2019 NEBULA AWARDS: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal Wins Best Novel!

The 2019 Nebula Awards ceremony occurred over the weekend (in Los Angeles County) and the winner for the Best Novel is Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars! The nominees were:

• The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
• Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (Ecco; Orbit UK)
• Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik (Del Rey; Macmillan)
• Witchmark by C.L. Polk (Tor.com Publishing)
• Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)

Of these nominees I have read Witchmark (see review) and Trail of Lightning (review forthcoming soon) and have already purchased a Kindle copy of The Calculating Stars due to strong buzz on Goodreads. I also hear good/interesting things about Blackfish City so I will probably get around to reading that eventually. I am not a very big Naomi Novik fan so I don't really intend to read Spinning Silver. I wasn't a very big fan of Uprooted even though it won the Nebula award in 2016.

BOOK REVIEW: Close to the Bone (DS Logan McRae, #8) by Stuart MacBride

Close to the Bone is one of the better entries in the DS Logan McRae series by Stuart MacBride, although one feature of this grisly, amusing detective thriller series set in Aberdeen is its consistently high quality.

MacBride seems to like taking on various aspects of society and in Close to the Bone he dissects both Hollywood star-crushes and the whole young adult magical fantasy craze. A series of truly horrifying murders are taking place while the movie adaptation of the popular WITCHFIRE book is being filmed around town. Plus there seems to be some kind of incipient gang war between rival marijuana suppliers. And a teenage girl who gets violent when she’s off her anti-psychotic meds and her villainous American-raised boyfriend have disappeared.

These are the mysteries that Logan has to deal with this time, except he’s also saddled with a (temporary) promotion to Detective Inspector while his torturous (and wildly inappropriate) boss Roberta Steel is now Detective Chief Inspector in charge of the entirety of Major Crimes and still determined to have Logan do most of her job while hectoring him to make sure he does his as well. But the most serious thing is that 2 years have passed since the events of the previous book, Shatter The Bones. Logan’s girlfriend Samantha is still in the hospital and he’s living in her old caravan, despite the fact that there’s been more than enough time to repair the apartment that was firebombed (which was the incident that led to both their injuries in the first place). He visits her every night but something seems off....

MacBride is a master at combining multiple seemingly unrelated plot threads into a compelling and thrilling police procedural which is both funny and intriguing and he does some of his best work in Close to the Bone.

I’ve already started pacing myself in reading the books because there’s only 2 more left in the Logan McRae series to date and  I enjoy each book so much.

Title: Close to the Bone.
Author: Stuart MacBride.
Paperback: 511 pages.
Publisher: HarperCollins.
Date Published: January 17, 2013.
Date Read: February 2, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.91/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

2019 HUGO AWARDS: Nominations Are Announced!

The nominations for the 2019 Hugo awards, the most prestigious literary award in science fiction, were announced today. The nominees for Best Novel are:

• The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)

• Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)

• Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)

• Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)

• Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)

• Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)

I have only read one of these books (Record of a Spaceborn Few), but I do own two of the others (Revenant Gun and The Calculating Stars). I found the former completely unreadable but the latter is on my list of the books to read very soon. I also will probably read Trail of Lightning but I was not a big fan of Uprooted Novik's last retelling of a classic fantasy tale so I think I will skip Spinning Silver.

The awards will be given out during Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland in August 2019.

BOOK REVIEW: Salvation (Salvation, #1) by Peter F. Hamilton

Wow! Peter F. Hamilton, who should be considered the Master of Technological Space Opera, does it again. The author of multiple acclaimed works of hard military sci-fi (The Night’s Dawn trilogy, The Void trilogy, The Abyss Beyond Dreams/A Night Without Stars, Great North Road and Pandora’s Star/Judas Unchained) has returned with a new trilogy that begins with Salvation.

All of Hamilton’s signature story elements appear here: a futuristic advanced society, disruptive technology, culturally opaque aliens, incredibly wealthy/powerful tycoons, secret/hidden agents, detailed action sequences, ubiquitous artificial intelligence and apocalyptic threats. In his more recent novels, Hamilton has been combining these familiar elements with brand-new ingredients. For example, in Great North Road these space opera tropes are deployed in the context of a murder-mystery police procedural. In the Void Trilogy he cleverly embeds a classic epic fantasy tale within a space opera plot. 

