I have loved the Johannes Cabal series so far. Each installment is modeled on a different author-style, including Ray Bradbury, steam punk, Lovecraft, and a monster apocalypse. This latest looks like it will be modeled on Poe, just based on the title The Fall of the House Cabal, but it’s not. This one breaks from the trend, and does its own thing, which in a way is in keeping with traditions of the series. The author says so directly in the Preface. Some of the […]
Well that was unexpected….
I know Primo Levi primarily from his personal narratives. He is an Auschwitz survivor, and many of his most famous writings relate his various experiences during that time. Some of his other writings discuss his work as a chemist or his brief stint in the Italian army before the war. This collection of short stories began in a similar vein. The very first story is about a captured Italian partisan who has the opportunity to set of a opportunistically positioned German grenade. As I was […]
The sort of book I would have liked more had I read it 20 years ago
I’m giving this book 3 stars, and I feel guilty about it. I feel guilty because I know it’s a classic, because it’s 50 years old and still going strong, because the writing is really beautiful, and because I KNOW that if I had read this 15-20 years ago, I would have adored it. 8-13 year old me, who reread books about Narnia and Prydain and various retellings of King Arthur legends year after year (and read a crapload of mediocre Catholic historical fiction in the […]
Yer a Wizard Harry!
Excluding one or two books over the last three years I have been exclusively reading New-to-Me books since joining CBR. This year I wanted to reread some books I hadn’t read in a few years and while I really want to tackle some of the books from my high school English classes I started with Harry Potter. I am a huge fan of the movie series (despite owning all the dvds I will still drop everything if Freeform is running a marathon) but I have only […]