Brandon Sanderson wrote two short books about the Legion character, which is different from the Legion character from the Marvel comics and TV series. It is basically about a guy who hallucinates other people around him, specialists that help him solve "cases". People are not sure in what box to put him. Is he schizophrenic, is he multiple personality disorder, something else? It doesn't really matter, since he is functional and (with the help of his imagined personalities) brilliant.

Yet, while the character can be compelling, the stories are rather boring. The joking punny positivism of Sanderson's characters is barely there, while the setup is that of classic detective stories. There is no fantasy like in Cosmere, nor are there interesting ideas that blow your mind. Just short average books about a quirky detective. It can't get less original than that, I believe.

Bottom line: without some serious redesign of the concept, I doubt Legion is a character that warrants further exploration.

The Grisha trilogy (or The Shadow and Bone series) is, as the name implies, a series of three books that comprise the entirety of a story about a young orphan girl and her childhood friend growing up to find they have powers and need to battle evil that only they can vanquish. Yes, it's typical young adult stuff.

The refreshing bit about this series is the Slavic flavor that permeates the story. The names are Slavic, the legends and history are similar to the ones around Russia, and if you read not the books, but the short stories, you get that nice hopeful dread that one can find in old Russian legends: things can be nice, but most of the time you can only hope for instructional and survivable.

That leaves me at an impasse. I liked the books, but compared to the expectations created by the short stories they are pretty crap. I mean, you get that Twilighty romantic triangle thing (it's more of a square, really), and so much potential from characters that are tortured by a rough childhood is just wasted on pointless romance dancing around. The first book is clearly the best, but then Leigh Bardugo falters and writes the rest of the story more and more traditional... not to the Russian folklore, but to Hollywood bullshit. The evil guy gets more and more evil, for no actual reason, the characters get more and more righteous, for no reason other than being juxtaposed against the evil guy, secondary characters get killed off randomly, with no gain from the effort made in defining them, while primary characters get more and more entangled, again, for no good reason. The worst offence, in my view, is that the author bothered to create this Slavic world of impoverished peasants fighting neverending wars with neighboring countries, only to basically end it all with a happy ending. In order to bring the story to a popular finale, she massacred an entire universe, not unlike the villain of the series.

Bottom line: an interesting and easy to read young adult story that unfortunately ends much worse than it had begun. Instead of continuing to explore the truly adult themes of loss, betrayal, learning from mistakes, surviving trauma, etc, it caves in to the easy romantic and tired idea of light versus dark, losing all other color in the process.

Ed Yong's style is a little bit over narrated, like those TV documentaries that start with some guy walking down the street while they present who he is and what he does. That's the only real issue I had with this book, other than a few groan inducing puns. Besides that, the book is not only extremely interesting, but also contains a multitude (OK, I like puns) of well crafted insights into the biological world all around us.

I Contain Multitudes explains how animal and plant life has evolved from a previous state in which microbes were everywhere and everything. Every adaptation since then has taken them into account and forced them to adapt in turn. Microbes, as explained by the book, are not a bunch of criminals hell bent on causing disease, but a complex ecosystem that overshadows the macrobiome, with complex adaptations in a matter of days.

A lot of eye opening ideas in the book. That disease is more often caused by an imbalance in a community of different microbes, not by one opportunistic infection. The old paradigm of "kill'em all" is no longer valid, as it just clears way for other microbes to take over the vacated real estate. The way selected cultures of microbes can function as a living drug for all kinds of afflictions, from bowel problems to mental issues, from tree diseases to those transmissible by insect bites, is shockingly powerful. But there is more, the most pervasive being that we cohabitate a world of bacteria and viruses that are as part of our identity and function as any other organ. Indiscriminately killing everything microscopic is then akin to cutting off your limb, just because you feel like it.

It is a book I can't recommend enough. Anyone even remotely interested in medicine should consider it as a must read. Anyone interested in their own health should read it. In fact, I can't imagine a single person that shouldn't read it. Check out the book's page on Ed Yong's web site for more information, videos and articles.

