Category: Book review

Categories
Book review

Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Not many authors can start off in the “mystery world” genre, tour through hard science fiction, and end up being about what it is to be a conscious being, all while keeping your attention. It’s a tribute to Neal Stephenson that he can steer this path with Anathem, and make it thoroughly entertaining with it.

We start off in a world occupied by “fraas” and “surs”, who we soon work out are the friars and nuns of some kind of secluded community. Once every few years – 10, 100, and 1000 years, it turns out – the gates of these communities are opened, and for ten days the inhabitants can go out and mix with the “extramuros”, that is, those who live in the secular society outside the walls. Turns out this has been going on for nearly four thousand years. Only this time, events start to happen which turn that regular, ordered, world almost literally inside out… We get to follow along, narrated by one of the fraas, through all sorts of adventures – which I won’t mention because, spoilers. And once I’d made it through the first 100 pages or so, and was beginning to get to grips with the odd vocabulary and all the new words, this was a great adventure, excellently told.

One thing I will say is that this isn’t a book about monks and nuns, so don’t let that first 100 pages put you off. It’s a book about many things, but perhaps most of all it’s about the human consciousness – what it might mean to have one, why and how we might have one in the first place, and what the outer limits of having one might be. It’s set on a world very similar to Earth in many ways, and contains all sorts of entertaining indirect references to science curiosities we might know on Earth – from Roger Penrose’s non-periodic tiles to Kurt Godel’s theory of time travel. All done with Mr Stephenson’s usual flair and wit.

In the end, this was almost a totally brilliant book for me, and just missed it by not quite exploring some of those possibilities far enough. So four stars, not five, but definitely worth a read.

Categories
Book review

The Path to Nibbana

How Mindfulness of Loving-Kindness Progresses through the Tranquil Aware Jhanas to Awakening

by David C. Johnson

The Path to Nibbana by David C. Johnson
Categories
Book review

The Sentry

by Robert Crais

The Sentry by Robert Crais

I’m not going to review this book, featuring Elvis Cole, a Private Investigator, and his friend, Joe Pike. Cole is cool (he shares his house on the hills above LA with his cat, and he shares his beer with his cat). Pike is beyond cool, and one of my favourite fictional creations (the cat hates him).

Instead, I’m just going to give you a series of quotes from it. If that doesn’t make you buy it, nothing will.

This was why the men down south used him for these jobs and paid him so well. Werewolves caught their prey.

The nature of his life had cost him the woman he loved and the little boy he had grown to love, and left him alone in this house with nothing but an angry cat for company and a pistol that did not need to be put away.

Prisons were filled with convicted murderers who got a drumstick when they wanted a thigh, or who felt dissed when a woman wouldn’t speak to them on a bus, or who decided a bartender was ignoring them. When a man felt frustrated or angry enough, any reason would do.

Pike had focused on a goal and would drive forward like a relentless machine. Back in Cole’s Ranger days, they had called this mission commitment, and Pike’s mission commitment was off the charts.

Pike was a man who showed nothing, projecting a zen-like detachment that Cole sometimes found amusing, but also admired. Cole often wondered what such calm cost his friend, and whether Pike had no other choice but to pay it.

“Yes. Of course, I will call.” “Stay with Artie. Watch his temperature.” “You are a strange man.”

That’s it. Go read it. Or anything with Pike in it, they’re all great.

Categories
Book review

The Delirium Brief

Laundry Files #8

by Charles Stross

The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross

I’m delighted to report back from the world of Bob Howard and Mo O’Brien that all is not well – indeed, all is going very very badly, verging on world-endingly bad, and it’s pretty much a race to the finish as to which particular variety of soul-sucking creature from a parallel universe is going to do us all in.

In other words, this, the eighth in the Laundry Files sequence from Charles Stross, is another cracking read. Although they’re all set in the same world and are more or less sequential, they are all sufficiently independent that I suspect you could pick this one up cold, and still get a great deal of enjoyment from it. I would still recommend reading the others, though, because (a) they’re very good, and (b) you’ll get a little bit more out of this one, as (for example) you’ll known Bob’s history with PHANGs – the in-series designation for what might otherwise be known as vampires.

