Tag: book-review

Dodger by Terry Pratchett

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

Just wow.

Late 90s or early 2000s, I was part of an IRC fan club of Terry Pratchett, called #ankh-morpork. I maintained a website built with html and iframes, dedicated to his works and the IRC channel. As part of this, I translated (poorly) a short story, a pretty grim one, and also pretty short, called Theatre of Cruelty. It showed poverty and death. The Discworld series shows cheerfulness, life, and dodging the bullet. It has trolls, dwarves, vampires and such, living together. But the Theater of Cruelty was just sad, grimdark, cruel. There was no hope in that story.

Dodger is a romance in the Theatre of Cruelty world. One that threatened to be a Romeo and Juliet story. We can speculate how much of Dodger was a result of Pratchett’s declining health but back in 1993, Terry and Lyn Pratchett were already producing that kind of works. Like sticky spots on a clean white table cover. The increased darkness of the Discworld series felt like a gradient, starting with the The Colour of Magic, with 100% cheerfulness and 0% darkness, and ending with the pure horror of his last works.

Dodger was published in 2012. It can be appreciated with no prior knowledge of Discworld. But the final fifth star requires some background. The language is shocking compared to his previous books. It has romance, which is also quite unusual. We had the grimdark world in 1993, long before 2007 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer. And Tiffany kissed the Wintersmith in 2006.

Speaking of which, there are maybe 2 or 3 of the Discworld books I missed, and Wintersmith is one of them.

5/5, a great book. A blast from the past, and beautifully published with hard covers.

The Alley of Books

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I’ve been a big fan of book fairs ever since I was a child. I hunted for comics and Karl May books, then gamebooks, then sci-fi, and so on. I usually visit them multiple times so that I don’t miss anything. Couldn’t do the multiple-visit tour this year due to my work trip where I damaged my computer and the consequences of that. At least I visited it once.

The Alley of Books’24 is happening right now on Vitosha Boulevard and near NDK.

Here’s my record-breaking harvest:

  • Bion by Satanasov is a comic book. Got the first part. I’ve heard good things about it
  • 2 Gamebooks by Lubomir Nikolov, frequently featured here
  • Dodger by Terry Pratchett. Pratchett influenced me as a youth and is one of my favorite writers. I missed 3-4 of his books, and here we are – filling a void in my Pratchettist degree
  • Travis Baldree’s second book – a fantasy bookstore?
  • Brandon Sanderson’s The Sunlit Man from Cosmere
  • Orconomics vol 2. This time I’ll be prepared for a bloody fantasy rather than a satire.

There were more books I wanted to buy but sitting on the shelves is not perfect. I challenge myself to read 5 out of these 7 by the end of October. I’m the most excited about Bion and Dodger.

June in Books

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

Best books for the month

Thraxas Under Siege. It’s 5/5 and overall great. “Thraxas and the Ice Dragon” and “Thraxas and the Oracle” are not far behind. Turai is about to fall and Thraxas will have to help Lisutaris any way he can, which varies between failing miserably and saving the day. Makri is not far as well.

Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich and The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik were also good reads and 5/5s. The Golden Enclaves concluded the Scholomanse series and explained the Maw-Mouths. Notorious Nineteen was a nice bubblegum. Stephanie Plum doesn’t age.

Worst books for the month

  • Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians – a parody where the author talks to the reader from the author’s position. It wasn’t fun in the way “The Carpet People” was. The only reason to complete it was my respect for Brandon Sanderson and the hope that Book 2 would be better. Brandon Sanderson is known to have some flops. I gave it a fair 3/5 because it was readable.
  • Iron Flame – the sequel to The Fourth Wing had 760 pages of people talking and moving around in a world that makes no sense but closely resembles other fantasy worlds that do. I gave it 4/5 because it was still interesting, but objectively, it was worse than Alcatraz. Brandon Sanderson built a unique steampunk magical system that could sustain excellent sequels, which isn’t the case with Iron Flame.

Honorable Mentions

I read one standalone gamebook and one collection of 3 gamebooks. The local community keeps printing these, and the artwork inside is above and beyond. Some adults are having fun and publishing stuff because they can. None of the writing is Brandon Sanderson’s quality but it carries the spirit of the 80s and 90s.

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I finished this monumental work by Rebecca Yarros and have mixed feelings. I considered not writing a review but at the same time the book is is divisive and engaging. So here are my thoughts. Let’s start with the good. It’s readable and I read it!

The magic system is not good and it doesn’t get better in this part of the series. The nagging feeling that the system was borrowed by Naomi Novik remained, even though it’s likely unfair.

Naomi Novik develops a Mana/Malia magic system in the Scholomance series, which I recently reviewed and appreciated highly. The Mana is a magical energy that’s earned by work and owned by life. The Malia is mana stolen from others, often by draining their life. Rebecca Yaros uses the same system but doesn’t use the names Mana and Malia. Good energy comes through Dragons and bad energy – from Earth directly, no Dragons. This becomes a critical problem in book 2 as the main conflict in the book is between the magicians who use dragons and those who don’t. But why are the dragon-users good? They don’t strike to be particularly kind or merciful. What generates the Dragon mana? Is it dead sheep?

Naomi Novik develops a dragon rider university in the series Temreire and chases the history of dragons, how they fly, how they fight, how they eat, what they eat, numbers, shepherds, fields, cows, and so on. Rebecca Yarros drops “I’ll eat a flock of sheep” in book 1, and “he moved a flock of sheep to the valley” in book 2. What we get instead is the description of how baby dragons sleep for months and grow while sleeping. I wish those baby dragons at least ate some food like baby birds.

I still found it interesting despite these serious flaws. The book is engaging in the way Matthew Reilly writes. Yeah, there are dragons, which make no sense. They are connected to humans for no reason, generate unlimited energy with no source, and the love story exists despite the constant lies and intolerable deception by the main male protagonist. But it is still a page-turner. I might even consider reading the third part, although it won’t be high on the list.

4*/5

Thraxas and the Dance of Death

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

It’s not common to read a book that’s not on Goodreads but this particular edition is unknown to it. It’s tiny and hard to hold. You have the feeling it will break if you press it too hard. It’s a fragile jewel, worth the read. The first page-turner for me in over a month.

Thraxas and a bunch of powerful wizards are after a green jewel that makes people kill each other and slip away. The story is good and has no villains, which is quite impressive given the large number of dead people.

Makri is accused of theft and wants to resolve the accusations her way by rolling heads. She’s surprisingly civil for a gladiator champion with ork blood this time.

Both cases somehow manage to connect. I couldn’t predict most of the stuff that happened. The only guarantee is that it’s a good read.

5/5