My crawl through this series continues. To be honest, I’d optimistically hoped that I’d be able to finish it by the end of 2017. I was in a good position to, having already read the first five books. Nine books in twelve months? Easy peasy. Except . . . each book has gotten progressively harder to get through. Less and less happens. The flaws stand out more as the plot thins. I’ve gotten through three of these books in ten months. Even if I manage […]
I am not a gamer, but I think I might know how it works now
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 […]
Scratches an itch I didn’t even know I that I had.
I’ve had a pretty good year of discovery here on Cannonball Read. I’ve encountered new authors who wrote books that deeply touched me (Colleen Oakley, Emily St. John Mandel, Peter Heller, Frederick Backman), rediscovered old favorites, explored new worlds opened by trusted authors (Andy Weir and John Scalzi), and been forced to reconcile with my own failures and limitations (Columbine, Chimamanda Ngozi, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Alexander). But there are a handful of books that really stand out, and they aren’t always the best, despite the […]