Sean
Amazing take on the mythos of Ghost Rider. Mind-blowing artwork. Typical Garth Ennis overkill on the violence, but it all fits so well.
Amazing book.
Mark Lawrence can write. I'll give him that. There's an odd, dark poetry to what he does. At points, I found myself craving more of his prose, and at other points I found myself rolling my eyes at the melodrama. In the end, I wanted more, though. I'm moving on to Book 2 of the Broken Empire with due haste.
Jorg Ancrath, as a character, is the poster child for Grimdark Fantasy. The entire book is a revenge plot to level vengeance against the man who had his mother and brother killed. Without remorse, guilt, or pity, Jorg hacks his way through a bloody landscape backed by his band of “brothers”–mercenaries who, while interesting fodder, are expendable in Jorg's mind. Nothing will stop him from his goals, not even the only “friends” he has.
It is hard to like Jorg. He's charming in that way that serial killers can be charming. He's intelligent. He's fearless. There are aspects to his character that are mesmerizing, but in the end, it is hard to like him. Lawrence really twists the fantasy hero archetype and says, here's a guy who checks the boxes, yet he's really a madman with a goal.
If you like your books bloody, then this is the one for you. If you want subtlety, then move along.
I liked it, but it's not going to hit the list of my favorite books. I'll still read the next one in the series, and I'm looking forward to checking out Lawrence's new series that begins in April, 2017.
Another standard jaunt around Joe Pickett's world. No real criticisms. CJ Box knows what's he's doing.
My only real beef when it comes to books like this are when the sleuths (or those around them) start doing superhuman stuff, or dealing with things that would have multiple arms of the extended government crashing down on them.
The B-story with Nate Romanowski was compelling in this one, but a little over-the-top.
I like Joe Pickett. He stands for something. He is a tad bit cliche in the tropes of the western hero, but that doesn't hurt. In fact, it probably helps. It helps because when Joe does something out of character, you know it. You feel it. It sits with you as being something that was absolutely necessary to do, otherwise he wouldn't have done it. The true joy of Joe Pickett books is not the mystery itself. It's not the inevitable white-knuckle climax. It's the delight in watching Joe navigate and overcome the maddeningly frustrating world of bureaucrats and governmental red tape. CJ Box knows how to torture his protagonist with the hateful, short-sighted world of pencil-pushers and micromanagers, and that's what keeps me coming back for more. I can't wait for the day when Joe finally snaps and starts slapping the holy hell out of those idiots who deserve to be slapped.
Listened to this on audiobook with the kid in the car one day. Granted, it is meant for younger girls, and it somewhat appealed to my independent 10 year old. She had problems with the subservience of the girls when they first get to the academy. It made her hate the characters. She wanted them to stand up for themselves better. She also didn't like that the girls were so preoccupied with wanting to be a princess. It drove her nuts.
“It would be cool if they wanted to be warriors instead of princesses...or ninjas.”
As far as my cultured opinion–for whatever that's worth–the story was cute and airy, without a ton of substance. It moved at a snail's pace for my tastes and was somewhat frustrating. The worst thing was Shannon Hale's relentless use of simile. It was ladled on heavily, often with multiple boring, pastoral, almost laughable similes shoved down your gullet.
“Her mind began to buzz like flies over a meal.”
“Her mouth curved upward on one side like a brook trout on a hook.”
It never ends. It drove me nuts.
I made the mistake of reading “Angels and Demons” before I read “The DaVinci Code.” And I read “A&D” before “DVC” was even released. I loved A&D, even though a few of the stunts were far-fetched. It was popcorn. Fast and fun...however, when I read DVC, I was expecting something new...
However, all Dan Brown did was take the exact same plot, exact same characters, and just change the names a bit. I was thoroughly disappointed.
It's a decent book...better than many that are out there, but people who call this book “amazing” and other such descriptors are showing their ability to be caught up by gimmicks in lieu of actual writing. Not that there's anything wrong with that–but that's the reason why James Patterson is a best-seller and most people haven't read Craig Johnson.
The only good thing about this book is how it made the Catholic Church's collective sphincter clench.
