiches.
I was thinking more psychological/cultural analogy than the actual, well, ”meat” ;-)

>288 Busifer: I Googled falukorv. That looks interesting. I was a little skeptical when this link described it as “bologna, but really good bologna”. Could such a thing exist? ;) The recipe for it on that page looks appealing, though.

>288 Busifer: and you believe those little signs? *wink*
I actually enjoy a good turkey bologna sandwich as a work lunch. Easy to make, portable, filled with protein and is still edible even if totally squashed out in the woods. But NOT what I want to eat for lunch on Saturday afternoon :-D

>287 YouKneeK: Goodness, what a fun little aside this has turned into. For me, a 4 star sandwich would be a toasted tomato sandwich. Toast, mayo, salt and pepper and sliced up raw tomatoes. Yum! I'm not sure what I'd do for a 5. maybe a reuben on rye? without saurkraut though! That would be a 2. I think a 1 would be an eggsalad sandwich...

Mmm, sandwiches. We boiled a gammon joint for our lunch today, so I shall have slices tomorrow for lunch, but probably with a salad and some damson ketchup. I'm not much of a bread eater, but I do like a nice crusty roll or a decent ciabatta or panini. The supermarket down from the office does a huge mozzarella and tomato roll, but the one I had the other day was oddly flavourless and rather soggy. I do like a nice bruschetta though, it's good starter at an Italian restaurant.

However, my usual lunch is a salad or left-overs. I'm rather sensitive to tummy bugs, so I tend to avoid commercially-made pre-packed sandwiches (especially with the recent Listeria scare). Plus, most commercial sandwiches involve large amounts of shrubbery and multi-grain bread neither of which I tend to eat. It's the healthy options being rather unhealthy for me.

>290 BookstoogeLT: If we start rating books with sandwiches, there is going to be massive confusion because I think we have completely opposite sandwich tastes! I don’t care for corned beef, although I do like sauerkraut. But probably not on a sandwich. And I like egg salad quite well, as long as it’s prepared fresh and not some mass-produced, pre-packaged thing. Which reminds me that I think tuna salad sandwiches are also pretty good, in limited quantities. I’ve never had a tomato sandwich. I’d be willing to try one in the right mood, but I’m not a big tomato fan. Sometimes I pick them out, sometimes I eat them, and there's no predicting which I'll do until I'm faced with it.

>291 Maddz: I typically have a salad for lunch also, especially on workdays. On weekends lunch is usually either leftover dinner or else I’ll just snack around. Dinner itself is inevitably something dinner-like, which does not include sandwiches in my book. With all that, eating a sandwich is a rare occurrence. I rarely have bread in the house. For just me, and for how rarely I eat them, there is little point in having sandwich-making materials on hand. A biscuit (the soft, thick, flaky US version; I’m not sure what those are called in the UK?) is a delicious but rare treat. I like rolls and other breads that one would typically eat with just butter, but I prefer them warm and soft.

>290 BookstoogeLT: >291 Maddz: >292 YouKneeK: I like sandwiches! A plain turkey or ham sandwich would be 3 star for me. 5 stars is easy - that's the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich the day after Thanksgiving. Turkey, maybe some dressing, lettuce, maybe a little cranberry sauce..... kind of hard to beat, but that's the ultimate sandwich. A good Philly Cheesesteak or Reuben might be the 4 star. A fried bologna sandwich comes in at 3.5, maybe 4. I'm not sure there's a sandwich less than 3 stars for me, because I wouldn't even finish it. Maybe liverwurst or something?

Now that I think about it, isn't the 5 star sandwich really the MLT?

>293 Karlstar: Right, you’ve done it now. I typed what follows once and then decided not to post it, but if you’re talking the leftovers sandwich, I’ll see your turkey sandwich and raise you with tapenade.
I used to do this back in Canberra while the kids were small. There was a small Italian bakery that used to make big, round loaves with a hard crust. Sometimes for a weekend lunch we’d buy one of those and I’d make some tapenade: kalamata olives, garlic, capers, anchovies, quick buzz in the blender, then cut thick slices of bread and spread the tapenade thick. We had 4 kids under 10 years old and they used to fight over it.
Recipe here, which looks pretty close to what I used to do.

>292 YouKneeK: I think what you are describing is what would be called a cookie in the U.K. too. We distinguish between cookies, which are soft, and biscuits, which are not (until dunked).