Female Orgasms is not so much as a book, as a really tiny set of chapters that are barely connected to each other. Emily Nagoski is frustrated by the way male standards are used to judge all sexuality and makes a point in this booklet that it is unhelpful, at best. However, while some of the ideas in the book are interesting, to me it seemed as a list of ideas and ramblings gathered together in order to form a volume, with most of the things either really basic or without any narrative or connection to others. 100 ebook pages and 26 chapters, that's saying something.

The book is oriented towards women, with men as a secondary audience. It is not a self-help book for men to become gods in bed, it is a self-help book for women on how to become more aware of their sexuality and enjoy themselves better. Some of the ideas I found interesting are mostly related to expectations. If we know 95% of women masturbate with clitoral stimulation, why do we even consider the necessity for women to orgasm from vaginal intercourse? It's nice when it happens, but as opposed to men, women don't orgasm predictably nor is the orgasm the end purpose of sexual encounter. Another interesting fact is that women are mostly responsive to erotic stimulation, as opposed to men who just wake up one moment wanting to have sex. It's a statistical fact, but still, one to take into consideration. One idea that the author wanted to make clear is that there is only one orgasm: the explosive release of sexual tension. How that tension is generated doesn’t matter (to the orgasm).

An important concept that Nagoski is making efforts to popularize is the one of arousal nonconcordance. In other words, while for men there is a strong correlation between physical sexual arousal and the desire or openness for sex, for women it's not quite so. Experiments of people watching porn while devices compare their sexual arousal and also take their reported input of how aroused they feel show consistently this is true. I do feel, though, that the author pushes a little too far, attempting to completely decouple the declarative and physical arousal. Considering some men use opposing ideas as justification for non consensual sex ("your body wants it, so you must want it" kind of logic) that is understandable, but less scientific than I would have liked.

This book is part of a series about sexuality, written by different authors, called Good in Bed Guide. I found it basic, but probably helpful for a lot of people. I wish it would have been better written and edited, though. Also, try reading this on the subway with a straight face.

What the hell?! After starting with so much potential, the story started fizzling, but there still was a lot of room for greatness. Instead, Bakker seems to have contracted Martinitis for his last book in the series, having important characters die off randomly, insignificant ones suddenly pop up, and filling space with feudal descriptions of the battles fought by completely irrelevant characters. Oh, and talking about erect penises. And then the end comes, everything seems to come to some sort of confluence, only it actually doesn't. It all goes completely to the left. Things get confused, the story goes nowhere, and the reader goes to WTF land for the entire day.

What is the purpose of having the reader getting invested in characters, only to kill them off, then return them later on (oh, they didn't die!), only to have them do nothing or die (again!)? What is the point of reading the names of every leader of men and no-men while they battle gloriously, complete with a short description of these characters right before they die in said battle? Was this book written with dice?

The Unholy Consult is a complete disappointment of a series finale. It ends practically nothing! Consider that it all started with Drusas Achamian, as a learned, in love, slightly damaged magus who liked to consider the world with wisdom. At the end, he is a bumbling old buffoon who can't string a thought in his head. Esmenet, the ex-prostitute, chosen by Achamian for her beauty and by the Emperor for her intellect and strength for bearing his children, first rises to the challenge of being a queen, then is just hauled away like a child and just does random things. Mimara gives birth to twins. But one is dead. There is no significance to this at all, it's just a random event. The four horns... they appear and disappear in the plot, like they have some great significance, but they don't. Why write about one character almost a quarter of a book only to kill him randomly in the next? Why be so verbose for 95% of a book only to break out into incoherent scenes and inconsistent actions in the last tiny chapter?! And it goes on and on like that. There is no moral to the story, no resolution to the fact that we followed the action of a psychopath for twenty years of book time waiting for this precise ending, only to be robbed of any meaningful closure.

Bottom line: I guess the author has a "great vision" in mind. If Prince of Nothing was followed by The Aspect Emperor, then a new series of books follows which is, in fact, another volume of the story. Only I lost all interest. What is the point in following characters if the author is going to butcher them (and I don't mean kill them off) later on to the point of irrelevancy? What is the point of following a story, if it leads to nothing?

