This is not one of John Saul's best books, but then again, when you say John Saul you say cliche book. All his books contain some sort of drama, usually concerning children, always in a backwater town or suburb, always playing the child in danger, family connection, deep instinctual fears, etc. But some of them are more interesting than others, me liking science related books more, even if I almost always relate to the mad scientists and their evil creations than to the pseudo-moral rednecks that fight against them. This one is plain boring.
The Perfect Nightmare is about a child abductor. He goes for young innocent girls, he takes them into a makeshift playhouse and "plays" with them. Being a mass production book, it presents some brutal violence, almost no sex at all, even if it hints towards it, and the first and largest part of the book is simply puffed with the actions and fears of the people left behind which are mostly average boring people. This makes the book average and boring. The murderer himself is not something truly original, neither is the way he is portrayed.
The ending of the book has a catch, but after reading 90% of it, it doesn't really has any effect. Bottom line: not even for John Saul fans.

The lead characters of this author seem to always be quiet guys, ready to accept anything and be taken anywhere by the story. The same incredible things happen, all narrated in a very calm way, making them real. The obsession for American or English music permeates everything. I've read two Murakami books, but also some reviews for other books, and the same situation seems to be repeating itself.

Dance, Dance, Dance is about this kind of a person, caught in a kind of metaphysical quest to find himself. Some symbolism, weird characters, absurd situations. In the end, surprise, he finds himself. Compared with Kafka on the Shore it is much slower at the beginning, but it picks up pace closer to the end, yet the very end is slightly different from the rest of the book. I first though that Kafka was a better book than this one, then I switched sides and now I see them as of similar quality. Not much else to say.

Now I can't say I didn't like the books. They are the kind of stories that take you nowhere, but on a very pleasant road. But in the end, you are left with nothing. Nothing really learned, nothing really gained, just like a walk in the park. And I rarely enjoy walks in the park.

So I have decided to call it quits. Harumi Murakami is a good writer, there is no doubt about it, just not my type of a writer. I feel his writing is too English and not Japanese enough, thus defeating the very purpose I started to read his books in the first place.

This book has everything a popular book needs to have: fantasy elements, a fully functional fantasy world, use of logic, sex, easy language. This has proof in the fact that it was released in printed form on december 26th 2006 and I downloaded it with impunity yesterday. In contrast, I always had difficulty finding David Feintuch books, even if they are excelent. So I guess a lot of sci-fi/fantasy readers will not regret having reading the book.

However, it is nowhere above average. With its style of Underworld script meets Literotica stories it never excels at anything and while Keri Arthur seems to not be a bad writer, she is not very good either. Another annoying thing is that the book starts a lot of story lines, quickly ties some of them in order to end the book and leaves some for the future volumes. Meaning you can enjoy the book, but only up to a point.

Bottom line, I don't intend to read any more of the series. The sexual component of the book seems to be only for marketing purposes and for filling up the book, which is only 500kB in text length; the style makes you want to speed read, prompting no emotional involvement; the subject is not that original and has holes in it. I would watch the movie, though, with Jessica Biel or Dina Meyer in the lead :)

Ian Watson
Reviews

I've first started reading this book with aprehension, it seemed to involve weird and useless experiments, a heavy language or writing style, socialist concepts and a lot of bull. After a while, however, it started to become interesting. The concepts were refined, the gray areas explained, aliens appeared... it seemed to gather pace. After reading 90% of it I was looking forward for the grand finale. Which was nothing but a big and sloppy hiss.

The whole idea of the book revolves around the nature of reality and our perception of it. It starts from three different points of view and it seems to have a very good foundation to build on. It does present some concepts that might have value, but in the end, it fails miserably. I guess the author was unable to carry everything through or he just got bored with it.

But do bear in mind that it's his first novel, written in 1973, and he won the Apollo Prix in 1975 with it.

This book is odd enough. Finally finished reading it a few days ago, I remained with the feeling of not getting it. What the hell? A guy is turned into a bug, then his family tries to take care of him, but after a while they just stop being nice to the poor insect and it finally dies.

But then, thinking about it, I noticed the symbols in the book. It is all about a dark hopeless capitalism as in Kafka's day, one that can only be coped with by roaches. Working continuously while being at the whim of whatever greedy employer you have, supporting family and servants and a bigger house than needed because you don't dare have a spine. In this sad little story, the main character did not once revolt against the situation in which he was. Actually, I am wrong, he did revolt against some trivial things like taking a picture from his room or wanting to see his sister playing the violin, thus exiting the room where he was confined.

The book itself ends with his family feeling relief of getting rid of the big roach in their house and having a better life because each of the members had to take a job to get through this.

Conclusion: this didn't feel like a very good book, but it was good enough. It is also a classic, this being the reason for reading it. So, it's worth a read, if you can take the time to think about it.

Wee! I've received a PDA from my bestest of uncles (which will soon work for Google and I am so proud of him). Ok, back to adult mode. I've used the newly acquired PDA to read books! I've started Metamorphosis by Kafka, but the file was incomplete by accident, so I ended up reading The Martian Child.
It's a small text, 80KB in length, and it's not really sci-fi, but it's nice. It's the kind of warm, easy to read text suited for bus rides. It involves a sci-fi writer adopting a child who says he is a Martian. During the entire text, the author struggles with the eerie feeling that the child was actually right, even if there is no way to prove it.
It was nice enough.

