Tag: book-review

July in Books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I had a good month, completed some great books that are easy to recommend.

Best books

  1. The Devils by Joe Abercrombie. I forgot to share a review here, shame on me. But the book is a clear 5*, and a slightly lighter (not in weight though) than the regular Abercrombie story. Some tropes here and there, features lots of random fantasy species. 760 pages and very memorable, well-built characters. You have a priest and a vampire joining forces, not the most common occurrence in literature.
  2. Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff – 1008 pages and a solid 5*/5. The sun stopped shining and the main deterrent to vampires spreading was gone. Also no review, pretty embarrassing, but at least I mentioned it. A must read.
  3. The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman – I think that one was around 4.5*/5 but pretty good 4.5, one that would love to read once a second part shows up in the bookstores. The blacktongue thief is thief from a race that has black tongues. Epic fantasy with some drama.
  4. Head Cases by John McMahon – a satisfying thriller about nerds solving crimes. It got 4.5* on Goodreads by me but looking back, I think it’s closer to 4. Despite being a good story, the other three above were much better.
  5. Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World – pop-sci book about probabilities. I gave it 4*/5 but from the distance of time, I think it’s not up to the 4* bar.

Worst books

  1. Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell – Lisa Jewell is a gem, comparable to Freida McFadden. However, just like Freida McFadden, some of her books are pretty awful. Not that the book is poorly written, it’s just not a pleasant thing to read. I gave it 4/5, appreciating the good storytelling, translation and such. I hated this book so much that I’d rather not buy anything else by Lisa Jewell any time soon. Boo.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I started my review of the last book by comparison to other books. I’ll start this with a quote.

I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn’t need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action.

Robert Bennett builds not just a fantasy world but a wisdom system for his series. It doesn’t need to be correct, to be appealing.

The gods were killed 80 years ago. With their deaths, most of their miracles vanished as well, including a large number of buildings from the sacred city of Bulikov. Eighty years later, the gods are forbidden. They can’t be mentioned, studied, hinted, their religions practiced, and the leftovers of their miracles cannot be used. People pretend they never existed, or at least most people.

Someone is breaking these rules. A top spy, the mighty Shara, is sent to Bulikov to figure out the conspiracy. Who killed the expert of the divine past, Efrem Pangyui? Why? Why do miracles still exist?

Dense and likable characters, a rich world, and an endlessly long ending, just like The Tainted Cup. Would I have been able to read this book if I hadn’t read The Tainted Cup? Unsure. But it’s a clear 5*/5 and a great fantasy. Ending with a quote as well.

Forgetting… is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself… For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.

Gone Before Goodbye by by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I knew it will be a tough book to read because it had bad reviews. It wasn’t easy but wasn’t too bad either.

Alexander Belyaev has a story about a man who is essentially dead but his head is attached to a machine and is still talking. The head is waiting for a compatible headless body so it can be reattached. The story is called Professor Dowell’s Head. You would expect that Gone Before Goodbye is a crime mystery thriller, where we are trying to figure out what happened to the missing person (who’s gone). But it is, in reality, something similar to Belyaev’s stray head.

The book is very well written in most parts, and well translated too. The first 100 pages were excellent; then chaos set in. Maggie, a surgeon who lost her license, is offered redemption if she performs a difficult and illegal surgery. Once she accepts and sells her soul to the devil, people start flying around the globe like there’s no tomorrow and for no clear reason. Perhaps to show off how rich they are.

The resolution is like the head I mentioned. It’s sci-fi and ridiculous. We also have an avatar, living inside a phone, a common trope in present-day sci-fi. These AIs are usually demigods, who can do everything, and so is Maggie’s AI app. Also ridiculous.

Why three stars and not four, for example? Because it is never really clear why anything really happens. The book contains all kinds of cataclysmic and dramatic moments, and not a single one of them is actually necessary for the story. The explanation for everything is that a head is trying to find a body. Characters fly to Russia, billionaire balls are held, some people chase others, while committing grand acts of bravery without any relation to this problem. It’s not exactly a head but you’ll see if you read it. So I felt a disconnect between the great writing style, nice characters, the grandiose scenes, and setup, and the missing link to the actual story.

