I tried. I really tried. I was even going to finish the book, since I've abandoned a few in the last few weeks, but I just couldn't go on. It was clear that none of the major story arcs were going to have any closure by the end of Elvenbane and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. It was trope after trope after trope, a female lead who seems to have no flaws and always falls on her feet - mostly because of innate attributes or luck, mustache-twirling villains, everybody is oppressing women and young ones in particular, dragons, elves, human mages, even a brother-sister infatuation, to just catch every single cliché. The world building was shallow and the focus of the book was instead on ideas on how the world should be, what is fair, who is attractive and who is not and so on, their feelings.

  Basically, this is a young adult fantasy from the '90s: too old to face Internet scorn and too new to be actual fantasy and not derivative corporate bookstore slop.

  Not even sure who wrote what. The book I have says it's written by Mercedes Lackey. The online says it's Andre Norton, sometimes with Mercedes Lackey, both women, only Norton was 80 when the book was published. Honestly, I don't care.

  The problem I have most is that the plot is inconsistent. I don't want to get into details, but there are many jarring events that just contradict whatever happened before. Simple example: the magical Mary Sue teleports with her mind a big deer for food. Apparently you can do that, but the result is instant death for the animal. At no point in the book does she do that with any of her enemies. But there are bits where she smugly teaches people what they could do with the little magic they know. 

  Bottom line: the occasional bright spots were not worth slogging to finish this book. It's derivative, tropey, amateurish and could have been edited to half the length. Feels like a publishing house money scheme.

  For my review of the same book in 2019, go here.

  Imagine a project that needs an underground group of dedicated scientists to even exist as a concept. They would have to lobby in secret, fight vindictive NASA administrators, tremendous bureaucracy and extremely tight and political budgets that change randomly to even get the concept noticed. A combination of very custom marketing has to be employed to get key people on your side. And then... you have to work on it, through changing administrations and conditions, for more than a decade, to make it happen. And then, you risk losing it all at launch in a single moment, or break down during its path or even hit something after achieving all mission objectives but before sending back the data. Oh, did I mention that it has to do everything by itself, because the speed of light lag between the probe and yourself is four hours?

  Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto is the story of New Horizons, an unlikely first mission to Pluto and very likely the last mission to Pluto, perhaps even the last to reach that distance from the Sun. It is important to understand the mindset of the people working on this, the real scientists and engineers who are masochistic enough to work in these conditions. Alan Stern did lead the project with close friend David Grinspoon writing the book based on their many interviews.

  It's a really useful and inspirational book. It takes you out of the stupid world of news cycle monkey politics because, even if it features its own brand of politics, it remains always in the background, the true focus staying on the purpose of the mission, the passion of the people involved, the true measure of humanity. It gives one hope that we're not all terrible. For that alone it should get maximum rating.

  But the book is also well written, easy to read and understand. Recommended to all of the Trekkies who didn't succumb to the "Star Trek is Anglo-Saxon capitalist propaganda" downers, but also to all who dream of something better for themselves and the world.

  Vicious could have been an easy to read book if not for all the flashbacks and time jumps. Linear storytelling is a forgotten art these days. The plot reminded me of Powers - the PlayStation Network TV series - the most, with some aspects of The Reckoners and Wild Cards sprinkled in. It's about EOs (extraordinaries), the authors name for "metahumans" or "powered people" in a world that doesn't seem to acknowledge their existence, yet the "recipe" for their creation is quite simple and would happen to a lot of people.

  V.E. Schwab's writing is good, it's probably what I enjoyed the most, making it an easy read, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed the book so much, mostly because of its characters. You've got the sort of rivalry that turns best friends into bitter enemies with an epic showdown at the end. The rest of the characters are clearly there to just support, even if their own stories should have been just as interesting. The book tries to go for dark, but at very few moments do I feel that the protagonists are actually villains or that their trauma is explored to its potential.

