At long last, we reach the end of the “Temeraire” series. Hot dang, it’s been 9 books… where would our heroes travel? how would they encounter Napoleon? would Laurence have complicated feelings about women in the military? would Temeraire rake his giant claws into the ground in distress over something? where would they settle down for retirement? all these questions had to be answered, and more! It’s no secret that I’ve adored this series, even though it became deeply repetitive and predictable. And in a surprising […]
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
I will admit, I thought I might be out-smarting these books, with the formula all figured out, but this one, the third in the “Temeraire” series, totally took me on a ride. Delightful, surprising, and exciting. Well played, Novik. Black Powder War bothers with barely any passage of time after Throne of Jade. The company is still in China, preparing for travel back to England, when natural disaster and politics coincide and intervene, causing Laurence and Temeraire to take their scrappy crew of aviators overland […]
in search of the celestial drug
In my mind exists a temple; a museum of the works of art that helped shape my inner world. Some works are on loan and some are part of the permanent collection. The permanent works that name and sustain me are existentialist: Solomon’s Ecclesiastes, Aurelius’ Meditations, Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Hendrix’ Axis: Bold as Love, Dylan’s electric Manchester performance, Rippel-Ronai’s Park at Night, the Bhagavad Gita. These are useful for determining how to live authentically and courageously in an unknowable universe. A less obvious […]
“Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.”
Writing 52+ reviews is hard. Writing 52+ reviews is harder when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation, and not reviews. Oops! Well, anyway, here we are. The Gone-Away World is a very strange book. It’s also a very good book, but it’s a good book that took me awhile to get into and appreciate. Harkaway’s prose is witty and often nonsensical, filled with non-sequiturs and descriptions that seem to mean absolutely nothing, and yet somehow conjure a well-staged — if surrealistic — scene, and […]