After The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Magician's Nephew is probably the best of the Chronicles of Narina. Perhaps even the best.
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
This… was truly a bizarre book.
A terribly dark book of teenage hooligans raping and thieving their way through the nights, all speaking the most bizarre Russianish slang that’s… interesting at best to read–up until the main character is caught and then re-educated in a perfect example of ‘do the ends justify the means’. It’s… really really bizarre.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Reading 1984 and Animal Farm back to back was … probably not a great idea. They’re entirely too similar. In one, the government already has power and in the other it’s an (animal) government coming to power, but the tactics used are all together too similar.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
1984 is quite a novel. In a nutshell, it’s the story of a dystopian society in which an overbearing totalitarian government controls just about everything by way of controlling the present, rewriting the past, and squelching any opposition.
“Heroism is a myth you tell idealistic young people—specifically when you want them to go bleed for you. It got one of my sons killed and another taken from me. You can keep your heroism and return to me the lives of those wasted on foolish conflicts.”
Well dang. After the absolutely bonkersiosity of the first three Stormlight Archive books, I hadn’t the slightest idea how Sanderson was going to pull off yet another (and another and another coming down the pipeline). And yet here we are.
Sandman is often considered one of the best of the best when it comes to graphic novels and… for good reason. It’s very very good. It’s got immortal ‘anthropomorphic personifications’ (Dream is the main character, but we also get a bit of Death), a crazy deep/complicate mythos, dark and creepy imagery, and a wacky awesome storyline. Pretty much right up my alley. There’s little I could do better than the blurb on Goodreads:
In PRELUDES & NOCTURNES, an occultist attempting to capture Death to bargain for eternal life traps her younger brother Dream instead. After his 70 year imprisonment and eventual escape, Dream, also known as Morpheus, goes on a quest for his lost objects of power. On his arduous journey, Morpheus encounters Lucifer, John Constantine, and an all-powerful madman.
I’ll give him this. Every word Nathaniel sent to Elma was true. It’s amazing how many lies one can tell with the truth.
The Relentless Moon is a bit of an odd third book in a series. While The Calculating Stars set up the universe and the space program and The Fated Sky went to Mars, in both cases we were primarily following Elma York, the eponymous Lady Astronaut and how she dealt with with all the troubles of sexism, racism, and all around nastiness of an almost apocolyptic alt 1950-60s space program.
Well that’s certainly a thing.
Almost exactly 4 years and what feels a lifetime ago (January 2017), I read the prose version of Neverwhere. I didn’t actually know it *had a graphic novel version (there are a number of other books in this category I’m finding). But looking back, I’m so very glad it does. The prose version of the story was weird and fantastical and wonderful–and the graphic novel turns that all up to 11, given form to all the strange characters and settings of London Below.
I actually really enjoyed The Horse and His Boy. It’s the first book with a completely new main character. None of either the four original children or their cousin Eustace take up a main role. Although they do show up, it’s in a more minor capacity. A nice way to shake things up.
Timelinewise, it takes place after most of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but before the end when the children have grown and return to their own world. So Narnia is at peace, but it’s a new peace. So when we get to follow an outside threat (we hadn’t otherwise heard of) from countries that have been mentioned but only barely… that’s pretty cool.
And so it ends. We already had one heck of a climax in The Boys, Volume 11: Over the Hills with the Swords of a Thousand Men , but now we have to deal with the fallout of that–and a few remaining twists to find along the way. After all, there are still supes about. And as I’ve been saying the entire time: the Boys are supes.
Some thoughts: