The Kingkiller Chronicle series seems to be, for once, an actual chronicle. In an inn in the middle of nowhere a guy actually called Chronicler comes and starts writing the stories told by the innkeeper, in reality a famous hero that just wants to be left alone. The whole thing feels like it was meant as a study in storytelling, as we read the telling of a story in which many times people tell other stories and concerns a character raised as a travelling actor.

More than that, the "shape" of the plot is a standard hero journey: young orphan boy with extraordinary abilities battles various types of evil as he grows into a popular hero. He is so talented, in fact, that he feels a bit of a Marty Stu when almost everything he encounters is extraordinary and within his ability to control or at least get out of jams with his legend intact. There are hints, though, that as it is told, the story will become more tragic. Also, as told by a talented storyteller, a reader might be circumspect of all the details in it; while improbable, it might all be revealed as a great joke by the end.

So, is Patrick Rothfuss just writing a nice bedtime story where the hero is all smart and strong and filled with magic, something to spread like wildfire and be sung in all taverns, making him a ton of money, or is it something more to it, like trying to teach the reader something that is impossible to teach? That is for the reader to decide.

I read the book really fast for its size, which shows my own preference for it, and it reads like a kind of Harry Potter in Westeros. Unfortunately, the pace of writing is borrowed from George R. R. Martin, rather than J.K. Rowling and people are still waiting for the third book in the series, more than 10 years since the writing of this one. One might want to wait until the entire story is told, as the second book in the series is a simple continuation of the first. The Name of the Wind just ends at a random moment in the story while The Wise Man's Fear continues the telling and also ends randomly. A lot of people that fell in love with the story are now frustrated with the lack of progress in writing it it. After all, Kvothe is telling it to Chronicler in three days in an inn, written by shorthand in ink, while Rothfuss has used computers for a decade already.

Bottom line: this is a well written series of rather large books. While the character feels a bit OP, the plot meanders through many interesting concepts and situations. I still have the strong suspicion that Patrick Rothfuss started writing this as a study of storytelling - an art that precedes writing and blends together artistry of composition and its declamation - but somehow ended up stuck with a character that is young, powerful, good looking and can't carry him forward. It is worth noting that while Rothfuss only wrote two major books in the series, he also wrote intermediate stories and other writers also contributed to the Kingkiller universe.

This is how I love my sci-fi: short and to the point. We still get the Charlie Stross signature nice techie guy who falls for girls in sci-fi settings, but since this is a novella, Palimpsest focuses almost entirely on the catch, the "what if" kernel of the story. And that is another exploration of what time travel would lead to, in this case an out of time organization called the Stasis that exists solely to protect Earth from inevitable extinction by reseeding it with humanity whenever it happens, thus creating a sort of stagnating but stable civilizational time flow that last for trillions of years until the heat death of the universe.

But I liked the little details a lot. As the title suggests, once you can time travel, the timelines can be infinitely rewritten, leading to all kinds of (maybe literally all) possibilities. In order to join Stasis you first need to kill your grandfather and in order to graduate you need to kill yourself in another timeline! Mad and fun ideas are in abundance in the book and I particularly enjoyed that it presented them one after another and then the story ended. No need to take it further to some sort of personal conclusion for the main character. It is pure fantasy and then it ends. Love that!

Charles Stross has a penchant for thinking big and then bringing that to the level of the average reader by the aid of pulp. That is why he is often discussing philosophical questions like what the world will be after millennia and what the consequences of time travel are or what if the Old Gods and magic were actually real in the context of a particularly handy tech guy who falls very easily in love and then spends the rest of the book saving the world and serving the one he loves. He is also an optimist who thinks people with all the information and power they could have will ultimately do the right thing with it.