In Salvation, Hamilton has all his usual space opera components present in a story built around two main plot threads. The main one is set in 2204 and tells the story of throwing a cadre of travelers together and recounts the background stories of each member of the group. In the second thread, Hamilton has a several hundred-year time jump from the main story line where a subset of the travelers in the first time line have become “The Five Saints” of humanity, which in the future is preparing for an epic existential battle with evil unnamed aliens who have apparently been exterminating all forms of civilization when they come across them. AND from a prologue we know there’s another alien species which has discovered and is secretly watching humanity.

Here the primary Hamiltonian disruptive technology involves quantum entanglement portals that allow instantaneous travel across interstellar (or intercontinental) distances. This of course has a dramatic effect on all forms of locomotion after its discovery in the 21st century and allows for many of the effects of climate change to be ameliorated. Other technological advances include telomere treatments for increased longevity and the use of alien biotechnology for beneficial and malignant purposes. The presence of highly developed artificial intelligence used as personal assistants and for many other purposes is another highlight of Salvation.

One of the central tensions in structuring the book in the way the author has are the questions it raises in the reader: Which of the travelers gain immortal status as the five saints of humanity? Which of the two alien species we know about so far that are portrayed as benign in the earlier time are actually trying to exterminate us? Or is there a third alien species we don't know about that takes this role in the time period that elapses between our two story threads?

For most of the book I was pleasantly entertained, enjoying Hamilton’s imagination and reveling in the familiarity of his plot structures and characterizations. I was generally thinking that this would be a very good but not extraordinary (a 4 out of 5 stars) read. However, the last two chapters of the book provided revelations that set up the next two books in the trilogy and completely blew me away, catapulting the book easily into five star territory.

Title: Salvation (Salvation Sequence, #1).
Author: Peter F. Hamilton.
Paperback: 426 pages.
Publisher: Macmillan.
Date Published: September 6, 2018.
Date Read: February 17, 2019.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Last Breath (DCI Erika Foster, #4) by Robert Bryndza

Last Breath is the fourth book in Robert Bryndza’s DI Erika Foster series. These are basically straightforward police procedural novels based in England. Foster is an immigrant from a Slavic country who has been in the country for decades but still has a slight accent and her own cultural differences from your typical British police officer. She has very little respect for administrative rules and the chain of command. Her focus is on finding the evil men who abduct and/or savagely murder women. Sadly, she has a lot of men to track down.

Bryndza has a sparse, straightforward writing style. In Last Breath, the reader learns pretty early in the book who the perpetrator is by getting his perspective on the planning and execution of his crimes. This is a device often used by mystery writers because it raises the stakes by giving the reader more insight into the criminal’s horrible crimes and twisted ideology. It also heightens the suspense of how and whether the police will catch the criminal because we get to see more details of how close (or far) the police are getting to the perpetrator.

The main aspect of the DCI Foster series which differentiates it from others are the supporting characters (in addition to the protagonist's obsessiveness with catching criminals). I appreciate the diversity of her investigative team which consists of DI James Peterson, a handsome Black guy (with whom Foster has a friend-with-benefits relationship) and DI Kate Moss, a chubby lesbian who regularly supplies the comic relief in the story.

Overall, Last Breath is an average entry in the DCI Foster series but since the series overall is well above average for the genre it is a suspenseful and entertaining read recommended for aficionados of the British police procedure genre.

Title: Last Breath.
Author: Robert Bryndza.
Paperback: 362 pages.
Publisher: Bookouture.
Date Published: April 12, 2017.
Date Read: December 26, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A-/B+ (3./4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu

Ball Lightning  is another science fiction novel by Chinese author Cixin Liu whose excellent Three-Body trilogy (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End) won the Hugo award for Best Novel in 2015. Liu is the first Chinese-language science fiction author to win the Hugo award and thus I was quite excited about reading Ball Lightning which was actually written before the Three-Body trilogy (which is officially known as Remembrance of Earth's Past) but has been translated and released in the United States well afterwards.

One of the features of Liu’s science fiction is his inclusion of real science and mathematical concepts along with his whimsical adaptation of these ideas in creative and mind-expanding ways. This is a central feature of Ball Lightning which is about a form of spherical lightning that kills the parents of Chen, the main character, in the first chapter and ignites a lifelong obsession with the topic.

In Ball Lightning, Liu again impresses with his imaginative use of science in the service of plot, perhaps at the expense of characterization. Chen is almost a cipher. The much more interesting characters in the book are Lin Yun, a female Army captain who is obsessed with finding and using scientific discoveries to produce paradigm-shifting weapons to benefit the Chinese nation, and Ding Yi, a brilliant but eccentric male scientist who makes mind-bending discoveries about the nature of the Universe.