Gave up on it. Got a little long and weird. I liked how it started, but then around the end of the first third of the book, it sort of changed flavor, and I stopped caring.
Another testosterone-fueled, Mary Sue main character who basically is what the author wishes he was...but, you know what? I didn't mind it.
Origin stories are usually my favorite books of the series. It's always fun to read about how the main character got his powers, for lack of a better euphemism. Mitch Rapp's motivations are noble, if a little on the psychotic side, and Vince Flynn (RIP) writes a solid book. It's a little thin when it comes to emotional impact, but the action is good, the dialogue is better, and I enjoyed it.
After forcing Walt Longmire into an unfamiliar town for the duration of The Dark Horse, Craig Johnson returns his beloved sheriff to Absaroka County, Wyoming for Junkyard Dogs, a novel that brings back the outlandish characters and intricately plotted mystery that Johnson does best.
A severed thumb is discovered in a junkyard and that thumb leads to murder. While Walt is unraveling this, he also has to deal with octogenarian romance, a deputy who has gone gun-shy and wants to resign, a second-in-command who has a hankering for a home and a raise, and squabbles between the developer of an upscale subdivision and the owner of the town's landfill. Not to mention, the denizens of Absaroka are up to their usual antics and wisecracks, and Walt's longtime friend and first Indian, Henry Standing Bear, has gone wedding planner for Walt's daughter's upcoming nuptials.
This is the sort of book that only Craig Johnson can pull off.
I've long been a fan of Johnson's writing, where the quips come fast and free and the simplest of phrases are given a clever literary spin that turns them to a sort of open-range poetry. Junkyard Dogs feels much lighter than Johnson's last two books (Another Man's Moccasins and The Dark Horse) and his writing feels much looser and more confident, as if he's already established Walt and company as action heroes and now can show more of their personalities as they interact with each other, rather than outside forces. He paints vivid pictures of Absaroka County, especially the...unique...inhabitants of the fictional Wyoming prairie town. With Johnson's books, it's the setting that makes the books unique, but the characters that make it irresistible. We are introduced to a bevy of they who comprise Absaroka County (including the sports store owner who had no problems selling a gun and shells to a man in a fluffy bathrobe), and of course, Vic Moretti continues to curse her way into our hearts and Lucian makes his presence known. However, with this trip through the county, Johnson lets us into his deputy, Sancho's, life more than he has in the past and through this, Johnson only enhances the canvas from which he works.
The Dark Horse read like an episode of the Lone Ranger, packed with action and sleuthing. Junkyard Dogs doesn't quite go whole hog for the action, which is actually a good thing because it's the characters being themselves that make Johnson's books must-reads. After I finished reading, my initial reaction was that this might have been his best book yet. It's hard to top the back-and-forth plotting of Another Man's Moccasins or the sheer stark beauty of Death Without Company, but somehow, Junkyard Dogs feels more accessible for people who might not have spun through Absaroka yet, but doesn't lose anything for those of us who can't wait to get back there.
Definitely a five-star read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. You'll read it in a single sitting and then email Craig nasty letters asking why we have to wait a whole year for the next installment of Walt and Company.
After you've written as many Joe Pickett novels as CJ Box has, it's important to keep them fresh. NOWHERE TO RUN succeeds on this front. By starting off the novel with the “bad guys” and putting Pickett deep into a high stakes game of cat-and-mouse, it's not a slow build mystery to a big a conclusion like his other books.
However, Box is smart enough to know that readers are not stupid, and that bad guys are rarely bad guys without a reason. Figuring out why these guys are the way they are is half the fun.
This was a worthy addition to Joe Pickett's considerable legacy.
LEGENDS AND LATTES was the best book I read last year. It was original and cute. I had high hopes for this prequel story, but it fell a little short of the greatness of the first book. However, it's still fun and kind and tells a compelling story with compelling characters.