  As for the powers they exhibit, they are interestingly low key, but with huge potential, yet they are also not explored nearly enough. Being the first book in a series, this can be easily remedied later, though. It's just that this is a big and common problem for most sci-fi of the genre: you either try for a bit of special, which you then use at maximum while readers cry out that it's not grandiose enough, or a lot of special, which leads to all kinds of scenarios and ideas that you can't possibly cover in a satisfactory way.

  Bottom line: a decent start for a superhero series, a bit silly, a bit dark, a bit low key, but showing promise, good writing. I don't think I will read the rest, mainly because I think I can read something more entertaining.

  I seem to be on a Did Not Finish spree, hope it's not me. Am I getting too picky? Am I turning into a snob? Will I start explaining how to read James Joyce in my blog? Hope not.

  A Darkling Sea felt so puerile that I didn't get to 10% of it. The whole idea is that three alien races (of varying technological prowess) meet on a deep ocean planet. Nothing in the book indicates James L. Cambias knows what the challenges of deep sea (or space) exploration are, or how to create characters, how to build worlds or how to generate interest. It reminded me of how I was writing in high school: all grand ideas, but without anything backing them up.

  And it's strange, I must have heard some really good things about this guy, I've got two books from him. I doubt I will try to read the other one.

  Pivoting from the Lovecraftian to James Bond, The Jennifer Morgue, second installment in the Laundry Files series, was... boring. A lot of self absorbed interest in the bureaucratic minutiae of government agencies, a lot of technobabble that did not forward the plot, some weird interpersonal scenarios that humans would never go with. It felt like a Tolkien possessed computer programmer trying to reinvent Fleming.

  There is a gap between my general perception of Charles Stross and what I felt reading his stuff. Since Accelerando, which I've read a looong time ago and barely remember, I've always had the impression that Stross is a great writer with amazing ideas. However I've looked at my ratings and reviews for his books and the vast majority of them were average. The evidence forces me to downgrade him as an author.

  The problem with this book is that it's not as funny or intelligent as it seems to believe itself to be. The snarky protagonist being the dunce gets old fast and the obvious twists at the end are telegraphed chapters before. There are no real characters in the story, either, just roles, which makes some sense in the context, but it's also because the writing is mediocre. Most of the action and behavior of characters twist uncomfortably to fit the narrative that Stross forced upon the book. So, great job, it's not Saturn's Children - that starts one way and ends another, it's not Accelerando - a patchwork book made of separate stories blended together, yet it feels worse, it feels fake.

  And it's a long book, too. The decision to slap a short story on to this book plus a long dissertation on the history of Ian Fleming and James Bond did not help with that.

  Bottom line: clearly not my style of a book. I enjoyed the first one in the series, but I am sure I don't want to continue with The Laundry Files and perhaps not anything else from Charles Stross, as much as it pains me to admit it.

  Sangu Mandanna's amateurish writing style put me completely off, this book is like written by a child. I am not going to continue reading this. The story is as shallow as the characters, the worldbuilding is terrible, I couldn't care less about anything. How A Spark of White Fire got to a four star trilogy starter on Goodreads is beyond me.

  This is a Young Adult book, featuring a young servant girl, who is secretly also a queen and protected by a god in a science-fantasy world of space ship wars and galactic empires. Only the secret is out in about a chapter and then it's all just... talking and people acting in ridiculously implausible ways. But at least it didn't offend me in any way, it wasn't a bait and switch, it wasn't agenda driven much, it was just a regular book that sucked.

  I don't know how I got to have Smilla's Sense of Snow on my reading list, but Wow! is it a good book! The whole story revolves around a half Inuit half Danish woman who is trying to understand why a small child died. As we follow this Nordic Noir plot, we learn a lot about the Greenlander culture, its interaction with their Danish European colonizers, the way people live in the "true north". The writing and the characters are also delightful. I loved this book.

