Zero Sum Game

Title: Zero Sum Game
Author: SL Huang
Series: Russel's Attic, book 1
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Published: 2014
Rating: 6/10

Review: I took a note of S.L. Huang in the fairy-tale anthology Retold that I read last month. Her story was one of my favorites, so I thought I'd give her novel a try. The premise sounded interesting: a mercenary with math superpower fighting a mind-controlling psychic.

So, I like math and I think math is cool and powerful and you can do a lot of different stuff with math. But this book pushed it well past the point of where I could accept it. There was one thing that bothered me in particular -- being able to do a crazy calculation about bullet velocity and direction is really not enough to dodge a bullet just because you know where it's going. I would have been much more accepting of a math super-power that also didn't turn into a physical super-power of precise motion and crazy strength. As it was, the heroine was pretty ridiculously overpowered and her constant math rationalizations for it made me rather annoyed.

The story itself was a pretty fun thriller type plot, which just kept escalating throughout the book. Drug cartels, mystery government organizations, hackers, and a psychopath with religion all figure into the plot that takes the main crew all around L.A. area. All-in-all, it was rather entertaining, if not entirely believable. I liked Arthur, the P.I. investigating a shadowy organization called Pithica who teams up with the heroine, Cas.

He has some serious reservations about Cas's moral compass and her murdering people left and right and I agree with that. I just wish he didn't eventually decide it wasn't that big a deal after all and strike a friendship. After all, by the end of the book Cas has probably murdered 4-dozen people as a very conservative estimate. Of course, they are all bad guys... Still, sometimes that much violence just doesn't sit well with me.

The other part of the book that could have been better is the writing. It's hard for me to put a finger on what exactly bothered me there, but I could easily tell it's a book by a new writer. I guess it just felt a little sloppy and under-edited.

All-in-all, it was entertaining, but I don't think I am going to pick up the next book in the series. Still, it's heartening to see books with female math ass-kicking superheroes.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Title: The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Author: Patrick Rothfuss
Genre: Fantasy
Published: 2014
Rating: 6/10

Review: I am generally a big Patrick Rothfuss fan. I loved The Name of the Wind when it came out and I read his blog pretty regularly. He is a really good author who happens to also be an awesome guy (the two don't always seem to go hand in hand -- not to point any fingers, but *cough*orsonscottcard*cough*).

Of course, when The Slow Regard of Silent Things came out, it wasn't really a question of whether to buy it. It was just a question of when I am going to get to reading it (hint: it did not take all that long). The foreword is a bit alarming though: Patrick Rothfuss basically tells the readers of the book that they might not want to buy it. That didn't stop me for two reasons: the first being that I've read the foreword after I already bought the book and the second being that when someone says you shouldn't read something that makes you want to read it roughly twice as much.

I understood from the prologue that it's not going to be a traditional story and that it's not going to advance the plot of the main trilogy. I was perfectly fine with those caveats. It's a pretty short book and I've read most of it in one sitting, but I have to admit Patrick Rothfuss may have been right in his prologue when he said I shouldn't buy it.

I generally don't actually mind books that don't have a plot as long as I am enjoying the characters. But in this case I didn't actually enjoy learning this much about Auri. You know how sometimes you see a crazy homeless guy yelling on the street that you are walking on and you feel a mixture of alarm and pity for them? Well, this is how I felt about Auri in this book. She basically behaves crazily enough in the story to make me feel physically uncomfortable reading the book. And on top of it, I felt like the book passes judgement on everyone who chooses to lead a normal life with some modicum of comfort. Perhaps, I was deriving a message that wasn't truly there, but that's just how I felt upon finishing the book.

Patrick Rothfuss is still a crafty author and the language of the book is quite interesting. He plays with homonyms a whole lot and he can certainly evoke imagery, but it just wasn't enough to turn the book around for me. I am going to pretend this never happened and go back to waiting for The Doors of Stone to get published.

