African-inspired Bronze-age fantasy with piles of caste based tensions, crazy sword battles, interesting magic, demons, dragons, and the distinct feeling that the ‘good guys’ might not actually be that good after all.

I’m reminded a lot of Ender’s Game (which I love and need to re-read at some point) in that you have a surprisingly good soldier that manages to train harder and break the rules, breaking down society as he goes. It’s a lot darker though and Tau (said soldier) is motivated almost entirely by vengeance. It’s… a lot to read at times, but it fits. Man he’s stupid at times for it though.

It’s a great book and worth the read.

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An odd book. It’s supposed to be #6 in the series, but really, it’s a prequel to Network Effect. There’s not much you need to know between the two, so you can read them in either order and if it were up to me, I’d probably swap them (mostly because I want to know what happens next!), but it still works.

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Well that took a while to read. I read it outloud, part of a chapter a night many nights, and it still took a few months. Glad I did it though, it’s a great book, especially for kids, but even more so to read aloud with them.

It’s a story about a group of children, each lost and/or alone in different ways, each brilliant (as the first section and a series of tests shows both to them and to us) and thus necessary for a SECRET MISSION. I won’t go much more into that, but once they get out on the mission and have to prove that they are more than up to the task–it’s great.

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Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?

Joe Abercrombie / The Blade Itself have long held a highly recommended spot on my to read lis, so when I caught the audiobook on Libby/the Indiana Digital Library¹ I figured it was about time.

Quick version: it’s wonderful, but also very dark. One of the main characters is a barbarian who’s family was recently killed, another is a soldier crippled in war turned torturer. And somehow, Abercrombie actually really makes you feel for the both of them, but man it takes a bit… On top of that, there’s some fascinating hints of magic–plus some more overt examples, no less terrible, when we meet Bayaz–the First of the Magi… or is he?

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So that was what had happened before the survey. Now we’re here, ready for the next major disaster. (Spoiler warning.)

It’s a full length Murderbot novel! Yay! And it gets far deeper and weirder into corners of the worldbuilding we’ve only had hints of before. I love seeing the hints of tension with the corporations and how much control they hvaqe, the weirdness that is alien remnants, and the knowledge that there are super weird problems out there that aren’t necessarily directly related to Murderbot.

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The games reminded me of something the author Haruki Murakami says in the intro to the English edition of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: “I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure.” In video games, we don’t have corresponding terms for novels and short stories—we simply have large games and small games. These Game Maker games were Murakami’s gardens: vibrant, intimate, and full of charm. Having just planted a large forest with Alec, I was eager to find my own little patch of fertile soil.

I absolutely love Spelunky. I remember playing the (now) Classic version when that’s all there was (even going so far as to decompile and mess with the source code, yay GameMaker Studio), spending hours on the HD remake (beat Olmec, made it to Hell, never did beat Yama)–mostly on Steam, and more recently put just as many hours into Spelunky 2. It’s a great game and what little I knew of the story was already inspirational. So when I saw this book, written by Derek Yu himself, of course I had to give it a try.

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A relaunch for a new age. It’s impressive how many Batman characters they manage to fit into a volume. Even if more than a few plots are left for later, it’s still a solid launching point.

Also, the cursive is hard to read at times…

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Murderbot has really stirred up some trouble. Now Dr. Mesnah’s caught up in it and it’s time to come back and perhaps fix some things.

Like the rest, it’s a quick read with a wonderful sense of all too familiar alienness, wonderful hacking and action scenes, and a fascinating look at what it means to be a person–or not.

Worth the read, but at this point, I expect you’ll already be blowing through these.

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Oh, that’s a great story. I read it long ago and listened to it a couple years ago. It’s a great story of animals basically doing the human thing in and around an abbey run by mice. It’s great fun so long as you don’t think too long and hard about which animals are sentient and which aren’t and how the vast differences in scale and lack of opposable thumbs could possibly work… but other than that, it’s great fun.

Formatwise, I’ve read a few graphic novel adaptations of novels and usually they feel a little lackluster (White Sand and Storm Front (Graphic Novel)) as two examples), but if anything was going to work, this was it. It’s already a lighter fantasy world with lots of light riddles and actions and over the top characters that fit just fine with graphic novels. And it pays off. As an introduction to this world, it’s a great alternative. It’s just so fun to see pictures of how someone else saw all of the characters from this world.

Well worth the read.

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That’s quite a story; quite a world. I only vaguely remember the film, but I still hear Hugo Weaving’s voice as V and Natalie Portman as Evey. The bones of what I remember match though. A story of a world gone well over the edge and a man determined to bring it back—but at what cost?

A fascinating read and worth the time. I need to watch the movie now.

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