Unfortunately Ball Lightning is not as effective or fascinating as the books in Remembrance of Earth's Past. I think some aspect of that may be due to the nature of the translation. Some of the language in this book seems somewhat stilted, in a way that reduces the impact of the many creative ideas Liu deploys. Another aspect of the book which contributes to my dissatisfaction is my lack of connection with the characters. As I said before, Chen has almost no personality. Both Lin Yun and Ding Yi have almost too much but none of the characters can be said to be appealing. This is not unusual in a Cixin Liu novel, but usually the creativity of the ideas and elegance of the plot counteracts this aspect of his writing (or at least it did in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).

Overall, I would say that Ball Lightning is a solid 3.5 stars, because it fails to meet the sky-high expectations set by the brilliance of the other work I have read by this author, but that still means it is well above the median of most work published in the genre of hard science fiction.

Title: Ball Lightning.
Author: Ann Leckie.
Paperback: 384 pages.
Publisher: Tor.
Date Published: August 4, 2018.
Date Read: December 8, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★½☆  (3.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B+ (3.33/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: B.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: B+.

BOOK REVIEW: Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan

Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan is the latest book by the author of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) and especially Thirteen/Black Man, the last of which is set in the same universe as Thin Air. Morgan is known for his futuristic, noir, sci-fi thrillers featuring ultra-violent, surgically enhanced, anti-heroes who often have a weak spot for the underclass in society. He is one of my favorite authors and I have wanted to read Thin Air since I learned this book was in the work in 2015. I bought it on Amazon and it arrived on its publication date but I delayed reading it until the holidays.

In Thin Air the protagonist is named Hakan Veil, an Earth-born mercenary who has been trapped on Mars for over a decade (earth years) after his last job protecting a space ship for a mega-corporation ended in a way displeasing to his bosses and almost fatally for the nearly indestructible Veil.

One notable feature of all Morgan’s work, which is one reason that it is catapulted to the top of my must-read lists, is his ability to convey a sense of place, culture and history in the settings of all his books, regardless of genre. Typically this feature of novels is referred to as “world building” but with Morgan the term doesn't do justice to the immersive nature of his writing. Although he is primarily known for his hard science fiction, he has also written an epic fantasy trilogy called A Land Fit For Heroes (The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands, The Dark Defiles) which also has a fascinatingly complicated backstory and setting.

The Mars of Thin Air is a compelling, technologically advanced, market-driven dystopia, with a rich history and multicultural, multi-ethnic populace struggling under the stewardship of staggeringly corrupt political and juridical officials. Morgan embeds his story in the long colonial history of the red planet under the forces of COLIN (the Colonization Initiative), an entity which has appeared in several of Morgan’s science fiction works set in the far future of humanity. COLIN is the organization which is responsibility for the expansion of humanity into the solar system and beyond. The author also describes a civilization on the red planet which is buffeted and sculpted by the amorality of corporate greed, organized crime and unregulated capitalism.

Morgan begins Thin Air in medias res as he thrusts the reader into a setting where Veil immediately maims and kills people, some of whom appear to be innocent bystanders but some who are also clearly responsible for horrible acts themselves. The effect is that we as the reader are not really sure if we are to identify positively or negatively with Veil as the protagonist of the story. Is Veil a hero or a villain? Morgan likes his characters to be morally nuanced, with situational ethics and malleable loyalties, and Veil is another example of this type.

Another feature of Morgan’s work are his bewilderingly intricate plots and Thin Air is no exception to this rule. The primary plot is centered around Veil’s task of protecting a COLIN Earth functionary who has come to Mars to investigate the curious case of an Earthbound lottery winner who disappeared before he could collect his prize. This reveals some obvious corruption (cui buono?) and the fact that several powerful forces are trying to control and dominate the future of Mars society. Of course, at some point Veil loses contact with his charge and it becomes clear that she may not be who she appears to be and that there is far more to the disappearance of the erstwhile lottery winner than meets the eye at first blush.

Overall, Morgan’s Thin Air  is an exciting, action-filled and intelligent take on a suspenseful mystery thriller set in a dystopian future society on Mars. If you like any of Morgan’s previous work (especially Thirteen) you will almost certainly also enjoy Thin Air. A lot.

FIVE STARS.

