Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Re-Read 7/13//18:

Valente is always worth re-reading IMHO. And other than making a few grand sweeping comments about birds and husbands, I have nothing to add to this marvelous piece of literature. The land of the dead versus the land of life in Russia. Mythology versus societal upheaval. Love, love, love, and none of it innocent.

Just like Russia. ;)



Original Review:

Breathtaking, quintessential Valente, making what might be a fairy tale into a gorgeously Russian love story between one unlucky girl stuck perpetually in the space of an hour who never got to marry the birds and the God of Life.

Of course, it never ends well, because she's conscripted into his eternal battle with Viy, Death, and regrets it, while simultaneously mastering Life in the middle of Leningrad during WWII, which ought to be considered one of the worst moments in human history.

Do we love life? Is he capricious and cruel and uncompromising and sweet? Is he locked in the basement and forced to listen to his wife make love to a mortal man? After that, can he still be true?

I cannot do this justice. Our heroine cannot fully commit to Life, and finally betrays him.

For all the truly magical qualities of this novel, the beautiful writing, the amazing mini-tales, I'm left in a state of profound sadness while being amazed at the sheer beauty of the tale.

It's raw, right down to the core, and horrific, sexy, full of the seeds of hope and longing and everything that makes the world so complicated and scary and wonderful all at once.

I sit in awe.

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The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything by Marcus Chown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a highly entertaining history of gravity, full of quite interesting anecdotes and the gradual unfolding of our understanding from Newton through Einstein through our quest to reconcile quantum mechanics with the one aspect we're most familiar with but which we understand the least.

From the first page to the last I was enraptured. It's a tour of the inverse square law, the connection between electromagnetism, light, and matter, right down to the physics that keep most theoreticians up late at night even now.

Humorous, insightful, and fairly comprehensive, it focuses on the subject well, describing the manner in which gravity functions and how it behaves. I'd recommend it absolutely as a beginner's book with a special delight for those of us enamored by the LAW. :)

I personally had a great time. Not much new, honestly, but it was a delight. :)

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Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5

It's okay, and them's the Breaks! ;)

I honestly thought this book was all right. Not fantastic but definitely strong in the worldbuilding, characters, and plot progression. The real stars are the floating ramshackle cities out in the Arctic Circle and the wildly delicious custom nanotech plague.

Everything else was a pretty cool but standard dystopia of Syndicates (mob landlords) and shareholders (super rich owners who are above the law), with fighters, skaters, hedge nano-wizards and bonding with animals thanks to the nanos. Pretty cool? It is pretty cool. Ish.

There's an obvious agenda here, the haves versus the have-nots, an almost mystical progression toward having a city without maps based on memory and the memory-plague mystery called the Breaks. I liked it and I was pretty entranced by it, but I'm not quite certain I buy where I was taken with it.

You might say that the Beginning and Middle was good, but the end left a bit to be desired.

Still, rather interesting. It was just the story itself that kinda flagged. Alas. Orca-savior? Cool in the particulars but maybe not in the whole.

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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are very few things I can say about this novel except it's Brilliant, Brilliant, Brillant. That, and I am afraid I'm a total fanboy of all Russian novelists and this one in particular.

And I thought Dostoyevski was good. Damn. This one is completely modern, absolutely unappreciated in his time, dead young, and hailed as one of Russia's most popular novelists. Ever. And for good reason. The satire, written in the 50's, lambasts Moscow's '30's and continues to be a threat to all Russia today. It became super popular in the 60's America and was the direct inspiration for The Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil.

Does this ring a few bells?

Let's get down to the reality of this novel a bit. The Master is the novelist writing about Jesus and Pontus Pilate. He falls in love with a woman, and she with him, and her name is Margarita. She becomes a witch. And in the meantime, we've got ourselves a total retelling of Job, a satire that raises the level of Cons to all new heights. *What? Moscow has CON-MEN?*

And of course, we have hard-drinking cats, the Devil, and Pontus Pilate running around Moscow, present day. Lots of action ensues, with decapitation, thugs running amok, plays that are really major shakedowns, rampant nudity, the walking dead, and the UTTER HORRIBLE TERROR that are all editors.

Did I mention I might have just found one of my favorite all-time books? Yeah. This here is gonna have to fight for room on my top 100 list of all time. Maybe it won't have to fight very hard. In fact, I might have to bump it up into the top 20 or maybe even top 10.

It's just that good.

I was reminded a lot of Neil Gaiman's American Gods in a very good way. I was also reminded of a lot of modern comic masterpieces. In execution, it's half-Noir and all literary despair in the other.