And my sandwich scale:
5. Smoked salmon with cream cheese and caviar
4. Roast beef with salad and horseradish
3. Tuna with mayonnaise
2. A plain ham or cheese sandwich
1. Egg and mayonnaise

>282 YouKneeK: >284 MrsLee: >287 YouKneeK: 5 star would be a prosciutto, provolone, mozzarella panini, heavily grilled on fresh bread with pesto sauce - with a little lemon juice drizzled onto it. Or one of those amazing productions brought into work in San Francisco in the 80s. 4 is a tuna melt with just the right tuna, cheddar and bread - or a perfect Ruben. I guess I go for the grilled sandwiches unless the bread is almost worth dying for in and of itself.

>294 haydninvienna: Sounds fantastic!

>293 Karlstar: LOL, I had to look up an MLT. I had forgotten about the mutton lettuce tomato sandwich.

>294 haydninvienna: The tapenade sounds interesting. I’m not sure I’d like it, but I’d be willing to try it and would probably be pleasantly surprised. I’m actually not sure if I’ve ever had an anchovy, but I know I like the rest of the ingredients.

>295 -pilgrim-: Pictures might help. This is what I’m calling a biscuit. (Link goes to KFC’s web site, a U.S. fast food chain.) That wouldn’t be a cookie in the UK would it? I tried Googling and it sounds like maybe what we call a biscuit in the US doesn’t have a UK equivalent. I saw some comparisons to scones, but that seems to me to be entirely different. I think of a scone as a type of dessert, with some sort of fruit or other sweet flavoring. A biscuit would be more appropriate as a side with a meal and in some cases is turned into a meal in itself by putting gravy on it, or turned into a breakfast sandwich with sausage and egg or something like that. But I think anything but butter ruins the glory of the biscuit!

>296 quondame: Mmm, now that sounds like a 5-star sandwich-ish thing that I could support! :)

>298 YouKneeK: Proportions of the ingredients are up to you. I tended to start with the basic package sizes--so 500 grams of kalamata olives, small can of anchovies, and so on. This made for rather a lot but with 6 of us eating it, it went pretty quickly.

I could also go for -pilgrim-'s smoked salmon as long as it was hot-smoked (and no cream cheese), or quondame's prosciutto etc. I think I've only ever had one reuben sandwich, and that was in the Qantas lounge in Los Angeles Airport once. I thought it was pretty good.

All of which reminds me that amaryann21 writes reviews with a food rating: "I've decided that I'm going to give books a food rating as well. I've often thought books compare to food quite nicely, and to me, they are nearly as necessary for my survival. ...".

ETA also that the cookbook Cooking Out of This World contains this sentence (in an article on eating while reading): “If you are reading Mr Lovecraft’s decaying prose, Roquefort is not the thing to be nibbling.”.

>294 haydninvienna: everything* is better with tapanade! Amazing on turkey sandwich as you said. And on pizza. I even stir a spoonful into tomato-based soups. (and eat it by the spoon when nobody is watching...)

(*the exception being grilled cheese sandwich, which needs no condiments)

>298 YouKneeK: A scone is the closest equivalent to an American biscuit, but you're right that the former tend to be sweet (although cheese scones are delicious!) and the latter savory. Bu they are about the same shape, size and texture and I suspect the recipes and techniques are the same barring some difference in sugar content.

>298 YouKneeK:, >302 Sakerfalcon: Scones can be either sweet or savoury. After seeing the picture, I now concur with Sakerfalcon.

>299 haydninvienna: On reflection, a more piquant soft cheese would be better. But I still feel cheese, or possibly sour cream, should be present.

This is certainly a mouth-watering digression!

>303 -pilgrim-: +1 for sour cream, in moderation. The "biscuits" in the picture that >298 YouKneeK: linked to look like scones to me. I therefore also agree with >302 Sakerfalcon: .

>298 YouKneeK: Cinnabon had a storefront in Cambridge and we tried them before we moved out of town. I wasn't impressed - I found their offerings sickly sweet and claggy. I'd call them more of a pastry rather than a scone or biscuit. Scones are more like a small dryish bun and as noted can be either sweet or savoury (I have a weakness for cherry scones). They usually are found making part of a cream tea - split the scone, butter them, slather on clotted cream and a generous helping of home-made jam (strawberry is traditional).

The Wikipedia article may be helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscuit

What I've seen marketed as scones in coffee shops in the US, at least where I live, are nothing like biscuits.

I seem to recall that Starbucks used to sell what they called a “scone” that was more like a kind of triangular rock-cake. This might be what >306 jjwilson61: is thinking of.

mmmmm.... triangular rock cake....

