Skyward is Brandon Sanderson at his best... and worse. Yes, his best characters have always been young rebellious loud mouths with a penchant for over the top lines and punny jokes. And yes, this is a young adult novel with a classically clichéd plot. I feel guilty for liking it so much, but hey, it apparently works! Personally I feel it's a shame Sanderson spends a year writing a book and I finish it in two days, but at least he's not George R. R. Martin!

The whole idea revolves around this society of humans, driven underground by an alien force. They live on a planet surrounded by a sphere of debris few can get through and attacked periodically by alien fighter planes and bombers that the humans must repel in order to survive. And here is this heroic little girl who dreams of becoming a pilot fighter despite her father being universally despised for being a coward and leaving the field of battle. Determined to clear her and her father's name, she enrolls in a school for cadet fighters and discovers she has what it takes to protect her friends and save humankind.

Sounds familiar? It should, every story lately seems to be about the same character. Is it an interesting and engaging character? Yes. Is the world weird and familiar enough to be enjoyed? Yes. If this is all you need, you will love the book. And of course, it's the first book in a series. I need a little more, though, and I feel that the twists were terribly predictable and there were holes everywhere in the world building. If you only focus on the characters, as the author did, you enjoy the book. But as soon as you try to imagine yourself there, things start to make little sense and whatever you would do, it would not be what the characters in the book do. Plus... that fighter! Deus Ex Machina much?

Bottom line: lovely book to read in a few days and feel you are a reader, but the story is as standard as they come and the only nice thing about it is that Sanderson wrote it.

The name says it all: "The Everything Creative Writing Book: All you need to know to write novels, plays, short stories, screenplays, poems, articles, or blogs", maybe too much. In this book, Wendy Burt-Thomas takes a holistic approach to writing, discussing everything from how to write poetry and children's books, blogs and technical specs to how to find an agent, self publish and so on. It covers writing techniques and editing advice, writer block solutions and how to deal with rejection (or success for that matter) and many more. In that regard, the book is awesome, it shows everything you might want to know a little about in order to decide what you actually choose to do, but like that Nicholas Butler quote An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing, the book is probably not very useful to someone who has already started working on things.

That said, the book is compact, to the point and can help a lot at the very beginning of the writer's journey. It can be used as a reference, so that whenever a particular subject or concern appears, you just flip to that chapter and see what Wendy recommends. Is it good advice? I have no idea. I've certainly read books that go more in depth about topics that interested me more, like how to write a novel or how to set up a scene, but a panoramic view of the business is not bad either. The material also felt a little dated for something released in 2010, especially in the technical sections.

You choose if you find it useful or not.

I started reading The Things They Carried as a recommendation for writing style and it is, indeed, a very deep personal work. Tim O'Brien writes about the Vietnam war in most if not all of his work, but this novella is a collection of short stories all brought together under the mantle of a sort of a confession. It's a mosaic, each piece beautiful, but together creating the artistic vision of the true war.

I liked the subtlety, most of all. The characters are not overly complex, but they are portrayed in a very personal manner, with details that are important for the overall meaning of the book. I loved how O'Brien described soldiers going to war (instead of running away to Canada, as he almost did) because they were too embarrassed not to. Died in the war because they were afraid to die of shame. Too cowardly to run.

At just 150 pages, the book shows not how the training went, or how the shooting was, it presents everything from the viewpoint of the people there. How it takes over every feeling you have, how it changes you into this creature that is completely different from the man (or woman) who left. It's not about maneuvers or tactical prowess or strategies of survival. They are all meaningless. The important part is to keep a semblance of sanity.

The titled refers to the trinkets people carry to remind them of who they are. And they carry much more: hopes, wounds, fears, diseases, the ever growing arsenal of pointless weapons and ammunition and so on. A bit depressing, but a damn good read.

