While on the road with his mother and baby brother, a ten year old prince is attacked by an enemy armed group. Thrown into a patch of thorns from where he could not move, only watch, he sees his mother defiled and killed and his brother smashed on a rock like a toy. He vows vengeance. Such a classic story, right? Only we see him a few years later, leading a band of brigands, murdering and looting and raping, his vengeance all but forgotten and replaced by a desire to unite all the hundred little states warring against each other. Well, more interesting, but still pretty classic, right? Nope, stuff still happens that makes the lead character (and you) doubt his thoughts and the true nature of reality and retroactively explains some of the more incredulous questions that the reader is asking.

  I would say Prince of Thorns is all about revealing layers of this world that Mark Lawrence is still shaping. I quite liked that. The first book sets things up, but it is not a setup book. It is filled with action. Nor does it tell us everything, leaving a lot to be explored in the next books in the series. That's something that is sorely missing in many modern stories. In order to enjoy the book, though, you have to suspend your disbelief when it tells of an eleven year old boy smashing heads, swinging swords and leading men. Yes, in feudal times being 11 is the time to have a midlife crisis, but it is all a little bit too much for a child.

  It is a game of thrones kind of book, but mercifully from the standpoint of a single character. There is not a lot of lore, but there is magic and a mysterious connection to an advanced but now dead civilisation, plenty of violence and strategy. I will probably read the next books in the series.

  The Grace of Kings feels long from the very start. Ken Liu is starting off from a fictional empire of seven islands, but it might as well have been a historical book. Everything is mostly realistic, with very human characters that do what human characters do: harm and kill other people and find rationalizations for it. Some of them are heroic and occasionally think of other people, too.

  Half way through the book (which is one of a trilogy, of course) I couldn't keep up with all the characters that kind of did the same thing, the long expositions of why people did stupid or horrible things to others and the various anecdotes that made some of the characters heroes or villains. And I call them anecdotes because that's what they feel like: short moments that disrupt rather than enforce the long and unfortunately boring history of the realm.

  Bottom line, it feels like a Chinese Game of Thrones, with less interesting characters and no magic as of yet. It's not badly written, quite the contrary, but its subject is long winding and doesn't interest me. I will therefore abandon reading it.

  Wakenhyrst is very well written, but where it excels is the dissection of the hypocrisy of people. Michelle Paver is telling the story from the viewpoint of a young girl who must navigate the world and her own adolescence in the house of a father that has no love for her or for her mother, finds every reason to blame others for his shortcomings and deeds, and yet is untouchable because he is a man and the lord of the manor. What legions of screeching feminists could not do, Paver manages with her subdued, yet defiant description of how women are used and ignored and pretty much treated as glorified pets. It is impossible to not hate the father figure in the book, even as the main character is torn between wanting to forgive him and dealing with the creepy and sometimes evil shit he pulls. The ending is powerful, as the daughter finds the strength to sublimate her hate into an even more appropriate emotion: pity.

  But the story's power is not limited to the detailed analysis of the human psyche. It binds together Anglican folklore, medieval beliefs about devils and angels and art, whitewashed (in the actual sense of the term) by Puritans and systematically destroyed by Victorians, the power of untamed nature and the horror of the human complacency. How refreshing to have a very young girl be the rational and intelligent agent that fends for herself in a world of mystical belief and societal poppycock, so that we can identify with her and see it as it was. How wonderful to have Paver describe it all without any trace of anachronism, as if she has lived in that world herself.

  The story starts slow and the pace almost never picks up, yet the tension and the level of details are constantly increasing, managing to somehow convey at the same time two distinct and contrary feelings: one of slow burn and the other of untamed power rising to a crescendo. It brilliantly mingles the oppressive hot wet feel of subconscious fear and superstition with cold analytical reason as its adversary. In the beginning I wanted to rate it above average only, but now, the more I think about it the more I admire the writing and the way the book tells the story. Good job, Michelle Paver!

  Bottom line: move past the slower start, it is certainly worth reading. A gothic tale of subliminal supernatural horror and a very human and real one at the same time.

  Salvation Lost is the second book in the Salvation Sequence trilogy from Peter F. Hamilton. I was commenting on the previous book saying that it is mostly filler and action that is irrelevant to the larger story. This book is a lot more action packed and a bit more interesting, but ultimately just as pointless. A lot of characters that will only get relevant in the third book, if at all, a lot of stories that happen in the past as we know what is going 10000 years into the future and no closure on anything. The horror of the alien invasion is powerful, but not as much as it could have been. The story invests so much in some people only to kill them later with no apparent effect on the timeline of events.