While I love his positivism and the grandiose hard sci-fi approach, the pulp thing is a bit of a hit and miss with me. In the case of Singularity Sky, I think the pulp messed up something that could have been a very powerful metaphor of the state of humanity in the present day (and in any past day, too). But that doesn't mean the book is not good - I enjoyed reading it - but it doesn't even come close to another "singularity" book: Accelerando. I understand it's not fair to hold every single thing Stross wrote in the balance with what is probably his best work, but that's what I am doing, because I loved that one and I was meh about this one.

The story presents a subset of human starfaring civilization which chose to live in a similar way to the old Russia tzarist regime. Communication, technology and free speech and thought are strongly regulated and kept to the level of the 18th century in most cases. So what happens when one day phones drop from the sky that open two way communication with entities that could fulfill every desire you never knew you had? It is a very interesting metaphor to the way humans have lived throughout their history and how it is their choice and their addiction to monkey power games that keeps them in the dark ages. Also touches (very little) on why people would choose to live that way and how other might respect or disregard their right for that choice.

However, the main story is terminally fragmented by less interesting substories. Two spies, one in the service of the UN and the other helping the mysterious Herman, just have to fall for one another and waste precious pages. Feudal and imperial authorities have to spend pointless time to prepare a full military defense of their colony without even understanding who they were going to fight. Critics, a non-human-anymore species that starts the book as "criticizing" and the rest of it appears randomly and doing nothing interesting, except never getting the talking part right and sounding like Yoda. The list continues.

Bottom line: a fun read, but nothing more. A wasted opportunity for something a lot bigger. The author explains on his blog how the book came to be and why he won't continue the Eschaton series, which is probably for the best anyway.

Funny how these things turn out. After finishing Proxima, by Stephen Baxter, which was also about humans colonizing the planet of a nearby star, but in the end was very little about the planet itself, I've stumbled upon Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which does pretty much the same. I don't want to spoil things, but really, just a small percentage of the book is even related to the planet they briefly called Aurora.

Let's get one thing out of the way, though. Aurora is way better than Proxima ever intended to be. It is philosophical and filled with information and science and raises questions that are essential to space colonization. That's the great part. The bad part is that it feels like an old man book. It is introverted, focused on people, their feelings, their shortcomings and ultimately advises we care more about our planet, the one we are perfectly adapted to live on, rather than imagine we can always find a replacement in deep space. That was a disappointment, not only because I am in Tsiolkovsky's camp, who famously said Earth is our cradle and we can't stay in the cradle forever, but also because the future, as seen by Robinson, is stagnant, with no evolution, no desire, no dreams other than those he considers foolish and even criminal. Stay in the cradle till we finally die, enjoying the golden age of our senescence. Bah!

Other than that I really appreciated the attention to details, taken from all kinds of disciplines, that the author put in the book. Stuff like the difference of evolution rate between complex organisms like people and the microbiomes inside them, or mineral balances, the effect of Coriolis forces on the well being of people and machinery, and so on and so on. It was ironic that the person everybody in the book revered was Devi, an brilliant engineer who always thought outside the box and solved problems. When she couldn't do that, everybody else just gave up. There is also a moment in the story when the colonists split into two groups. I found it almost insulting that the book only described the adventures of one of them and completely forgot about the other.

Bottom line: I liked most of the book, if not its ending moral. The style is a bit difficult, almost autistic, as half of the story is from the standpoint of the ship's AI and the other from the perspective of the protagonist who is unusually tall (for no reason that has any impact on the story) and a little slow in the head. I understand why some people actually hated it, but as we can learn from every viewpoint, and often more from one that is different from ours, this book has a lot to teach.

Here is an interview with the author, but be careful, only the left audio channel has voice, the other is an annoying music.

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Proxima is the first book in the Proxima duology, by Stephen Baxter. And it is barely about Proxima! The book starts with multiple viewpoints over several arcs, is split into tiny chapters and volumes, attempts to become something epic and eventually fizzles. It's not that it's a bad book, it's simply not very good.

You have alien technology found on Mars, two different expeditions to Proxima C - if you don't count the first misguided one, a habitable planet in the Proxima Centauri system, several people and their families over a span of several decades, Artificial Intelligences, a nebulous period in the history of mankind called "The Heroic Generation" which seems to have left people in fear of innovation and discovery, alien lifeforms, artificial lifeforms, parallel timelines, etc. And it's all mixed in. It feels like it should be more, like it was meant to be more, but it just comes out as jumbled and directionless. I think what bothered me most is that characters barely have time to change. In order to explain what happens with a zillion people Earth, Mars, Mercury and an alien planet in a single book, their personal development is sacrificed.

But overall the book was interesting. It covered some bits of Earth future history that most sci-fi works quickly get past. The downside is that it went over them really fast, too :) The actual exploration and life on Proxima was on fast forward, too, with a really hard to believe ecosystem for its simplicity. Oh, and that ending was horrid! I will not read any of the works in the series. I feel that Baxter is overambitious, but also very courageous. I usually have a lot of problems with his works, but still read some of them.

I found Being a Dog a bit misleading, as it is not so much about dogs as it is about smell in general. However, as a book about smell it's a concise and very interesting book. Alexandra Horowitz has a steady professional writing style and the information in the book is being related as anecdotes from her very thorough research.

From the very start the book acknowledges that dogs are not visual and auditory like humans are; instead their main sensory organ is their nose. As the author explores the world of smells, we understand more about us, dogs and how we sense the world in general. I liked many sections of Being a Dog, but I found the first part as most interesting. Mainly because it is about dogs :) There we find that the structure of the nose of dogs is as much responsible for their great sense of smell as is the immense number of sensory cells and dedicated brain neurons. Horowitz explains that dogs do not pass the so called "mirror test", but that is because they are not visual. If the experiment is constructed so that the mirror is olfactory, then they easily pass the test. It also tells us where the smelly glands on the dog are, including its paws. And indeed, I smelled my dog's paw and it was concentrated and nice. If you have a dog, smell their paws now!

That doesn't mean that the part about human smell was not captivating. I found myself smell things on the subway - that is a good thing - just because I felt inspired by what the author described. In conclusion, I recommend the book. It's a light read and it is the kind of work that makes us aware of a part of the world that is both near and ignored.

Until recently, all I knew of Jack London is that he wrote White Fang, which I read when I was a child and to my shame sometimes mix up with Romain Gary's White Dog, and To Build a Fire, which is a short story I really liked, but which I mostly use as an example of how cold some places on Earth are. At a friend's recommendation I started reading Martin Eden and I really loved it.

Slowly building the characters and with careful attention to details of action and thought and feeling, London is both heavily autobiographical and feverishly critical of society as a whole. An extreme version of his own history, Martin Eden's character is a street ruffian who had to fend for himself since he was eleven years old. A chance meeting with a beautiful young girl from high society makes him want to be more so he dedicates his life to reading, learning and becoming more like the ideal he believes people in high society embody. Handsome, strong, very smart and blessed with good health and powerful will, he does just that, in short time managing to cross the cultural gap and then continuing to grow and learn until he even becomes a critic of the people he saw as gods just a few years ago.

There is so much more to the book, though. The transformation carries the reader through every strata of society, dissecting behavior, culture and belief, making bold philosophical claims while making one feel and understand from the point of view of this amazing character and others. At the time of the writing, the book was not well received, mostly because of the ending, which I won't spoil here, but how premonitory it was to describe similar events to the actual fate of the book itself! Now it is considered one of the best Jack London books and the one he is more known for.

I've read the Andrew Sinclair introduction after I've finished the book, which is what I really recommend to everyone, since it spoils the entire story. From the intro we learn that the book is heavily based on the author's own life and also of the differences between Eden and London's stories. Sinclair also criticizes some parts of the book, where the writing was not as good or was discordant with the rest of the work, but I personally liked every bit of it. Used to a classical story structure, I always expected some things to happen which did not or happened differently, an early sign that so much of this is based on real life. But also, I feel that having Martin Eden be endowed with so many positive attributes made the book a bit less accessible that it should have been, for the character is a beast of will and life force, of health and capacity of work. London was not as fortunate himself and many a reader will probably feel as I did, that the book hints that only an extraordinary person can break away from their position in life and maybe it isn't worth it anyway. Intended as a critique of individualism and personal ambition, it falls a little flat when we encounter the person London probably dreamed to be.