The Martian was a total surprise as it took the world by storm and became beloved by all science, tech and fast talking pun lovers in the world. Artemis, on the other hand, will not be. Andy Weir writes another book about a supersmart tech savvy character with a great sense of humor, this time solving technical problems on the Moon. Is it as good as The Martian? I don't know, because now I have a template and knew what to expect. Without the element of surprise, it's difficult to compare the two books. Yet I finished reading the novel in a day. That's gotta count for something.

Stylistically it is first person, filled with dialogue and action. It's incredibly easy to read. This time, the main character is a young woman and the location is a city on the Moon. Andy Weir is nothing if not optimistic, so in his book we do get there. I thought the action was following the pattern of danger-action-solution too closely, so much in fact that at one time I saw the entire story as a big adventure game. I will bet you lots of slugs that Weir loved Sierra games as much as the next geek (that being me).

Bottom line is that I liked the book, I gobbled it up and enjoyed it to the end. I didn't like Jazz Bashara as much as Mark Watney and, while the technological descriptions kept me interested, I still think that space mechanics and Martian farming trump EVA shenanigans and vacuum welding any time. It was still damn entertaining, though.

All in all I liked Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood is writing in a very technical manner, at least it felt like that to me, with scenes and characters constructed in a certain way. That is both instructional and a bit off putting, because once you become aware of it, it distracts from the plot. The plot itself is simple enough: the world has ended and there is this half crazed old man who is reminiscing over what happened. At first it is all unnervingly vague, with things being kept from the reader as the feelings and mental issues of the main (and single) character of the book are being declared. Then, when vagueness cannot be sustained anymore, it is all told as a linear story of what happened, with clear explanations of everything. No mystery left.

To me, it felt like Atwood wanted to warn about the way we treat our world and she just exaggerated some things while letting others be whatever she wanted them to be. From a scientific and sociological standpoint some of the things described are spot on, others are complete bogus. I would go into details, but I don't want to spoil the story. One example is the marketing brands that she cooked up and that are all (and I mean all) phonetically spelled descriptions or sometimes puns. All companies, all product names, all new animal names are like that and it gets really tiresome after a while. Also people are able to do wonderful (or horrible) new things in some areas and not advance at all in others. The timeline is a little screwed up, too.

My favorite quote, the one that made me think the most, was: "All it takes," said Crake, "is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever" . He is referring to technology after a post apocalyptic event. There are few people that understand any instructions left by makers of advanced technology and the ones that can are ill equipped for survival.

The book does feel like it was written as standalone, with the possibility of being continued, which is a good thing: no ending cliffhangers and too much setting up the next books. The title is weirdly misleading, though, as both Oryx and Crake appear very little in the memories of the main character. Why was the book named so? It makes little sense. I am not sure if I will be reading the next books in the MaddAddam trilogy.

Bottom line: good, although a tad bland writing. A single character reminiscing is all that happens in the book. Grand ideas that most of the time make sense, but sometimes fall flat. Scientifically things don't go as she described.

This guy can write! I mean, Peter Brannen is writing about paleontology and climate change and the words just sing to you, make you see worlds that we actually know very little about and feel for ammonoids like there would be the cutest kittens, looking at you with big eyes and begging not to get extinct. As someone who wants to write himself someday, I really hate this guy. He is that good.

That being said, The Ends of the World is a book about the major extinctions in Earth's history, their causes and how they relate to our present lives. It's a captivating read, evoking lost worlds and very carefully analyzing how they disappeared and why. There is humor, drama, interesting interviews with fascinating people. Dinosaurs? Puh-lease. This takes you back to the good old days of the Ediacaran and slowly brings you around our time and even speculates on what could come after us, the hubris filled species that, geologically speaking, was barely born yesterday - or a few seconds ago, depending on how you measure it - and has the chance to outshine all the other species that came, ruled and went.

There is no way I can do it justice other than to say that I loved the book. In itself it's a summary of life on Earth so summarizing it myself would be pointless. I highly recommend it.