  Peter Høeg is writing a stoic, kind of psychologically stuck, woman, her icy heart - tempered by the teachings of her native Greenlander mother and the brilliantly intellectual but emotionally weak Danish father - gets softened by the arrival of an Inuit boy at her doorstep. She doesn't want to warm up to him, but he becomes almost a surrogate child to her. Then he dies. The rest of the book is Smilla making sense of his death through a labyrinth of government corruption and overreach, shady characters that almost all prove to be not what they seem and the hard science of ice.

  I loved the writing, careful to detail, always full of hints about people's inner motivations or some cultural ideas or some scientific knowledge, but that never felt shoved down your throat; they are just there for the taking. A Danish buffet. Smilla's sense of ice is not really used much in the book, the entire concept is more of a metaphor for the many types of hardness inside her and their potential to melt. It's a long book and sometimes it meanders towards a destination or conclusion, but the journey is almost always interesting and bringing a little bit more insight into the Danish mindset.

  Also, it was kind of apropos to read about a Greenlander character right when a deranged American president had dreams of buying the territory from Denmark (or else...). It's immediately apparent that even for a culture of social democrats like the Danes, annexing a territory already occupied by native populations goes the same way as for any other conqueror before them. The forced education at the threat of military power and cultural erasure, the pillaging of the land, the brutal authoritarian control, the way people are being swept away before the tide of progress.

  I loved reading the book and I liked Smilla's character. Some things were pushed a little too far towards the end, but overall I almost couldn't put the book down. There is also a film adaption, featuring Julia Ormond of all people, from 1997, and I am going to watch it as soon as possible. Highly recommended.

  My Year of Rest and Relaxation features a young female New Yorker in a deep depression that she herself does not recognize as such. The reasons are not that important, instead it's the fact that she can't make herself care about anything and all she wants is just to sleep and be left alone while she heavily medicates herself. Her best friend and serious codependent person can't make herself to let her be.

  I really liked the Ottessa Moshfegh's writing and I was able to like even the protagonist, who should be in fact extremely unsympathetic, but I warmed up to her somehow. Think of Camus' The Stranger or No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai and you get kind of the same vibe. The main character is not so much a sociopath, as she is deeply depressed. She might have been and could yet turn out to be a normal person with normal feelings, but in the "year of relaxation" she is just ... down. Only being able to access her introspective thoughts makes her likeable.

  Bottom line: great writing, an interesting character, not much of a story. People seem to either hate or love this book. I liked it a lot.

  I will go ahead and say The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu is an abject failure at best and a complete fraud at worst. I have no problem with any writer creating and publishing something. They may be good, they may be bad, it's all about how what they write makes me feel. But in this case any such feelings were drowned by outrage because most, if not all of the stories in this book, have nothing to do with Lovecraft or the mythos developed by his writer followers.

  I feel I know what Lovecraftian means. People flaunt the term "cosmic horror", but most of H.P.'s stories were not about something truly cosmic, just incomprehensible - worse, unacceptable - by the protagonist. And then these young people come around and say "Oh, I know, I will take what's good from these stories: the monsters, the supernatural, the feeling of unease and mind breaking power of finding something truly alien and ignore the bad things: the entitlement, the racism, the feeling of dethronement" and they do achieve something, but it has nothing to do with Lovecraft.

  Lovecraft himself felt he was above the average man, yet felt incapable of accepting the changes the world was forcing on him. That's where the horror comes from. You can never take a regular person, add a supernatural element, drop a Chutlhu in there and then assume that's cosmic horror. No, that's just normal stuff, slightly elevated by the occult. You need to start from a sense of entitlement to achieve the fall required by what Lovecraft was describing. You take that away and it's the very opposite of Lovecraftian. It may be good fantasy or good horror, but nothing to do with the man.

  This book is worse. There were stories that were barely fantastic, not horror at all. Some had nothing to do with anything, but some cultists that believed in some member of Chtulhu's pantheon - and we know that because they use their name, once, out of context. It's not even that the stories were bad, it's just that they cannot in good conscience be called "New Lovecraftian". They don't add anything to Lovecraft's body of work and they are barely influenced by it, if at all.