Title: Thin Air.
Author: Richard K. Morgan.
Paperback: 544 pages.
Publisher: Gollancz.
Date Published: October 23, 2018.
Date Read: December 30, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A+.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Witch Elm by Tana French

Wow! Tana French proves yet again why and how she is the Queen of Literary Mystery Fiction. After writing six (ok, maybe five) exquisite entries in what is now known as the Dublin Murder Squad series, French decided to release a standalone mystery The Witch Elm (or The Wych Elm) which is not even indirectly connected to her much-celebrated prior works. When I discovered in late September that Tana French had a new book coming out soon, I pre-ordered the hardcover from Amazon instantaneously. There are a handful of authors for whom I do that for (Peter F. Hamilton, James S.A. Corey, Richard K. Morgan come immediately to mind) and there are none others in the mystery fiction area (although new books by Ian Rankin, Louise Penny, Adrian McKinty and, more recently, Val McDermid are all on my must-read-as-soon-as-I-can list).

The Witch Elm  is very different from French’s other books, which are generally police procedurals set in the context of murder mysteries and generally have police detectives on the Dublin Murder Squad as the main character for whom we get first-person perspectives.

Instead, The Witch Elm has Toby Hennessy as the main character, and for an extraordinarily long period of time (well over 100 pages, possibly close to 200) there is no sign of a dead body and no sign of anyone from the Dublin Murder Squad. There goes Tana again, breaking those genre rules and upending her readers expectations!

Toby is a very odd choice for a main character of a book that ends up being an intricately plotted murder mystery, since he’s a 20-something, blonde, attractive, upper class white guy who begins the book basically bragging about how lucky he is. His charmed life is shattered by a scene that happens very early in the book, where sudden violence befalls Toby, leaving him injured and potentially permanently incapacitated (due to a vicious blow to the head).

French is deploying and deconstructing the literary device of the unreliable narrator as a central trope of the book. Toby potentially has permanent brain damage which affects his perception of events around him as well as his memory. We the reader literally can not believe what Toby perceives to hear and see. But it also becomes clear that Toby has always been oblivious to what goes on around him due to his inability to perceive the effects of marginalization on people who do not share his class and gender.

As the plot develops (and the dead body finally arrives) we are engulfed by a complicated and multifaceted network of familial relationships that involve jealousies, slights and resentments which are sourced from events in the characters’ pasts. Toby is the only child of a pair of well-to-do parents (mom is a professor and dad is a barrister) and has grown up with two other similarly situated cousins, Susanna and Leon, who are about the same age and attended the same secondary schools as Toby. They have literally known each other their entire lives and in some sense are closer than some siblings. Their parents all vacationed together and  would regularly leave the 3 kids for weeks at a time during holidays at the home of their parents unmarried brother Hugo, at a grand old house called The Ivy House. Even now, when Toby, Susanna and Leon are nearly 30 and their grand-uncle Hugo is nearly 70 the extended family (Susanna is married and has 2 kids of her own, Toby has a longtime girlfriend named Melissa) attend weekly Sunday dinner at The Ivy House, which  almost serves as another character in the book. French delights in using her command of the language to describe its coziness and provides the reader with a real sense of place. It’s during one of these Hennessy family gatherings that a human skull is discovered in the wych elm on the grounds of the Ivy House, leading to multidirectional finger pointing and eventually actual suspicion between various pairings in the trio of cousins about how much and what each of them knows or remembers about the past and the supposed suicide of a teenaged classmate 10 years before. The notion of suspecting and being an object of suspicion of the people whom you have literally grown up with animates the emotional resonance of the book.

French uses the evanescence and plasticity of memory as another trope with which to redirect the suspicions of Toby, our unreliable narrator and the reader towards various possible suspects. She also (somewhat rashly) seizes the opportunity to conduct another anthropological survey of the social lives and mores of Dublin teenagers. This was at the heart of what I think of as her worst book, The Secret Place, which revolves around the discovery of the body of a teenage boy on the grounds of a posh private girls school. Happily, I think she’s more successful and insightful at the portrayal of modern-day teenage life in The Witch Elm. I am curious as to why French wanted to return to depicting that particular milieu when there are so many others to choose from.

Typically, for me, the joy of reading a Tana French novel has been sourced in her mellifluous, oftentimes  surprisingly piquant prose as she describes conversations between characters who are usually experiencing the worst times of their lives, either during a police investigation into the death of a loved one or recalling situations that dredge up the emotions and feelings that led someone they knew to commit (and/or conceal) a murder. Happily, that Tana French is well represented in The Witch Elm. What is missing this time is the voyeuristic perspective she usually provides the reader by allowing us to see the discovery, detection and resolution of crime(s) through the eyes of a member of the Dublin Murder Squad. Surprisingly, this is a minor loss.

