Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great fun. This book barrels along at a fast pace, and never slows down. Has a bit of swearing, and one sex scene, which is pretty easily skipped.

In a world where the government has downsized to a small suburb in LA, and Corporations have franchised the functions of government, traffic travels at a pace somewhere between Mad Max and Falling Down, and customer service is king.

It's meant to be outrageous, not careful, so an elite hacker samurai, who delivers pizza for his living is perfect for a protagonist, especially when his name is Hiro Protagonist.

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The Baker's Boy

The Baker's Boy by J.V. Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very different from her Sword of Shadows books, this world is populated by villains and innocents. She avoids complex characters, right up until the end of the book. The simplicity is sometimes in itself entertaining. The villains are mustache twirling plotters, the innocents are a maiden and a baker's boy, both running from home. With interjections of guards telling each other (mildly) dirty stories, and dropping hints about the intrigue between the villains, the book feels like a melodrama. The shadows of complexity arrive in the storylines about Tawl, a knight, and Nabber, a child pickpocket. Starting from far away, their trajectory seems to place them like a meteor streaking between the villains and innocents, and it's not exactly clear what their influence will be.

I'll be reading the next book in this trilogy, though I don't find it as original and compelling as her later books.

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Acacia: The War with the Mein

Acacia: The War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book has a great plot structure. The arc of the story is well planned, and has potential for interesting conflicts and characters. The weakness comes from:

1. a sometimes too obvious use of a trope, such as Chekhov's Skill, or Orphan's Ordeal.*

2. related to 1, an uneven level of character intimacy. Two characters(the daughters) get great treatment of their progression, their conflicts, their relationships. They are in interesting predicaments, and you see a definite progression from one plot point to the next. You're shown the progress from A->B->C, not just told about being at A, being at B, being at C. The other two characters(the sons), we just get little vignettes where there is more explaining than exposition. This shallow approach makes it feel like those tropes have sharp edges sticking through the fabric of the story.

This is this Author's first fantasy book, coming from Historical Fiction. As such, I can see his predilection for understanding conflict as being a product of the past. There's definitely understanding of the relations of great powers, and the ability of an empire to co-opt it's conquerors.

Surprisingly, his grasp of the fantastic elements are quite good. He creates magic that is unruly, mystic, and has real drawbacks. When you finally do understand the "Tunishnevre", the mixed sense of menace, horror and pity is well portrayed.

In all, I think there's potential here. I'll check the next books out of the library,

* Using tropes in fiction is not a problem, in fact fiction is built out of tropes. Sometimes it can be fun to just list all the tropes in any fiction. We depend on a shared framework of storytelling for drama. It's natural, but the skillful storytellers cloak the tropes in characters, prose and action.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very easy to read, format of letters to a stranger creates an intimate, well-divisioned story.

Like most fiction, this story takes all the dramatic things that could happen to the character, and they all happen. Which, while unbelievable, is a useful device for exploring the drama of being a teenager, and being a teenager who doesn't quite fit in the normal high school crowd.

The amount of sex doesn't jive with my own experience as a teen, and there's definitely some graphic content here. It mostly falls short of being explicit, however. I think I'd have a hard time saying it was ok for a teen to read, but for adults wanting to develop more sympathy for the teenage years, it's a great start.

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Epiphany of the Long Sun

Epiphany of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A continuation of "The Book of the Long Sun", which I reviewed earlier, this continues the story of a priest become revolutionary.

Gene Wolfe can write character voices. There's a lot of dialogue in these books, and sometimes there's not a lot of tags, like "he said, she said". It's still obvious who's speaking. After a couple words, you know if it's the always polite(politeness so sharp it can be a weapon) Patera Silk, the slang-dealing thief Auk, or the constantly hemming and hedging Patera Remora.

For a book that is so quick to read, I was surprised at how it had me using more words in everyday life. Some books are hard, and they exercise your brain, stretching it to places where it stores those more rarely used words. This book was able to do that without bogging down in parenthetical phrases.

As a book driven mostly by dialogue, some people will be annoyed by some of the voices, the tendency to interrupt, or fail to explain fully a point. Also, the action often happens in the dialogue. Threatening words might connote a raised gun. Of course, if you read the first half, then of course you won't be bothered by those things, so check out the first couple of chapters of the first book before committing to these two books.



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The Gates

The Gates by John Connolly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Since I read "The Book of Lost Things" by this author, my wife saw this in the Library, and decided that I would like it. She read it first, and loved it. I read it second.

The author certainly has a theme: childhood lost. In the first it was because of a parent dying, this one because of divorce. The difference between the two books is in tone, and appeals to a bit different audience because of it. The Gates has a very light tone. The author uses the well known British humo(u)r to keep a story about Hell, demons, and the end of the world, appropriate to younger kids. The same humo(u)r might make you laugh out loud.



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A Dance with Dragons

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A continuation of the dark, complicated, political, magical(not in the fairies and unicorns kind of way), conflicted, frustrating(why aren't the good guys winning? Why can't I tell which ones are the good guys? Why did that guy, who I spent the last 4 books following and rooting for die?), surprising(see previous), and satisfying(some of those bad guys are getting what's coming to them) series, recently made popular by a TV adaptation by HBO. I love it, but there are many people who will be turned off by the dark nature of the book. If you can, it's a great series to read. If you can't, don't force yourself. It's good, but no one "has" to read this series.



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