  Bottom line: it's notoriously difficult to bring Lovecraft to modern audiences, but just slapping his name on random stuff is disgraceful. This doesn't even try. It's the book equivalent of corporate streaming TV series.

  Michael Mersault did a much better job in The Silent Hand that in the previous book of the series. Character development, world building, pacing, action, writing, everything is better. It's not perfect, but by the end of the book I despaired the third book is not available yet. Hopefully I will remember to read it when it does get published.

  Anyway, I believe the author planned to place Inga front and center, while Saef was going to take a more minor role. However you can't do that when your lead is the right hand of the guy, so we got flashbacks. A lot of them. I wasn't bothered that much, because I wanted to know where Inga came from and to see more of the world that Mersault created. Still, all that backstory ate from the actual story, which made the book feel at the same time too long and too short. Just when things were getting fun, the book ended.

  Bottom line, I am curious how this will all turn out, yet at the rate at which things are being revealed, I don't know how Mersault will be able to tie it all up in just one more book.

  There is a type of sci-fi that I will probably never hate, even if it's corny as hell, and that's space opera. Spaceships, interesting yet cliché characters, military honor, strong men, sexy women, that kind of stuff. Yet, having just read another underwhelming military space opera, I was not happy to start reading The Deep Man, as I thought it would be more of the same. Maybe less. I mean, it started with a human space empire, nobility families bound by honor, space navies and so on, but focused so much on the various aristocratic rituals in the beginning that I thought it's going to be just as average, only more boring.

  But as I was reading the book I started to warm up to the it and the writing also improved, becoming more focused on action, story and character development. I enjoyed it enough that I immediately started looking for the sequel - which is not easy, because apparently no one heard of this. Let's face it, it's a fun book, nothing great, but it reminded me of David Feintuch and a little of Herbert by some of the ideas inside.

  What I didn't like was the title. It refers to a sort of psychic conditioning of nobles to find "the real man" inside them, kind of like the Gom Jabbar trial in Dune. So when I saw that, I was really looking forward to some form of exploration of the strength of will and identity. Only most of the book is not about that at all, so the title felt misleading. Also it started slowly enough that I almost didn't want to continue reading.

  Some interesting ideas in the book, though, barely touched upon yet. Already mentioned the Deep Man, but also the system of government divides the population into full citizens and demi-citizens. The full citizens have to pass some tests and fulfil some conditions to demonstrate they can take responsibility for their actions and shoulder the risks of true freedom. The demi-citizens are not slaves or anything, they are just protected by the state from themselves and others. For example two citizens can declare a duel and fight to the death for some perceived honor slight, yet a citizen cannot harm a demi-citizen. Same for drugs or anything that might be perceived as dangerous or risky.

  I found the idea fascinating. Basically what we now do with minors, only just passing a certain age is not the (only) requirement. Conversely, it is taken for granted that a citizen is fully responsible for their actions, but also more free to take them because of it. And it's not just empty elitism I am taking about, because the book also explores the abuses and decadent aristocratic corruption that comes from it. If you think about it, isn't the same with society now? Adults being complacent, corrupt and uncaring while holding all the power and kids ineffectual protesters against a world they don't yet fully understand?

  Michael Mersault is a competent writer and I felt I knew where his influences for this book came from - and I approve. This is one of those books that you read for fun, but it hides some unexpected depth from place to place and I enjoyed that.

  The Cruel Stars is a typical military space adventure, complete with reluctant military commanders, gruff retired Scottish admirals speaking with an accent, space pirates, space royalty and nobility, princesses, space Nazis, snarky AIs and criminals with hearts of gold. It's the first of a series, naturally, which means that even if you enjoy it, you will not feel you've reached the end of the story.

  John Birmingham's writing is competent, without being anything special. The plot is bit inconsistent technically, though, with technology that sounds futuristic, but is basically what we have now with whistles and bells, and which is used differently depending on what the story requires. The world building is minimal, with some hints on how the different human empires work, but no details.

