The premise of NPCs is not terribly original: what if when people stopped playing, the world of the D&D-like game kept moving, and the characters who aren’t actually players have independent existences. I feel like I’ve seen this sort of thing before, but at the same time, here it was still somewhat entertaining. This is not highly literary fiction one reads for the sake of being able to say one has read it; this is the kind of thing you read when you want something […]
Welcome back to the awesomeness of Mr. Gaiman
At some point in the past year or so, I somehow got the idea that I didn’t especially like Neil Gaiman books; I blame a probably-too-fast re-reading of American Gods. Then I picked up Neverwhere off my TBR shelf (and it is a full shelf and a half right now), and I was reminded, oh, yeah, that’s why… Neverwhere is basically Gaiman’s breakout hit, the novelization of a tv show that Gaiman says he’d always kind of intended to make into a novel, even as […]
This was supposed to be emotionally wrecking
I saw a lot of social media responses to this, but thankfully no spoilers, before I got around to reading it myself. Many of the responses involved some expression of devastating emotional impact upon finishing this book. I don’t see it. Our Dark Duet is not a happy book, and the ending really fits with the tone of the story overall, but I just don’t see the devastating crushing heartbreak that was described by lots of people of Facebook, Twitter, etc. My biggest problem is […]
Possible Heresy Alert
I have a confession: I have deliberately avoided reading A Game of Thrones and the following books. When the series first got big, I picked up A Game of Thrones, the first of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and flipped through it, but it didn’t really grab me. I don’t have HBO and I’ve not followed the tv show, for similar reasons and the additional facts that I don’t especially enjoy watching graphic violence or sex, or soap opera type dramas. This was […]