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.

In 2014 Yuval Noah Harari became world wide famous for the English publication of his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. A lot of my friends recommended it, I couldn't turn around without hearing about it, but before I could read it, I watched some videos and TED talks from the guy so I was hearing the slightly whiny voice and I was imagining the face and mannerism of Harari while I was reading the book. And the truth is the book feels just like an extended version of one of his lectures. I found the book interesting, with some insights that were quite nice, but I think it started a lot better than it ended.

It goes through the history of our species, starting with the origins, going through the changes that shaped our society and identity. It goes on to explain, for example, how almost everything our society is based on is a myth that we collectively cling to and give power to. And he is not talking about religious myths only, but also notions like country, nation, race, money, law, human rights, justice, individuality, good, bad, etc. Like a house of cards, once we started to be able to think abstractly and communicate ideas, we've created a world that is based on assumptions on top of assumptions that we just choose to believe. I thought that was the most interesting point in the book and the one that made me think most. If our entire life as a species and as individuals is axiomatic, then how different could lives be if only based on other axioms?

Another great insight was that liberalism and individuality, coupled with the capitalist growth model that is based on a scientific and technological trust in a better future, are very recent inventions. Most of human history, even up to the nineteenth century, people were content with the status quo, were nostalgic about some bygone era that was "golden" and better than today, and people were stuck into their lives with no hope or even thought of changing them. The explosion of new discoveries and conquests comes from a new found hope in a better future, one based on technological progress and scientific discovery. Other ways of living weren't worse, they just were obliterated by people who chose to accept that they don't know everything and started looking for resources to plunder and answers to their questions. In contrast, whole societies and empires based on the holiness of stations manned by people who assumed knew everything stagnated for centuries.

Yet another point that I found interesting was about the state and commercial institutions eroding and replacing the traditional. Before the legal, moral, support, educational and emotional systems were part of the family or the extended community. Now they are outsourced to law, financial institutions, psychologists, schools, which thrive on the concept that we are individuals and need no one.

Harari makes the point that we are the product of evolution, not different from any other animal, but once we went over a threshold, we created new arenas in which to evolve. Something I didn't particularly agree with is his view that hunter gatherers were living a better, more content life, than farmers. Rather than working all day for a very limited diet, they were free to roam and enjoy the seasonal food that was literally hanging around. Further on we went through the Industrial Revolution and people were even more restricted by the rules of technology and industry. A big portion of the book is dedicated to this kind of thoughts about how our success bound us to a way of life we now cannot escape. The author even uses the word "trap".

In the end, Sapiens tries to analyse our state: is it better now than before? It goes through chapters that talk about happiness: what is it? do we have it? does it matter? Harari is probably agnostic, but he does favor Buddhist ideas of meditation and escaping misery by removing craving, and that is pretty obvious by the end of the book.The last chapter contains a short and kind of reused discussion about the future of us as gods that remake the very fabric of our bodies, minds and reality and, of course, the singularity. But while at the beginning each historical step of Homo Sapiens was analysed with scientific attention, with insights that were clearly coming from a lot of thought on the subject, by the end the rhetoric devolved into just expressing opinions.

So, I did like the book. It felt a bit too verbose, because Harari's style is to explain something, then give an example to make it clearer. If you understand what he explained, the example feels superfluous most of the time. I also didn't like that the book started great, with careful analysis and beautiful insights, and ended with obvious personal opinions superficially backed by facts. I could have accepted either one, but having both just highlights the contrast between them.

As a final thought, Harari mentioned Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) as one of the greatest inspirations for the book by showing that it was possible to "ask very big questions and answer them scientifically". I tried reading that and it was way too thorough and heavy. So having something like Sapiens is like light reading for people who are interesting in science but not very bright :)

The idea is nice: multiple versions of the same city of London, somehow named the same, even when the countries and the languages and the magic is different from world to world. Then there is the magician who can go between worlds and the charismatic female thief who accidentally steals from him exactly in the moment of a great change in the structure of power between these worlds.

While I liked the idea and even enjoyed the characters, I felt like Victoria Schwab was more in love with the story than with the characters. Barely sketched, they do things because they do things, not because of an inner drive that makes a lot of sense for them. Even the villains are standard psychopaths doing bad things because they like doing bad things. Plus they kind of suck. I liked A Darker Shade of Magic, I think I may read the rest of the series, but I barely managed to feel anything for the characters. Whenever something needed to happen, some prop or person appeared right then and there. Everybody had stunted emotions that only seemed to push people to action when the plot required it, rather than as a natural consequence of feeling something and plot holes were a plenty.

The bottom line is that I can't recommend this book to anyone, even if I enjoyed reading it.