  Also, no aliens, yet. The book starts with hints of an old and nebulous threat to humanity, that one assumes some exotic alien race, but it's quickly revealed to be an AI phobic and race purist republic of humans.

  The book was good for a palate cleanser, although it was a bit too long for my taste, and as fun as it was, I won't be continuing to read the series. It's space pulp, basically.

  Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a really good work of writing. Maybe sometimes inconsistent, like Marlon James wrote different parts of the story, then stitched them together, but it is a huge book with a lot of archetypal African tribal mythology, a lot of symbolism that probably flew over my head and complex world with interesting magic and creatures and vibrant characters.

  At first I was a little annoyed. The main character is this African boy who becomes a man. He's always boasting and challenging people in this strange literary kind of Black English and he's also sexually weird... I didn't know where it was going. But in my head I was imagining this annoying little kid from the Galvanize video Krumping around. I don't have anything about Black folk, but I am triggered by loud mouth assholes.

  And then it hit me. This is like an African Conan the Barbarian. Only it never bothered me when it was Arnold in a Dark Ages kind of setting and speaking Austrian English. Am I racist? I didn't think so. Anyway, the character never actually grew on me. I followed his journey with great interest, but he remained annoying through sheer will power :) 

  What I loved was the world. A lot of cities and tribes and witches and ways of looking at life. It felt like Iron John, but written by a Jamaican Lev Grossman, A lot of archetypes who make the hero grow. Sometimes the opposite. Not a typical hero's journey and always surprising, which makes me consider reading the whole series, but I also felt it took me a looong time to finish the book and I am not sure I want to invest that kind of time in the continuation of the trilogy.

  Bottom line: this takes some effort, but it's worth it. I feel it was the most different book I've read in quite a while. I don't know if I am going to read the next books, though.

  Metamorph is a fun little book that doesn't seem written in 2016 at all. It features what are basically fearless space pirates with a heart of gold, energetic young people living their lives to the fullest and even some romantic tension between a man and a woman who mutually appreciate each other. The technology is basic, the politics and the portrayal of alien contact are naive and overall it's all a hopeful lively adventure that throws back to the age of Star Trek Deep Space 9 or maybe Firefly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this book was a repurposed DS9 fan fiction draft.

  Chris Reher is a decent writer, I can't complain. The characters are quite basic, though, they only reveal themselves through their actions and occasional thoughts, so you either like them or ignore them. Luckily, no flashbacks in the book, which is a relief. Better to have cardboard characters than flesh them out with past histories no one cares about.

  The plot is classic space adventure: aliens, pew pew, clumsy plots in barely built worlds, a lot of action. I realize that when I write it like that it doesn't feel like I endorse it, but it was actually a pleasant read. It wasn't great, though, by any means. It's pulp: if you go in without expectations you're going to have a good time.

  Bottom line: when the book ended, I kind of wanted more, like a light sci-fi series that I am curious to continue watching, even if it's not great. I probably won't, I have too many books in my list, but maybe give it a try when you don't feel like a book that requires effort to read.

  I am not a big Friends fan. I mean, I know of the show, who doesn't, but I never got into it. Likewise with any Matthew Perry movies: maybe fun, but not memorable. You can then induce that I didn't know about his personal life or his addiction issues either and you would be right. Therefore when reading Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, I was just a guy reading what another guy had to say about his life. And it was brutal, I kid you not, but it wasn't that much fun.

  Coming from a self proclaimed funny guy, the book is very serious and direct. It focuses primarily on an honest depiction of his inner demons and the alcohol and drug addiction plaguing him. It goes through successful TV series, movies and celebrity relationships almost like they're afterthoughts in the big terrible story of his need for attention and drugs. I understand why one won't joke and jest about something so terrifying and personal, but it makes for a rather insipid reading.

  That's why I personally liked the book, appreciating Matthew's honesty and openness a lot, but I didn't love it.

  I guess not knowing anything about the guy also made me oblivious of the fact that he had died, of ketamine overdose, just a year after he published this book. One quote stuck with me: "I was never suicidal [...] But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept."