Book #348 of 2021: Strange Dreams edited by Stephen R. Donaldson Rating each story in this 1993 collection individually, they average out to just three-out-of-five stars overall for me. It’s an uneven bunch, yet there are still some winners among the lot. (No fives, but 10 fours, along with 11 threes, 5 twos, and 2 …
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Book #82 of 2019: The Black Ice by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #2) I’m of two minds about this second Bosch novel. On the one hand, the detective and his associates feel more like the versions that I know from the TV adaptation of the series, which presumably means that they’ve settled more into their …
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Book #48 of 2018: Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (Enchanted Forest Chronicles #3) I’ve liked the first two books in this children’s fantasy series, but this third one is a misfire for me. Its issues might not trouble a younger reader, but the humor is way more slapstick than before, and the new …
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Book #206 of 2017: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King This is a fairly typical early Stephen King collection: a few stories are great, most are simply good, and a couple are pretty bad. On the upper end of that scale we have Dolan’s Cadillac, which is a King take on The Cask of Amontillado, …
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Book #117 of 2017: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #15) This second Discworld City Watch novel is an improvement over the first, thanks mostly to some appreciated deepening of the characters of Carrot and Sam Vimes. But it’s still not great, and the satire on affirmative action involving the appointment of fantasy creatures …
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Book #82 of 2017: Wolf-Speaker by Tamora Pierce (The Immortals #2) An okay follow-up to Tamora Pierce’s earlier novel Wild Magic. I liked that Pierce went out of her way to emphasize that not all creatures who look like monsters are evil, but this was kind of a weird message in a novel where the …
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Book #116 of 2016: The Giver by Lois Lowry (The Giver #1) I remember really liking The Giver when I was growing up, but I was still a teenager at the oldest the last time I read it, so I only really had fuzzy memories of its specifics. Of course, it more than lived up …
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