I'm in love. :) I wanna do a huge Russian kick now. Maybe re-read all the greats, and then head back to this one and revel away. :) Just. Wow.

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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Who knows, maybe I'm one of the only people in existence who enjoy good long novels about buildings. But then, there are a lot of fans of Follet's Pillars of the Earth, so maybe not.

Are people the thing? Or is it place? Or what happens when we start confusing a place with the persons within it?

Notre-Dame is a misshapen monster with a lumpy heart and a lumpy head. Or wait, is that Quasimodo? Is Esmeralda a good-natured gypsy dancer or is the spine of Paris itself?

Seen this way, the whole tragedy of Esmeralda's gross miscarriage of justice (or the BIG IDEA writ as architecture in Notre-Dame, Quasimodo) being the gross travesty of France's history, takes on a wickedly abusive satirical slant.

Or, if you prefer, a blind, deaf, and dumb legal drama so obviously obtuse as to become a farce... or is it? No. It's firmly a tragedy. Witch-killers, inquisition, hungry mobs, vagabond guilds, and blithe royalty, clergy, poets, and tradesmen... well, it's a sad, sorry tragedy where everyone gets a trowel up the flue.

Did I like?

That's hard to say. I loved the architecture rambling bits, which, I might say, might be the least favorite bits of other people. The characters themselves were sometimes amusing but always writ larger than life. I like that sometimes, and I liked it here most of the time. But there were points at which the tale seemed to get derailed and the more subtle points that Hugo WANTED to make, satire-wise, were lost in the drench of pathos.

Overall, a solid novel and it certainly doesn't fail to entertain, but I can't quite put it up there as an absolute classic.

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Beggars Ride by Nancy Kress
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let's get this out of the way. The first 2/3rds of this book was filled to the brim with rather boring Sleeper and Sleepless politics. It lacked all the charm of the first two novels because the first two had great characters.

They're missing from this novel.

The characters we do have didn't manage to pick up and become great until after the first nuclear explosion.

Beginning and Middle in this novel was... meh. Not horrible or anything and I really DO like heavy explorations of gene-mods, social repercussions, and (theoretically) how they lead to massive political upheaval. I just didn't think it worked particularly well here. Unlike the first two Sleepless novels. The end conclusion in this one was satisfying in its way, dealing with an engineered plague that causes people to be aversive, isolationist, (and oddly compassionate), building up to another plague that's half relying on imagination, putting oneself entirely in another's shoes, and half cognitive therapy. It doesn't ignore the underlying biological issue, but it does allow for transcendental biology. You know... mind over matter -- at least when it comes to happy placebo events. :)

We are not limited to our biological destiny, no matter what the naysayers say.

Let's back up here. The whole series as a whole is NOT about that. Indeed, it's a rather awesome series about super geniuses being created out of a genetic alteration that removed the need to sleep. The children are blameless, oddly awesome, but then all the normals fear their super brilliance and work-ethic and focus, they're hounded, forced to take control, and from there take over the world with varying levels of success.

This novel is the aftermath of all that. It's goodish but sometimes meandering and often rather boring until THINGS START HAPPENING. Sigh. Well, they do, and the end is quite fun, but the rest was something of a slog. Alas. I just didn't care for what was going on until after the nuke. :)

Is this enough to save the whole novel? No. But I'm glad I got to the good stuff, for all that.

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Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Re-Read 7/7/18

It's so great doing a re-read. I mean, I was somewhat hesitant at first but it's so rich with detail and the action is perfect. And by action, I don't just mean Bobby in her Goliath suit. I mean Avasarala on her com. :) Avasarala is a FORCE to behold. :)

All in all, though, this second book happens to kick major butt. Venus really stole the show by the end, but all the Powers butting heads was also fun as hell.

Did anyone else whoop when Avasarala and Bobby got on the Rocinante?

It was truly great both times I read it. :)



Original Review:

The Expanse series is rapidly becoming one of my favorite stories, and it's only partly due to the scope. Look: If I'm going to read a space-opera, I want huge, Huge, HUGE scope, right? Well, it's my own preferences here, so the answer is a definite YES! I know a little astronomy and scale and putting all of that in perspective with what the hell just happened at the end of this novel is right likely to blow my mind, if it hadn't already been blown when I read Stephen Baxter's The Ring. That's not really that important right now, though, because this novel isn't that novel. This is a much better novel in all the ways that count; in characters, in action, in complicated drama and fully believable, no... engrossing settings.

I think I've read some fantastic space-opera, before, and I think of Bujold as one of the best, but now I will be putting these two guys at the head of the class. Thank you, D.A. and T.F.! For the rest of you peeps sitting on the fence about reading these books, get off your asses and get some startle on.

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