part-time prevaricator
This link opens in a pop-up window
Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.
Following the events in …
If you've enjoyed the Murderbot saga so far, you'll almost certainly enjoy this one too.
Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a …
Athene sets up a city based on Plato's Republic and peoples it with freed slave children, worker robots, and men and women from up and down the timeline. About five years in, Socrates shows up and starts asking some difficult questions.
If you haven't read Plato, that's OK. I haven't, either, and I still understood the book.
One warning: there are a couple scenes of sexual violence, and Jo Walton doesn't shy away from it.
Now I need to read the sequels.
An astonishing, hotly anticipated new novel from the great literary fantasist and creator of Thursday …
This was my first Fforde book, and it's not gonna be the last.
WINNER of the 2021 Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards!
The first full-length novel in Martha …
Gad, I love Murderbot.
I got about 100 pages in but it just wasn't working for me.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story …
I can't tell if all these comma splices slipped past the editor(s) or if they're an intentional part of the style.
"A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small …
A short novel with a lot to think about.
Centuries after the last humans left Earth, the Exodus Fleet is a living relic, a …
This was good. Great character development, interesting ideas, unforeseen consequences—Becky Chambers is a great writer.
Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly …
Very good. I think this is going to reward re-reads.
Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly …
I'm just waiting on my pre-ordered copy to arrive.
Finished the first novel, Soldier of the Mist, last night. Time to start in on Book 2, Soldier of Arete.
It's in the TBR pile; I bought a copy at Audrey's Books in Edmonton
Centuries after the last humans left Earth, the Exodus Fleet is a living relic, a …
It's in the TBR pile; I bought a copy at Audrey's Books in Edmonton
A Kafka-esque travelogue
But then there's always a lot going on in a Gene Wolfe novel. This was my first read, and it's going to require additional read-throughs for me to pick up on some of the puzzles. But even on a surface level, this book is very "all things to all people".
Grafton, an American travel writer (well, that's what he claims to be, and why wouldn't we believe him?), travels to an unnamed country in Eastern Europe, the land across the mountains, intending to write the first travel book about the nation. Very quickly he becomes entangled in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, a haunted house, at least one love triangle, a buried treasure, and a Satanic cult. Strange figures come and go—for example, was that Dracula?
To quote one of the police officers in the first chapter:
"All maps are wrong. If the [enemies] come, they will be lost."
Cugel's Saga: That was a wild, picaresque ride.