Book #171 of 2021: City of Bones by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #8) I wouldn’t say this Harry Bosch novel is bad per se, but it’s probably my least favorite of the series yet. There’s a lot of attention placed on the reckless rookie cop that the detective is dating, coupled with a brusque rejection …
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Book #164 of 2021: The Briar King by Greg Keyes (The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone #1) This early 2000s fantasy series is a real hidden gem, one that I’ve always been surprised isn’t more popular. I wouldn’t call it a ripoff of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, but that …
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Book #242 of 2020: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #29) This wasn’t my first Discworld title, but for a long time, it was the only one I had read in the subseries about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. It’s the volume I’ve reread the most as well, so I can attest that it works just …
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Book #89 of 2020: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson I admire the ambition of this novel to build up an alternate world history across six centuries — in which the Black Death kills off almost all of Europe, and China and a Muslim empire become the dominant geopolitical powers instead …
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Book #100 of 2019: Golden Fool by Robin Hobb (The Tawny Man #2) This second Tawny Man novel is as slow-paced as the rest of author Robin Hobb’s wider Elderlings saga, but it benefits tremendously by situating its hero back at his old home of Buckkeep with a variety of interesting people to bounce off …
Book #228 of 2018: The Man Who Killed His Brother by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Man Who #1) Author Stephen R. Donaldson is best known for his fantasy sagas like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, but his character work and intense internal struggles resonate more than the epic quests and magical worldbuilding, and …
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Book #212 of 2018: Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #2) Two books in, I think I have to conclude that this series is just not working for me. There are plenty of clever ideas, but they’re delivered in such a scattershot manner that none of it really coheres together. I’m …
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Book #91 of 2018: Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #4) A solid but kind of unremarkable Tortall adventure. The Protector of the Small series is generally marketed as a quartet, but it honestly feels more like a cohesive trilogy followed by this somewhat vestigial afterthought. I’m not trying to be too …
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Book #79 of 2018: Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (Takeshi Kovacs #1) This hardboiled science-fiction novel is rich in premise and atmosphere, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the recent Netflix adaptation has done with both. The story is a fairly straightforward noir investigation — and unfortunately comes with the oversexualization of women …
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Book #152 of 2016: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang Science-fiction is generally concerned with exploring the unknown: potential future technologies, or alien lifeforms, or anything else that could perhaps be possible. And there’s some of that in this collection of stories from Ted Chiang, but the strongest entries are more fantastical …
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