Bottom line: a powerful book on the nature of life values, as they are taught, believed, chosen and created, about how illusion can spur one to magnificent deeds and hard achievement sour the taste of life itself. It talks of the inner and outer drives of people, making them both majestic and ridiculous. It felt realistic and somehow uplifting and terribly depressing at the same time. I highly recommend it.

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer, is a very short book that seems to be inspired by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. The same timeless quality, thoughtful introspective characters and a weird area that seems to defy the laws of physics and biology. But nothing is truly revealed, or learned, other than the somewhat senseless thoughts that the main character has. The other three women quickly succumb to the influence of "Area X", so we are left with a weird chick moving around in an unexplainable place with unfathomable rules. If Dallas' Pamela would have woken up from a dream at the end of the book, it would have meant just about the same as the actual ending.

I only read the book because of the upcoming movie. I am fairly certain that it will be better than the book, which manages to bore in half the pages of a decent story. It isn't that I disliked it, it's that I did not actually like anything in it. Everybody is acting crazy and without context and in the few pages that bring some context, it's the boring relationship between the lead and her husband and I couldn't care about any of them.

I am sorry, but when you write a book about a scientific expedition, it's customary you write about characters that behave like scientists, not like directionless drunkards with self-traumatic histories. I don't understand how this book won any science fiction award. It is well written, but it's barely average. I am not going to read any of the other books in the trilogy.

The Atrocity Archives tells the story of a technical computer geek enrolled by force in the British governmental organization that keeps us safe from supernatural threats. By Charles Stross' own admision, as a mix of Len Deighton and H.P.Lovecraft by way of Neil Stephenson (with a bit of Le Carré and Flemming thrown in for good measure), the book seeks to bridge the emotional catharsis of facing one's fears (the realm of the horror) with the desire to reveal the truth of the thriller. Bundled with it, the short story The Concrete Jungle, continues the saga of our protagonist.

I liked the book. A master of technobabble and fast paced intelligent action, Stross first came to my attention with the wonderful Accelerando, which I will never stop recommending. In the Laundry Files series, he tackles with equal humor horrors that could suck the universe dry of energy and life and things like bureaucracy (less efficient versions of the same thing) in government agencies. The pace is alert, the writing good and easy to read, the characters sympathetic if a little too shallow, funny, punny and, once I got into it, this book was almost impossible to put down.

I don't know if I will continue with the rest of the series, but as science fantasy goes, The Atrocity Archives is a pretty good book.

Written as a 19th century explorer's memories, this book subtly achieves several things, effectively and decently. First of all, it is a sort of fantasy, although really if one removes the dragons, it's pretty much normal history. Second of all, it is a feminist story, but one done well. Instead of describing the horrible things done to women by evil cardboard characters, we get an intelligent and driven female hero that makes the most of her advantaged situation to expand her goals and enrich her life, despite social norms, but supported by friends and loving family. She is young, attractive, but not extraordinarily so, and her fascination towards dragons and science books leads her towards a career normally reserved for men. She is inspiring as a model, rather than complaining about her helplessness. She gets by through her efforts and skill, not by magically being gifted super powers. The fact that the action is set in a reasonably old period so that folk don't get touchy about it, but close enough so that it describes people that thought themselves the pinnacle of civilization helps with making the reading comfortably remote, but seriously instructive. Thirdly, it is written in an easy to read way, a personal memoir that can be understood by adults and children alike.

