If there is something that went wrong with this book, then it has to be the cover on Goodreads: a hipster young man with dark hair, a goatee and a pointlessly fancy dagger, which has almost no connection to the story. Instead, try the one on Amazon, which at least doesn't offend. And that concludes what went wrong with The Black Prism! I actually liked it a lot.

The story feels like so many other young adult fantasy novels, with the young child with important ancestry that had a bad childhood and is suddenly thrown in a world of magic, war and intrigue, but the characters are fresh, their motivations carefully crafted with respectful attention to detail. The world building follow suit, with a novel magic system, a deep history and not all yet revealed. The writing is good, too. After reading this first book in the Lightbringer saga, I immediately felt the need to read the next one in the series. But there is a dark side to all this, too, as The Black Prism isn't a stand alone book. If you like it, you will have to read it all.

Bottom line: I really liked the love Brent Weeks weaved in his book. This is not one of those "give me your money now" kind of work, it's something that has value and beauty. It's not the greatest book ever written, but what book is? For the fantasy genre, it was pretty entertaining (and big!).

When I was a child I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I was going through the pages of the Zoological Atlas again and again, looking at the big lizard like monsters and memorizing all of their names. If I would have had access to a book like Steve Brusatte's, I would have probably become a paleontologist! By that I mean that the book is good... for an eight year old or for somebody who is already giddy with the prospect of reading about their favorite subject. Now, decades later, I really made an effort to enjoy The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, but it had no wow factor anymore. The plethora of names that I haven't known about when I was smaller than a toddler did not bring me joy. Hearing about feathered dinosaurs and what is the most likely reason feathers evolved at all or how they dinosaurs turned into their modern day form - the birds, even the tales about the dwarf dinosaurs found in my own homeland merely made the book bearable. Having a long chapter focused on Tyrannosaurs and having my book reader stop after each T. in T. Rex didn't help either.

My verdict, therefore, is that it is a good history book. It is well written and the passion of the author is palpable and admirable. Yet, unless you either know nothing about dinosaurs or you already love them, you won't read anything really amazing or new. It is, quite literally, a history of how dinosaurs rose and fell and it feels like reading a history book. Somehow, I was expecting more, something that explored in depth a lost world, but in fact it only made clear how little we know and how tiny chances are that this will ever change. Instead of the feel of a lush green world where danger loomed and beauty abounded, I got a dry dusty look at people digging in rocks for small hints of that world. It was like looking at shadows and trying to figure out what made them.

Have you ever found a book so bland that you just refused to continue reading it? To me it happens rarely, but it did with Malice, by John Gwynne. And I do feel a sense of loss, since the reviews I've seen are all so overwhelmingly positive. Maybe if I would have just read a few more formulaic chapters I would have gotten to the part when something, anything, happens.

But no, I do have a lot of books to read and I am not going to waste my time reading about another child who wants to be a hero, but he's weak and bullied, another large blacksmith who was once a soldier, another pair of good and evil gods and their minions, noble savages, strong princesses, evil viziers and so on and so on. After several chapters all I got was a bunch of people in different contexts, each with their own names, friends, family, dreams, history and narration. Whenever I thought something would happen, another character with a silly name came along to perform whatever ritual is assigned to its cardboard role. Confusing and boring as hell.

Bottom line, I couldn't even begin to finish it. I probably read about 10-15% and gave up.

Much like City of Stairs, Foundryside is a steampunk story set in a world where power resides in the hands of a few "houses" who use a magical programming language to alter reality. The lead character is also a girl, the plot also revolves around someone who wants to abuse ancient magic to rule the world and the state of knowledge is yet again recovering from a major catastrophe that veiled the past. Yet with all this, I liked the book less.

Just as the story moved from a more mystical setting to a more rational, scientific one, so did Robert Jackson Bennett's writing turned more formulaic. It's like he took something he had success with and applied the same exact formula, with some improvements related to what people want to read. As a result, the characters are less mysterious and more cardboard, the hints peppered around the story for the reader to glimpse where it is going are way too revealing (something that bothered me a little in City of Stairs, too, but here it was just too obvious). But what bothered me most was that the characterization: some were way too modern, way too educated or philosophical, considering their background, and the divide between good and evil was so obvious, back to the annoying cliché where the good characters are principled and loyal and intelligent and their opponents are insane, frustrated and ugly.