Imagine Me Gone is one of those books that I thought I should read because it received prizes for great writing. Maybe I'm too stupid to understand why something that doesn't say anything in the first 5% of it is a good book. The subject is great, too: a family of five people that each describe their lives while battling crippling depression.

I think Adam Haslett found a good way to convey depression: talk endlessly about random pointless things, describe the weather, the way light bounces off of things no one cares about, don't actually express anything or mention anything interesting and occasionally say something really heavy or personally relevant with the same boring and bored rhythm and style. It makes sense, it's the way people feel when in the thralls of this terrible affliction: nothing matters, nothing stands out, it's all grey and pointless. However, a good book means more than just making the reader feel suicidal, it has to have some story to care about, some characters that stand out, anything than just forcing the reader to fight throwing away the book in boredom.

That is why I couldn't even begin to finish the book. I wasn't interested in the depressed description of someone I couldn't care less about, talking about how she handles the depression of others. I can only assume that the high marks for the book are coming either from writing that went completely over my head or from people who were affected by mental illness in the family and read about themselves and got the book. My family is not without its share of psychological problems, but I've had just about enough of it as it is.

I've read some books in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation series and I more or less liked them. So when I've heard of a new book from the same author I've decided to try it. The result is mixed. For most of Revenger I disliked the characters and the story, but the ideas in it made me want to see what was going to happen next.

What you need to understand is that this is a straight pirate story, only set in the future and in space. It starts with two girls that decide to leave their world and join a spaceship crew in order to make some money. Only they get jumped by pirates, so one of the girls must fight the system and her own nature to become hard enough to find the pirates and save her sister.

The problem is that the characters are hard to empathize with, are pretty inconsistent and always stretch belief in this world in which space crews are uneducated louts speaking in jargon and going from world to world in search for ancient technology they cannot understand that was left by long gone alien races. The only part of the book that made me want to read the next one was the very end, the rest was people acting weird, not thinking too much and speaking a lot.

Bottom line: I can't recommend the book. I might read the next one, after all the books in Revelation Space had wildly varying degrees of quality. The ideas are nice, the implementation is what hurts the book.

I liked Dreadnought, the first book in the Nemesis series. It was fresh, with a sympathetic character that went through some major changes in life. The team was interesting, the villain, too. A bit too female centered, a bit naive, but hey: it's about a teenage transgender superhero. What could I have expected? It says something about the book that I read the next one in the series.

Unfortunately, I almost disliked Sovereign. The discussions about weird sexuality (without actual sex scenes) and the characters that are connected to transgender issues increased, the character development stalled, some people simply disappeared (Danny's parents say two phrases in total in one appearance), the villain's motivation is stupid, the heroics are random and the drama and tension that should have kept a reader to the edge of the seat, curious to see what will happen next, are almost non existent. When people die, the heroes kind of shrug it off: "oh, we killed some people. Sucks!" Not an actual quote, but it felt like this. And the only reason why they find out about the villainous plan is because the head vil is literally inviting Danielle to his mansion to explain said plan. Some things happen just because the story couldn't go on without them, and it's painfully obvious. I understand April Daniels may have identified too much with her characters and is not eager to torture them, but the book felt like a kiddie show in written form.

I finished the book, but I won't be interested in the future of the series. And it's too bad. I felt that this concept was going places.

Ruthana Emrys wrote the short story The Litany of Earth as a reinterpretation of Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth, where the people of Innsmouth were actually the victims of persecution from the government. Extending the story to the first book in a trilogy, Winter Tide acts as a sequel to the Lovecraft short, telling the story of some of the few people of the water working with the US government to investigate the misuse of their magical rituals.

If in Shadow over Innsmouth, the horrible fish people were being righteously rounded up by the authorities and interned into camps, their town and traditions forcibly destroyed, in this book they are the victims of persecution, a subspecies of humans that just wants to be left alone. Their magical rituals are more about communion than power, but some of them can be terribly misused, like the body swap technique. This gives the author opportunity to add to the story the Yith, ancient race of mind travelers who have the only concern to archive the experiences of sapient beings before they go extinct - with the added horror that they face any extinction event themselves by mass swapping into another civilization, leaving those poor souls displaced in unfamiliar bodies and facing certain doom - depicted by Lovecraft in The Shadow Out of Time, as well as hint of a body swap misused as means of trying to achieve immortality, as told by Lovecraft in The Thing on the Doorstep. So when one of the last females of the water people is asked to help by an FBI agent, she decides to put aside her distrust and horror and help the ones who murdered her people in the purpose of at least preserving her race's reputation and preventing the use of their magical arts in the terrible world wars the air people were waging.

