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lifg posted:That sounds like Qanon. Older than that. The evil AI is Terminator: Genisys. Skynet is in the internet! It's in the cloud! It can control anything with a microchip! The book explicitly takes place during Occupy Wall Street, and the protagonist used to be part of Anonymous, who the book assured me were super elite black hat hackers who went up against the CIA and won.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:56
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What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman. An enjoyable, easy to read for laymen book about current scholarship and research concerning owls, from conservation to biology to behavior to history and mythology. It's not focused on any one particular subject about owls, just a general overview by someone who really loves owls and wants to share that with others. A brisk, easy read that I enjoyed, if also rather depressing near the end when Ackerman starts talking about how owls are historically and presently seen in cultures around the world, and the state of owl species and conservation around the world today.
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Sep 4, 2023 00:03
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Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs is an urban fantasy novel of the 'cozy' type, focusing on the dysfunctional relationships of a family with secrets, especially two estranged sisters, with magic as an extra sauce to keep the plot going and add stakes beyond the personal well-being of the protagonists. I found the book predictable and dull, you'd think one of the protagonists being a bisexual woman working in Antarctica as a mechanic would change up the formula, but she turns out to be far and away the least important main character to the plot and is soon shoved into a standard urban fantasy character archetype, her girlfriend forgotten about. Torzs presents a world where magic doesn't seem to have much if any limits, but people use it for the dullest things. It's very clear which characters Torzs actually cared about and which were there just to be there because the plot and conventions of the genre demanded it, and she pulls off the relatively rare trick for me of presenting a half-understood world of magic with secrets and mysteries and I never found myself wanting to know more about how this world worked.
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Sep 9, 2023 21:03
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The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt is a weird one. It's a steampunk fantasy world set in an ersatz version of Earth and we-swear-it's-not-Britain, centering on two young orphans on the run from... something, who are special for... some reason. Hunt goes a mile a minute, telling the story like you already know what's going on. By context I was able to figure out what some of the slang and proper nouns meant, but I've rarely met a book so overwhelmingly full of weird poo poo and so uninterested in explaining what anything is or what's going on, to the point that I bluntly stopped caring about the characters because I lost track of what was going on, who had what agendas, and what the stakes were beyond that the protagonists dying was probably bad. I feel like it's what you'd get if Guillermo del Toro sat down to write a book, bearing in mind that the guy's a master of visual storytelling but not so good at dialogue or interested in explaining anything with words.
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Nov 16, 2023 02:07
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anilEhilated posted:The sequels get more interesting plots but that element never really disappears. Noted. I checked out from reading the plot closely when he had body horror with women being kidnapped to use their wombs as organic factories.
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Nov 16, 2023 23:43
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Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. It tries to be a love letter to classic James Bond type supervillains via a down on his luck schlub suddenly inheriting his mysterious uncle's estate including a volcano fortress, but runs into the problem that Scalzi only has a handful of jokes to tell on the subject and doesn't know how to write this kind of corny but still entertaining plot. It's a quick read that made me laugh a little, but I'm glad I got it from the library instead of paying money.
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Dec 7, 2023 20:20
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Rabbits by Terry Miles. It's been a while since I've spent an evening ensconced in a cozy chair and reading an entire full-length book cover to cover in one sitting, but this did it for me. Rabbits, I only learned after checking it out from the library, got started as a podcast before being adapted to a novel, and it shows in some ways. Essentially, the book is about one of those augmented/alternative reality games that were briefly the Next Big Thing before being largely forgotten about - a game that takes place in real life, following clues and unraveling puzzles to find rewards, but supposing that there's a secret underground ARG surrounded by a shadowy conspiracy and vast rewards. Most of the book is spend following the protagonist as they become involved in the game, following clues and solving puzzles, and I feel the book does a pretty good job of striking an atmosphere where everything seems off-kilter and it's unclear whether there's actually supernatural events afoot or if the protagonist - explicitly identified as neurodiverse - is becoming delusional and seeing things that aren't there because of their obsession with the game. While the ending is an expected letdown, and the book is undeniably dated in some ways (what is never specifically stated to be Slenderman makes a few appearances), I felt that the book was a pretty enjoyable ride up until that point. I also have to credit the book for never stating a gender for the protagonist, and thus making the love interest gay or straight as you desire. The book is told in the first person, the protagonist has a gender-neutral name, and nothing in the story indicates their gender one way or another (as it happens the audiobook used a female VA and so the author decided to make the protagonist of the book officially female moving forward, thus making this a book with a gay love story). I frankly don't expect satisfying endings from this kind of book, but I enjoyed the trip to get there. As someone who might be neurodiverse myself, I related very much to the mood throughout the book of "Did I actually see that, or is my mind making up connections that aren't there? I'm self-aware enough to know that the latter is very possible, but all the same I'm pretty sure I saw something I shouldn't have..."