  Bottom line: I will probably read the last book, scheduled sometime in Sep 2020, but I feel this series is one of Hamilton's weakest.

  I consider Peter F. Hamilton to be one of the great science fiction writers. Yes, he has a formula, yes he messes up the endings, but the ideas and worlds that he puts on paper have rarely disappointed me. I can't say that of Salvation, either, but I didn't especially like it, as it gives away too much too soon, then proceeds on boring or enraging the reader with police procedural vignettes that we already know will have no impact on future events.

  Hamilton has this method of combining at least two threads, usually one is hard science fiction and the other is fantasy or police procedural or something different, only to bind them together at some point in time. In this book, we see a group of people running away from an enemy species bent on exterminating humanity and also a peaceful future in which humanity has discovered how to create instantaneous transport portals to other places and was contacted by two different alien species. Somehow, how we get from one point to the other is the topic of the book, but the vast majority of it is about corporate security people that abuse their power to "get things done" or toxic cleanup people or other kinds of short stories that only bring some new information to light while eating up reading time. Then the book ends!

  And it's a bit annoying that even the technical aspects don't add up, like how you can know how to make portals, but you still rely on nuclear weapons or rockets to do war, or that people fear sabotage and terrorism, but don't see the possible threat posed by personal portals to other worlds. Gravity alterations, atmosphere loss or pollution, a portal from a star to an inhabited area would have been much more dangerous. Also some of the ways characters act are completely unnatural and it feels jarring to see them do things in a sequence (heh!) only to further the story and not consistent to their character and expertise.

  Anyway, I am reading Salvation Lost now, but in my view the first book in this series could have been a lot more, especially from a brilliant writer such as Hamilton.

  This is How You Lose the Time War came highly recommended by a Goodreads buddy of mine as the way to write sci-fi. I don't know what to say about that. He was so ebullient about how great the book was that there was bound to be some disappointment. It is nicely written and touches, under the guise of science fiction, the intricacies of human relationships and feelings. But other than that it was just one idea, stretched over 200 pages, in something that was both short and felt unreasonably long. Perhaps some time issues need arise when time travel is involved.

  What I found interesting is that it is a double author book. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone worked on it together although I suspect it was mostly El-Mohtar with the story and Gladstone with the tech stuff, although I could be just stereotyping. To me, it felt like the story has a distinctly female vibe.

  Bottom line: it's a very humanist type of story: the time war, the tech, they are all props. One could have written the same kind of stuff about African tribes or corporate lawyers. After a while everything started to feel repetitive and stale only to reach the all too predictable ending. Nice book, but not great.

  A Short History of Nearly Everything is very well researched, subtly written and does pretty much what it says: explain the history of science up to the present as humanity is trying to figure out where it came from, how long ago it happened and how things actually work. It's a dense work, which makes it a long read. You either go through it and not retain much or you have to read bit by bit and think on each for a while. I read it bit by bit and retained little.

  Anyway, as I was reading The Invention of Nature, another great popular science book, I've stumbled upon this quote "There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person." and never have I thought about it so much as when reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. In fact, the same quote appears in the book near the end. As Bill Bryson describes it, most of science is accidental and has to fight a plethora of egos that believe they are better than you just in order to surface. Many times the work is lost, misattributed, stolen or sabotaged into oblivion by personal opponents. As such, the book has a wonderful freshness from the tired history of science that we are so often presented where very smart people think of something and then everybody applauds and accepts another idea that will further human knowledge. The book is also about how little we know about many things that usually are presented as completely clear, fully researched and completely understood. All in all, it's a book that needs reading.

  "So", you will say, "isn't this another Sapiens?". No. I liked Sapiens and its funny and accessible style made it an instant hit worldwide. A Short History of Nearly Everything is way better. It focuses more on sciences like geology and anthropology and abstract physics and on the personal histories of the people involved in the discoveries rather than on humanity as a whole, so it's a bit harder. When it does look at humanity it sees it as small, petty and destructive. Sapiens makes you feel good, this makes you feel ashamed and happy you are still alive.

  I have to say that I almost abandoned reading it; it is that dense and full of information. If I was reading a novel in three days, spending weeks trudging through knowledge made me feel both too stupid and getting smarter at the same time. Surely I could find a better way to entertain myself, I thought. This book is entertaining, but it requires focus to read and understand. In the end, I am very glad I've read it.

