You know that feeling you get when you finish a really great book and you want to shout about it from the highest mountain and tell everyone you know You know that feeling you get when you finish a really great book and you want to shout about it from the highest mountain and tell everyone you know to read it? Yeah, that's me right now.
The Wool Omnibus is *the* way to read this series of stories. Once I read Wool #1, I couldn't stop. Good thing I bought the omnibus! Wool is about the people who live in a sealed silo that goes for more than a hundred levels below Earth because the surface of Earth is toxic and uninhabitable.
What happens when these people discover the history of Earth and how they came to be where they were isn't surprising to a frequent reader of post-apocalyptic fiction, but what makes Wool so great is that I felt almost everything the characters felt. I felt such hope at the end of the first chapter, just as the main character of that chapter felt his heart fill with hope. I felt the surprise and horror when another character discovered a terrible truth. I felt panicked and anxious when another character almost drowned. It was quite a roller-coaster.
I also loved that Wool has one of the strongest female protagonists I'd read recently. She's a mechanical engineer, brave, quick on her feet, compassionate, logical, just all around awesome. Sci-fi needs more leading women like Jules....more
Masterful and wonderful to read. Like a good scotch, The Tender Bar should not be rushed through and instead, savored slowly and thoroughly. Also likeMasterful and wonderful to read. Like a good scotch, The Tender Bar should not be rushed through and instead, savored slowly and thoroughly. Also like scotch, it took me a couple of exposures to The Tender Bar before I started liking it.
The first exposure was when my husband and I were researching bars we should visit while in Tokyo. During my googling, I found a few mentions of this book but read a blurb about it and thought it sounded boring, so I let it slip my mind. In Tokyo, we visited an eponymous bar on the fifth floor of an anonymous looking office building. (Coincidentally, the master bartender who works at this bar shares the same first-letter, lastname combination as a former colleague at Goodreads.) At this bar I had one of the most expertly shaken drinks of my life. All subsequent drinks would be compared to the ones I consumed at the Tender Bar.
My second exposure was after I had read The Great Gatsby for the first time since highschool. The book that I only thought of as a requirement during my first reading revealed its subtleties and sad themes during my second reading. After finishing the book, I wanted more books like it and consulted some reading lists online for comparable books. The Tender Bar was mentioned and I added it to my to-read list. It wasn’t till a year later, when someone on a gaming forum mentioned the book, that I finally got around to reading it.
Although I categorized the book as a bildungsroman, it’s less of a coming of age as it is a coming to terms book. Moehringer crafts a Dickensian (I hope you like that word because it comes up more than a handful of times in the book) tale about the men at a bar. Like life, it’s not any one story or experience or even one person at the bar that changes the boy, but a culmination of events and disappointments that pushes him into being the type of man that makes his mother proud.
The Tender Bar is the type of novel I’d want to read by the fire with a comforting glass of scotch. It’s heartbreaking at times, but there’s a certain hopeful undercurrent to the writing. Even in the sections where Moehringer is an adult, it was easy to see that he was still very much still a boy....more
This collection of Chiang's short stories should be on every science fiction fan's reading list. My boyfriend, Life changing. Mind blowing. Wonderful.
This collection of Chiang's short stories should be on every science fiction fan's reading list. My boyfriend, who doesn't like science fiction, even liked this.
Chiang's writing is sparse, straight forward and almost too dry (which makes sense since he's a technical writer), but the ideas each story presents are mind-altering. The characters in his stories always seem a little flat, or too similar to each other, but the experiences they go through and the revelations they have resonated with me.
Two of my favorites from this collection are Tower of Babylon and Story of Your Life.
Tower of Babylon is very Borges-like and even if you can predict the ending, it doesn't make it any less powerful.
Story of Your Life is science fiction that makes you *feel* something, which is the best type of fiction, IMO....more
Do you ever feel like stopping everyone you see on the street and telling them about the exciting book you just read? Well, that's how I felt after fiDo you ever feel like stopping everyone you see on the street and telling them about the exciting book you just read? Well, that's how I felt after finishing the last page of Mistborn. The last chapter was that satisfying an end to the massive tome.
But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the beginning, or rather, the middle, because that's what I felt like after reading the first couple pages of Mistborn. Sanderson drops readers straight into the brown-shaded world of the book, right in the middle of the action. It's disorienting at first, but after the first fifty pages or so, I caught my bearings.
The main plot of the novel isn't a revolutionary one. It's the age old tale of the represses masses under the overwhelming control of the privileged and a god-like, evil, dictator. That's not the draw of the novel. Sanderson drew me into the story through the duo of magnetic protagonists, an excellent heist, and one of the best magic systems in any fantasy book I've read so far.
Typically, I'm the first to cringe about magic in my fantasy books. Yeah, yeah, a quick glance at my recently read books will say that I read a lot of fantasy books, and yes, a lot of fantasy books have magic, but a lot of fantasy books also have god-awful magic systems. This isn't so in Mistborn. No, in this novel, magic is based on different types of metals. Specially skilled people have the ability to ingest different metals and "burn" them in their bodies. In doing so, they gain some kind of power for the duration of the time the metals are burning until it runs out. The powers range from useful things like enhanced strength and speed to less physical things like being able to see who's currently burning metals.
The magic system is the heart of the book, which is apparent through the sheer number of pages dedicated to details of the system. This was helpful at first, but toward the end, I was wishing the editor had cut out some paragraphs going over the system in such painful detail. It was a bit insulting how Sanderson thought readers needed so much explanation of how things worked.
Despite the overly explanatory sections about it, the magic system was instrumental in making the handful of heart-pounding action scenes. Some of these scenes felt so physical that I felt like I did after beating an awsome video game boss fight using my character's super-enhanced abilities. I could definitely see some of these scenes recreated pixel by pixel.