Another feature of a French novel is her penchant for breaking the rules of the detective mystery form she is writing in. From the unresolved issues in her brilliant debut novel In the Woods and the stunning audacity of The Likeness to her clever refusal to center multiple books on the same detective(s) in her ongoing mystery series, to the disastrous dabble with the supernatural in The Secret Place, French has blazed her own trail in the British police procedural genre. In The Witch Elm she goes even further, by centering the book around Toby, a self-centered, entitled “git” who is oblivious to his own privilege (and prejudices). French is (I think) trying to reveal and skewer the perspective of the Tobys of the world, while she simultaneously uses his lack of awareness to misdirect the reader to the central mystery at the heart of the novel. 

In the final chapter of the book, after the major reveal of “whodunnit,” she breaks the rules of the genre again (multiple times!) so successfully that I was forced to give her my top rating and applaud her daring. This is the case, even though early in my reading of the book I had harbored disappointed misgivings about The Witch Elm’s eventual place in French’s oeuvre (“uh-oh, I think this may be another misfire like The Secret Place!” to “Oh my goodness what just happened? I have to re-read that entire section!”). By the end I felt she had surpassed the cool, precise excellence of The Trespasser, which up to that point was in a statistical tie in my heart with Broken Harbor for my designation as her best book. The Witch Elm, in my opinion, is another example of French operating at the top of her game, expanding and demonstrating what a literary genre novel can and should be. Another triumph.

Title: The Witch Elm.
Author: Tana French.
Paperback: 509 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 9, 2018.
Date Read: December 18, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A+/A (4.16/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A+.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Age of War (Legends of the First Empire, #3) by Michael J . Sullivan

Sullivan does it again! Age of War is the third book in the “Legends of the First Empire” series, which I understand is now going to consist of two linked trilogies instead of the five books the author initially planned. The first two books, Age of Myth and Age of Swords.

The Legends of the First Empire series is set in a time thousands of years before the events of the author's Riyria Revelations. It is based around conflicts between the three races of civilization in the word of Elan (Fhrey or elves, Dergs or dwarves, Rhunes or humans) as societies clash and develop in the equivalent to our Bronze Age. Since Fhrey can basically live for thousands of years, there are characters in this series that survive and greatly impact the future we have already been exposed to in the original Riyria trilogy.

In spite of (or in some cases, because of) this, the fate of many of the characters in Age of War have heightened suspense for the reader. Ever since the first book, Age of Myth  we have been following the story of Persephone, Raithe, Suri, Roan and Brin (who are all humans) and Arion, Nyphron and Mawendule (who are all elves). It is a testament to Sullivan’s craft that he is able to place most of these characters in mortal danger due to a war and kill off more than one(!) while still making the book very satisfying and thrilling.

Some other readers expressed disappointment about the third book in the series and I agree that there are significant differences between Age of War and the others that precede it. For example, there is a noticeable increase in the (heterosexual) romantic pairings in Age of War between a few of the main characters but often also between important secondary characters. Some might find this discomfiting and although I don’t think it’s a net positive aspect of the book I don’t think it significantly detracts from my overall enjoyment of the story. So I would strongly disagree with the notion of any disappointment about the level of quality of Age of War. The central question of how (and whether) humans will survive a war with the much more powerful Fhrey is suspenseful enough to cause Age of War to be as excellent as the other entries in the series. I can't wait to read the rest!

Title: Age of War (Legends of the First Empire, #3).
Author: Michael J. Sullivan.
Paperback: 420 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey Books.
Date Published: July 3, 2018.
Date Read: December 14, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: The Dark Winter (Aector McAvoy, #1)

The Dark Winter is the first book in the Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy series by David Mark, about a Scottish police detective located in the Northern England city of Hull.

A better title for the first book would be “The Unjust Distribution of Miracles” as the story is about a sequence of murders of people who are the lone survivor of horrible incidents, although it takes quite awhile (longer than it took this reader) for Aector to figure out the connection(s) between the killings.

Despite the lack of difficulty of the central mystery, the book has several strengths. The first of these lies in the author’s string characterization of the book’s protagonist, who it is slowly revealed to be in an uncomfortable situation on the job, having been assigned to a new station after he discovered and revealed the corrupt and criminal activities of a popular (or feared?) high-ranking police supervisor. That and being Scottish in northern England and physically imposing (6-foot-5 and “hefty” and red-headed) makes Aector stand out in most situations. He clearly loves his pretty, pregnant wife Roisin and his young son Finlay. He has a female boss whom he both seems to be afraid of and also (sexually) attracted to, at various points in the book.

