3/11/2010

3/11/2010

chris keating: tekgrrl. a j menden.
1. verdict: ---
2. review:
  
  "this book is fucking awful." this is another train station book store
  find. evidently a waste of paper if ever there was one. i don't have
  much to write down about this book, the synopsis was garbled and
  bizarre, and he really hated this book.
chris ege: in great waters. kit whitfield.
1. verdict: meh.
2. review:
  
  this is a mermaid book. no shit. you might think this is playing off
  the current trend of romantic vampires, romantic werewolves, etc., but
  it's not. it's just basically straight political fantasy. so it's the
  16th century or whatever, it's england, and for the past several
  hundred years the monarchies of europe have all been these
  mermen. (who knew?) they appear in venice in the 8th century and,
  uh... one demands to be there king. (josh finds the book very soft,
  and likes the typeface.) so the story is told from the point of view
  of two half-deepsman bastards, and it begins to sounds quite
  tedious. chris confirms that it is indeed tedious. there's a lot of
  stuff about growing up under water and moving to the land, and there's
  a lot of stuff about cultural differences. "it had good parts and bad
  parts, i wouldn't recommend it, but it wasn't tekgrrl."
chad: contagious. scott sigler.
1. verdict: +
2. review:
  
  "i liked this better than the first one." wow, this is great. in the
  last book, the football dude killed his best friend and cut his own
  dick off, but they saved him. in this book, he's the hero who's
  leading the cia and the military (!) around and doing all this
  stuff. this is is "a lot more like 24 than the last one," it's really
  tightly plotted, i guess, and he tells us all about it, some
  5-year-old girl who "becomes the mother brain", i dunno, i'm losing
  track again. the action climaxes in detroit. i guess they had to nuke
  it. it seems like this guy is into some pretty bad stuff, and it turns
  chad off. a credit to chad's moral stature, if you ask me.
marko: the name of the wind. patrick rothfuss.
1. verdict: ++
2. review:
  
  this is a really, really good book. "when people speak, they speak the
  way real people speak. that doesn't happen in most of the books i
  read." we've reviewed this book a few times, so i dunno, not much new
  to say. but people really seem to like this book. (josh: what was your
  favorite scene? marko: i think... learning to play the lute. josh:
  that's the part that made me cry.)
adam: black man. richard morgan.
1. verdict: meh.
2. review:
  
  this is the same book as "thirteen", which marko reviewed awhile
  back. this guy seems rather obsessed with genetics, and more
  specifically macho stuff. "basically, it's jason bourne done with
  genetics, rather than with brainwashing." spends way too much time
  talking about gender relations and women's place in the world, and
  it's pretty offensive. and of course the main character is
  black. anyway, adam found it pretty distasteful. it was enjoyable, and
  pretty well done, but he can't really say he liked it either.
interlude.

jeff regales us with tales of his recent reading. lots of alastair
reynolds, name of the wind, elric, abercrombie. sounds like he's been
busy and enjoying his selections. it's nice to have jeff with us once
again!
matt: transition. iain banks.
1. verdict: ++
2. review:
  
  chad read it and reviewed it last time. i liked it, too. recommended.
josh: peacekeeper. laura e reeve.
1. verdict: meh
2. review:
  
  this book is straight to mass-market, $6.99 at borders. another debut
  novel, from an ex-air force officer. he has mixed feelings about this
  book. he thinks it was probably pretty bad. all the scenes that he
  figures were supposed to be important just kind of went by without him
  caring too much. the writing sounds pretty awful. but, he says, it was
  a page-turner. he thinks it was bad, but... "i'm not convinced i won't
  buy the next one."
chris ege: the windup girl. paolo baigalupi.
1. verdict: ++
2. review:
  
  set in the unspecified future, maybe a few hundred years, in
  thailand. man has depleted pretty much all our resources, and there
  has been a series of catastrophes with the food supply. there's a
  story, but it isn't as important as the world. chris was skeptical of
  the premise, but he really liked this book. recommended.
marko: best served cold. joe abercrombie.
1. verdict: ++
2. review:
  
  much better than the trilogy. he liked the fact that it's a revenge
  story, he liked the fact that the person seeking revenge gets sick of
  the whole thing halfway through. nobody gets redeemed. it felt like
  the world was much bigger than these few characters, which was good.
paul: last argument of kings. joe abercrombie.
1. verdict: +
2. review:
  
  via email: Last Argument of Kings was a very good finish to the First
  Law, though I didn't realize it until very near the end. For a couple
  hundred pages there I thought Abercrombie might be going soft on me
  and was getting a little irritated. Bayaz was getting set up to be the
  typical fantasy messiah for a couple books there, and though it seemed
  clear enough that he had another agenda in the first book, that kinda
  got pushed away in the second. Then he crushes Jezal's will utterly,
  sticking with the corruption of power theme, and I was cheered
  tremendously by that dark turn. Also, even though Terez is nasty and
  unsympathetic, what Glokta does to her at the end is unconscionable.
paul: light. m john harrison.
1. verdict: -
2. review:
  
  via email: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. chad disagrees.
that's all, folks.