Secondary to the well fleshed-out magic system are the two main characters, Kelsier and Vin. Kel is the charismatic leader of a thieving crew planning the greatest heist ever, and Vin is a street urchin theif just trying to get by. Not the most original characters to appear in a book, but I found myself drawn to them anyway. They were flawed characters, but they were also characters who grew as the story went along. I was also drawn to Sazed, a scholarly, secretive character whom I wished had more background story, but perhaps that's for another book.
The richness in which Kelsier, Vin, and Sazed were described made the secondary characters rather flat in comparison, which is one reason why I couldn't call this a perfect book. Other members of the crew were likable, but were also just archetypes of a heist story. While the book is already very long, more pages dedicated to those characters and less pages over-explaining the magic system would have been preferred.
Even though, when it boils down to it, the story in Mistborn is one that's told over and over again, the way it's told is a good one. Good enough that I finished the massive book in just a few days. In the end, it's an exciting heist set in a fantasy world with characters that I cared about....more
Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place in the future? The crowded, multi-factioned, multi-leveled city of Shanghai and nearby Pudong made me misIs it possible to feel nostalgia for a place in the future? The crowded, multi-factioned, multi-leveled city of Shanghai and nearby Pudong made me miss my hometown terribly. Stephenson's descriptions of brightly lit Nanjing Road and small, dim, alleys of hawkers was so spot on. The mix of high technology, the sophisticated neo-Victorians, and the Confuscians made a confusing but ultimately satisfying story.
I came to The Diamond Age with a vague idea of what the book was about. Like previous steampunk books I read, there was a combination of neo-Victorian sensibilities, technologies different than what we're used to, and a huge disparity between classes. While that may be what gets the book labeled as 'steampunk' by some people ,it surpasses that label and has so much more.
It has cyber-punk technologies. It has dystopian characteristics. It's part adventure story, part riddle, part allegory, part detective story, and best of all, it feels epic without losing its main characters in too wide of a scope.
Reading Stephenson is always hard for me but I always enjoy it. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that his books are not easy to skim through. Go too quickly in The Diamond Age and you end up in an underwater rave wondering what the heck just happened.
The book was definitely worth reading for any fan of the author. It certainly is my favorite book of his so far. My only complaint was that Nell was too perfect. While it could be said that it the Primer had something to do with that, if I take a step back and look at the character, her lack of faults is unbelievable.
Other than that one little complaint, I loved every part of the book from the heart-wrenching stories in the Primer to the action-packed lead up to the Mouse Army. I also liked all the mentions of tea.
Protip: Fountain pens were mentioned at least nine times in this book!...more
This was suggested to me by someone as a helpful book for someone new to the language but not new to programming in general. I found this more helpfulThis was suggested to me by someone as a helpful book for someone new to the language but not new to programming in general. I found this more helpful than the Pickaxe book because it's concise with examples while being detailed in the why's, when's and how's of things, which is something I'm more interested in when learning a new language.
It's an excellent companion to the Pickaxe book since it gives a different voice and perspective on the subject. I mainly read The Well-Grounded Rubyist and then used the Pickaxe book as reference when I needed to look up something more technical....more
A Game of Thrones is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read. This may sound like high praise especially after only reading the first book of thA Game of Thrones is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read. This may sound like high praise especially after only reading the first book of the series, but A Song of Ice and Fire series may just well be the Lord of the Rings of my generation.
I know the old saying about not judging a book by its cover, but I had put off reading A Game of Thrones for a while because the cover was so generic with its orange gradient background and silhouetted wolf on the cover. I’m sorry I waited so long. The 800-plus page book is such a page-turner that I read the whole thing in less than a week.
The beginning of the novel may put some people off and I certainly was confused, but just keep with it. The novel is laid out with each chapter coming from the perspective of a revolving set of characters. The first few chapters are hard to read through because there’s not much to go on, but readers who continue will soon be rewarded.
A Song of Ice and Fire is not a fantasy novel for the weak at heart because it spares no punches. There are unexpected deaths, incest, torture, twists, and all sorts of back-stabbings. What really won me respect for this novel is that George R. R. Martin isn’t afraid of killing characters that other authors would keep alive. When good characters die, it opens up a realm of possibilities of where the story can go because readers know that there are no limits.
I took a long hiatus from reading fantasy novels because I was put off from the genre from reading too many Terry Goodkind novels. This series is an awesome welcome back to the genre. Every part of the first novel is exciting, even the political back and forths that usually bore me. I’m probably late to the party on this, but even if you’re on the fence about this book, at least read through the first hundred pages of A Clash of Kings to see if the series is for you....more
It's hard to say much about this book without spoiling the plot. The book follows the narrator through her childhood, into adolescence and finally intIt's hard to say much about this book without spoiling the plot. The book follows the narrator through her childhood, into adolescence and finally into her adult life. It's part mystery and part commentary on technology and how it affects society.
The mystery part comes from not being exactly sure what the narrator is talking about until halfway through the book, and then dealing with the problem of having an unreliable narrator.
The commentary part comes from thinking about how the narrator and the people she grew up with are treated and seen by outsiders.
At first, I grew tired of the way the author structured each "flashback", where she would say one thing, then go back further and talk about something that happened before before actually getting to the thing that triggered the flashback in the first place. But eventually, I just grew to accept that was the way the author reveals the story.
The sense of dread that pervades through the whole book is impressive since this isn't a horror story or anything. I kept feeling "there's something strange going on here" and I had an inkling of what it was, but that didn't keep me from feeling sad when the author revealed what was going on.
Part of me felt happy that the narrator and her friends had the priviledged life they did, but part of me felt sad about where their life ended up....more
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