As such, I think A Natural History of Dragons is one of the few books that can claim to have made the world a better place, as it provides both escapist pleasure and educational value. That doesn't mean it's a perfect book. Marie Brennan's educated Victorian noblewoman style starts off as refreshing, but quickly gets old, the details providing less and less context and just filling up space. The book is well written, but at times I just wanted to get past the way people were dressed or how the architecture influenced the mood of the main character. The title is misleading at best, as the story is marginally related to dragons and instead focusing on one person and her incidental fascination with them. You learn almost nothing "scientific" about dragons but you sympathize while you observe this young woman desperately trying herself to understand more.

In conclusion, this is a book that I would gladly give to a hypothetical young daughter to read. As an adult, it is light enough to be enjoyable. The world is built thoroughly and perhaps the next books will be more action packed, while expanding on our view of it. The story is a bit lackluster, but nothing to complain about. It reads as a light fantastical autobiography. A more alert pace would have made it more accessible, but it would have probably detracted from the character's voice.

I really tried to read and enjoy this book, which is highly rated and reviewed, which makes me wonder whether there is something wrong with me. Whatever the reason, I couldn't even finish it. Everything in this book is grating my senses, from the writing style to the scenes details, from the editing to the basic story outline. If you've read Dexter (the book the TV show is based on, not the TV show itself) you will have found a similar plot, but as I thought that book was bad, this one felt worse. I can't imagine who in their right mind would give this a full rating.

I've found a blog post by the author, Matt Hilton, that describes the unfortunate period in which he wrote the book. His seventeen old daughter just died. Maybe that affected the writing style, maybe the fact that it was written in several versions that then were edited into this one. I don't know. He has my sympathy for his loss, but not for PreterNatural. In his situation I would have expected to at least get the grief part right. Instead the character lives with the mind of his family's murderer in his head and has humorous dialogues with it.

It's a bad book. I won't recommend it in any way. Considering this is the first and only book in the Carter Bailey series, I think even the author probably agrees with me.

The quote So what's the moral of this story? - Moral? Our stories don't have those! perfectly describes the narrative of LaRose. The book is well written, there are a lot of very well described characters that go through their own arcs that intersect often and in uncommon ways, but you are just left with knowing a bunch of people better than before you began reading the book.

Louise Erdrich describes an intertwining world of traditions, history, real life, strong emotions, cool heads and above all, the feeling that it all somehow makes sense (without it actually reaching that point). It could have easily been completed at the middle of the book or continued for a few more volumes, it lacks finality, with the last chapter feeling forced in the way that it tried to complete some concepts. I can imagine Woody Allen saying "It involves Native Americans" after reading it for twenty minutes.

Given what I've said above, it's difficult for me to rate such a book. I enjoyed reading the words, but did not enjoy the book. I ground the words into submission with the whole intention of finishing the story and then reading something else. I loved the characters, even if the myriad of details about them did not interest me in the least. I learned about a people that is, as the book itself recognizes, rapidly going extinct. Is this a good book? Yes! Would I have read it if I knew what I know now? Probably, because I am vain like that. Should I have read it? Probably not.

Bottom line: I will rate it above average, because it most obviously is, but that's about the only reason.

What the hell have I tried to read? It felt like a Google bot trying to describe random YouTube videos, a meaningless brainstorm of a neural network trained on black and white images, an intentional insult to anyone attempting to make sense of the book. At a mere 260 pages (on my smart phone) I thought that no matter what the subject or writing style, I would finish it, but after 60 pages of understanding nothing and using all my will power to continue, I've decided to call it quits.

It "helped" that I had no idea what I was reading. I just picked a book at random from my library and started it. I didn't know Herta Müller was a Nobel laureate for literature, I didn't know she was part Romanian, nor did I know of the Romanian movie based on the book. I could just read and enjoy the content. Or not. I don't know how I can describe this book in a way that is comprehensible. I had to read the synopsis of the movie in order to understand what The Fox Was Ever the Hunter tried to say! I am Romanian, I've lived through communism, even if I was just a kid at the time, I should have no reason not to at least understand the basic plot of the book, but I didn't get it. Eyes just glossed over the pointless descriptions, unnamed characters identified by body characteristics or clothing, useless details and unrelated chapters. One chapter ended in "The comb's teeth were blue." It wasn't a particular comb, it didn't feature in any interesting way in the story (had it been one), it was just a piece of detail that should have conveyed the lack of interesting things in the gray communist era or something. The book is filled with stuff like that.