The world of the Laundry files is the world of modern 21st century England, with a twist: there is a branch of the civil service responsible for dealing with the occult. Up to about book 6 of the series, this was a very secret organisation. Underfunded, drowning in bureaucracy, and with endless reports to fill in, but still very secret.

However, in the preceding book, The Nightmare Stacks there was a full-scale invasion of Yorkshire by undisguisably occult creatures, with some very serious consequences. So now the dreary world of bad coffee, broken IT, and crippling paperwork which Bob used to inhabit has been brought into the harsh light of day, and is being picked over by the mass media in an entirely believable way (an early chapter deals with Bob’s quizzing by Jeremy Paxman on national TV…). At the same time, the organisation is under external threat from not just the usual occult beings, but the more immediate danger of self-serving politicians, all seeking to cover their arses in the aftermath of what happened in Yorkshire. And then a private jet lands at an airport in England, bringing an entirely new kind of threat…

It’s a great book, with a twisty plot, plenty of wry asides, and some new characters, as well as the return of many old ones. I loved it!

Categories
Book review

The Quantum Spy

by David Ignatius

The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius

So very disappointed in this novel, I’m sorry to say. It’s set in the present day, with China as the baddie for our intrepid CIA spies, and it has a bit of a techie theme, with the plot loosely set around the search for real life quantum computing. I had high hopes – quantum stuff, spies, high-tech thriller potential, what’s not to love?

Well, what’s not to love is cardboard characters straight from central casting (the hard-as-nails CIA deputy director, the geeky CEO of a tech company, the conflicted American-Chinese), the wildly telegraphed plot line, the simple straight-line narrative thread, written so you didn’t have to worry about losing the thread when you got up from the sunbed where you were reading this to buy an icecream (or a margarita, as you choose).

Some bits weren’t bad – there were some nice snippets of “tradecraft”, and the tech stuff about quantum computers was actually very well done, from a techie POV. And the scenes were set in some interesting places, generally very credibly described. But still not enough to get past the disappointment.

Categories
Book review

Dungeon Born

by Dakota Krout

45712252. sy475

This is a book in the “LitRPG” genre, which for those of us who spent their adolescence with a bunch of other social misfits, surrounded by character charts, multi-sided dice, and rule books for various role-playing games (RPGs), will seem somewhat familiar. In this case, it’s the story of a dungeon, and how it grows up. For it turns out that dungeons, in this world at least, grow from small crystal cores, which slowly gain more abilities to shape the earth and stone around them, and to imbue with life increasingly powerful creatures (rarely friendly) to populate their underworld passages. Add in some adventurers (including one by the name of Dale, who sort-of accidentally owns the land on which this dungeon is growing), and an interesting set of physical laws for the universe, based on the accretion of various “essences” into your soul to increase your powers, and off you go!

I hadn’t met this literary genre until I picked up this book, and it was quite fun, I must say. The plot was straightforward, driven by the dungeon slowly levelling up, and Dale also levelling up and learning about the world of adventuring. The writing was straightforward, if not very nuanced, with some of the moral lessons necessary for Dale to mature being imparted to Dale in very much a “tell, not show” kind of a way. So if I were to be snobby, I’d say this wasn’t a sophisticated book, but all in all, it was entirely enjoyable, and kept me engaged throughout. I probably won’t be reading the follow-on books simply because this isn’t perhaps my favoured style of book, and I have only a limited number of books I can fit in, but but that’s just a personal thing, and others will love this, I know.

Categories
Book review

The Poppy War

by R.F.Kuang

37906566. sy475

The Poppy War is a fantasy novel with a difference. Most such novels are set in a sort-of Lord of The Rings lineage of countries, which all look a lot like medieval England (with greater or lesser degrees of grittiness, but with wizards, and of course lots of men with mighty thews and huge swords.

Instead, here we are in a country like medieval China, with shamans who are linked to sixty-four fantastical god-like creatures, and women with wicked martial arts skills – oh, plus a few mighty-thew’d warriors to round out the numbers. This does give the whole thing a very different flavour, which I have to say I enjoyed. The exploration of this culture, and the way the empires have grown (and are falling), was well done throughout, and definitely deserving of praise.