Bottom like, I liked the book, but I feel like Foundryside is a step back for Bennett. It was harder to empathize with the heroes and almost impossible to do so with the antagonists. The story felt recycled from a basic idea scrived with the same recipe as City of Stairs, but more lazily.

What makes a good story? It has to be the telling or writing style, of course, but then there are other factors: believable and sympathetic characters, an interesting idea, a tight plot, good world building, entertaining scenes. I am happy to report that City of Stairs aced everything! I haven't heard of Robert Jackson Bennett before, but I am sure to remember his name now. The first book in a trilogy, City of Stairs wasn't just blessingly self contained, but also made me happy to have following books to continue the story.

The main character is a woman who does everything from conviction, care for others and most of all her own intelligence and effort, not because of her gender. The story is a detective story, set in a fictional preindustrial almost steampunk world where gods recently existed until people killed them. It is a book of mystery, intrigue, politics, detective like investigations, spirituality and magic, but held tight around a solid core of whodunit and great character and world building. It reminded me of the wonder I felt when starting reading Brandon Sanderson's books.

Bottom line: not the greatest work of literary fiction that ever existed, but I couldn't find any fault with it. Per my definition, it was a perfect book.

At first I thought this will rehash the same information I've got from books I've read recently: how microorganisms are everywhere and how they live in symbiosis and cooperation with themselves, plants and animals, how the imbalance in the ecosystem is what we normally get to call disease, maybe some epidemics stories and so on. Instead I've got an ode to E. Coli and how studying it for decades has revealed to us in details the way life works. It's Carl Zimmer's multifaceted portrait of a single species of bacteria (although that's a lot of bacteria, if you get to read the book).

Well written even if more technical than the average popular science book, Microcosm explains how heredity works, DNA, RNA, proteins, amino acids, bacteria, biofilms, archaea, eukaryotes, viruses, plasmids, mutations, evolution, resistance and so on until it gets to creationists, genetic engineering and exobiology, all while following our scientific history built on the study of this one bacteria, the workhorse of microbiology. In fact, it is so focused on E. Coli, that it snubs most other bacteria, it talks little of epidemics or the microbe ecosystem and instead focuses on how things work. It's like an engineer's view on how life works, or a user's manual for Escherichia coli.

I liked the book and I will probably read more from the same author. I mean, if he writes a book per microbe species I could read his books until one of us dies :) I highly recommend it not only for its subject, but also for how it makes clear the inner workings of life and evolution. I would have loved to read this book when I was 12.

To be honest, I've reached the beginning of the third book in The Faded Sun Omnibus and I've decided to stop.

It was 1978. Religious people living in the desert under strict rules and brandishing swords were still cool and not considered terrorists. C.J.Cherryh decides to write a story about a fierce warrior race that works in the employ of others to wage space war, driven by a very exact culture that emerged in the desert. They carry black veils that only let show their eyes and are very partial to rituals and hand to hand combat. No wonder humans kicked their asses, but even they are terribly anachronistic. They have waged 40 years of war with the humans, under the contract of the Regul, fat immobile and amoral beings that care only for their own tribe's well being.

Reminds you of Dune, the Freemen and the Harkonen? Well, this is where the similarity ends. Where Dune was deep, these three books are tediously drudging through all kinds of futile rituals and each character is painfully introspective, to the point that tough warriors bred for battle are recognizing and thinking about their feelings of fear all the time. Worse, nothing really seems to be happening. It takes a book for a ship to get to its destination.

And the book has aged poorly, even when in the whole thing there are maybe a page of technical descriptions, probably less. There is no mention on what makes the ships run, what types of weapons are used, how computers work, etc. A ship just "fires" and it is never even described in what way.

But the ultimate sin is how little sense it makes. I mean, this is the age of Star Wars, where... errr... people on starships wage battles with swords... OK, the author isn't the only one who screwed stories up, but the Mri are presented as this scourge of the battles, yet they don't know technology or can even read or write, they are appalled by mass warfare and prefer hand to hand combat (like real men!) and are strict in what they are allowed to do, know or even think. It's like giving space weaponry to the Flinstones. OK, you get the Jetsons, but how is that supposed to be terrifying or a match to the voracious human penchant for mass destruction? And there is more. After 40 years, we learn that people have never captured Mri alive, never studied them. The Mris themselves are accompanied by huge bear like semitelepathic animals that they never name or even know how they reproduce. Unlike Frank Herbert, who was obsessed with ecology, Cherryh feels no need to explain how a species of huge carnivores exists on harsh desert planets that are almost devoid of life and water or how three completely different species can share air and food, or how the animals and plants on a different planet are the same as from one that lay 120 planets away, or how language and culture stays the same for 80000 years. A lot of things just don't make sense, including the story's main premise, which is the fear that humans and Regul alike carry for the Mri.