Another strong feature of The Dark Winter is the inclusion of several exciting action scenes, including one in the penultimate scene which are surprising, gripping and well-written. 

Overall, the spare, effective prose of The Dark Winter makes it an excellent entry in the crowded field of British police procedural murder mysteries. At well under 300 pages in length (my copy from Blue Rider Press was a mere 292 pages despite Goodreads listing it at 304) The Dark Winter packs a memorable wallop appreciably larger than other books up to twice its size from authors with bibliographies twice as long.

RATING: 4.5 STARS.

Title: The Dark Winter.
Author: David Mark.
Paperback: 292 pages.
Publisher: Blue Rider Press.
Date Published: October 25, 2012.
Date Read: November 28, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Jar City by Arnaldur Indriðason

Jar City is the first book by Arnaldur Indriðason that I have read. I was mostly interested in reading it because it’s set in Reykjavik, and ever since the city was put on the map fro the famous World Chess Championship between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in 1972 I have been interested in it. I visited Reykjavik this year for a week to celebrate my birthday in May 2018. Thus it was sorta fun to read place names that were somewhat familiar in Jar City. 

However it turned out that Jar City the book was not that interesting to me in the end. I have a theory that quality of mystery books depends on a number of factors: the quality of the characterization of the protagonist/detective, the interesting features of the sidekicks, the compelling nature of the setting and the intricacy of the puzzle/mystery. 

Here the strongest aspect of Jar City is the puzzle. The protagonist is Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, who is somewhat interesting but also a bit of a misanthropic and unattractive character. This is not necessarily a deal breaker for me to enjoy a mystery book, since one could also describe popular mystery characters like Inspector John Rebus by Ian Rankin. The main problem with Jar City is with the sidekicks, who are completely uninteresting to me. One  is a woman named Elinborg and a guy named Sigurður Óli. We don't get very much (if any) of the internal monologue of either of these supporting characters, and it's not even very clear what Erlendur thinks of either of his partners. One would think that the setting (Reykjavik) would be compelling but in the end the homogeneous and exotic nature of the setting is not as interesting as I had originally expected when I discovered the books existed. 

Although Jar City is technically not the first book in the Inspector Erlendur series, it is the first book in the English translation order of the books. It's also often true the first book in a mystery series is often not the author's best work. (This is definitely true of Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson and Patricia Cornwell, just to name a few.)

I have to add that the one aspect of the first book that may get me to read the future entries is Elendur’s relationship with his pregnant, drug-addicted daughter Eva Lind. I’m definitely curious about what happens to her character but there are many other series that I would rather make progress on first (Val McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan and Stuart MacBride's DS Logan McRae immediately come to mind, for instance).

Title: Jar City (Inspector Erlendur, #3).
Author: Arnaldur Indriðason.
Paperback: 275 pages.
Publisher: Minotaur Books.
Date Published: October 1, 2005.
Date Read: July 29, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★☆☆  (3.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B (3.0/4.0).

PLOT: B.
IMAGERY: B.
IMPACT: C.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

“A heartbreaking work of staggering genius” is of course a clichéd title of a famous book by Dave Eggers but in the case of Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia this description would be quite appropriate.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is the first book I have read by this author (although his science fiction work Exit West has been on my radar for awhile as book to be read). I had to read How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia because we have assigned this book as the reading for all entering students at the college at which I work. Happily, the book is a quick read (a mere 222 large-font paperback pages), surprisingly engaging and extraordinarily effective.

It is true what others say that the gimmick of being a self-help book is somewhat off-putting at first and the setting in an unnamed Asian country, following the life and career of its initially destitute protagonist, can appear to be distancing to readers who do not share this positionality. But, by the end, what makes the book work so well is the absolute universality of its themes. That, along with the stunning proficiency of its prose, puts How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia in rarefied company.  

Mohsin Hamid is clearly a master at crafting clever phrases, deploying insightful metaphors and cheeky similes all the while skewering many aspects of society. Just off the top of my head (without consulting the text again) he pokes fun at: the surveillance state; society’s obsession with celebrity; the venality of politics, government and banking; and, of course, the pursuit of “wealth” as a measure of successful life. This last subject is the ostensible topic of the novel, but I would argue the real point of the novel is force the reader to think about their own life and goals while simultaneously depicting a plausible life path for his unnamed protagonist.