I could have given it two stars as well because of the publisher’s decision to compact the 350-page book into 300 pages by making the letters tiny and squeezing the letter spacing.

Despite the review, I enjoyed the individual fragments of good writing. 3/5 because of that.

Nightshade by Michael Connelly, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

Michael Connelly is one of my favorite crime/thriller authors. I’ve read almost everything he’s written (probably everything but I’m not sure about one book). He is producing high quality books pretty consistently. However, he has flops. Nightshade is one of the books I did not like.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been moved to Catalina Island, after a series of questionable life choices. Within the book, he has three tasks:

  • Investigate the murder of a protected buffalo
  • Get statements from some suspicious character who hit a police officer with a bottle
  • Keep his partner Natasha happy

This is not what he does, so in a sense, he continues with the questionable life choices and is surprising that the police didn’t transfer him to the North Pole. He jumps in to investigate a murder, and of course, one murder leads to another, so there are many murders.

Had the killer or the multiple killers stayed put, none of the book would’ve happened as Detective Stilwell’s entire game is to find clues in the exceptional overreaction by the suspects, giving them away over and over. Remove that and there’s no book. The original clues get compromised or are mostly ignored by the detective. For example, the body found in the beginning of the book – the book itself makes it very clear the first body should’ve been found elsewhere or never found.

Now, Natasha. Detective Stilwell is in love, according to the pages. He will manipulate, lie to, and ignore Natasha “Tash” Dano over and over. His treatment towards her is reckless, irresponsible, and borderline abusive. Although it is completely fine to describe an abusive relationship in a fiction book, the term for what we see is fridging. Fridging is when a character is introduced for the sole purpose of being killed and placed in a fridge, so the detective has business to do. I felt that the female protagonist only exists to increase the difficulty level to Detective Stillwell. The character development for her felt superficial but it is like that for the rest of the characters as well, except maybe the main victim, whose life and dreams we’ll explore in greater depths.

The best part of the book is the cover. It is beautiful and was one of the reasons to read it last week.

I rated Nightshade with 2*/5. One of the stars is a bonus for the cover and the whole Catalina idea. The content is perhaps the worst I’ve read by Michael Connelly.

Books I Read in April

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

April was not a great month for reading for me. I missed the first 10 days and then read a few short ones for the number. Nevertheless, some mind blowing books came out of it. Few but good.

Best Books

  1. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir – the sad story about necromancers who face too much magic and a universe that’s 10K years after the apocalypse. I think some love is lurking in there but it’s not a romance. It’s deeply touching, well written, engaging, interesting, and memorable. It was by far the best book I read this month, and I keep thinking about it.
  2. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams – a former director from Facebook reveals dark secrets from her past work. Mixed feelings here. Her story is awful and at the same time, the genie is not going back to the lamp.
  3. Harrow the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir. A book where the imaginary and the reality are so mixed that I needed Wikipedia to explain the events to me. However, despite the 4*, I feel this book was far more memorable than the next books on the list that I can forget quickly. I plan to get the 3rd part as well but maybe after a break.
  4. The Narrow Road Between Desires – Patrick Rothfuss is a modern classic with his incredible skill of arranging small and tiny events into a larger puzzle. I’d say, a good member of the Cozy Fantasy family.
  5. Cursed by Alex Kosh – 5* but pretty much unavailable anywhere, I was the lucky first reviewer on Goodreads. And also, thematic, it is about ghosts and in line with Gideon, Harrow and the unfortunate sixth book.

Worst Book

  1. Five Broken Blades – ironically, almost identical plot with Gideon the Ninth, which I liked so much. The story is about 6 (no kidding) people trying to assault an immortal king who is both the enemy and the ally. However, unlike Gideon the Ninth, it’s constantly annoying, and none of it makes sense. For example, why 5 blades if it’s about 6 people, and why broken, if nothing is broken? The book doesn’t answer. Maybe the sequel will.