The Name of the Rose

Title: The Name of the Rose
Author: Umberto Eco
Genre: Fiction
Published: 1984
Rating: 6/10

Review: I picked up The Name of the Rose without much knowledge about the book with a vague idea that it'll expand my horizons and put another notch on my "reading belt" of important books. (I really gotta just throw that belt out of the window).

This is a fairly hefty tome of over 500 pages written in first person by an aging monk named Adso in 14th century to narrate a mystery he experienced in his youth at a Benedectine abbey in Italy with his Franciscan master, William of Baskerville.

In the beginning, I found the narrative rather fascinating, if a bit on the slow and wordy side of things. We are introduced to life in the abbey, the characters, and hooked onto the murder mystery part of the book. Brother William approaches mysteries in highly Sherlock Holmsian fashion -- his name is not coincidental, I believe -- and provides sharp observations about people and events at the monastery.

Unfortunately, Adso doesn't have his master's succinct style and goes off-tangent quite a bit. There are literally six pages of text describing the gates of the church at the abbey in such detail that my eyes glazed over and rolled around the back of my head and he still kept going. The author addresses this in his postscript saying that "arias" such as these were traditional parts of medieval age story telling. I can understand Eco's choice to follow the traditions of the style, but to me it means I am going to avoid books written in middle ages and books pretending to have been written in middle ages from now on. Because there aren't any gates in this world that deserve 6 pages of description, in my not so humble opinion.

And yet, the story and characters continued to be sufficiently interesting that I kept reading despite everything else. As the story progressed, another angle was introduced to the narrative, which spoke of the division of church's teachings; heresies; and conflicts between the emperor, the pope, and everyone else. I don't know the first thing about any of these things, but there were plentiful asides and explanations for me to follow, so at the end I did know a lot more about it, but unfortunately kind of wished I knew less of the church's politics and more about who's murdering the monks.

The author's postscript explains a lot about the novel and makes me feel bad for not appreciating the depth of the story and all the historical research involved. It does feel like the sort of book where you could run an English course for a term just to study all the different implications of all the different topics covered. Except that I wouldn't want to be in that class -- it would be much too aggravating to spend even more time thinking of how poorly women are treated by the church or how often church uses religious pretexts for gathering power and wealth at the expense of citizens.

The ending of the book is very fitting and disagreeable at the same time. I felt a keen disappointment in William who was the only character I thoroughly enjoyed throughout and not for his detective failures, but rather for the way he handles the last confrontation. It's disappointing, but at the same time, genius, when you are writing a book about personal failures (oh, and there sure is a lot of those in this novel).

To sum it up, it's not a book to be undertaken lightly, but with merit in both plot and historical detail if you can bear to read that sort of thing for hundreds of pages. I would've probably enjoyed it better if author gave up on the historical and religious aspects of the story and stuck to the murders at hand.

Boy Nobody

Title: Boy Nobody
Author: Allen Zadoff
Genre: Young Adult
Published: 2013
Rating: 6/10

Review: I picked this book up based on a synopsis I saw on another site. The premise of the story is a 16-year old boy who shows up at your school as a new kid, becomes your friend, and then suddenly someone close to you dies of seemingly natural causes. The boy's parents allegedly move towns and the boy disappears never to be seen again. Of course in this case, the boy is a trained agent, whose mission was to kill.

Really, I only have myself to blame in being disappointed in this book. I think I came with expectations that were a bit too high for a plot like the above. What it turned out to be is a teen high school drama with just enough mention of sex to be interesting to teens and just enough story to keep reading.

The main character's secret protocol procedures just kept me rolling my eyes a whole lot. And he endlessly belabored the point that he's a soldier for whom mission is everything and he will get it done and so on and so forth. For a trained operative who can read people and gain trust so well, he certainly isn't very perceptive about himself and his deductions leave a lot to be desired. That's probably the crux of the problem for me -- I liked the antagonist better. At least she was pretty smart.