I have read all the Prince of Nothing books and the first two of The Aspect Emperor, in truth a single large story rather than two separate series. I am amazed of how many details and human truth could R. Scott Bakker stuff in the books and I wrote in the review of The White Luck Warrior that I was in withdrawal after I realized the next book was not published. Therefore my strategy was to wait until this and the fourth and last book in the series were published. Which is both a blessing and a curse. I had to remember what the hell happened "before", though the book has an intro in which is tells the story up to that point which I found very useful. I was also detached from the story and characters.

With that being said, the book felt even more like filler material. It mostly covers a rather boring part of the Ordeal, Esmenet and the story of a now more interesting Sorweel. Yet throughout the book I felt like the author was struggling to push meaning into less and less interesting concepts by his overuse of italics and very detailed introspection. That is both the general flavor that makes the series so good and the bit that sometimes made me want to fast forward. Kellhus is almost absent, like in the previous book, which is strange for a series called after him, but there is also less action. Or at least less from characters that I enjoy reading about (there is a nuclear explosion in there and large army conflicts, but again they felt like filling space). I was disappointed with the short and empty solution to Ishual, considering the largest part from the previous book was about getting there and towards the end there is an interaction between a Dûnyain and Qirri that left me in a "WTF?!" kind of state. On the bright side, a character that I enjoyed a lot reappeared as an agent of the Consult. That was fun!

So I am overly glad that I waited for both books from the series to get published so I can now get at the meat of the story (praise the meat!). I may have given you the impression that I didn't like the book, but I was merely comparing it with the rest. It is still a damn good book, however I am the type of guy to focus on the negative, so that is that. If I were meeting my past self, the advice I would give would be to read The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor back to back. Oh well, that ship has sailed.

The Shattered Realms series is starting to gather momentum with Stormcaster. While Flamecaster was set mostly in the Arden empire and Shadowcaster in the Fells, Stormcaster goes everywhere, connects the characters developed in the first books and finally reveals the main villain. Unfortunately, that is all it does. Stuff happens, things are set up, people meet, then the book ends. We just have to wait for the fourth and maybe last book in the series to see how things end.

As I was complaining for the first two books, Cinda William Chima is really nice to her characters. The most that can happen to a hero in this series is that they lose a loved one. Even the scenes describing said loss are weak, almost neutral, like someone who would lose a lover or a parent and their reaction would be "Damn! That sucks!". She is definitely not George R. R. Martin and when reading these books remember that they are probably aimed at fresh teens. Heroes are all very young and yet competent and in control of their life. What child wouldn't love to read that?

Stormcaster brings us in contact with the remote empire from the East and its empress, along with a bunch of new characters. However we will have to wait until Deathcaster, probably the last book in the series, set to be published in April 2019, to see how the story ends.

Flamecaster has a prince as the main character, but was named after a dragon that appears at the end of the book. Shadowcaster has a princess as the main character, but is named after a "magemarked" bard who in a random paragraph ponders what his superhero name should be. It felt to me as if Cinda William Chima intended to follow a certain pattern in her books, but then kind of abandoned it halfway. As the Shattered Realms series develops, each book adds more characters and then makes them interact with existing ones, which shatters (ahem!) any static model or recipe. There are commonalities, though.

All heroes are young, beautiful, intelligent, competent and moral. All villains are mean, narrowminded, corrupt, cruel, despicable and usually ugly. Occasionally some "gray" character appears, only to be developed later as a misunderstood hero. If it weren't for this little detail, I think the books in this series would have been really captivating. Instead... they are adorable, like a children's book that you read to see how Harry Potter and his merry gang defeat the meany. Only in comparison Harry Potter is way darker and gripping than this. And it is too bad, because I like the writing and the world building.

Shadowcaster continues the story from a moment before Flamecaster ended, from the perspective of other characters. If the first level boss was defeated in the first book, this one foreshadows (ahem!) the appearance of a more terrifying villain. It makes little sense to start with this book without having read the series from the beginning and it ends with even less closure than the first book.