One aspect of the book I found incredibly powerful was the way that the author is able to suddenly switch the meaning of the word “you” between his characters. The primary use of “you” is usually referring to the central protagonist whom he is using as an example of someone who is following the author’s “self-help” advice to “get filthy rich in rising Asia.” But sometimes “you” switches to  mean the reader, or another character in the story (often “the pretty girl” who is the love interest of our protagonist).

The structure of the book is sneakily effective at slowly drawing the reader into the plot, while maintaining the “self-help” gimmick with chapter names like “Avoid Idealists,” "Focus on the Fundamentals,” and “Have an Exit Strategy.” By the end of the book I suspect that most people who read the final sentence (which is nearly a page long!) will leave tears dripping on to the page/screen. 

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a tour de force by a very talented writer using a clever premise and unexpected literary device to produce a work of fiction which is surprisingly effective.


Title: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
Author: Mohsin Hamid.
Paperback: 222 pages.
Publisher: Riverhead Books.
Date Published: March 5, 2013.
Date Read: August 20, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A+.

BOOK REVIEW: Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3) by Becky Chambers

Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third entry in a loosely connected set of books written by Becky Chambers called the Wayfarers series. It is set in a Universe where many generations before humans have been forced to abandon Earth and conducted an exodus into space on 32 generation ships formed from the metals and materials of their cities. Eventually the Exodan Fleet made it to a part of space where they met and were allowed entry into a thriving community of alien lifeforms called the Galactic Commons.

The Wayfarers stories began with A Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet in 2016 and continued with A Closed and Common Orbit in 2017. Although I was not very enamored of the first book, it definitely had a lot of award-worthy buzz for a debut novel and even now has an average Goodreads rating well above 4.0 out of more than 40k ratings, which is impressive. The structure of that book was off-putting to me in that Chambers uses the now-familiar George R.R. Martin structure of each subsequent chapter being named for and centered around different characters. In A Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet, the characters are the 7 members of the crew of a ship, and Chambers goes into details about their backgrounds and home planet. However, I simply didn't care much about any of the characters and there's very little plot development, but the universe the book is set in was compelling enough to convince me to read the sequel. A Closed and Common Orbit has less than the half the number of ratings of its predecessor but an even higher average rating, with good reason. (It was also on the short list for the 2017 Hugo award for Best Novel.)

In Record of a Spaceborn Few the story is centered firmly in the Exodan Fleet with passing references to the numerous planets that humans have colonized throughout the galaxy instead of focusing on one ship and its crew like in the first book. (Although to be fair, by going over the backstory of the crew, we did learrn more about more of the other planets in the Wayfarers universe than we do in this book.) The plot of A Closed and Common Orbit was much more story-focused, as it dealt with a continuation of the story of one of the crew members from the first book and has a fascinating focus on the cultural norms of a society filled with multiple, variegated forms of alien life.

In the third entry in the Wayfarers series, Chambers has the good sense to make the civilization and culture of the Exodan Fleet the central aspect of the story, more as it was in Book 2. This time she does this by focusing on several characters who play specific roles: a disaffected teenager who wants to rebel against Exodan society; an alien amateur anthropologist who is visiting the ship the story is centered around and a lesbian librarian who is shepherding her around; a clueless human "Grounder" who leaves his planet to visit the Fleet to make his fortune; a single parent with two kids and who yearns for a better life; a spiritual leader who actually does find a hooker with a heart of gold. It is an eclectic mix, and this feature is one of the great strengths of the novel. The main characters and side characters are diverse in age, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation and other factors.

However I still found Record of a Spaceborn Few to be a slow, somewhat forced read for me. It started off very slowly, and I thought it would become a repeat of the first book where I hated all the characters but instead what happened is that all of the characters grew on me and I was anxious and interested in what happens to them. It's clear that plot is not really what Chambers is interested in, as much more of the focus is on the contours of the character's lives. Happily, Chambers obliges with codas for most of the characters at the end of the book which tell you what happens to them six months to two years after the main events of the central plot are resolved. This allows the reader to end the book on a hopeful and satisfied note.