Better still for me was the main character, Ren, and the portrayal of her inner conflict between duty and vengeance, as she grows from fighting to survive, to fighting for her country, to fighting for her friends. It’s a great piece of character development. We see her start as a young war orphan in a shop in a rural village, then through sheer force of will and determination, we watch her pass the tough exams to attend the prestigious war college – her only way out of this life other than through an arranged marriage to a man 20+ years her senior. From there, we follow her through the college, and into the real war that breaks out before she’s had time to even graduate. It’s then, in many ways, that the really interesting action starts. I did feel a times though that this was a longer book than it might have needed to be, and perhaps some of the build up to this might have been judiciously edited down.

It’s worth warning that some of the writing in the battle scenes in the final third of the book is very dark. One of the themes of the book is about how when we cease to see the “other side” in a war has human, that (a) makes the war easier to fight for the soldiers, and (b) produces extraordinary brutality. You are treated to this in full. I think of myself as mentally quite robust, and am entirely used to high levels of gore in movies, etc, but this gave me some quite unpleasant dreams. Enough said.

So, overall I’m giving this 3-1/2 stars, rounded up to 4 stars. The novelty of the setting and the characters, plus the higher-level themes, elevated this above your normal fantasy novel. Just not for the faint of heart!

Categories
Book review

The Fifth Season

The Broken Earth #1

by N.K.Jemisin

25194939

Sometimes you read a book, and you’ve no idea what’s going on for the first third of the book, but then you put together a few threads through the middle third and you enjoy how it’s going, and by the final third you absolutely love it and are upset when it ends. This was such a book, and I loved it. Some of the rest of this review might need to be shrouded in spoilers, so you can have the same experience, but it’s clear very early on that we’re in a strange world here, with lots of history, and – it turns out – lots of earthquakes. Not all of which are triggered in the usual way. Turns out, there are some people in this world that can trigger earthquakes. Turns out there are those who can feel and control (to some extent) magma flows, the slippage of plates in the crust, the crumbling of rock, and other geological things whose names I didn’t know until I read this book. Really great world building – I can’t think I’ve read anything like this before. I can see why it won the 2016 Hugo Award!

Also, by the way, great storytelling throughout. The story unfolds from multiple points of view – a woman in deep distress, a second-person narrative, a strange creature born from the stone itself, and others. How they come together is the reveal of the middle section of the book. It’s a neat approach, and very well used, but not abused. No annoying super-powers wielded by super-humans, deus ex machina-style, but rather very human characters with flaws and strengths, struggling to come to terms with the world in which they find themselves.

SO, some great characters in here, a brilliant world setting for them, and an intriguing plot. It also has enough of a wrap-up at the end of the book for you to feel satisfied – you aren’t left poised on a cliff edge. Definitely want to see more from this world, though, and there is plenty enough left unfinished to justify reading the next book(s). A well-deserved five stars.






View all my reviews

Categories
Book review

Dangerous To Know

by K.T.Davies

I’m sorry to say I gave up on this after a couple of chapters. I could see that another day (and certainly to other readers) this might be an entertaining read, but I ended up getting annoyed by the fantasy swords-and-sorcery tropes, foreshadowing, and not terrifically well done dry humour.

I hate being mean about someone’s writing, because heaven knows it’s still better than I could manage, but I couple of years ago I realized that I only had a certain number of books I could read before I shuffle off this mortal coil, so I’d better make sure I didn’t waste my time. So I leave this to others, who, based on the consensus of the other GoodReads reviews, will enjoy it more.


Categories
Book review

Silence

by Erling Kagge

This was a short, interesting, exploration of the way we can find quiet in our lives, and the value of doing so. It takes the form of 33 very brief chapters, each only a few pages long, looking at silence from a different perspective. Nicely done, and the physical book itself is a beautiful publication, complete with beautiful photography and art of wild empty spaces. Three and a half stars, rounded down to three as I couldn’t feel it warranted four.