>305 Maddz: To be fair to cinnamon rolls, they are a yeast bread, not a soda bread like biscuits and scones. In the US, biscuits can be flaky or crumbly or in the not-so-good cases almost bread like, sort of like light salty scones. I prefer the crumbly sort, as a base for great pork sausage gravy, but in California a good biscuit is hard to find.

>300 haydninvienna: LOL, that food rating system is very funny. I scanned through a few of her posts and enjoyed reading her reasons for the food she rated the books with.

>302 Sakerfalcon: A cheese scone sounds like something I would very much want to try! In the US, I agree with >306 jjwilson61: that the scones I’ve seen here aren’t anything like US biscuits. I’ve had scones at Panera and Starbucks, and I think a couple random other places that I can’t remember. The scones I’ve had all had a much drier texture than a good biscuit, and were more crumbly than I would expect a biscuit to be. I’d say biscuits have more air in them than scones do also.

So if, as >307 haydninvienna: says, US scones are “triangular rock cakes”, then maybe we just don’t have proper scones in the US? On the other hand, the description of a scone that >305 Maddz: provided sounds fairly similar to what I’ve experienced. If and when I next get the chance to visit the UK, I’ll have to seek out some scones for the purposes of making a scientific comparison!

>305 Maddz: I think I’ve only eaten at Cinnabon once. I didn’t much care for it either. If I’m going to indulge in that much sugar, I’d rather hold out for something that tastes better. I would definitely never consider calling them a scone or a biscuit. I’d just call it a cinnamon roll I guess, although I agree that pastry is a closer definition than scone or biscuit.

For some strange reason US scone recipes have the dough being formed into a large circle and cut in wedges instead of being rolled out and cut into disks, which is the procedure for biscuits. What are sold in Starbucks as scones are architectured to stand up to rough handling, whereas a real scone must be treated carefully if it is to last form the oven to the table. Also the sometimes put oats in them. Really. So nothing like a scone. My daughter makes scones that are closer to small cakes than to biscuits, but have just enough crumbly not to go over the line. I'm still working on her to attempt a jalapeno cheddar biscuit, but she's stubborn.

>311 quondame: It sounds like we’re seriously missing out in the scone department here in the US, at least if our only exposure to scones have been the fast food variety!

>312 YouKneeK: Real scones with Devon cream and the sweet gooey stuff of your choice can't be beat.

>310 YouKneeK: Recipes - classic scones https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4622/classic-scones-with-jam-and-clotted-cre..., cheese scones - https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1666638/classic-cheese-scones

You could also look at the Great British Bake-Off for more recipe ideas.

>314 Maddz: Thanks! The cheese scones especially look delicious. I’m not much of a cook/baker, but they look like they might be easier to make than I would have expected. Seeing those pages also makes it much more clear to me why US biscuits would be considered similar to UK scones.

>314 Maddz: I watch the Great British Baking Show on PBS, and it seems that every episode involves baking some kind of confection that I've never heard of but which seems common to the contestants.

There is a biscuit complication - some biscuits are dough dropped in blobs on a sheet or rolled and cut. other recipes involve rolling out the dough and layering with butter to create separated layers. I'd be interested to know if there are different terms for the two very different styles, but I've always heard both referred to as 'biscuits'.

>310 YouKneeK: Let us know if you do come to the UK!

>316 Darth-Heather: UK biscuits are generally dough rolled out thinly and cut into rounds, and baked on a sheet. They usually produce a dry, crisp product which is eaten as is, perhaps dunked in tea, perhaps iced. These may be sandwiched together with a filling - see custard creams or chocolate eclairs (not to be confused with an éclair which is a chocolate covered pastry with whipped cream filling).

Blob-style biscuits tend to be things like macaroons (extra-large amaretti). The main thing about a British biscuit is the dense, dry texture. Scones, buns and tea breads are more bread-like; cakes range from rich fruit to sponge cakes. Then you get hybrids like Jaffa Cakes - they're a sponge layer, with orange jelly covered in chocolate, Inland Revenue wanted to classify them as a biscuit (so it would attract 20% VAT) but McVities won the battle to keep them as a cake (0 rated).

Generally speaking, biscuits are dry, crisp and dense, scones and breads are bread-like - open crumb but tending to a dryish texture, cakes are open crumb and usually fairly moist. Scones, breads and cakes usually include a raising agent, and biscuits usually don't.

