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?

Siderite's Razor: "The simplest solution/explanation is often somebody whining"

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos is the film that banks on the hunger of Alchemists all over the world after the Brotherhood series ended. It is not a sequel, just a full feature film happening sometime around the 21st episode of the series. The story is complicated: three nations in turmoils, alchemy of all sorts, chimeras and in the middle of it all: Ed and Al, fighting for what is right.

I liked the story, it hit a lot of sour points of the present, with large nations literally shitting on smaller ones, while they can only maintain their dignity by hanging on old myths that give them moral rights over some God forsaken territory. What I didn't particularly enjoy were the characters and the details of the plot. There were many holes and, in all, no sympathetic characters. The few promising ones were only barely sketched, while the main ones were kind of dull. The animation also felt lazy. If this was supposed to be a send off for the characters, it exceeded its purpose, as now I am considering if I would have even enjoyed a series made in such a lazy way.

So, bottom line, part cash grab, part great concept. A promising film that reminded me of the series I loved so much a decade ago, but failed to rekindle the hunger I felt when the series ended. Goodbye, Elric brothers!

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.

Update: Many people have asked me how can the Body Mass Index be right when people who are very muscular are heavier than fat guys their exact volume. The truth is BMI and any other metric is just a tool to measure your own progress. Another one that I found interesting is the waist size around the belly button. Apparently, there is a nice heuristic that tells you how big it should be: half of your weight. Here is a simple calculator to tell you the optimal weight and waist size given the height and sex:

Height (cm)     Male Female
Optimal weight (kg)
Optimal waist (cm around)

How is that right that a male should have the same waist as a woman when they have 2 points of extra BMI? That's the muscles that you should have :) The rest of the article applies just as well. Use whatever metric you feel comfortable with. Now for the meat of it:

Intro

As many other people, I am not satisfied with my weight. Putting aside the medical implications of having a lot of fat around my internal organs, I am mostly motivated by girls looking at me not as a hunk of a man, but as a fat old guy. I've tried various diets, which all worked in some capacity, but in the end I've just gained back the weight, in something called the Yo-Yo effect. So I've decided to approach the problem in a rational manner.

In order to solve the problem, one needs several pieces of information. First, you need to define the problem. Then you have to measure it, see if you have it or not and in what degree. Only then you can think of solutions, having the tools to measure your progress in applying them. Finally, you have to compare the solutions in terms of effort and results, predicted and actual.

Defining and measuring the problem

So yeah, I am overweight, but how is that a problem? Being overweight or obese may increase the risk of many health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers. There is a whole damn list. In order to define the term overweight, people have used various metrics, the most common being the Body Mass Index or BMI that takes into account just your height and weight. Recently that metric has been updated to include other factors, like age, race and gender. There are a lot of sites on the Internet that compute this.

I am going to eschew the fancy calculators and instead use the BMI calculator from calculator.net. For my input, the desired weight if I were to be smack in the middle of the normal range is 84 kg. That's surely a bit extreme for a guy who is 197 cm tall, but let's go with it. If I had that weight, I would have a BMI of 21.64. As it was a month ago, it was 31, meaning Obese class 1. Well, I don't want to be obese!

But what does make me fat? I mean, if I could change the gravitational pull, like going to Mars, I would be lighter, right? My BMI will lower considerably. But it wouldn't solve my problem which is actually related to how much extra fat I carry around.

Solutions

There are three ways of losing fat:

• Using more energy than you put in
• Tricking the body to not store it and/or eliminate it
• Mechanical removal

For my intents and purposes, I will not discuss the last two. I don't want to have unnecessary surgery performed on me and if I had some medicine to make me eliminate fat, I wouldn't be able to know enough to judge the side effects. Either way, I wouldn't recommend things like that on my blog without being an expert, due to the inherent risks. The thing is that what I am going to propose at the end of this blog post - that you have to read to the end - is that how you lose fat is irrelevant, as long as you do. But I'll get there.

Now, burning fat requires a negative balance of calories. Stuff you put in has to be less than the stuff you use. If you look up how many calories are stored in a kilogram of fat, you will get a huge value: around 7500. To put that in perspective, running or cycling for 10km at a reasonable pace consumes about 500 calories and a whole Domino's pizza is around 2500. Fortunately, there are inefficiencies in processing, storing and using fat as an energy reserve, but we can use this as a comparison.