Here is the author, presenting his book at Google Talks:

What's Expected of Us and Others is a collection of stories by Ted Chiang including

• Exhalation
• Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• What's Expected of Us
• The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
• The Great Silence

All the stories are speculative fiction, their subjects related to the meaning of life and evolution in relation to technology. His writing style is direct, unsophisticated, often based on first person perspective and dialogue. It's the ideas that he is exploring where he spends most of his efforts. All in all a nice collection of sci-fi, but not something extraordinary in nature.

As far as I can see, Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon is the first thing he published. It's a short story (that you can find online for free) about two workers climbing the tower of Babylon to dig through the Vault of Heaven.

In this story the tower is not struck down and the people have been working on the tower for centuries. It's a fun read, although not particularly funny or captivating. It does show Chiang's penchant for speculative fiction, though. I liked it, but not enough for four stars and three seems too little. Read it. It's short and I don't want to write more about it than it is itself in length :)

A Conjuring of Light ends the Shades of Magic trilogy, although apparently a new trilogy set in the same universe is on its way. All the major threads are closed, although some of them felt a little forced and some of the drama was clearly artificial. But at least it all ends, which is one of the major reasons I read this book, only to see how Victoria Schwab's characters will end up.

I felt that this was the more ambitious volume of the three in the series, with all three Antari having to interact, with foreign dignitaries stuck in the royal palace while it was under siege from a demented magical creature who believed itself a god, with ties with families and past revealed, with new places and new magic. However, the book was quite inconsistent. For example, there is a plan to use a spell to seal the god in a body. When it is inside one, they forget about it and fight him with knives and fire and what not. There is a spell that could restore Kell's memory. He wonders if he should use it, then we forget about it. As for Grey London (ours) and Black London (the one where the creature originated), they are completely ignored.

The personalities of the characters also change a lot, with everyone acting brave and selfless (sometimes to stupidity) as if forgetting we are talking about a ruthless street thief, a killer turned sociopath by years of torture and so on. To me it seemed as if the author wanted a tough story, but she couldn't help turning it into a classic hero quest with a happy ending.

Bottom line: I had fun reading the series, but I won't continue with the next trilogy. It's not bad, but it's not above average either.

It involves Russia! The story of how Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago got popularized and received the Nobel prize for literature is fascinating and one of the reasons why my wife and I decided to read it as part of our own private book club. She loved the book, although she admitted she didn't understand a lot. I couldn't finish it because I didn't understand it at all!

Let me get this straight, this is not a bad book, the fault lies solely with me. That being said, I've read half of it before I decided to watch the TV adaptation from 2002 and realized I had no idea who anyone was. I had read half of a book, enjoying the way Pasternak describes individual lives, but I didn't remember one character or scene. And the explanation is simple: this is like Crash, on steroids, had sex with Gone With The Wind and had this bastard child around the first World War in Russia. People have three different names, plus nicknames, that the author just splays around without explanation. Events are described through short chapters that sometimes connect via a character seeing the same things from a different perspective or saying something about a character, using a different name than the one we read about it previously. And all these people keep bumping into each other again and again. Sometimes there is no rhythm in how things are written, sometimes it sounds like poetry. There is huge attention to some details and complete ignoring of others. And so on. It is not an easy book; it requires your full attention.

It is obvious that Pasternak loved people and he described their experiences and toils during times of great upheaval, but for him those paled compared with the love stories and the feelings of the characters involved. I can understand how he was confused on why people thought his book was against the Soviet system, where it was clearly about people. I am sure this book is great, it is just not for me. If you want to try it, I suggest you read the summary in Wikipedia so you understand what is going on and you do not read it in bits of 15 minutes in the subway.

I started watching Killing Eve, the BBC TV series starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer, and I quite liked it. So I've decided to read the books it is based on, Codename Villanelle being the first one. The result is a mixed bag. I clearly prefer the TV show, but the book is not bad either. They are, I have to say, quite different.

