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Zelse Locked account

zelse@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 months, 1 week ago

Mid-30s, he/him, Canada. I enjoy horror, sci-fi, fantasy, humour, weird fiction, and some scientific and political texts as well as humour and the occasional mystery or queer text. Sometimes I read stuff that is rather against my own politics out of curiosity, so please don't take reading as endorsement of the views.

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Zelse's books

2024 Reading Goal

40% complete! Zelse has read 4 of 10 books.

Michael Reaves, Neil Gaiman, James Lowder, John Pelan, Brian Stableford, David Ferguson, Poppy Z. Brite, Steven-Elliot Altman, Steve Perry, Elizabeth Bear, Barbara Hambly: Shadows Over Baker Street (Paperback, 2005, Del Rey) 4 stars

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is among the most famous literary figures of all time. …

Review of 'Shadows Over Baker Street' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I always enjoy little anthologies like this, and it was well worth acquiring via interlibrary loan. If you enjoy Lovecraft and Doyle, you will like the stories. The authors run in interesting directions with the content, with some preferring Holmes to Lovecraft and vice-versa, but not one of the stories dragged or was unenjoyable.

Gary Paulsen: Brian's Winter (1996, Laurel-Leaf) 3 stars

In Hatchet, 13-year-old Brian Robeson learned to survive alone in the Canadian wilderness, armed only …

Review of "Brian's Winter" on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A bit funnier than the first book, which I appreciated - and manages to not feel too much like merely more of the same. I read it on a whim, but I don't regret the hour or so it took.

Gary Paulsen: Hatchet (Hardcover, 2000, Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books) 3 stars

Brian Robison, a teenage boy struggling through his parents divorce, is flying up north to …

Review of 'Hatchet' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I re-read this on a whim when my brother mentioned he was teaching it to his class; I'd read this when I was a child. It's still a fun little story, worth the 30 or 40 minutes it took to read.

Dennis E. Taylor: All These Worlds (2017, Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency) 4 stars

"Being a sentient spaceship really should be more fun. But after spreading out through space …

Review of 'All These Worlds' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A good end to an enjoyable series (though I think there's now a fourth entry on Audible?). Just enough pathos to allow a bit of catharsis and give the story some extra punch.

Dennis E. Taylor: For We Are Many (2017, Worldbuilders Press) 4 stars

Bob Johansson didn’t believe in an afterlife, so waking up after being killed in a …

Review of 'For We Are Many' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A good second entry; quality is about the same, though this book was definitely a bit more melancholy. Much like Lord of the Rings, this feels like one bigger book split into 3 than 3 books separated -- but that's not a bad thing.

Eric A. Posner: Radical markets (2018) 4 stars

"Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution …

Review of 'Radical markets' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

The main problem with this book is that it tends to look at evil, and rather than eradicating the evil, seeks to feed it in such a way that they hope it will be less awful. The immigration system is fraught with inefficiencies? Allow any person to import an immigrant labour and pay them less than the minimum wage as an indentured servant - it's ethical(TM) because this is already a thing under au pair visas in the US and the Arab world. Data logging by companies is intrusive and makes them powerful enough to manipulate democracies? Make them pay you in exchange for even greater intrusions. I think the most damning illustration of this is how often variations of this phrase show up in the book: "[the thing we just proposed] might be compared to slavery, wrongly in our opinion".

The authors are fundamentally unwilling to accept what their …

Dennis E. Taylor: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (EBook, 2021, Fanzon) 4 stars

“Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life …

Review of 'Мы – Легион. Мы – Боб' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I actually really enjoyed this one. I'd put it in the same category as something like "A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet": a quick, nice read. Nothing too challenging idea-wise, and it's not going to win any awards for innovation in the genre, but I don't regret reading it. A great book for a vacation read, I think, and the different Bobs let it sample a couple of different genres in a neat enough way.

Yukito Ayatsuji: The Decagon House murders (2015) 3 stars

Students from a university mystery club decide to visit an island which was the site …

Review of 'The Decagon House murders' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I really enjoyed this one, from the pacing to the atmosphere to the characters. I was worried that this was going to hew too closely to the And Then There Were None formula, but was delighted that it simultaneously did and did not. It's great when in hindsight you can see the clues you noticed and the ones you did not. The great shame was finding out that this book is part of a series with ten others...only one of which has been translated, though a second one is coming out in May.

Seishi Yokomizo: Death on Gokumon Island (Paperback, 2022, Pushkin Vertigo) 4 stars

Kosuke Kindaichi arrives on the remote Gokumon Island bearing tragic news – the son of …

Review of 'Death on Gokumon Island' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

An enjoyable read. Nothing amazing, but he paints a decent picture of his setting. At times it got a bit melodramatic, but then so did Columbo, and Kosuke Kindaichi is basically Japanese Columbo by the author's own admission, so I can't really call that a fault.