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Dec 8, 2023 20:10
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The Quiet Room by Terry Miles is the sequel to Rabbits, a book I reviewed on the last page. Unfortunately I didn't like this book as much, and for reasons I kind of expected: having explained what Rabbits (the in-setting ?game?) is in the last book, the sequel feels the need to escalate the stakes but fumbles at finding a plot that isn't just a retread of the first book, while also trying to avoid actually revealing anything new about the setting. A big part of what grabbed me about Rabbits (the book) was the eerie feeling of unease and trying to figure out what's going on. In this book both the reader and the protagonist know what kind of thing is going on so the book leans a lot more on generic action sequences and a deeper characterization for the main characters, which I feel that Terry Miles doesn't do as well. A disappointing sequel in my eyes, proof perhaps that Rabbits didn't need a sequel.
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Dec 14, 2023 04:16
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God's Monsters, by Esther J. Hamori. This was an interesting book to me on the premise of the inside cover: diving deep into the Bible and Judeo-Christian mythology to examine the monstrous beings mentioned or described in the Bible, like the seraphim and Leviathan, and looking at the broader context of mythology and folklore in the region to place these beings as part (or not) of those traditions and looking at how they've been used in the Bible and down through the centuries. Unfortunately, I feel that the author's blatant axe to grind - she repeatedly calls YHWH of the Bible a treacherous, abusive, murderous figure in every chapter - gets in the way of her analysis. I'd hoped for a broader basis of discussion and analysis with other mythologies and the use of monsters in folklore in history, but so much of this book unfortunately reads like a screed railing against Christianity instead. Some people might be into that, I suppose.
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Feb 6, 2024 19:54
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Mort, by Terry Pratchett. My first Discworld novel in a long time, and the first of the Death series. The premise is simple: Death (the entity) wants to take a vacation, so he hires an apprentice and shenanigans ensue. Honestly, not one of the better Pratchett books I've read, I feel like the titular character goes from hapless nobody to 'oh crap this is why Death is supposed to be a remote and inhuman being' at the drop of a hat without any particular growth to get there or calming down at the end. It's still Pratchett so it's still decently fun, I'm just calling it mediocre for one of his books.
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Mar 16, 2024 13:00
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escape artist posted:Someone on here suggested this as my first Discworld book, but after your review I am wondering if that is the best place to start... Death is a fan favorite character with a lot of Discworld fans as I understand it, so Mort might be the best place to start for that. My first Discworld book was Guards! Guards! which I quite enjoyed, but it's an entirely different cast of characters and almost a wholly different setting.
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Mar 16, 2024 15:04
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The Book of Doors, by Gareth Brown. It seems there's a whole subgenre of urban fantasy that's 'frumpy young-ish woman discovers magic books and gets drawn into a dramatic world of intrigue and magic as people vie for control of magic books that can shape the world, featuring a mysterious but hot British librarian dude as the protagonist's guide into the world.' If you've read one of these books before, The Book of Doors has little of interest going on. People are thrown decades back in time by magic books and show up again in the next chapter fifty years older to pick up exactly where they left off. The villain is pure evil because a magic book made her that way. Everyone is exactly as pure and good or as depraved and evil as they seem to be when they first show up, and the grand mystery of what the books are and where they come from is both answered and not very interesting in the first place. Just generic schlock from an odd little niche of urban fantasy.
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Mar 18, 2024 21:39
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