While healthy and promoting muscle growth and a sure way towards those girls seeing the hunk beneath all that fat, using sport to lose weight seems terribly inefficient. That being said, the long term effects of sport are that your metabolic rate increases. That means you normally burn more energy, even if you are not constantly exercising. However, understanding how much effort to expend, in what way and what are the long term effects pushes me more toward the unknown territory of "maybe it works". Going there would not be rational. So while I will hold sport as an optional nice to have, it is NOT a solution.

If you are wondering how many calories you are using in a day, there is the Harris-Benedict formula that computes the BMR and then you multiply it with your daily activity level. Just to put more nails into the sports coffin, the daily activity level is a number between 1.2 (sedentary) and 1.9 (extra active). So the best you can achieve through sports is a 50% increase in your energy use if you are "extra active". No, thanks! For me, the calorie burn from a month ago was 2678 in order to maintain my weight.

So if I am not burning more energy, I have to input less. The same useful calorie calculator tells me that in order to lose weight I have to eat 1678 calories, so 1000 calories less than what I am burning. That is why a lot of diets are based on "eat only low calorie food that tastes like crap at fixed hours to the second, while avoiding anything that feels like an actual meal", with painstakingly complicated menus of what you are allowed to eat. Well, those are complications I don't need. And this calorie calculation adds even more complexity. I have actually lost 10 kg in a month, so now the daily calorie use is 2522, a sliding value as I lose weight!

How are all these metrics calculated? They take into account some constants, like my height and age and gender, and then some variables, like my weight. In order to affect any of them I need to simply lose weight. I have a simple way of measuring weight - with a scale, I have a target - 84 kilograms, a starting point - 120 kilograms. I also have a solution for decreasing the weight: eat less. This also leads to muscle loss, which CAN be solved by physical exercise, but that's another story.

Possible hurdles

As I said, there are more ways to lose weight, but there are even more ways of eating less. Less carbs, less fat, eat only certain things, avoid certain things, fasting, eat many small meals, eat one enormous meal very rarely, don't drink sugary drinks and alcohol, drink disgusting vegetable concoctions, etc. While trying other diets I've discovered several impediments to losing weight that are based more on human nature than anything else:

• it's much easier to start eating than stopping
• strict schedules constrain my way of life
• diet food is bland at best
• the world is constantly bombarding me with offers to eat and drink
• once I've slipped, it's hard to get back on track
• eating is social
• eating is a habit to pass boredom
• food is a source of comfort
• complex diet systems are easier to cheat and I always find how
• dieting goals can be daunting
• losing weight is slowing down as you go along
• your body learns that they should burn less when you eat less, decreasing the metabolic rate. Your subconscious learns that if it makes you feel miserable enough you will slip and eat

I would like a diet that takes all that into consideration.

Let's start with ambitious dieting goals. Let's say I wanted to lose weight until I got to 84 kilograms (which I will actually never do, because it's insane) meaning I would have planned to lose a third of my weight. Isn't that a little daunting? You start off fast, because the first thing you lose is a little water and you say "wow! 5 kilos in a week, if I keep it up I will lose 40 kilos in two months!" and then the next week you barely lose one kilo (because it was your birthday and you deserved that cake!). Well, not only it's not because of the cake, it's also because of all the other points on the list above. Your weight loss is slowing down, your body is switching to a slower burn, social events are constantly bombarding you with high caloric foods, your diet is depressing you and your normal solution for depression is to drink booze and eat comfort food, once you started with the slice of pizza you couldn't just stop there, and so on and so on. In the end, after two miserable weeks you have all the reasons to stop dieting and continue with your normal routine. Nothing from a normal diet is pushing you towards keeping with it. It's torture.

Yet it all started with an ambitious goal. What if the goal was closer, as in "baby steps"? If I weigh 120 kilos, I can consider a victory getting to 119. An therefore lies my solution.