Reading though this rather thorough discourse ;-) on biscuits, cookies, scones, and cakes, I'll say that the Swedish types are very English. I have never really understood an US "biscuit", because it's very NOT a biscuit as I know it: to borrow from Maddz definition - dry, crisp, dense, no rising agent, but just maybe some glazing (but usually not).

It is always interesting to get to understand these differences, were language doesn't really cut it and translations are arbitrary approximations.

Just to confuse the issue and muddy the waters a bit: in South Africa biscuits in English are what a Brit might reasonably expect, but an Afrikaans beskuit is a rusk. Should we ask divinenanny, Ennas or zjakkelien what Dutch beskuit is?

ETA: And Speculaas is what every Brit biscuit wants to be when it grows up and goes to Heaven.

>319 hfglen: Of course, isn't the etymology of biscuit from the French bis cuit - cooked again? Which effectively is the definition of a rusk - bread cooked again. See ship's biscuit, melba toast...

>318 Busifer: Haha, your description of this as a “rather thorough discourse” cracked me up. :) This thread may collapse under the weight of all these biscuits, scones, cookies, cakes, and rusks before the end of the month!

>319 hfglen:, >320 Maddz: I had never even heard of a rusk; I had to Google that one. I have heard of melba toast, although I don’t know if I’ve ever tried it. Wikipedia also says biscotti is a type of rusk, which I believe I may have had, but it didn't make much of an impression on me if so.

We really need to get to work on inventing a method for instantaneous transportation of foodstuffs. We could have monthly multi-cultural food exchanges from the comfort of our homes. :)

>321 YouKneeK: Ah, you weren't a Farley baby then... ;) (A well-known brand of rusks for babies in the UK - good when teething as I recall my mother sticking one in my sister's mouth when she was grizzling.)

>322 Maddz: Not as far as I know! I believe I chewed on wet washcloths, if I remember my mother’s stories correctly. But I guess at that age we actually would have been living in Germany, so I was at least in closer physical proximity to Farley rusks than I would have been here in the US. (I was born in California, but we moved to Germany when I was two weeks old and stayed there for a couple years before coming back to the US. Too young to have any tangible memories of living there, unfortunately.)

I was going to wait until quarter end to start my next thread because such timing appeals to me, but this one really is bursting at the seams and I don’t want to drive everybody nuts for 5 more days with the slow loading times.

In a few minutes, the link below will lead to my new thread. Feel free to continue any conversations about books or baked goods or whatever, either here or there! ;)

Wow! Nothing like an international food comparison to blow up a thread! :) Love the descriptions of sandwiches. Now I'm thinking that we need to take one type of sandwich, and use the variations thereof to determine the ratings. For instance. Peanut butter and jelly. Mass produced white bread, smooth, sugary commercial brand peanut butter, commercial cheap jelly = 1. Lovely homemade wheat bread, chunky natural peanut butter with homemade delicious jam = 5. You see?

>325 MrsLee: Yes, but doesn't it depend on what kind of homemade jam? A 5 for me would be strawberry, since it is about the only one I can make myself, but I have fond memories of a cherry jam my mother used to make. Homemade grape is also amazing but really a pain to do. I think you've hit on the perfect bread though.

>325 MrsLee: peanut butter and banana slices. with raisins.

>325 MrsLee: I can't see any sandwich without melted cheese making it past a 4.0.

>325 MrsLee: LOL, no kidding! I love the single-sandwich rating idea.

Really, I’m starting to think we’re all being incredibly unimaginative with our simple star ratings. The other day (yesterday?) I saw a sarcastic comment in one of the LT redesign threads that people could use a photo of their cat as a book cover if they wanted to, and somehow my mind jumped to this thread with discussions about sandwich ratings, and I found myself thinking about how different pictures I have of my cat might be used to represent different book ratings. I don’t think I would actually do such a thing, if only because it would add too much time to the review process, but it amused me to consider it!

>324 YouKneeK: Amen to that!

>325 MrsLee: It is a great idea, but I think I'd run out of appropriate photos very quickly.

>326 Karlstar: I suppose, like star ratings, sandwich ratings are highly individualized, and therefore not an accurate measurement of a books worth, but possibly more fun than stars. :) I made some grape jam last summer that is out of this world, and the process was not nearly as difficult as I feared.

>328 quondame: There is a cheese which would be wonderful melted on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Gjetost. It is like a less sweet caramel. Sliced paper thin and melted on toast/bagel, etc. it is amazing.

>331 MrsLee: Perhaps not in your site reviews, but in your threads here, your kitty photo ratings could be done? Hmmm? Pretty please? Maybe just now and then?