There she goes, my beautiful world
Reviews of books
With the new Harry Potter movie out, I decided that I would finally get around to reading the books and seeing what all the fuss is about. I understand that the later books aren’t quite as lightweight as this, but one must start at the beginning.
Thanks to my friend Erik I was able to read it in the original English, meaning the Queen’s English rather than the American English. I like American English just fine, but I wanted to … Read the rest
I’m not ready to declare the Temperance Brennan novels to have jumped the shark with *Bare Bones*, but even with some time away from the series this one didn’t do much for me. If in *[Fatal Voyage]([canonical-url:node/1313])* and *[Grave Secrets]([canonical-url:node/1317])* Kathy Reichs relaxed into the job and hit her stride, then in *Bare Bones* she might have relaxed a bit too much.
Reichs’s writing style continues to improve. Gone are the forced similes found in her earlier … Read the rest
Alastair Reynolds has some tricks up his sleeve. I’ve observed this pattern in the two novels of his I’ve read so far, *Revelation Space* and *Absolution Gap*: I notice at some point when I’ve gotten a good way into the book that it doesn’t seem surprising and that I’m not getting much out of it, then just before I begin to lose interest there’s a subtle twist I hadn’t anticipated and I get hooked in.
In the case of *Chasm … Read the rest
For many years I’ve enjoyed William Gibson’s novels. I read Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive when I was a teenager. In the last ten years or so I’ve reread those and several others and, while not as impressed as I was when I was younger, I still liked them. I especially liked his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, which seemed to break many of Gibson’s patterns which held him back from being an excellent writer. Pattern Recognition’s characters showed … Read the rest