The plot was reasonable for a YA story, it had a bit of a twist, even though I saw it coming. Overall, I imagine I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more as a teenager without the critical lens on the believe-ability of the character's actions and motivations. I also didn't connect well with the whole betrayal, mother, father scenario, but Zadoff gets points for adding that layer into the book, it was actually not badly done.

Basically, I would recommend this to actual teenagers. I don't think this works well as a YA for adult enjoyment. This reminded me quite a bit of Francine Pascal's series Fearless. So if you liked this book, you might want to check that out as well.

The Dog Said Bow-Wow

Title: The Dog Said Bow-Wow
Author: Michael Swanwick
Genre: Science Fiction stories
Published: 2007
Rating: 6/10

This book took me a long time to finish. I started reading it in the summer and slowly made my way through about half the stories before I stopped reading for a few months. Recently I picked it up again and finally finished off the rest of the book. I really don't like leaving books unread even if they are going slowly.

Turns out I am just not a huge fan of Swanwick's style of writing. The stories he writes are very clever. They are layered, they often reference mythology or make fun of established fantasy and science fiction tropes. I thought I would enjoy this book a whole lot more than I actually did. The reason I didn't is that I generally failed to connect emotionally with the characters and the story being told. At the end of the story I might think "Ha, that was cleverly played!", but there was no feeling of wonder and satisfaction accomplishing the thought and that failure to really connect with the reading is really the reason for my low rating.

I imagine if Swanwick's writing speaks to you and you like clever twists in your stories, you will enjoy this book a whole lot more than I did. But for myself, I think Swanwick is just not the author for me.

My favorite stories among the bunch was The Skysailor's Tale and A Small Room in Koboldtown. There were also a number of other stories where some parts of them or twists I found really cool, but I didn't like the ending or didn't connect with the story as a whole -- for example in The Bordello in Faerie the main character ends up serving as the "man for hire" in the bordello and becomes addicted to the life, which is a rather neat reversal of roles that one might expect. However, the details of how that addiction is resolved just felt a bit like a let-down at the end of the story.

 I also didn't particularly enjoy the stories about Darger and Surplus though on the face of it both of them are very unique and interesting characters. There are three stories in the book about them: The Dog Said Bow-Wow; The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport; Girls and Boys, Come out to Play. The last is probably the best of the bunch -- particularly because they both get played more than they make out themselves.

All-in-all, an interesting collection of stories that I didn't enjoy as much as I hoped to.

Rose of Fire

Title: Rose of Fire
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Genre: Fantasy, short story
Published: 2012

Rating: 6/10

Thoughts: This story is really rather short and it's a tale about the creation of the Cemetery of Forgotten books featured in The Shadow of the Wind. The story is told in a standard fairy tale fashion. Let me just say it involves emperors, curses, dragons, and amulets. It's a neat story, but I didn't find it particularly interesting since it follows all the generic tropes and doesn't seem to have much to say on its own beyond telling the story of the Cemetery. I think this is mostly meant as a promotion for The Prisoner of Heaven -- and as such it does a pretty good job. I am really looking forward to the book now.

Acacia

Title: Acacia: The War with the Mein
Author: David Anthony Durham
Series: Acacia, book 1
Genre: Fantasy
Published: 2007

Recommendation: Good series for those who enjoy political epic fantasy with swords, wars, and betrayals.
Rating: 6/10

Summary: For hundreds of years, the Akaran family has ruled over an empire of nations. However, a plot is hatched in the far northern lands inhabited by the Meins to end the Akaran's rule and begin a new empire. Leodan Akaran, the King, and his four children will have to follow their destinies to resolve this conflict.

Reactions: Acacia has been sitting on my bookshelf for awhile now since I was avoiding epic fantasy and the massive scale of the book intimidated me. However, I have been talked into reading the book recently and I do hate having unread books on my bookshelf.

