Tag: reading

You Are Deadpool

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

An adventure gamebook in the shape of a comic book. Best of both worlds 🙂 It has 5 sub-stories, each with 100-ish episodes.

September starts strong with a 5/5 book that I would not dare to review. It’s Deadpool. I hate superheroes but Deadpool hates them too, so I think it’s fine.

The August Pile of Books

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I read 9 books in August. Pretty happy with that achievement, although two of these were very short.

Best books

  • The Dry by Jane Harper, and the series about Aaron Falk. It’s a quiet mystery — cozy and depressing — that doesn’t fit the usual mold. I enjoy books with a lyrical style, where the story is secondary to the writing itself. Jonathan Moore writes like that.
  • The Goblins Return by Lubomir Nikolov. It’s a fun and refreshing gamebook that touched my childhood memories. The book’s content aged well, though the pages were yellow and brittle.

Worst books

  • Six of Crows – a popular young adult novel where teenagers act like elderly gang members. There’s a 17-year-old leader with a cane who is too mature to have a girlfriend. Nobody has acne or other problems appropriate for their age. The storytelling was nice and smooth but the details felt dubious. I think the good execution compensates for the bad details and gave it 4/5.
  • Orconomics – some people walk around in a fantasy world and wait for the main character to awaken as The Red Beard. I’m actually looking forward to the continuation. The Red Beard was kind of cool and the absurd world can be a feature.

The Goblins Return

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

Found this gem on Facebook. Fresh humor on yellow pages that barely hold. I enjoyed it very much. Not sure if it can endure another read without starting to fall apart. But the book was cool, well written, short, and brought me good memories.

I finished the monumental Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo yesterday and my original plan was to blog about it today but then I read the above book to fix the my tastebuds. The Goblins deserve a post, and the Six of Crows can be left to less critical book bloggers.

Exiles by Jane Harper – Book Review

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Jane Harper’s trilogy about Aaron Falk concludes with Exiles – the opposite of an epic thriller.

3 people died over the last years in a small but flourishing Australian town. It’s all written off as accidents but a body is missing and Aaron Falk will start digging. Most of the book it’s not even clear he’s investigating. He doesn’t do much other than enjoy the hospitality of his friends, and whenever he notices something, the writer doesn’t tell us what. However, he’ll find clues and solve all of the cases. It’s all hidden in front of our eyes.

The big issue? This town is way too good. Can Aaron go back to the big city as a federal agent after seeing how all these people live?

I give it 4*/5 and despite the sub-optimal score, I enjoyed it and would read a continuation if one is ever written.

The shelf naturally formed with other low-stress books like Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, two Brandon Sandersons and 3 gamebooks. I have some reading ahead of me.

Jane Harper’s Force of Nature

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When I write book reviews, I often mention the level of realism. Imagine a scale from 0 to 10. 0 is complete BS, things that can’t happen, heroes that can’t exist, and a path from start to finish that’s like a fairy tale. 10 is a boring autobiography by a boring person who doesn’t lie to put themselves in a good light. Realism is not required to have fun, a good story can be 0 or 10 on the scale.

Let’s rank some pop culture on the realism scale.

  • 0: Avengers: End Game – a complete disconnect with reality, written entirely to be like that. The characters are only visually human
  • 1: Star Wars Episodes 4-6 – a complete disconnect with reality but some of the characters make sense, like Jabba the Hutt. I’d put here most of the fantasy I read like Thraxas, Joe Abercrombie, Raymond Feist, the LOTR universe, Robin Hobb, Brandon Sanderson, Harry Potter
  • 2: Matthew Reilly, often featured here, writes about cars flying at a speed of 700km/h and crashing with no harm. Not far off from F1, although the characters are inhuman. I feel like he deserves the number 2 spot for himself.
  • 3: Stephen King plugs in plausible humans and outcomes in impossible fantasy settings. His work is incredible and diverse work but let’s average it to 3. 3 would be fantasy with a possible story or with possible characters but maybe not both
  • 4: The Foundation, Andy Weir – the classic sci-fi where the people look real and the events could eventually happen
  • 5: Song of Fire and Ice – lots of that happened in medieval times, or at least people imagined it did. Not the dragon eggs but the other stuff that fills 95% of the pages. Realistic fantasy, dystopia
  • 6: Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers has a solid foundation in reality and the characters are likely based on real humans, perhaps from later periods
  • 7: Cinderella. That probably happened and was later decorated with some magic
  • 8: OMG ❤️, Stephanie Plum, Harry Bosch’s universe, Harlan Coben, the true crime stories
  • 9: Historical fiction, books like Wolf Hall that are as connected to the real events as they could be, autobiographies with some level of commerce
  • 10: Boring autobiographies

On that scale, Jane Harper enters the territory of boring autobiographies. There’s “No way” and “Oh, that’s why, yeah, damn”. Reading it is like reading the continuation of Cinderella, the happily ever after where the prince turned into a king, and the king was drunk and cheated.

So, I won’t tell you what the Force of Nature is about, but it’s sad and depressing in a beautiful way. Do not touch if you want an orthodox crime story.

4.5/5