Currently reading
Blackbirds
Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 05
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Who Owns the Future?
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts
It's not bad, but something about the writing style failed to really grab me. I never felt an emotional connection with any of the main characters.
Gets an extra star for being revolutionary and groundbreaking in terms of the series. Otherwise it's fairly average.
Meh. The Repairman Jack series has been getting less and less interesting the more it becomes the story about the Adversary. This is just a big old disaster movie, with Jack's story arc shunted into an unimpressive ending. Disappointing.
First of the Repairman Jack books that I didn't like. Jack has always been a dark character. There is nothing particularly bad that he does in this book that he hasn't already done earlier in the series, but he does it here with such flat and ruthless affect that it's hard to get behind him. The supporting cast range from blandly unsympathetic to plain nasty. There's no-one likeable to get behind.
The two star rating is because as a novel, I didn't find this a very good book. There are a lot (a lot) of funny moments, amusing characters, and far-out imaginative horror. David Wong is a very clever writer, and he knows how to put together scene for razor-sharp comic effect. But the story felt like a wild and crazy rollercoaster ride going all over the place instead of a journey from A to, well, anywhere. It's more like a sketch comedy show that goes on for two hours than a movie. If you're into that kind of thing, then go for it.
Lots of clever stories based around a single, fascinating premise. I had to take a break half-way though becuse it was making me think too much about mortality.
Felt disgusted by the end of the first chapter, and couldn't go on. The interesting points he was trying to make were too thickly padded by layers of bourgeois self-justification.
My two favourite genres are detective mysteries and science fiction; a successful combination of the two is a very rare treat. I'm discovering, though, that the combination of "urban fantasy" and detective mystery tickles my fancy in much the same way. Because urban fantasy is popular right now, it's throwing off a lot of delightful material.Rivers of London reads like a combination of Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May series, Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift books, and Charlie Stross's Laundry Files. It's filled with old and new London lore, an internet-age vision of practical magic, and an irreverent attitude towards institutions -- in this case the Metropolitan Police.
The book dances between laugh-out-loud funny and gruesomely serious. The characters are delightful, and the writing is sharp and witty. I brought the paperback book with me on holiday. After finishing it, I downloaded the ebook of the sequel straight away - it's must-have-more good.
A good action-packed thriller, punctuated by regular interludes of 45 year-old gender expectation dissonance.
