This is an archive of my shorter book reviews and notes, which historically have been posted over at the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal, but which I’m starting to move over here. I’m posting them with altered date-stamps, but they might show up in my LiveJournal cross-post anyway. Bear with me, please.
Note: Many of these books also have full reviews available in the book review podcast (RSS).
#46:
I actually expected this book to be more violent and dark, more like The Shivered Sky (same theme, different author). Anyway, in this book, the angels are all trying to cope with the chaos that both created them but also can destroy them, and the political struggle that ensues…. well, it’s based on the fall of Lucifer and his angels, so I suppose you can guess how it ends.
#47:
Pictorial field guide to dinosaurs and prehistoric life from the pre-Cambrian through the Tertiary periods. Really great little reference book; I read it for research into Late Cretaceous North American species for my NaNoWriMo novel, but ended up reading the whole thing because it was so fascinating. Dinosaurs are cool.
#48:
Spider, Spider. Hang up your hat, buddy. The Callahan series needs to end, like, three books ago– this was easily the worst book I’ve read this year– and I had one that I wanted to actually give up on entirely. Sigh. It has everything bad in science fiction and fantasy– in-jokes that make no sense, puns that don’t, either, only two characters that actually interest the author enough to give them more than a couple of paragraphs’ screen time– and one is Nikola Tesla and the other is the author-offspring-insertion Mary SueErin, a supergenius infant (an infant with the intelligence of the Internet). Yeah– as a friend of mine remarked– nobody wants to read about their neighbor’s super-smart, perfect-in-every-way prodigy. Oh, and that’s not even touching on the plot, which essentially revolved around doing things they planned perfectly, laboriously coming to conclusions the reader had five pages ago, and generally never having even one second of conflict or resolution worthy of the name. I recommend the first three Callahan’s books, completely. But stop there, please, so you’re not as disappointed as I’ve been.