This post isn’t so much a review of the 4th Pirates installment, but an little digression on its amusing relationship to one of my favorite books. What’s interesting here is that Disney put “suggested by the novel On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers” in the credits and felt it needed to option the novel just to include the two basic elements of Blackbeard and the Fountain. Nothing else. Still, it’s a fun movie, better and more self contained than either Pirates 2 or 3.
The book’s been a classic for 80 years, and with good reason. There are so many reasons why this is the archetypal detective novel. It’s pure pleasure from start to finish.
I’m sad. It could have been so much better. Oliver’s debut novel, Before I Fall, was fantastic. And I have nothing against dystopian — I am after all a hard core sci-fi reader — and the prose is great in this second novel, but the story and characters just fall flat.
Lessons is a lot like Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun & Profit. Both cover a bunch of the big areas quickly like plot and structure, and also include the author’s personal perspective on his career (Morrell’s best known for First Blood, on which the first Rambo was based) and the writing business. It does not focus heavily on sentences or editing. There were a number of interesting insights, and some interesting tidbits on the trials and tribulations of going Hollywood.
This is one of the best YA books I’ve read in a long while. Part Groundhog Day, part The Source Code, part Judy Blume, part The Lovely Bones — all itself.
This 1934 novella just breezes on by. The first half (act I) is like watching a train wreck unfold. I greedily devoured the setup. Seedy drifter, sexy unhappy wife, and loser older husband. Plus it’s a crime novel. You know things aren’t going to end up good. The style here is lean and mean. It feels fully modern — timeless even.
This new addition to the field of video game histories is a whirlwind tour of the medium from the 70s blips and blobs to the Facebook games of today, with everything in the middle included. Goldberg has wisely chosen to snapshot pivotal stories. He seizes on some of the most important games, and even more importantly, the zany cast of creatives who made them.
This is a weird weird book, and I mean that in a good way. Nominally, it’s about a schizophrenic girl, Hanna, who’s dad has died and who decides to move in unannounced with her mom she’s never met. But her mom doesn’t live in a normal town. She lives in some kind of weird place in Texas where gates between universes have let all sorts of strange monsters and realities in. A town with its own supernatural police.
This is a short YA book, with nice prose and likable main characters thrown into ‘weird’ paranormal situations. The action so condensed as to occasionally be confusing and it has an unhappy but not completely tragic ending. But I found Tithe’s creepy fairy flavor really to my taste.
This is yet another foray into the world of paranormal YA. This book, unusually, has a male protagonist, and he’s part of a family of “curse workers,” although he himself doesn’t do any magic. He lives in an alternative reality where a small minority of people are able to “lay on hands” in a bad way and curse people. It’s well written and a fast and fun ride.
With the premier of Game of Thrones, the HBO series based on what is perhaps my all time favorite Fantasy series, fast approaching, the network has been releasing all sorts of goodies. Now I’ve posted about this before, but these…
As the sequel to The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear is one of 2011’s two most anticipated Fantasy novels. This is High Fantasy of a rather less epic sort. Not that it’s any less fun to read, even weighing in as it does at 1008 hardcover pages. But they whip by as the characters, prose, and world are phenomenally well crafted.
I am blown away by the effort of translating this book for the screen. Frankly, although I loved the novel, I like the film better — this is rare. Anthony Minghella managed the near impossible, translating this gorgeous prose into an equally lyrical visual style.
In 2008, I read this 722 page novel in Xian China during a single sleepless night, and I reread it just now for the second time in preparation for the sequel. NOTW is a beautiful book. Of all the Fantasy I’ve read in the last 15 or so years, this is perhaps second best after The Song of Ice and Fire. But that’s not to say that they have much in common, other than both being really good.
This is a phenomenally interesting book about the London Underground of the 1720s. You think it was bad in Dickens time? — woah, things really calmed down in the century between.
Ben was a pretty amazing guy, as influential in his own wry way as any man in history. And he didn’t kill thousands or conquer nations doing it. Ben was a man of rare genius. And he’s depicted here with all his very human faults. But fundamentally he was a spirit of curiosity, optimism, energy, and general good intentions.
Since I’m always cryptically referring to my novel in progress, I figured I’d post a few words about it. The Darkening Dream is a historial dark fantasy. It’s currently 95,000 words and I’ve just finishing up the line editing and polish. [ Updated…
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The premise is fine, set in a dystopian 2150 where teens are branded at 16 as”legal for sex.” Nina is almost 16, and is dealing with not only the stress of this oncoming rite of passage, but boys, the death of her mother, and a bigger conspiracy. But it just fell flat.
This 60 page short story is so up my alley. A story of time travel, set in medieval Baghdad, what could be better? If it were written in a lyrical style reminiscent of the Arabian nights! This is a gold and gem encrusted little dagger of a story.
This book is rather brilliant, but isn’t for everybody. It’s racy, written in a breezy first-person past with a kind of stream-of-consciousness lightweight quality that made me have to look to make sure it wasn’t present tense. The prose is very very good — fitting the material perfectly.