Okay, I’m back. I haven’t lost my mind, or my grip on reality. Everything’s fine. It took me a long time to read this final installment of “The Dark Tower” series. Sure, it’s super long, but it’s shorter than a few of the other installments. I just truly didn’t want it to end, so I stretched it out, found distractions and procrastinations, and delayed the inevitable. This final chapter is less full of revelation, and doesn’t so closely ressemble a conspiracy theorist’s corkboard with pushpins […]
“Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.”
How to begin? I have wanted to read books by Octavia Butler for years and somehow never picked one up until now. Wild Seed wasn’t’ an easy read, although the language is beautiful, the characters are compelling and change over time (in many ways!), and the plot is complex and interesting. The story takes place over several hundred years and the characters mostly live day-to-day having children, falling sick, getting married, eating food – with powerful ancient beings living day-to-day next to more “ordinary” psychic […]
Sacrifices understanding for looking real smart. Mistakes complexity for depth.
What it comes down to with this book is that the barriers to entry were too high. (I shouldn’t have to add the “for me” to that statement, but I will because other people are losing their mind over this book and it was nominated for a bunch of awards, so clearly SOMEONE gets it.) With science fiction and fantasy as a genre, certain barriers to entry are expected, even looked forward to. I always relish that feeling of confusion and displacement I get when […]
More space than fantasy is not as much my thing
I loved Ready Player One, so when I saw another book by Ernest Cline, I grabbed it. Armada is very similar, but not quite as great. It’s got the fun mix of characters, a good geeky premise, and adventure, but it just doesn’t quite have the sparkle that the other story does. I wonder if maybe I didn’t love Armada as much because I was comparing it to its predecessor, and the significant parallels between the books make that really easy to do. Both books […]