Blog Archives
Book Review: The Martian, by Andy Weir
Once upon a time, there was a webcomic called Casey and Andy. Mad science, zany characters and lots of geekery, it was one of my favorites. I was sad, but satisfied, when it ended.
Then about a month ago Howard Taylor mentioned a hard sci-fi novel called The Martian, and that it was written by the same Andy Weir who once gave us Casey and Andy. I bought the book before I finished reading Howard’s post about it.
And it’s good.
Book Review! Hull Damage by Timothy J. Meyer
I picked up Hull Damage for Kindle free on Amazon. The current rating there is 3 & a half stars, and that feels about right to me. It has a lot going on, both for and against it.
The setting is sci-fi, it feels like a cross between Heavy Metal’s dystopian space settings and Firefly’s wild lawlessness, with a healthy dose of Star Wars. The book follows the career of a space pirate and his crew, an episodic story of the ups and downs they face trying to make a name for themselves. Read the rest of this entry
Book Review! The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
The title alone made me want to read this book. It also made me a little nervous, since a movie called The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies has demonstrated conclusively that a title can be more fun than the work itself, but never fear! This one happily lives up to its name.
The title also saves me the trouble of providing a plot summary. By and large you already have a pretty good idea what sorts of things happen in this story, a girl is taken to Fairyland and has adventures there. She meets strange people, encounters odd magic and weird rules. It has that surprising depth that you’ll find in all my favorite children’s books. The titular voyage itself takes up less of the story than I expected, happening near the end after most of the characters are well-established. Read the rest of this entry
Book Review! Cold Days, by Jim Butcher
I’ve been waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the price of this book to come down enough for me to buy it. I actually paid a hair over my usual limit for ebook prices, but the Dresden Files have generally been good enough to warrant an extra six cents.
This one certainly was.
If you’ve been reading The Dresden Files, you already know whether you want to read this or not. If you haven’t, this is not a good book to start with. While it wouldn’t kill you to read them out of order, I don’t advise it. That said, the weakest books in the series (in my opinion, at least) are the first two, so I could understand someone starting with Grave Peril to see if they wanted to bother.
Book Series Review: The Domain
Hello again! It’s been so long, and I’ve missed writing terribly. Tonight I’m going to talk about The Domain books, by Richard Capwell.
I’ve written before about Richard Capwell’s Witches Bureau of Investigation books, which I enjoyed quite a bit. So when I was perusing free ebooks on Amazon and saw one by the same author, I quickly snagged it. Then I had to go buy book one, as it was book four in the Domain series that had been temporarily marked down to nothing.
Money well spent. I finished the fourth book last night, and now have to wait for the next one.
The Domain is a fantasy series that starts like many others, with people from our familiar world getting yanked into a strange, alien place. In fact it starts out feeling a little cliche, which I suspect the author did on purpose because it starts getting weird pretty fast. It feels to me like a far more “grown-up” story than the WBI, but should be suitable for teenagers or preteens. Read the rest of this entry
Book Review! WBI: Witches Bureau of Investigation by Richard Capwell
A while back, I bought a cheap Android tablet computer. (There’s a lot of story behind the device itself, but I’m not going to talk about that now.) One of the first things I did with it was install Amazon Kindle for Android and start downloading free books. At any given moment Amazon will have a lot of Kindle editions for free, and I grabbed a lot of books based purely on the cover art, or because the title interested me. Most of them I’ve been pretty lukewarm about so far.
This one I’m really pleased with. There’s no way I would have paid money to try it blind like this. Before I started writing this review I checked Amazon to see what the price is now, and found a sequel! The sequel is already purchased and downloaded and as soon as I publish this I’ll be running off to read it. Read the rest of this entry
Book Review: “Be Ours Forever” by R. C. Murphy
This is Ms. Murphy’s first book to be published in actual paper. You might think that in that case I’d go easy on her in this review. Especially since she’s not only a friend but also knows where I live. Bah! Honesty demands the truth, angry authors be damned! Besides, honest reviews will make it easier for her to get better, and since I like her writing, I want it to improve. Though I will be sleeping near a dog and checking for poison needles the next few weeks.
Be Ours Forever is a story about love, power, trust, outdated conservative political entities, telepathic group sex, sadistic monsters, nontraditional family units, and lots and lots of vampires. Seriously, there’s a whole mess of vampires in this story. The plot is kicked off by the question of whether or not the sole named human character should change and become a vampire. It’s that kind of book.
The genre is given as “Paranormal Romance”, but I kept thinking of it as “Fangbanger Porn”. An outline of the book might go: Introduction, Body Horror, Sex Scene, Torture, Torture, Torture, Sex Scene, Resolution.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 