This tale finds the orc warrior, Viv, recovering from a battle injury in Murk, a seaside town with not much going for it. Viv, out of boredom, stumbles into a bookstore and befriends the proprietor, Fern. Fern runs a cluttered and unsuccessful bookstore, but she turns Viv into a reader by giving her saucy tales of swords and romance that she figures Viv will enjoy. In turn, Viv helps Fern run her shop better. Add in the conflict a necromancer poses to the area, and you have an enjoyable low-stakes fantasy adventure.
Baldree continues to root this series in a Ted Lasso-like kindness that makes it an enjoyable change of pace from so many books out there. It's anachronistic and silly at times, but that's what makes it endearing.
Writing the second book in any series is difficult, even more so when you write a prequel instead of a sequel. In the acknowledgments, Baldree even notes that he wasn't able to write the sequel he initially wanted to write, but he put forth another fun story and a worthy installment for this clever fantasy world he's creating, but it just doesn't land quite as well as the first book, probably because I'm not terribly interested in prequels. Tell me what comes next.
I'll look forward to whatever comes next for this series.
Most entertaining autobiography I've ever read. Craig is a true wordsmith and he doesn't pull punches.
Not as good as the first two in the series, but still better than a lot of YA out there. Too bad this is the last book in the series. It felt a little unfinished at the end.
The Orville feels more like Star Trek: The Next Generation than anything coming out of Star Trek's canon in recent years. The philosophical debates and the adherence to a idea feel very much in line with the stuff Brannon Braga was kicking out in the late 80s and early 90s. There should not be easy answers to questions raised in any debate, and there is always a lot more gray than black and white.
This novella was meant to be an episode of the new season The Orville: New Horizons, but due to COVID and other things, they ran out of time to film it, so Seth MacFarlane converted the script to a novella and tossed it into the world as a fairly-priced eBook.
After reading it this afternoon, it's a shame they didn't get to film it because it would have made a helluva an episode to watch.
I don't want to give away spoilers, but even non-fans of the show are in for a treat with this one. And the issues it brings up are–sadly–still very relevant to today's political climate.
For three bucks, this is more than worth the time.
As a writer, I'm known for a post-apocalypse survival trilogy and a trio (so far) of mystery novels. They've sold modestly well, but neither of those is my preferred genre. I am, and have always been, a fantasy novel lover at heart. It is my great hope to not only write a good fantasy novel someday, but I have also been long-fascinated with trying to write an atypical fantasy novel more concerned about what daily life is like in a world populated with magic, creatures, and high fantasy. I've never been able to crack that code, though.
Travis Baldree perfected it.
LEGENDS & LATTES is a perfect book. It's cute. It's clever. It's unexpected. And it's sweet with a heart that swells to a breaking point. I'm envious. I want more.
Travis took a silly idea and turned it into a book with as much at stake as any farmboy-who-must-save-the-world swords'n'sorcery novel. The main core of characters are as endearing as any book I've read in years. And the idea that Viv, the adventurer who tires of adventure, finds a new cadre to adventure with, even if that adventure is just making coffee and pastries for customers, is wonderful.
I can't recommend this one enough.
SA Cosby writes a solid book. Great characters. Good dialogue. Nice plotting. Solid premise. I enjoy his work a lot.
If I have a single complaint: Dude uses similies like Mormons use sugar.
I like his writing because the prose is languid and interesting, but too often a ham-handed simile takes me right out of the flow. They're frequent and often awkward.
I mean, I guess it's his writing style...but as an editor and former writing instructor, they'd be the first things I'd tell him to work on cutting down.
Also, while I like Nathan Waymaker as a main character, he suffers from the author-insert-wannabe syndrome that so many main characters suffer from. He's stronger than everyone else. He's tougher than everyone else. He's smarter and more well-read than anyone else. He's a former Marine. He gets to have sex with the hot pornstar who is impressed by his sexual ability. Every woman in the book hits on him.
It gets ridiculous.
Otherwise, I'm very much looking forward to his next book.