While both focus on a police woman trying to find a highly skilled female professional sociopath assassin, the show adds a little dark humor, which is both nice and off putting, while the book is going for the full "secret world of spies and weapon technobabble" route, which is also half and half. I think Luke Jennings wanted to write a simple spy story, inspired by the likes of John le Carré, while the show screenwriters have more ambitious goals. Most of the little episodes there are based on stuff in the book, but wholly reinterpreted, the characters changed or added, their fates changed.

But enough about TV. The book is easy to read, but a bit one sided: kill after kill and the chase of the department that has to uncover not only the identity of the killer, but also who are the high placed people who help hide her tracks, without most of the emotional exposition that makes a character relatable. Funny enough, there is more emotional content related to the killer than the cop. Makes you wonder which one of them is the psycho sometimes.

In conclusion, I will not read the rest of the books, but I will continue to watch the TV show. I feel like reading the first book opened my eyes on what the characters were supposed to be and thus Codename Villanelle acted like a nice companion book for an interesting series that I enjoy watching.

I liked Binti, even it is a short story. It is my first contact with the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor and I loved how African ideas blended with science fiction concepts in Binti. I will probably read the others in the trilogy, sooner or later.

The story is about a girl that leaves her tribe and planet to go to a university she was just admitted to. Just when getting there, an alien race of Medusae kills everybody except her. You will have to read why that happens and how she becomes the ambassador of the aliens, because the story is short enough to get spoiled by a detailed review. The writing is not without flaws and the character is dangerously close to the one in Who Fears Death, but I felt that it made a lot more sense in the context of an interstellar Federation as in Binti.

Read it. It was fun.

Who Fears Death is an interesting book mainly because of the Nigerian background of Nnedi Okorafor, the author, and the subject vaguely inspired by the atrocities in Sudan. The fantasy plot revolves around a girl resulted from intertribal rape who has to deal with the injustices of her world using her magical powers. Imagine a Harry Potter book in a German extermination camp scenario where he is a Jewish girl and you get close. In fact, this and other books on the subject of tribal hatred in Africa should make any white supremacist feel good about themselves, because there is no worse racism than between violent religious uneducated tribes that pretty much look the same.

Yet the book's interesting factor kind of stops there. The African culture references throughout the story keeps it entertaining, but the plot is a classic hero arc with pretty much all of the flaws inherent to the genre. Hero is young and powerless, discovers powers, is guided by mentors that keep from her just about everything there is to know and use up until she needs it, evil villain to whom she has a direct connection and opposition, friends that are there just to support the hero, things that happen for no other reason than they needed to further the story in a particular direction, she has amazing powers but uses them sparingly and often is stopped from using them for moral reasons by her friends and so on. In fact, it gets a lot worse, considering the hero is an African girl who could get killed at any moment by an angry mob just for the color of her skin, moving around in a society where even her boyfriend thinks it's OK to keep things for himself or treat her patronizingly just because of her gender, not to mention the old male mentors.

So while the book is interesting and well written, it does have a major flaw in the way it was structured as a story. Perhaps the docile Black woman who occasionally gets upset and then regrets it resonates better with African audiences, but for a Westerner it might get a little frustrating. It is a book worth reading, mainly because of the culture shock one experiences while reading it, but it could have been better.

Who writes like this in this day and age? Around 10% in the book I was convinced The Great Influenza was written sometime in the middle of last century, when people still did painstaking research and paid attention to every detail, not like now, when researching something involves trying different Google keyword combinations ad nauseam. And how many people can pack so much information and knowledge into a book that is also easy to read and incredibly captivating? Apparently, John M. Barry, with this book published in 2004.

I can't stress enough how much I liked this book. I would give it 6 stars out of 5 just because I rated books with 5 stars and this is an order of magnitude better. Imagine that I only found it because I was curious about the influenza epidemic from 1918, what is popularly known as The Spanish Flu, and at the time I was worried that one book on the subject would clearly not be enough. Not only would it present just one point of view, but surely various interests or lack of resources would influence (pun not intended) the end result. Instead I was shamed, that is the right word, by the amount of care the author used to research and write this book.