Again, it is very easy to read, I've read it in a few hours, nicely split into minuscule chapters so you can read one whenever you take the shortest of breaks. I will read the entire series, I believe, yet only three books have been written so far and at least another is contracted.

Flamecaster is a typical young adult fantasy: a princeling loses the people who would guide him, thus forced to find his own way, while finding other people to guide him and using his great skills to fight the typical tyrannical villain. However, that doesn't make it a bad book. The characters are easy to sympathize with, maybe too easy, and the world is interesting enough without being too weird or requiring great leaps of belief or a lot of thinking.

I thought the title of the book was related to Cinda William Chima's name and I expected the next books to be related to fire as well, or at least some cinders, but it's the "caster" part that is important and it seems as if each book will focus on different main characters, which I find refreshing. I am currently reading Shadowcaster, which I expect to finish quickly, with Stormcaster to follow. Unfortunately, this is not a trilogy and the fourth book is not published yet. I was hoping to read the entire story start to end.

Bottom line: easy to read, reasonably well written, not too challenging.

Missile Gap is a mere novella by Charles Stross, which frustrates the reader when the story ends. The universe the author describes is so interesting and full of potential, but it is only used once, for a short story that ends suddenly and depressingly.

Well, imagine the world of 1976, suddenly finding itself transplanted on a huge artificial disk that spans enough to provide space for millions of planets Earth. Nobody explains how or why it happened and the few realities that the world has come to accept, like the ability to reach outer space, or a finite geopolitical area which can be controlled via routes on a sphere and the threat of ballistic missiles, have flown out the window. Yuri Gagarin is leading a 5 year mission of exploration on the other continents on the disk, to go where no man has gone before, while Carl Sagan is trying to get to the bottom of what happened. Are there other species on the disk? Whodunnit? Why? Very few answers are provided as ideological differences, transplant shock and paranoia, plus a few other agents that I am not going to spoil - the name Brundle is a hint, though - lead to a less than fulfilling ending.

I wish there were entire book series set on this Discworld. I love Stross' ideas and I would have loved to see how people handle the exploration of a new "outer space" which is now both more accessible and less so, due to communication breakdown. Perhaps the aliens that did the transplantation would deem necessary to bring Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro people there. That's my solution for the immediate sense of loss I felt when the story ended. It's a brilliant idea, stuck in a glass jar, like an insect specimen, only to be studied occasionally when it's feeding time. I really wish it would have bloomed into something greater.

After a period of reading only fantasy books, I've decided it was time to get to something more serious. So I started reading Roth Unbound, by Claudia Roth Pierpoint. Funny enough, the book is a biography of Philip Roth, an influential Jewish-American writer, written by a person named Roth that has no relation to him.

Anyway, the thing is I am fascinated by what people think and feel when doing things, so I love well written auto-biographies. However, this book is written by someone else than the subject of the biography and, worse, it reads like a factual history mingled with commentary on the guy's art. In its defense, it was not supposed to be a biography at all. I got to about 10% of it when I decided I will not continue reading it. And it's too bad, because from the few things I did manage to read, Philip Roth is a very interesting fellow.

Well, the bottom line is that I will rate this book low for reasons of not being able to feel anything about anything while reading other than pure boredom, regretting the interesting facts that I am probably missing.

On the bright side, there is a Philip Roth Unleashed BBC documentary from 2014 that can be found on YouTube split into part 1 and part 2, not to be confused with Tim Roth Unleashed, which is the web site of the actor Tim Roth. How many Roths are there, for crying out loud?!

The Everything Box is an old fashioned nice crook in a dirty city story. Only Richard Kadrey is a fantasy author, so the book is filled with angels, demons, magic, curses, magical police, vampires, zombies and so on. It is a fun book, one that is obviously designed to be easy and not take itself seriously. I only read it because I was curious about the author's work after reading Butcher Bird. I am happy to say that The Everything Box is much better, although maybe just because it is a bit funnier.