Bottom line: if it were nice to read at least, I would have given it a shot, but after two books of people thinking in fear about what others are thinking of them, I gave it up. It was just tediously boring.

Now, Cherryh was at the beginning of her illustrious career and there are books written by her that I liked. I just hated this one.

The City in the Middle of the Night reminded me of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis, only way lighter. The same female centric focus, the slight weirdness of descriptions and feelings that comes from a truly different perspective. Charlie Jane Anders describes a planet far away from Earth, a colony that devolved after humans reached the planet until it got to feudal levels of government and technology. The planet is tidally locked, so people live on the narrow edge that separates frigid night and scorching day. There are some aliens there as well. Pretty cool story and concept, so much so that I hated it when the book ended and it was NOT a trilogy or a saga or whatever. Hard to please me, right?

The writing style isn't on par with the richness of the concepts, though, and I was also thrown off often by gaps in the understanding of science, social norms and even sensory descriptions. Yet once I understood the author is a transgender woman with sensory integration disorder, it started to make sense. The main characters are all women. There are no real romantic or familial relationships between them, unless counting the fact that they are always feeling things strongly and lying together in beds without doing anything. The lack of sexuality in the novel is refreshing but going a long way in the other direction until it feels eerie. And they often react physically or mentally in such overblown ways that it's hard to empathize. Stuff like someone saying something and they suddenly go to a corner to heave, or having seen someone smile or being touched in a certain way just short circuits their brain. There are a lot of leftover threads in the book, things that get partially described and you just wait for them to be explained later on and they just don't. Also the mix of first person perspective for Sophie and third person for everybody else is strange and forces one of the characters as the main one, even if maybe a reader would relate better with somebody else.

So I had difficulty in rating this book. I would give an excellent rating to the world building and the concepts presented there, but an average on characterization (even if most of the book is about what characters do and think and feel). I would rate some descriptions of internal struggle and emotion as great, but others really lame, especially when it comes to characters who seem to be designed to be thrown away later on. The writing style is not bad, but not great either. It's a mixture of brilliance and average that is hard to reconcile into a single metric. I mean, I could describe the entire plot of the book in two paragraphs; the rest is just people bumbling around trying to make sense of the world and themselves. No character has a real back story, except a few defining moments that feel pulled out of a hat, and they are understandably confused all the time. Who are their parents? Everybody in the book is an orphan. Why so many descriptions of invented food if does nothing for the plot, yet no sex, only a rare and weird longing sort of platonic love? Why is everybody so casually violent, yet so disgusted with violence in their inner thoughts?

It seems to me that this is a book that only some will be able to connect to (the others will get delirious and murderous). I liked the ideas, I liked the characters, it's just that they are coming from nowhere and ultimately going nowhere.

The book might put you off at the beginning, as it starts with a no bullshit nomenclature chapter. It basically says: "This is how I am going to call things in this book and if you don't like it, talk to people who actually care about semantics". The rest of the book continues with the same directness and I believe it is one of the works' best qualities.

Good Germs, Bad Germs starts like a few other books on the subject I've read recently, with a short history of how people have looked upon disease and its causes: Hippocrates' humors, the (all bad) germ theory, vaccines, antibiotics, the bad antibiotics and the good germs, modern understanding of immunity. And yet this is just the first half of the story. The rest is about new ideas, actual therapies and studies, real life cases and attempts to bring this new knowledge into the public domain.

I really liked the book. It's easy to read, easy to understand. Less of the story-like or anecdotal writing style of some other works and more to the point. I also liked that it doesn't take sides: one therapy has to go through wholly unreasonable FDA hoops to be allowed to even be tested in humans, the author points both positive and negative aspects of being prudent. Is it ridiculous that the lack of communication between American hospitals hides invisible epidemics that then get reported by Canada or Europe and end back into the States' headlines as foreign diseases? Jessica Snyder Sachs just reports on the facts, letting the reader draw their own conclusions.

