He/Him. In the USA... for now. Mastodon
I only track books that I read for pleasure, mostly SF/Fantasy. I've fallen out of the habit of actually writing reviews beyond giving a star rating. It would be nice to get back into that habit.
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The Night Watch series has caused a sensation never before seen in Russia -- its …
There are some interesting spins on traditional motifs here: the eternal struggle between Light and Darkness, vampires, shape shifters, magicians. Unfortunately, after the first section, the main characters spends too much of his time moping around philosophizing.
Idealism can be transferred from one person to another on a vehicle called revenge.
[from …
Sabatini has a problem with making his heroes too good. But an entertaining adventure.
Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in …
This book did a good job of making me want to visit Venice, and a great job of making me want to never be involved in Venetian business or politics.
Sonic loaned me a copy of this and it was sitting in my to-read pile for a while. I recommended it for bookclub without even flipping through it. It turned out to be quite good. It's deceptively short, pithy, and quite funny.
There are few more convincing, less sentimental accounts of love than Wuthering Heights. This is …
Tinny predicts I'll hate every character! She's right! More entertaining than I expected.
Bookclub book. Depressing.
A Book of Wonders for Grown-Up ReadersEvery once in a great while a book comes …
Excellent. Darker than In the Night Garden, but still enchanting. I think that the next time I read these books, I'm going to have to diagram the relationships as I go. Knowing that it all does fit together in a large pattern will make things simpler.
This is a collection of four novels, three of which focus on the emergence of psychic powers in humanity and the consequences thereof, and two of which deal with a struggle between humans and alien organisms. There's a thematic thread running through them all about the morality of survival and the value of life. I found them stronger on character than on plot.
The Virgin Suicides is a 1993 debut novel by the American author Jeffrey Eugenides. The …
Quick read. Not sure what to make of it.
The Anubis Gates is a 1983 time travel fantasy novel by American writer Tim Powers. …
Powers clearly did too much research while working on this, and felt it necessary to include it all. It was a decent adventure, but would have been better if it had been a bit more focused.
The Meaning of Everything
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a 2003 book …
It was really interesting to learn about the process by which the OED was constructed. I'd never really given it a lot of thought, but my hazy suppositions would not have been even close to the actual method.
I particularly liked the essay on ice cream. I had no idea it was so old. I was lukewarm on the collection as a whole, though.
A Book of Wonders for Grown-Up ReadersEvery once in a great while a book comes …
A beautiful, surprising, and strangely familiar set of tightly-linked stories. In addition to new ones, the stories include many standard motifs and creatures from fairy tales and mythology, but they're combined in inventive ways. It feels like this is a retelling of stories that I've internalized, but they're (as far as I know) actually new.
Marco Polo Didn't Go There is a collection of rollicking travel tales from a young …
A collection of travel writing, along with some notes about how the stories were written. Potts spends quite a bit of time musing about the difference between "travelers" and "tourists", and if there is one. Potts is a clever writer, and this stories have lots of great turns of phrase.
Mostly an exhortation to get outside and look around. Lots of interesting little tidbits about the "built environment", like that cities tend to not have street trees because they get tangled in overhead wires.
