Book #118 of 2023: Orion and the Conqueror by Ben Bova (Orion #4) This isn’t the worst title of the Orion saga — it’s a noticeable step up from the angst-ridden previous volume — but it might well be the most boring. Much how the first half of Vengeance of Orion was little more than …
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Book #260 of 2021: The Gap Into Madness: Chaos and Order by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Gap Cycle #4) The penultimate volume in this Wagnerian space opera is a welcome step back up in quality after a third novel that I personally consider a bit slow and talky. This one is an improvement on all …
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Book #209 of 2020: The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #3) This 1994 novel opens with detective Harry Bosch on trial for his shooting of an unarmed man four years ago, a civil complaint brought by the widow against the city. (The deceased was a suspected rapist and serial killer, and Bosch mistakenly …
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Book #140 of 2020: The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa First published a quarter-century ago and re-released last year in a new English translation, this Japanese novel offers a quiet and sorrowful dystopia. The tale is set on an island where people are gradually forgetting the function of everyday things like ribbons and candies, and …
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Book #137 of 2019: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt An evocative travelogue of late-twentieth-century Savannah that could use greater structure throughout. The introduction of a certain true crime element around the midpoint adds some focus to the back half, but before then I kept wondering where this narrative was …
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Book #203 of 2018: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King (Mary Russell #1) This tale of a Jewish teenager being trained as a detective by a retired Sherlock Holmes in the early twentieth century is a lovely bildungsroman and portrait of a budding partnership. Mary Russell is a great character in her own right, …
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Book #178 of 2017: Emperor Mage by Tamora Pierce (The Immortals #3) This third novel in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet is the first one that I’ve felt approached the quality of the other books I’ve read in her wider Tortall series. The main character is still absurdly overpowered – she’s already able to magically communicate …
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