In order to explain what the book is about I would have to write a lot about The Spanish Flu, a disease that killed between 50 and 100 million people globally within six months in the middle of a five year world war that killed just 20 million in military and civilian deaths combined. Yet very few people care about it or even know about it. There are few documents about it, no movie that I know of, very few books. Inside the pages of The Great Influenza are the seeds of a dozen Steven Spielberg war movies, various crossings of The Outbreak with The Knick and a few Netflix series - I find it criminal that no one thought about it so far. Therefore, I urge you to first read a little about the disease itself, on Wikipedia and Google like normal people, then read this book. It will blow you away.

John Barry is clearly an investigator at heart. Not only does the work for this book, but clearly empathizes with the people who fought to understand disease and find cures, locked in laboratories and sacrificing everything for understanding. He calls them The Warriors, the name of the first part of the book, where he describes the history of medical science in the Unites States and the people how would ultimately champion it further and fight the outbreak. The second part (out of ten) describes the disease: a type of influenza so virulent that it makes the immune system destroy the body it's supposed to protect. Only from the third chapter on we start reading about how the pandemic started, what influenced its movements, how people reacted and so on. The last two chapters are solely about the after effects (almost as important as the ones during the pandemic). A whopping 10% of the book is just notes and thanks and references.

Also relevant, I think, is the fact that Barry is American and clearly proud of it. The book has a very American centric view, not only because of the nationality of the author, as probably because it would have been a lot more difficult to research the actual events in other parts of the world. Yet even for an American patriot the book is filled with outrage at the way governments and local authorities and narrow minded bureaucrats treated the disease and the people affected by it. For an European as I am, the way a fanatical American president managed to turn an entire country into a weapon, effectively disabling the values that Americans are known for: democracy, freedom of speech, pursuit of happiness, etc, is beyond chilling. America was a sleeping giant way before Pearl Harbor and the way it awakens and consumes everything and everyone that stands in its way is ironically similar to the way the influenza virus swept the world. One of the main reasons people don't know about the disease is because any mention of it that could have affected morale during times of war was censored in the land of the free. The name Spanish Flu itself comes from the fact Spain was not censoring its media at the time.

Bottom line is that I urge everyone to read this book. It's a wonderful example of how one man can dedicate seven years to research and document something as scary, monumental and mysterious such as the great influenza pandemic of 1918, analyse it from multiple viewpoints, name, quote and praise the people who were right in the midst of battle, the unsung scientist heroes of unheard of laboratories and the people who gave them the wind under their wings. Great job, John Barry, great job indeed!

I liked A Gathering of Shadows more than the first book in the series, A Darker Shade of Magic. It felt more grounded, more meaty. A large part of the book is split into two parts as Kell and Lila walk their separate paths only to collide in the middle and be tragically broken apart towards the end. There are more characters, more world building.

Not all is rosy, though. There are still huge swaths of pointless exposition, followed by truncated bits of action. In this book, a part of the focus is on a magical tournament that all characters are somehow involved with, so a big part of the story you wait to see what is going to happen when wizards fight each other. And then there are the scenes of battle which are either a few paragraphs long or simply summarized because Victoria Schwab didn't really care for the characters fighting or because she wanted to focus on a (bloody hell, I am so tired of this cliché!) love triangle. I also wish Lila would have had a more interesting arc, other than going to sea for 4 months and returning a world class magician without an actual event to drive her evolution. It's basically a "she read some books, watched some YouTube tutorials and she was smart" story.

I found it funny that this book ends in a gigantic cliffhanger. So large, in fact, that in the acknowledgements at the end the author apologizes. She managed to write four books that didn't end in cliffhangers, so she is allowed this one, she reasons. Is this an emotional need for writers, to hang their readers? Something so powerful that they just have to do it from time to time in order to feel alive? Kind of like magic, eh? :)

Anyway, I am happy to say that I will probably read the next book in the series and not only because of the cliffhanger, but because I am actually interested in what the characters will do. I have other things on my plate first, though.