My take on the solution

My system is simple. You have three parameters: your weight target, your weight decrement and your grace period. Also, choose a dieting method. Any dieting method, and/or even some other solutions like sport, medication or medical procedures. This is how it works for me: my target is 84 kg, my decrement is 1 kg and my grace period is two days, which I intend to increase progressively as it becomes harder to lose weight. The method I chose (because of the first point) is to not eat or drink anything caloric, therefore fasting. I started at 120 kg and with the decrement of 1 kg, I need to not eat until I get to 119 kg. Once I get to that, I can eat. And I mean eat anything, drink anything, as much as I want. After that first meal, I have the grace period until I apply the decrement again.

Here is an example: I started on the first of May. Just by not eating for a day I lost more than 1 kilogram. On the second of May I had 118.5 on the scale. So I ate normal stuff, which made me get to 119.5 the next day, so I didn't eat that day at all. Next day I had 118.1, so I could eat again. On the fourth of may I had 118 kilograms, but the grace period of two days from the first meal had expired. Now the weight I needed in order to be allowed to eat was 117.

What are the advantages? I need a fancy list to enumerate them all:

1. the Yo-Yo effect works for you now! You gain weight, then lose just a little more
2. as long as you get to your target you may continue to keep the diet without the decrement. You can continue your entire life eating whatever you want, as long as you are at your desired weight
3. you don't need to feel guilty about eating what you like and you don't have to stop once you started eating
4. there are no schedules or special menus as long as you are on target
5. you can pause the diet whenever you want. If you go on a vacation and you gain 10 kg, all you need to do is diet until those 10 kilos are gone, and then you are on track again. Same for social occasions, you don't have to be the guy that says no because he's on a diet.
6. the dieting method is irrelevant, as are the various metrics and computations. It's as easy as getting to the next decrement. There are no complexities and no way to cheat
7. it's so simple you can automate it in a computer program or smartphone app
8. you can adapt parameters to your weight loss rate. As long as you plan to lose 10 grams in a billion years, you have a plan and can get on target. Take it as slow as you want, you will get there eventually. In other words, you need to get under a curve on a graph, not feel constantly bad if you have not reached your target yet
9. and this is the best yet: if you eat a lot when you are allowed to, the later dieting will punish you for it. You get punished for indulging yourself and rewarded for losing weight. You are motivated to eat less, with less calories, but you choose it with your own free will. Your body also learns this and starts burning fat to get to the good part

Results

So, I am writing this article a month after I've decided to try this. I started at about 120 kilograms and now I have 107 kilos. It's not a lot, but I haven't felt I was really dieting. I drink a lot of water and I supplement it with vitamins and mineral pills if I have to not eat for a few days. I have the feeling the water is helping the losing of weight as I was usually getting the water only from the food I was eating or Cola and now I drink at least three liters of water a day. Our office is a "pizza office" so I slip often, but I don't feel bad about eating a slice of pizza, it still way under the calorie limit that leads to weight loss. At first I would eat a whole pizza, then fast longer afterwards, but after a few tries, it's much easier to just taste a slice and stop. My body is not usually craving anything and when it does, I just promise myself I will get that as soon as I get on target. And this has the extra advantage of delaying gratification. Often, when I can eat whatever I want, I remember the list of things that grabbed my attention and most of it is not appealing anymore. I started cooking weird stuff, just because while I am not eating I get ideas of what I would really like to eat when I get the chance.

In fact, I am starting a diet every two days or so. I lose a kilo, the diet is over, then I start another. In total I am reducing my calorie intake, but only by eating less of what I was already enjoying. I occasionally ride a bike or eat stuff that fires the metabolism up, but those are just extras. Even if I am allowed to, I stopped drinking so much Coca Cola. Strangely, I thought that it would taste better after a long pause, but it's just the normal aromatic sugar water taste.

Now, I doubt that eating once in two or three days works for everyone. Do whatever is easier for you: don't eat sugar, set your decrement to 100 grams, do those only meat things, eat only leafy veggies, whatever! For me, not eating is much easier than eating and stopping or eating bland things. I need my sausages and pizza and food that is so spicy that you need to keep eating it lest your mouth catches fire and alcohol and fizzy drinks and all the unhealthy crap that people usually eat. This doesn't stop me from eating that, but it slowly erodes my need to. It's an interesting side effect that I intend to explore further. Also, while there are reports of apparent health benefits for intermittent fasting, they have no part in my decision to do the diet the way that I am doing it.

