I’m of two minds as to how I should review Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Taken in-and-of itself, my response to this novel is overwhelmingly positive. It’s damn good. Good enough that I fully expect it to be nominated for some awards (although I don’t know if it’s good enough to win any).

Compared to some Mr. Robinson’s other work, however, my reaction to this novel is less favorable. But, then, maybe it’s unfair to compare Aurora to his other work…

I’ll start by mentioning some of the reasons why this book works well:

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I read Ready Player One over a year ago, but somehow never got around to posting my review of it here on my blog. Given that it’s one of my all-time favorite novels—and given how often I now compare other books to it—I really should post my review. So, here it is…

Ready Player One is a nostalgia trip like no other. It’s an ode to the rise of gaming and geek culture, a recollection of the early history of geekdom, all crammed between the covers of a really good future dystopian SF novel.

Most of the time, nostalgia bores me. I find affectionate trips down our cultural memory lane insipid, overly rose-tinted, and saccharine.

Ready Player One, though, grabbed me from the very first page and wouldn’t let me go. It kept me up past my bedtime, it kept me off my computer and social media, because reading it was the only thing I wanted to do.

Continue reading “Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline” →

The Martian by Andy Weir is brilliant. That’s one word I try not to overuse or water down—brilliant. This novel earns it.

It’s the story of an astronaut, Mark Watney, a member of the Ares III mission to explore Mars, who gets stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew abandons the planet and believes him dead. On his own in an environment lethal to life, Watney must find a way to survive with only the equipment and supplies left behind. If he can survive, he also needs to find a way to get back home…

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Patrick Rothfuss introduces The Slow Regard of Silent Things with a warning that it’s not a proper story. It doesn’t do the things a story is supposed to do.

And it’s wonderful. It’s unlike most anything else I’ve read and I treasured every word of it.

This isn’t a story so much as it’s a contemplation. Reading it isn’t an act of reading so much as it’s a meditation.

Even more so than in the novels of his Kingkiller Chronicle, this novella displays Mr. Rothfuss’ delight in language. He plays with words here in a way that’s both elegant and giddy. The book is lyrical, bursting with alliteration, homophones, and rhyme, but it never comes off as contrived or self-conscious. Rather, his language is a search to find just the right words for each thing that needs to be said.

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Like many of my generation, I went through a Clive Barker phase when I was a teenager. The Hellraiser movies, Nightbreed, Candyman; his novels, The Great and Secret Show and Imajica. He defined dark and edgy for me, and he was much cooler than Stephen King.

Sacrament was the first new-to-me Clive Barker novel I’d read in over two decades. It wasn’t what I expected.

Because of his early work, Mr. Barker is too easily dismissed as a horror writer, albeit one who incorporates a greater portion of magic and fantasy than most. This has never been entirely fair—his best novels have always been more than just horror, as fantastical as they are horrible, works of unfettered imagination.

Sacrament casts off any chains previously tying Mr. Barker to the horror genre. There’s darkness in it, and danger, but it’s definitively not a horror novel.

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