You have to admit when you think Lovecraft, you don't often imagine a gay female author writing about the importance of diversity, community and love, yet this is what Winter Tide is. And it has a quintessentially female style of writing, where the lead character helps the people she should normally hate in order to bring peace, she solves problems by bringing people together and treating them with familial love and encouraging their differences rather than using violence. Her purposes are selfless and she wields power not as a sword, but as shelter.

While the style felt a little too formal and the pace was rather slow at the beginning, I found myself wanting more by the end of the book. It felt like a strange melange of Lovecraftian lore, notoriously difficult to bring to a modern form - yet Emrys did it effortlessly - and a style of writing that brought it back to a more ancient feel, thus relating modern themes in a work that still tastes like Lovecraft. The second book in the series, Deep Roots, just came out and I intend to read it as well.

I am sure I only heard of this book because of the agenda of some of the sites I visit, but I do not regret reading it. Dreadnought is about a teenage boy obsessed with comic book heros who secretly wants to be a girl. When he gets his wish (plus some awesome superpowers) he has to deal with the lack of understanding from parents and people he thought of as friends. At first I thought "Oh, no, I fell for it again. It's going to suck! It's going to be Sense8 on paper. I am going to read the entire book about how bad cis-people are". I am glad that it wasn't so, so before you automatically dismiss the book, think again.

While the main character is transgender, this only adds some complexity to it, without polluting the main thread of the story, which is a typical teenage superhero saves the world kind of thing. The way the world is described reminds me a bit of Wild Cards and maybe also some of those Union Dues books about powered people who get screwed over by politics and unions that were so popular on Escape Pod: metahumans are common, some of more power than others, heroes have leagues and are commonly recruited (and financed) based on their abilities, bad ones always try to take over the world while a majority of them are doing whatever they can with what nature gave them. The issues the main character has revolve mostly on how her bully of a father is messing her life after the transformation. Her parents want "their son back" and try to "fix" what happened to her. Meanwhile she is hunting for the biggest supervillain there is, trying to deal with her asshole family, handling the pressure from superhero adults who try to tell her what to do before explaining anything and ... do homework for school.

This is not a masterpiece, mind you. I enjoyed the book, which is rather short and pretty naive, because I actually thought the story was interesting, however it is mostly typical YA crap with a fresh perspective. A second book in the series from April Daniels is already out, Sovereign, and I intend to read it as well. I hope it's at least as good as Dreadnought. I was kind of hoping that it would be a different hero in each book, but it's the same in each. If you like that kind of diversity between viewpoints, I really recommend you read the Wild Cards series. It's huge, though.

Just after finishing some mediocre books from Brandon Sanderson I started with Oathbringer, as if to remind me why I like this author so much. As Lift would say, the book is awesome! It's not without its flaws, but it is a mammoth in size, great in quality, epic in scope.

The third book in The Stormlight Archive, ambitiously planned as a ten book series, Oathbringer focuses more on Dalinar Kholin rather than Kaladin, who one might think was the main character of the series. Yet it also expands the characters already introduced and brings even more. There are histories that explain what is going on: the Voidbringers are back, another Desolation has begun, Parshendi will become agents of chaotic destruction under the control of mighty Odium, their god, who wants nothing more than to bring the end of the world, and the only hope comes from Heralds, Knights Radiant and people united against their common foe. But is that what happens? Who are the Voidbringers, really? Why are parshmen awakening, but instead of agents of destruction most behave like normal people who have just woken up from stupor? Are the Radiants united under the same purpose? Are they even the good guys? Where are the Heralds and who among them are still sane? Who's god is Odium and what does he really want? And when spren become corrupted by one god or another, what happens when you bond one? All these questions make for not only a good exciting read, but an intelligent one, as well. I felt the adventurous reader, the engineer and scholar in me all enjoy the book.

As for the bad part, the book is, as were the others in the series, quite large. Maintaining pace, or indeed even pretending there is one for the entire book, is impossible. Some parts are bound to bore, while others to annoy when perspective inevitably switches away from them. Sanderson paints each character as the hero of their own story, creating understanding and compassion for almost all and bringing them up and down as the story progresses, and while this is a worthy goal and a mark of a good writer, it takes a toll on the reader who would rather just root for the good guys. Probably worse of all, the next book in the series is optimistically planned for 2020, which means another two years of yearning for the mere continuation of the story. It is a book that feels more wide than it is long and waiting for fifteen years for the series to end so one can read it all it is not manageable either. So yeah, my biggest complaint with Oathbringer is that it is too good.

I loved the Reckoners series and Elantris. Funny enough the Mistborn series that Sanderson is known for threw me away and some of the recent attempts like Legion felt just bad. Yet The Stormlight Archive is a series I can get behind and invest in its characters and enjoy. Oathbringer is just a part of it, but a good part. Bring on the fourth shard of the story, Brandon! I need to unite them all!