So what is my real target? I am still deciding. I started with 97 kg just because I was expecting to give up around 110. Now I am thinking I haven't weighed 97 kg since high school and then I kinda felt I was too fat. Who knows. The beauty of this is that the graph stays there. Even if I stop for a few years, it just patiently waits for me to get under it. I feel no pressure which is more than I can say about any other diet I've tried or heard of.

Other links

I am not the only one saying that fasting is good and apparently the term has been increasing in popularity and study exposure. A web page that seems to list various sources for benefits of fasting is The Benefits Of Fasting

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.

Whenever I am trying to determine the translation for a plant or animal, I go through two steps: first I look the name up in the language that I know, in order to get the Latin name, usually from Wikipedia; second I look the Latin name with site:ro in the query or whatever other language I am interested in. This way I get information about both language and the characteristics of the species. But how did we come to have this universal naming of living things and the single one used throughout the biological sciences? Even the British use it!



It's thanks to this guy called Carl Linnaeus (or Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnæus, it was a long time ago and they were playing with names back then, heh heh), a Swedish biologist and physician. He devised around 1750 what we call the binomial nomenclature, in which any living species name would be encoded by two Latin parts, the first, also known as the generic name, would be the genus and the second, also known as specific name, identifies the species in the genus. Now you also know how the words generic and specific came by, maybe :). To be fair, his work is based on Gaspard Bauhin's, who lived in the 1600s. Now, the words could come from any language, you just have to spell them in Latin.

While the system is rational and helpful, there are peculiarities in it that are worth attention. For example, how come a lot of species use vulgaris as the specific name? Because it means "common" in Latin, so for example Beta Vulgaris is the common beet. What other specific names are there? How about species where the generic and the specific names are the same? They are called tautonyms or, later, tautonymous names, of which some are funny enough like Gorilla gorilla gorilla (yes, three names, hold on, I'll get there). It's like saying "a man's man" :) A bonus fun thing related to this, botanical nomenclature forbids tautonymous names, defined as having identical generic and specific names. However, if you spell them differently, even if they mean the same thing, that's allowed, so you get stuff like Picea omorica, which means pine in Latin and Serbian. For zoological names, tautonyms are allowed, though.

There is more. How about the three part names? You can get stuff like "Something orother Linnaeus 1753" and "Another thing (Linnaeus 1753)". They both mean that the guy who first named the species was Linnaeus, but the second form indicates that the name has changed since first named. There are obvious reasons for that, as the taxonomy of species was first based on physical similarity, while more recently it is based on genetic similarity. One species might appear to be part of an existing genus just to find out later that its genes are of a completely different origin. Another reason for a third part of a species name is the trinomial nomenclature, which introduces the concept of taxon. The system is used to mean different things in botany and zoology, since it is governed by different organizations and you know, they just have to differ in opinions. How Linneaus must roll in his grave. Anyway, taxa are so vague that not even the same body of people agree on what the rules are on that.

Let's return to binomial nomenclature for a bit, though. I've stumbled upon the specific name officinalis. Linnaeus gave the specific name "officinalis", in the 1735 (1st Edition) of his Systema Naturae, to plants (and sometimes animals) with an established medicinal, culinary, or other use. That's a very interesting category and it endures in the age of medicinal pills created in labs by big pharmaceutical companies. When you look for the name of a plant, you usually get some local name that then became the general term for that plant in a language, but when you look at the Latin name, you understand that it has medicinal or culinary properties. Funny enough, the name comes from officina, which is the name of a building attached to a monastery where the monks prepare their medicine, but in modern Italian it means workshop. Also check out this paper: On "officinalis" the names of plants as one enduring history of therapeutic medicine.

There is so much to discuss on this subject that it would make too long an entry and I lack the necessary time. Even the few tidbits of information here are taken mostly from Wikipedia. Imagine digging a little further... it's a huge rabbit hole that holds a lot of promise. If you are the kind of guy that plays RPGs and takes a Rogue character so you can sneak past enemies and collect flora to make potions, then you should really dig in here :) Or if you are interested in the lost medicinal and culinary qualities of plants and animals. I hope this gives you a nice start for something really interesting. Last fun fact, the winner of Wikipedia's influence list in 2014 was Carl Linnaeus. The most influential person on content in Wikipedia. Not some rock star, not an American president or British writer, but a 18 century Swedish biologist who gave us a way to name things.

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.