Bottom line: I didn't find any positive thing to say about this book. No sentence that made me feel something, no interesting fact, no eye opening writing style, no plot or character that made any sense or brought any pleasure as I was reading it. It was like being so thirsty that you try to drink desert sand. It works just as well as this book. I hate it with fervor.

Persepolis Rising went into an interesting direction. One that I don't particularly like, but interesting nonetheless. The seventh book in the Expanse series is happening about 30 years after the sixth. You have to remember that lifespan is slightly longer in the future, so that's not a show stopper or a revamp with new characters. It also featured yet another condescending asshole who wants to rule everything using the protomolecule.

Now, the thing I love about The Expanse is the locality in the Solar System, the exploration of the near future society of space that is mere decades away from now (assuming we discover the Epstein drive, hmm...) Moving the action on other planets in other systems, more into the future and messing with alien tech doesn't help that. Instead it is turning it into yet another Stargate or similar franchise, where they just up the ante until there is no more up and people are bored. The authors have dodged the same bullet a few times in the past, though, so it just may be that they are aware of this and careful to thread the fine line between hard sci-fi and the ability to relate to what is going on in the story.

There isn't much about the story that I can tell without spoiling it. Some dudes want to go Roman Empire on the 1300 solar systems available and "civilize" humanity. Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have different ideas. However, the book basically ends in a cliffhanger so if you hate that kind of stuff, I recommend you postpone reading it until the eighth book is published. I liked the writing, the pacing and again I read it in mere days. Is it a masterpiece, not really, but it reads well. Now I have to wait until I can get my hands on the next book to see where the story is going, but considering that plans are to end the series with the ninth book, I wonder if I shouldn't just wait until they are all written and spare myself the misery of ending up with another, larger, cliffhanger at the end of the next part of the story.

Conclusion: I liked it, but I would much rather have read another dozen books about the Belters and how they made their home in the asteroids. If you think about it, the last few books did away with even the pretense of space colonization realism and it is always a small pain seeing how the stories always favor planets, which are not only less rich with the type of materials needed in space, but also have a lot more limited space. Asteroids can support trillions of people, and that in this Solar System alone. But that's another rant altogether. Just make sure you calculate the exact energy and reaction mass you want to spend in reading and then waiting for the next part of the story, which may not be published yet.

I was left a little disappointed by the books in the Expanse series. The TV show was doing great with the ideas in the books masterfully woven together, while the books were turning more and more into pulp. The greatest sin, for me, was that they took the action out of the Solar System, which was the main quality of the Expanse concept. Well, I am happy to report that, without a large increase in quality, Babylon's Ashes has returned to be a Solar System story, complete with intrigue, space war, politics and the Rocinante finding itself in the middle of everything important, again. It may be formulaic, but it's the formula that I like! Plus, it is clear that the quality of the TV show is feeding back into the books, which is great.

So Holden and Naomi need to deal with the fact that her psychotic ex-boyfriend and father of her child is a mass murderer who is leading the whole Solar System to war, chaos and finally starvation. Some characters die, which put Holden even more in the spotlight. Quite pointless characters are preserved, like Prax, which I personally despise, and others are added, like the pirate captain Michio Pa. In this book, the authors are tying up the loose ends: the state of the Solar System, the war, the situation at Medina station. The path toward the future is still in the balance at the end of the book. It's almost like asking "so, do we do cool Belter culture Solar System stories or do we pulp it out in the alien worlds?". Well, I will read Persepolis Rising next.

Conclusion: I liked the book enough to read it in a day or two and it made me want to read the series again.