Bottom line: I thought it would be just a repeat of the same information I've become familiar with lately, yet it was not only a different way of tackling the same subject, but also a lot more information about actual attempts to use it in real situations. I recommend it to anyone trying to understand how we stand in this coevolution with the microbes living inside and outside us.

Knights of the Borrowed Dark is a typical fantasy story filled with tropes like: "the one", "son of..." (or "noble family" or "everybody is related to everybody"), "secret war (for no good reason)", "light versus dark", "evil must be fought with swords", "no one tells you anything, even if it makes no sense", "dark king" and so on. The main character is a Mary Sue, an orphan who doesn't know his parents and has lived his entire life in an orphanage, but somehow is a balanced, well read individual who favors rationality to emotion, yet has no problem using both. Add the trope of trilogy to this and you have a complete picture.

Now, does that mean I was not entertained? Nope. It was all fun and games and I've finished the book in a day, yet I can't but be disappointed in both the formulaic nature of the story and the fact that I liked it anyway. The bottom line is that Dave Rudden writes decently and has enough skill and humor to make the same story you've read or seen a dozen times already feel pleasant. So read it, if you like that kind of thing, but don't expect anything above ordinary.

I liked the book, but not a lot. Ian Frisch is an investigative reporter who happened to enter a circle of disrupting young magicians who want to shake the industry and make it ...err.. fresh again. Really didn't intend that pun. However, if you expect revelations of how tricks are done or the deep exploration of the human soul, you won't get a lot of satisfaction from this book.

Full title Magic Is Dead: My Journey into the World's Most Secretive Society of Magicians, it feels more like a roadie story, where the young author gets sucked into a group of charismatic artists and ends up in their group. You can't use it as a barometer of the state of the magic industry, as the story is pretty one sided. The writing style isn't that great either, with some of the ideas repeated several times and none of the emotional bare stripping of the soul that I've come to love in autobiographies. There is no big drama or action of any kind - this is not Point Break or The Magician or anything. Moreover, the "secretive society" isn't all that secret, it is just a club of people hand picked for their innovative contribution to what many see as a stagnant industry and that many people know about. The title is pretty confusing as well, since it is not about magic being dead, alive or anything in between, but rather the pinhole perspective of the author while seduced by this group of very talented and interesting people.

As an introductory work in the world of magicians as a whole, it works pretty well. There is a lot of name dropping and some starter resources for wannabe magicians. It presents the mind set required to do magic in a way that satisfies not only you, but the customs of the magician community. But that's pretty much it. I can't recommend it, while I can't criticize it too much either. I would call it average.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a typical fantasy story, with realms, heroes, heroines, dragons, magic and the mandatory evil one. It is a large book, that others would have made a trilogy out of; considering it is a single story, I find it most honest that the author published it directly. Samantha Shannon writes really great for a 27 year old and considering she already has under her belt a seven book deal under which she already published four (The Bone Season series), she seems to be doing good. People even hailed her as the next J.K.Rowling, which I personally would think it feels annoying rather than flattering.

So what is the book about? There are several countries with different religions that all stem from the same event: the bounding of The Nameless One, a huge evil dragon with intents to conquer the world. Some think all dragons are evil, some think dragons are cool, some think only some dragons are evil and the others are gods, and so on. There are conflicting stories about who is the hero that defeated evil a millennium ago, too. And of course, evil is stirring once again and a new generation of heroes rises to the occasion. They are mostly female, although some males are prominent in the story. Also, at least three characters are gay and one may be asexual.

About the gay thing, I found it not annoying. Although major events of the plot depend on the love towards another person of the same sex, it wasn't forced towards the reader and it didn't feel like it was glue added to the story. But it was also funny, because in the whole book romance is either gay or really short, chaste, doomed or kind of second rank. I imagine this is how a gay person reads a straight romantic story, where homosexuality exists on a conceptual level at best.

The point is that the story is not difficult at all, except at the beginning when you have to get acquainted with too many characters in too many countries all at once. Then it just flows, sometimes a little bit too smoothly, towards the predictable end. I read it all in a weekend. The main characters are complex and competent, although the minor ones are kind of one dimensional. If anything, I was disappointed with the villains. They were cartoonish, almost. I mean, the most evil of them all was called The Nameless One, like some extra that has one line in a public bathroom in a movie: "the guy in the bathroom". He didn't even have a "same thing we do every thousand years, Pinkie!" moment. Lazy as hell, all the dirty deeds were done by his henchmen... errr henchfolk? And that ending...