  This is a very short story that is barely science fiction. It describes a place of lowlifes, living on despair, terror and violence. Among them, a bland guy that seems to be unaffected by anything, but that can explode into violence in a second. If you just thought this character has similarities with Amos Burton, you thought right and the surprise is that he was not born with that name. This is kind of his origin story.

  I felt that The Churn was a bit lazy. A criminal boss character that calls his large underdog "little man" was also used in Gods of Risk, for example. Then there is nothing that binds the plot to space and time. It can be any place of ill repute, whether on Mars, Earth or anywhere else, in the future, the present or the past. Indeed, if you ignore the last pages, it's not even about Amos, but about other characters that have incidental contact with him.

  Bottom line: it brings nothing new to any table and it is barely an Amos story, clearly not an Expanse one.

  The story is of little girl Cara, daughter of colonists on Laconia, discovering dog-like creatures in the forest, apparently able to fix anything. When her brother is killed in an accident, she takes his body to her friends, to get him fixed. Adults, though, feel differently about the whole thing.

  Strange Dogs is one of the more sci-fi shorts in The Expanse universe, though still focusing on very relatable characters and very well written. The events here foreshadow some things in Tiamat's Wrath, which makes me believe the dogs' influence on the whole Expanse plot will be important. Now I can only hope that the ninth novel in the book series won't be the last.

  I just finished watching the fourth season of The Expanse TV series and, in strong withdrawal, I started reading the Expanse shorts written by James S.A. Corey. Serendipity has it that Gods of Risk is covering most of the Bobbie Draper subplot in the TV season I just watched and that the story happens during Christmas (although what Christmas means on Mars is a bit vague).

  The story is less detailed and with characters pretty different from the TV series, after all it's a short novella, but the basic plot is that same: nephew gets in trouble with the local underworld, aunt Bobbie kicks ass and saves him. It's well written and contains that element of world lesson that I felt was in Auberon. In this case, the only reason the good Martian nephew gets in trouble is his affection for a girl and his desire to protect her after she begs for help. Help provided, despite warnings from both his aunt and her pimp, she spurns him. A good lesson for adolescents everywhere.

  Want to feel old? Flea (born Michael Peter Balzary) writes this memoir at 57. In Acid for the Children, he covers his life from childhood in Australia up to, but not including, the Red Hot Chili Peppers era. And it's a nice book, one of those autobiographies that are written with honesty and nostalgia and that shares the lessons the author learned during his life.

  Michael was a scrawny kid, with either physically abusive, alcoholic or indifferent parent figures, born in a poor family. Yet his spirit was that of an artist, so he did what kids like that do: lots of risk taking, misdemeanors just for the sake of it, lots and lots of drugs of all kinds. In the book he thanks his guardian angels for not getting HIV or other life ending diseases or addictions. By the time he got noticed as a base player, he had escaped most of the mentality and came to grips with his parents. He even leans towards snowflake territory at the end there. The book is loosely chronological in order, made of various anecdotes. How he remembers stuff from his childhood with so much detail when I don't remember what happened ten years ago is a mystery, but that's how some people are.

  It's always good to read books like these. Makes you see the world with different eyes. In Flea's case, he made me realize that people do drugs from different reasons: some want to reach a potential they feel is right under their skin, they use them as tools to uncover themselves and when they do, they reach a place of bliss and pure joy. Others want to get to the bliss and joy directly, with no talent or drive to talk of, so they become addicts and "losers". Perhaps that's a kind of uncovering themselves, too. He also made me realize that you need some life experience to be able to access the emotions that are required to do art. It may seem obvious, but when our highest drama is who said what on Twitter or how beautiful is the scenery in a tour guided vacation, we don't have that experience. Lost to this illusion of safety in efficiency as cogs in the machine we lose not only our individuality, but our chances to even become people.

  Bottom line: Flea is a really nice guy, if he can say so himself, and it becomes clear as the book progresses that he had that from the very start, he just had to jump through some hoops to make that work for him. I am glad he made it. I liked the book.

  What I like about Brandon Sanderson is his optimism. In the Skyward universe people are quarantined on a planet while regular alien incursions must be repelled by younger and younger pilots flying crappier and crappier fighters. Anyone else would have made this a bleak post-apocalyptic story. Not Sanderson. He somehow makes it feel cheery!

  In Starsight we learn more about the aliens and the thing that made them all hate humans so. Spensa has to navigate (pun intended) another flight training school, but in a totally different context and the things she learns are even more valuable for the survival of the human race.