I've just finished reading this book, in Romanian translation, and I found it nicely written, but not exactly my type of book. For me, art needs to draw you into atmosphere and conclusions, not to be understood only if you make the effort to draw the conclusions yourself. Yes, I am lazy, but don't get me wrong, I like art. It's just that art is supposed to communicate. I may recite a beautiful poem in Romanian, but if my audience is English, it wouldn't do any good.
So my review on this book is as follows: it is well written, freely written (I can sense throughout the book that Murakami has an open mind, not clogged by clichees and prejudice), it draws you into the atmosphere. But there is where it stops. I know there are deeper meanings in the things that happen throughout the book, but they are not properly explained. I can draw beautiful conclusions and see very deep things, but it would be my merit for making the effort and looking deep, not the writer's. And I wouldn't be sure that it's what the writer intended telling in the first place.
Read it if you are into atmospheric books :D and if you like dark, philosophical discussions.

I've just finished The Runes of the Earth, the first in the last series of the Thomas Covenant saga. I must say that the style and content changed significantly from the first books, therefore I felt the need to review the whole saga as I see it now.
I liked that in each book new ideas were introduced, they weren't just reprints of the same story. The moral basically stays the same, but everything else, sometimes even the lead character, changes.
From the second series, a new model of writing was used, thus all the books in one series make out a story rather than one book per story. I didn't like that, especially now, when I have to wait for the next books to be published in order to see what is going on. What I also minded was the need of the characters to shed tears over all kind of stuff. I think the author overdid the misty eyes scenes. A lot of the creatures and the culture from the first series was completely obliterated in the second, but it seems to be making a come back now.
The good thing about it, though, is that the writing gets better with each book. In hindsight, the first book seems amateurish compared with the rest. No more singing, more story, less descriptions. It is interesting that the last series of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever was published 20 years from the end of the second. Donaldson justified this as taking time to become a better writer before ending the story.
Let's see how it goes.

I am used to commenting on the things I see in life. I do the comments on movies on IMDb, but I haven't made an account on iblist, since I read so ridiculously few books that are not technical and IbList doesn't seem to be so complete and organised as IMDb.
So I will blog about books until the time when I see myself worthy of an iblist account.

Spurred on by a need for fantasy I've just finished Lord Foul's Bane, by Stephen R. Donaldson. Remarcably well written, it is obviously inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. There are lords, there are rings and there are brave and honorable quests. At times this becomes annoying, when characters feel compelled to sing songs (and the author actually wrote the lyrics in the book) or sacrifice themselves in rather ridiculous ways. I didn't like the way Lord of the Rings was written because of all the useless details in it. Lord Foul's Bane, the first in the Covenant series, is a bit like that, but not as bad. The main character, Thomas Covenant, is also most interesting than Frodo, having come from our world and being full of pain. Unfortunately, in the most important parts of the book, Covenant does things as moved by a puppeteer rather than by his own logic and good sense. This makes the plot seem a bit too unreal. The fantasy world, though, is pretty well done, with sensible magic and purposely made to look like a mirror image of our own, with all the bad things in our world not present and (I would say) all the good things being bad there. Like stopping from your journey and starting singing songs that are sometimes labeled as gay in the book.

I've also finished the first two volumes of The Spook series (The Spook's Apprentice and The Spook's Curse), by Joseph Delaney, which is interesting and well written. In this one, a feudal world is plagued by evil witches, ghosts and banes. The man that takes care of this, like a Dark Ages ghostbuster, is a spook. He does the job that no one wants to do, everyone needs him, yet everyone hates and fears him, including and especially the Church, which in this series are portrayed as a bunch of corrupt and amateurish incompetents. The main character is a young child who, under the guidance of his more than ordinary mother, becomes a spook's aprentice. There are twists in the plot and the magical domain is well conceived. Unfortunately, the plot is rather straightforward, with young useless brat finding out he has unsuspected power. But they don't call it heroic fantasy for nothing, so , there it goes. I liked the series and I expect to read the third book (The Spook's Secret), released this year, as soon as I find it.

I've also read the first two Eragon books. While the fantasy world is very complex and well written (especially taking into account the age of the writer) the magic "technology" is a bit hard to wield. I hope the author refines the way it works in ways that don't turn ridiculous. Christopher Paolini is a young American writer of Italian origins, born from a wealthy family of book editors. He started writing Eragon at 15 and finished it at 19. It should come to no surprise that the book became a huge hit; it is well written, but the marketing of the book was intense and privately funded by the author's family. There is an Eragon movie due to be released in 15 of december this year.

A quick mention of Christopher Stasheff, a rather prolific fantasy writer, who tries a combination of magic and space science-fiction. Unfortunately I couldn't finish his first book (Escape Velocity), the first of the Warlock of Gramarye series, as I found the writing style rather annoying. I've read good reviews about his latest books, though, and I plan on starting a bit further up, maybe with the Rogue Wizard series.

The end. :)