When it comes to writing, I know my role. I'm a genre hack, a storyteller who wants to make people have a little fun while reading, but not someone who's putting out literature that people would use big words like “important” or “poignant” to describe. I basically write mysteries with gratuitous one-liners and a decent payoff at the end. In my college writing classes, my professors always pushed me toward literary fiction. That was the gold prize. That was where your true worth as a writer would be measured. They told us that genre fiction was beneath “good writers,” and that we should concentrate on telling human stories in human settings. I doubled down on my dragon-fighter and private eye stories because those were what interested me. And besides, I knew my role, and I knew I was not, and probably would never be, a good enough writer to engage readers on the level of literary fiction. I needed my gimmicks, my structures, and a handful of known tropes to lean on. I couldn't just tell a human story. (Maybe that's because I've always felt like I'm missing some of the components that make us truly human, but that's an issue for a different therapist.)
Maggie Ginsberg is a writer who can engage the human condition and make important and poignant commentary on the deepest issues that affect us all. In STILL TRUE, Ginsberg does battle with big issues like loss, isolation, grief, strength, and weakness. She digs at the uncomfortable lies we tell ourselves and the deepest secrets that we don't tell others. She examines distance in relationships, and how even married couples can have miles between them no matter how close they think they feel. She also finds an undercurrent of being needed. Of feeling valued. And of finding a place in this world when our original plans fall apart and our original places reject us.
I have never been a fan of literary fiction because I find so much of it so deeply pretentious. It always feels like authors are digging too deeply in their toolboxes for the tricks that will make people think they are some sort of genius wordsmith. Ginsberg is able to craft art with simple phrases, but there is no shortage of poetry in her construction. With a few paragraphs, she can bring life to vibrant, living color in your mind and keep you questioning the characters' intentions and personal shortcomings.
STILL TRUE is the kind of book you read in a single day, a simple story on the surface, but one whose true depth is hidden behind layers of nuance and humanity. It's also the kind of story that you will dwell on while you look around at your friends and family with new eyes wondering what sort of secrets are they hiding that are currently keeping them from experiencing life to its fullest.
A desperately intriguing tale of real people despite its label as being “fiction.”
I don't usually read Stephen King books–I get them on audiobook and listen to them while driving, while working out or doing yard work, and while I take the dog on walks. I like listening to them because the narrators are always solid, and King always spins a good yarn. He's not my favorite author by a long shot, but he's a good writer and writes very listenable stories.
In FAIRY TALE, King goes full-on Neil Gaiman and spins a wild fantasy novel that is part adventure, part Wizard of Oz, and part Grimm's Fairy Tales come to life.
You can probably find the premise online. King doesn't really break much new ground, and other authors have told this sort of story better than he has, but in the end, it's still an enjoyable romp and very engrossing.
I'd recommend getting the audiobook from your library. Seth Numrich performs this book in its entirety, save for a cameo from King himself, and he does an amazing job. A narrator can make or break a book. I've had to return audiobooks to the library and pick up the physical book because the narrator just doesn't fit the book, or isn't expressive enough, or doesn't perform it well enough.
Numrich is the real deal. He made this book for me. I probably would not have maintained interest without his narration, like if I tried to read this book myself, I would have bailed after 30 or 50 pages. With Numrich lighting the path, I ground through all 24+ hours of the audiobook and enjoyed it greatly.
All in all, this isn't my favorite Stephen King book, but it's a better-than-average book for King. I'd recommend it if you don't have other books to read at the moment.
(However, if you're actively looking for other books, try my mystery novels, the Abe & Duff series. I'd appreciate it!)
A trio of Grisham novels written with typical Grisham prose and pacing.
They were good stories but lacked any serious emotional punch.
There's an elegance to Michael Connelly's writing. No fancy prose. No unnecessary words. Like his principal characters, it's terse and gets the job done, but there's a real pro's prose at work. I always enjoy reading his books. The grit and realism make the words hit harder, and they make the impact of the scenes stronger.
With this book, Harry Bosch is all but done with the game. When Renee Ballard gives him a chance to go after his white whale, Finbar McShane, Harry can't resist. He joins Ballard's Open-Unsolved Cases Unit as a volunteer and starts the legwork to find the man who murdered a family with a nail gun and buried them in the desert nine years ago.
