As I wait for the next installments in A Song of Ice and Fire, The Kingkiller Chronicles, and The Magicians series, I mined the depths of GoodReads to find the next great fantasy series. The first contender is The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham. Fantasy books have the added challenge of not only building a world from whole cloth but also explaining that world without the reader feeling like they are stuck in a boring history lecture about some minor skirmish between two countries […]
On Sequilitis, Nymphomaniacal Faeries, and Leveling Up
I’m not exactly reporting breaking news when I say that sequels are tricky. Finding the balance between giving people what they liked from the first book and adding enough to justify a second book is one of the more difficult challenges an author faces. Which brings me to The Wise Man’s Fear, the 1100-page brick of a middle chapter in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles trilogy. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some 1100-page bricks. There are few things in this world that I love […]
“It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.”
Where do I even begin to describe a book like 1Q84? This was my first Murakami novel, and though I felt, at times, that certain minutiae for which he is apparently infamous (food preparation, repetitive dialogue and re-iteration of expository detail) contributed unnecessary padding to the 1157 pages, overall I found myself quite swept away in the lyricism of the writing and the surreal but precise detail in observing the world of 1Q84. The central characters are Tengo, a cram school (assuming this is an […]
Jelinas Reviews Cannonball #2: The Love Song of Brian J. Prisco
A good coming-of-age novel is interesting in that, even if the main character’s experience is vastly different from the reader’s, the reader still feels the nostalgia.