What I liked most was that it all starts with a quest for an item and not a quarter of a book in, the quest is over, the object is retrieved. Only it doesn't stay that way, as more and more people pile on, attempting to get their hands on it. Their incompetence and greed makes them the butts of the joke, but as the story progresses, you get the same treatment again and again: "oh, the book must be over, oh no! something else happened." Its fast paced, even in dialogues, so it goes down fast.

It's not that it's a literary masterpiece, but it does what it was supposed to do: entertain, and that is why I rate it high.

Almost a year ago I was reading Ninefox Gambit and loving every page of it. Raven Stratagem continues the story from where the first book in The Machineries of Empire series left off, but naturally the novelty wore off and I was left with just the story and the writing style... which are still great! Now I have to wait for Yoon Ha Lee to write the next book to see where the story takes me. One can still occupy oneself with the 5 short stories in the same universe until June this year, when it's supposed to be published.

One unfortunate effect of reading the book so long after the previous one was that I didn't exactly remember what had happened before. The book is still delightful anyway and can be considered as a standalone, with a little effort of imagination. I don't want to discuss the plot here, for fear of spoiling it, but let's say that while I enjoyed it and the characters, it all felt strangely aloof. Jedao's character is only described from the perspective of others, which makes it difficult to empathize with him. Even the ending feels a little bit rushed, with a grandiose effect, but little fuss over the implementation. One moment you are in a story, the next something happens that has little connection with anything else and then the book ends.

My conclusion is that either Yoon Ha Lee was unsure about the direction he was going to take the story, or he was very sure and the climax is to be had in the next book. In either case I recommend reading Raven Stratagem after Revenant Gun is published, to save you the frustration.

The Volunteer ends The Bone World trilogy. Badly. It's still better than the second book, The Deserter, but that had a plot that made some sort of sense. In contrast, in this book, Peadar Ó Guilín tries to combine the story paths of both Stopmouth and Wallbreaker, bringing together religious roof people, secular roof people, aliens and the original human tribe, each with their own psychotic would be leaders, while the world is slowly covered by Diggers.

While the world established on the surface of the planet was well thought of, The Roof was pretty much a disaster, so that is why the third book takes place on the surface again and is entertaining enough. Yet the interaction between people becomes confused, sub plots open that have no resolution (see the slime woman) and people just do random stuff that makes no sense. Even the characters chosen to die do so without consequence to the story, as if Ó Guilín didn't know which part of the story he wanted to write. The ending feels rushed and incomplete.

Bottom line: The idea of The Bone World is pretty interesting, but the story is not well realized. The first book is interesting enough, but the last two are not really worth it. If you want to read some Ó Guilín, read The Call.

If The Inferior was OK, The Deserter, the second book in The Bone World trilogy, is quite weak. The story continues with Stopmouth trying to get to the surface to get to Indrani, and while he does get there, it's not really his merit. And when he finally arrives, the world there is just as dumb and savage as the one beneath.

I really dig (pun intended) the way Peadar Ó Guilín writes about societies and people. His writing has a sort of Shakespearean quality, where everybody is looking for themselves and backstabbing everybody else, no matter how horrible or dishonorable it is. However, his hi-tech writing leaves a lot to be desired. The plot holes that were apparent in the first book, but that hinted on a technological answer from The Roof, become larger when we finally get to see it. Highly dependent on machines that do everything for them, the "civilized" people are divided into tribes that fight each other for no good reason. It is a general theme in the author's writing that people gather in tribes or churches or states or gangs with the singular purpose to blame everything on another group and then try to destroy them. However the society in The Roof doesn't make sense in almost every respect.

There is a sci-fi sub-genre, that of the uncivilized but pure reaching a civilized place and overcoming everything through strength, be it physical, moral or both, and the works from it usually are weak. The Deserter is no exception, I am afraid. In a book where information is so essential for survival, the people in The Roof know nothing, care for nothing except their stupid squabbles and are completely lost without technology. It is hard to empathize with anyone in this book that feels like filler content until the third book, which also takes place on the Inferior.

Bottom line: I've read it quickly, in order to get to The Volunteer. In my eyes, The Deserter was a disappointment.