Like the rest of Connelly's work, the book is compelling and moves at a brisk clip. Unlike the rest of Connolly's work, it really feels like Harry Bosch is closing in on the end of not just a series, but the life he's lived. It feels like this could be Bosch's penultimate journey. It feels like Connelly is setting up Bosch's jaunt through the literary world to end once and for all.
All good things must come to an end, and Bosch is included in this. It wouldn't make sense for him to be written by anyone else, and after 30+ books with Bosch, this might be setting up the great cop's finale.
I, for one, will be sad to see him go, as Connelly's books are something I look forward to every year. Give me at least one more ride around LA with Bosch, Mike, and then I'll be ready to close his case.
Craig Johnson is a must-read for me. Since I first discovered Longmire shortly after the release of the first book, it's been one of the books I've looked forward to every year. Walt Longmire is at his absolute best when Craig Johnson is doing one of two things:
1. Light banter with slick jokes between Walt, Henry, and Vic
and
2. Walking that shadow world between light and dark, reality and myth, and courting the edge of magical reality.
Ever since Virgil White Buffalo's introduction into the series way back in ANOTHER MAN'S MOCCASINS, he's been my favorite character. His passing and subsequent self-appointment as Longmire's spirit guide on the other side have been one of the best things Craig has done with the series. Sure, some might dislike the magic or spirituality of it, but for my money, I'm always interested when the big Crow makes his presence felt in Walt's life. Virgil practically takes center stage in this novel, and the movement through the twilight realm is fascinating. It's done briskly and leaves the reader questioning his own reality.
In HELL AND BACK, Walt has headed into Montana to investigate the disappearance of a young woman from the reservation back in Absaroka. The events of the previous book, DAUGHTER OF THE MORNING STAR, set Walt on this path, but when HELL AND BACK opens, Walt is in a strange realm of eternal night and has no memory of who he was or what he was doing to get there.
First-timers to the Longmire series might enjoy this book, but really–this book is one for people who have been reading since 2004. It brings back so many things from Walt's past adventures, like the ghostly highway patrolman, Bobby Womack, or Walt's late wife Martha, but it moves it forward in a way that forces Walt to confront his past and appreciate the present.
In the end, Walt is faced with a showdown with the Wandering Without, and he is faced with his own regrets, the little things that haunt him yet. And he's faced with the memory that he's to an age where most cops retire. It feels like Walt is coming into a reckoning. No matter how much he tries to cowboy up and keep strapping on the Colt to keep the peace in Absaroka, time will win in the end. It always does. And it seems like Walt is becoming more aware of that fact with each book in the series.
If you're a fan of the series, get yourself a Rainier and a pack of Mallo Cups. You've got some reading to do.
Fans of Conan (of which I am), will know of Sona by extension. Over the last decade, she's become a semi-familiar face, and now voice, joining the gangly walkaround muppet on his adventures.
Throughout the course of this book, Sona details her side of many stories familiar to Conan viewers (the Armenia trip, the Gigolos mug, Conan picking on her like a big brother), and with an abundance of self-effacing charm and humor, she lets you in on the secrets of being mediocre at her job and managing to maintain her position as Conan's majordomo.
It's competently written, but at a very minimal level, much like everything else Sona seems to do. It's not some sort of flowery, languid prose that will woo you or excite you, but it conveys what it needs to, and there are a few good zingers and jokes thrown in for good measure.
All in all–if you're not a fan of the show, you won't like this book. If you are a fan, you'll find some good humor in it. If you were hoping for some deep, revelatory backstory, you're not going to find it here. Sona really doesn't shed any new light on anything that wasn't already known, but it's a fun, fast read nonetheless.
I read Just a Geek years ago.
The annotated version is nice because it really shows how 20+ years of age and wisdom can change our perspective on things we once held as true.
The jumping back and forth between the text and annotations got wearisome after a while, but luckily this is a book you can feel free to read an entry and walk away from at any time. If doesn't demand page-turning like some books or narratives. Each essay is a quick, easy read.
I like Wheaton's prose. I hope he does some more fiction work in the future.
Gareth Powell doesn't write bad books. Dude just keeps knocking space opera out of the park. That's all he knows how to do.