Bottom line: nice story to read, above average clearly, but not something to be amazed by.

I've had a blast reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a humorous take on Harry Potter if he were educated in science and not just another emotional teen lucky enough to be "the one", so as I was reading A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero? I was really hoping it wasn't just a one off. And it wasn't! Although much shorter and not so rich with references, this novella from Eliezer Yudkowsky is just as funny as I hoped.

A self proclaimed translation of a Japanese manga that was never written, the story follows a girl that gets summoned into another realm as the virgin hero to save the world from evil. However, the reason she is still a virgin is habituation to Internet pornographic depravity and losing interest in any normal relationship. The world she arrives in is a world of prudes and the power of the magic there relies on one) being a virgin and two) asking prudish demons to do something awfully depraved so that they refuse.

I won't spoil it for you, but it's funny and short and I recommend it highly.

I guess when your main work concerns the sex organs of animals, you have to own a healthy sense of humor. That is why, even if I wasn't terribly interested in the subject, I continued to read the book mostly because of Menno Schilthuizen's writing style. This book - full title Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves - kept being funny and captivating, despite being about a niche subject treated in a very scientific way.

But having read it, I don't regret a thing. There are a lot of interesting insights to be drawn from the book, things I wouldn't have probably thought about for myself. The focus is on sexual organs - mostly in invertebrates, but not only - an area that is both fascinating and rarely explored in a rigorous fashion. Why are they so important? Because in almost every species they are changing from generation to generation faster than anything else. Many species that basically look the same, having evolved in the same particular niche and maybe even from common ancestors, have wildly different genitalia and strategies for impregnation, an intriguing fact that leads Schilthuizen to explore the theory of sexual evolution, in other words changes determined by the choice of partners. You know, like the Pompadour hair style...

Forget human sex, or even mammalian sex. It's spiders, insects, worms and snails that will amaze you with the weird and kinky adaptations in their romantic lives: females that store the sperm of various pretenders and only use the one from the guy they liked most, spoon like penises used to scoop out the sperm of rivals before climax (humans have this, too, BTW), complicated female organs and mechanisms meant to thwart male attempts at forceful insemination and males who choose to stab their mates and short circuit the whole thing. Oh, and did you know snails are hermaphrodites? How does that work?

Bottom line: a very well written little book that may surprise you both through how entertaining and interesting it is. No, a penis is not just a syringe and a vagina not only a hole that accepts anything you put in it. In this book you will learn why, how sexual organs evolved and, indeed, continue to evolve faster than any other organ in most species.

Tiamat's Wrath comes after a roller coaster of a ride. I absolutely loved the TV show so I started reading the books, concluding that the show was better. Of course, being good, it almost got cancelled until it was picked up by Amazon (thanks, Jeff!), but I continued to read the books. The part that I loved, the realistic colonization of the Solar System, got quickly left behind in favor of Stargate-like portals to other worlds, not one but two God-like alien races and, in the seventh book, a Nazi-like occupation of the entire humanity. Like? Even the small hints that suggested space travel using (impossibly efficient) fusion drives takes months and years got left behind in favor of fast paced action. The books themselves followed the same pattern of going bad, then coming back up again and being amazing, with the only commonality being the crew of the Rocinante, smack in the middle of everything, somehow always influencing things at planetary and civilization level.

So how was the book? Predictably bad. Predictably good. Equal bite size chapters that tell a rather bland story until the end when everything comes together in a cathartic way and kind of makes up for the rest. The writing style of the two authors known as James S.A. Corey is professionally good, without anything outstanding. The characters are empathetic: a major one dies, one is reborn, a new one appears. The same roller coaster and the expected, but still annoying, desire to read the next book when I know it will take another year for it to be written.

As far as I know, the next and ninth novel will be the last of the series, which is painful, because The Expanse, for me, was the perfect blend of pulp and space science. Typical to serialized American fiction it went too far too fast (leaving its soul behind to catch up). Yet I still enjoy it. I wonder what my response would have been without the TV series. Still, if you are new to the subject, I recommend you read the first three or four books, then watch the TV series.