Book #108 of 2026: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #2) [Note: this is an updated version of my review from 2020.] This is the second volume of its series by internal chronology, but I maintain that these stories are best approached in publication order instead. …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis”
Book #71 of 2026: Return to Mars by Ben Bova A largely pointless rehash of a sequel. I really enjoyed Ben Bova’s novel Mars in his loose Grand Tour saga of early space exploration, but there’s little that this second visit to the red planet accomplishes that wasn’t done better in the first. You also …
Book #60 of 2026: Moonwar by Ben Bova (Moonbase Saga #2) Author Ben Bova’s novel Moonrise was a somewhat scattered prelude about life in a near-future lunar settlement, but it built nicely to the situation that’s front and center for this sequel: the facility’s leaders declaring their independence from Earth, so as not to be …
Book #52 of 2026: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1) This is my very favorite book, which I’ve now read four times in as many years. (I’m not necessarily committing to maintaining an annual rereading tradition, but I’m not exactly ruling it out, either.) That’s once in my …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard”
Book #49 of 2026: Moonrise by Ben Bova (Moonbase Saga #1) I remember liking this mid-90s duology about the first lunar settlement within author Ben Bova’s larger Grand Tour sequence of space exploration stories, but mainly for the political element, which it turns out is mostly in the sequel Moonwar. Here that takes a backseat …
Book #47 of 2026: The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker (The Prince of Nothing #1) I know that I read this fantasy novel around when it came out back in 2004, but I couldn’t remember anything about it and I don’t think I ever got to any of the sequels. Revisiting it …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker”
Book #38 of 2026: Mars by Ben Bova This is probably the Grand Tour novel that stood out the clearest in my memory before my current reread, telling a thrilling yet grounded tale of outer space exploration that paved the way for so many subsequent releases (and not just from author Ben Bova, though it …
Book #10 of 2026: Tales from the Nightside by Simon R. Green Three years after the main Nightside series concluded, author Simon R. Green released this anthology of shorter stories set in the same supernatural corner of London. All but the concluding novella The Big Game had been previously published elsewhere, while four of the …
Continue reading “Book Review: Tales from the Nightside by Simon R. Green”
Book #202 of 2025: The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green (Nightside #12) And so the Nightside series comes to an end, more or less. (There’s still a collection of short stories in the setting, which I’ll be rereading next, and a few crossovers with some of author Simon R. Green’s other works …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green”
Book #191 of 2025: A Hard Day’s Knight by Simon R. Green (Nightside #11) This isn’t the worst entry in its urban fantasy series, but it might be the most generic. Our protagonist received the legendary sword Excalibur at the end of the previous volume, and in this one, he has to return it to …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Hard Day’s Knight by Simon R. Green”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more