  This is a simple linear book with few but relatable characters and a fast pace. I finished it in a day. Skyward is not the best series of Sanderson's, being of a sub-genre that I disconsider, the one of the smart savage that learns the secrets of the world and advances in it with no particular problems and often with the help of overpowered "ancient" artifacts. It's not really that bad here, but I have to compare it with The Reckoners, which has a similar cheery vibe, but also terrible loss and realistic pain. Skyward is just too soft.

  Bottom line: almost pulp, I enjoyed reading the book, but I also felt that it didn't bring too much at the table.

  What is it with Brent Weeks and story endings? He himself says at the end of this final book from the Night Angel trilogy that the biggest challenge is the middle of the story. I don't see it that way. His stories have deep and rich middle parts, with new threads constantly being created, new characters and revelations added. It's the ending where, so far, I've felt disappointed.

  Don't get me wrong, this trilogy was great and Beyond the Shadows was a very well written book. It's just that with every chapter in the Night Angel story, the magical world and the characters get wider and the expectations grow with them. The finale, regardless of how epic, should feel like it closes all avenues, it resolves all conflict and explains everything and it just can't! Worse, by using unexpected external forces, abilities, premonitions, prophecies, characters, nations, unknown historical facts - and Weeks uses them all in his endings - everything you've read so far gets invalidated. Glaring examples in Beyond the Shadows are Jenine Gyre and Elene, both some of the most prominent female characters in the story, which fulfil their prophesied purpose almost like tools. And when you look behind, at their personal storyline, you realize that most of it was superfluous, pointless and nonsensical. The character in the end has almost no resemblance to the one at the beginning (or middle) and some of the decisions taken contradict some of the previous ones.

  And then there are all the nations and magic flavors and the geopolitical and historical context. What happens to those?! At the end, every character is awesome, fully grown and with amazing abilities. At the end! When they can't do anything anymore. All their strength and experience is used for a quick bow and a speedy exit stage left.

  Bottom line: Brent Weeks writes epic fantasy stories like Brandon Sanderson and ends them like Peter F. Hamilton, in a rushed mess. Night Angel is no exception. Considering both people I compared him with are in my list of favorite authors, he will probably be on it, too.

  Shadow's Edge continues the Night Angel story started in The Way of the Shadows. Kylar has to choose between his desire for a peaceful life and his responsibility. Characters die, but not really, then they die for real, but not really, while new characters and previously unheard of cultures all converge on Cenaria. Why? No one knows. It's all the fashion now.

  In this book, though, characters are much more relatable and the narrative flow feels more natural. You root for them to succeed. I liked it more than the first book in the trilogy, but now I dread the last book, Beyond the Shadows, will have Brent Weeks finish the saga like he did Lightbringer, with characters randomly brought down or up in an epic finale that lacks real meaning. But it could also be great! The suspense is killing me.

  Brent Weeks is a great writer, but all his stories so far seem to suffer from the same flaw: nothing of importance that happens in them does so in any relation to what had happened before. If someone is desperate and without choices, they become rich people with connections to nobility. If they plan things in great detail, some new character of great power comes and changes everything. Everyone in indeed connected to everybody else, but not in the way you thought. And if you thought something was in a certain way, don't fret, new information will appear that changes everything. Yes, the characters are captivating, the world building amazing, but the flow of the stories is more suited to movie than book as it's either a thoroughly passive experience or a very frustrating one. It was true for Lightbringer and so far it seems true for the Night Angel trilogy.

  In The Way of Shadows, the lead character is a street urchin that becomes a magical assassin's apprentice, finds noble friends, influences the fates of kingdoms, loves and is loved, loses his soul then finds it again and so on. A lot of people die, but not really by his hand. I mean, he becomes a lean mean killing machine, but we don't learn about his 10 year career, only about his skills. Thus he has the opportunity to make all kinds of moral judgements in the end. He has immense power, but he can't reach it unless he finds a special artefact that allows him to draw on it. Of course he finds one, but only when it's too late to properly train with it, so whenever he does things they are very random and somehow further the plot along. And, as if this weren't enough, there are prophecies and people that can see possible futures and influence it, so that the fates of the characters are even more unpredictable.

  As you have guessed, for me the experience has been as much a positive one as well as a really really frustrating one. How can I possibly invest in a story that changes radically like maddenning rat mazes in science experiments?! I really hope against hope that the ending of the trilogy is going to be satisfactory, but considering Night Angel comes before Lightbringer and that ended as randomly as possible, too, what are really the odds?

  Bottom line: Weeks is a sadist who writes beautiful stories, but forbids you any investment in the fate of his characters. There is only one god and his name is Brent.