Title: Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3).
Author: Becky Chambers.
Paperback: 359 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: July 24, 2018.
Date Read: October 13, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★½☆  (3.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: A Conjuring of Light (Shades of Magic, #3) by V.E. Schwab

A Conjuring of Light is the third and final entry in the Shades of Magic trilogy written by V.E. Schwab. 
The books are set in a universe with four parallel worlds that are connected via various flavors of London (Red, White, Grey and Black). These are listed in diminishing order of magical resonance, with Red London where almost all the action takes place and Black London is a ruined, barren place where magic ceased  to exist ages before. The main characters in the trilogy are Kell, Lila, Holland, Rhy and Alucard. Most of these characters have special magic abilities that allow them to travel between the Londons and all but Alucard appeared in all three books in the trilogy. You can read my reviews of A Darker Shade of Magic and A Gathering of Shadows for my thoughts on the complex relationships between these main characters. Instead, since this is the final book in the trilogy I want to give my opinion on both A Conjuring of Light and the Shades of Magic trilogy as a whole.

The trilogy structure is a familiar one in the science fiction and fantasy genre. Typically, the first book is usually quite strong, introducing the compelling characters, the setting of the exciting story, which often has some plot elements resolved but leaves some to be dealt with in the subsequent books. Oftentimes the second book is not as good as the first because the characters are now familiar to the reader so the frisson that arises from novelty is lost and the author can’t conclude all the plot threads because there’s a third entry yet to come. Then the final entry often disappoints because it has to resolve all the plot points that have been introduced in the first two books and some of the characters that we have gotten to know over two books don’t make it to the end. I point this out to note how difficult it is to have a compelling trilogy.

However, the description of the generic trilogy I gave above  fits the Shades of Magic trilogy to a tee. I quite enjoyed  A Darker Shade of Magic  and was slightly less impressed with A Gathering of Shadows but still liked the second book overall. There are multiple problems with the third book, A Conjuring of Light, the main one being that it is simply too long. This is often a common problem of third books in a trilogy (c.f. The Return of the King in the Lord of the Rings books) although there are definite counterexamples (Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy and Michael J. Sullivan's Riyria Revelations are two trilogies in which each entry is uniformly excellent).

There are several good aspects of A Conjuring of Light. The centering of the most prominent female character, Lila Bard, is a plus. Additionally, the romantic scenes include those between same-sex couples as well as opposite-sex couples. There are many action scenes, which are written quite well. There’s also a lot of dead bodies, oftentimes of important characters who had made it through the first two books, which raises the emotional impact of the book. However, the story does drag in some parts and it took me longer to finish this book then the other two and I don't think this was due to its increased length. Overall, the third entry is not as compelling as the first two but I would recommend the trilogy and I'm glad I finally read it.

Title: A Conjuring of Light (Shade of Magic, #3).

Author: V.E. Schwab.

Length: 624 pages.

Publisher: Tor.

Published: February 21, 2017.
Read: October 6, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A.

IMAGERY: A-.

IMPACT: A-. 

WRITING: B+.

BOOK REVIEW: A Gathering of Shadows by V.E. Schwab

A Gathering of Shadows is the second book in the Shades of Magic trilogy. This time the cast of characters is expanded beyond Lila (the gender-bending thief with surprisingly powerful magical abilities), Kell (the magical Antari who can travel between parallel worlds) and Rhy (the prince of Arnes and Kell’s adopted brother). The main addition is Alucard Emery, the rakish captain of The Night Spire, the pirate ship that Lila has been working on for the last several months.

The key feature of these series of books is the fact there are four versions of London (Red, Grey, White and Black), and, of course, the presence of magic (based around the elements). In this book, most of the story takes place in Red London (which is in the nation of Arnes, ruled by Rhy's father, the King. The plot revolves around the Element Games, a magic competition held every four years between contestants from the three main countries in Red London’s world: Arnes, Vesk and Faro.

Through a series of deceptions and suspiciously coincidental events Kell, Lila and Alucard all compete in the Games (but most of them not under their real names). Meanwhile the relationships between all of the competitors (and Rhy) become increasingly tangled and complex. Rhy and Alucard. Rhy and Kell. Lila and Kell. Lila and Alucard.

In the first book A Darker Shade of Magic it felt as if the stakes of the resolution of the plot were very high, as one world (White London) attempted to take over another (Red London) and one of our main characters actually died (and was then resurrected by magic). In this second book, the stakes are very different. There is the question of who will win the magic competition and the effect that will have on the characters involved and their relationships. But I didn’t feel this was as compelling a hook on which to hand the story as the first book. However, I am still curious as to how the entire story will be concluded in the third and final book.

Rating: 4 stars.

Title: A Gathering of Shadows (Shades of Magic, #2).

Author: V.E. Schwab.

Length: 512 pages.

Publisher: Tor Books.

Published: February 23, 2016.
Read: September 15, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.

IMAGERY: A-.

IMPACT: A-. 

WRITING: A-.