At first the book was going really slowly for me. It takes a really long time to get to the meat of the plot and two hundred pages in, I was still slowly wading through the back story, hoping that the main plot will finally take off. It does around page 300 or so where I could finally read more than a chapter at a time without an irresistible desire to doze off. And once it starts going, it actually continues at a pretty good pace. I definitely enjoyed the second half of the book better than the beginning.

My biggest issue with the book is that it's really the standard epic fantasy stuff that I am tired of reading. There are children with destinies, mirroring plotlines that have way too much symmetry to them for me to find it believable and a pretty obvious distinction between the good and evil characters. There is plenty of idealism and some of the plot points were poorly motivated or I found them hard to believe (e.g. Corinne's side of the story towards the end of the book).

On the other hand, I did think some aspects of the world building and the characters themselves were rather neat. The concept of island people revering a sea eagle was pretty interesting. I also found it fascinating to have a King character whose primary focus were his children. He ended up being a much better parent than a King and I thought that was pretty unusual and rather interesting to see. There are also quirks in various other characters that I tended to like.

Altogether, Acacia took me over 3 weeks to finish reading and sadly the 700+ pages served to just lay the foundations of the story. While I am somewhat curious about the rest of it, I don't feel like the book was interesting enough to spend another two months reading the sequels. Off to some pacier reading now.

Sunshine

Title: Sunshine
Author: Robin McKinley
Genre: Fantasy
Published: 2003

Recommendation: A mediocre urban fantasy novel with a few interesting characters.
Rating: 6/10

Summary: Rae Seddon aka Sunshine is a baker at Charlie's Coffeehouse. One evening she goes for a drive and gets captured by a gang of vampires who bring her to an empty mansion and chain her together with another vampire. There an unlikely alliance starts and Sunshine begins to discover her powers.

Reactions: The back cover of the book has the following quote which I found very promising:

McKinley [balances] the dark drama with light touches of humor. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will feel at home.
--Orlando Sentinel

Considering I like the above mentioned show A LOT, I figured this might be the book for me to enjoy. The plot summary sounded quite interesting too if not particularly original.

However, there is one huge problem with the novel. Writing. McKinley seems to be a huge fan of long info dumps, thought purges and just random ranting. I imagine the reader is meant to feel as if they are in the protagonist's head (it is a first person narrative), but I found the paragraphs and paragraphs of thoughts to introduce the history of the world to be overwhelmingly distracting from the story. In fact throughout the book there would be long pauses in action to fill us in on some piece of Sunshine's history or her thoughts on family, etc. Overall, the back story was not supplied very well.

The second source of my irritation with the novel are a few very contrived plot devices. For example, Sunshine figures out the means to escape her vampire antagonists in a memory-dream. Her proficiency in magic once she starts to use it also feels like a bit of a stretch. Overall, I had some trouble suspending my disbelief in several spots. It would have probably been easier to swallow if the book moved a bit faster overall, but much time is spent on Sunshine's thoughts.

It was not all bad, however. I enjoyed the character of Sunshine, having her be a baker and seriously into baking was an interesting twist. Her family and other characters were all pretty well drawn and fun to read about. I never quite figured out what made her relationship with Mel work, but most of Sunshine's relationships seemed somewhat dysfunctional, so I let it slide.

Overall, it was a mediocre read. I found there were too many problems with the writing and plotting to enjoy it thoroughly, but there were interesting characters and some fun action every so often to keep me going.

I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence

Title: I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence
Author: Amy Sedaris
Genre: Non-fiction, cookbook
Published: 2006

Recommendation: A good collection of advice and recipes to get if you like snarky humour and lots of butter in your cooking.
Rating: 6/10

Reactions: I read very little non-fiction in book form. In fact this is probably the very first cookbook I've read from cover to cover. I've been reading it on and off for several month now and I finally finished. Phew.

Starting the book, it was a pretty fun read. This is not so much a cookbook as a manual to housekeeping & entertaining guests with recipes interspersed in between. At first the tongue-in-cheek commentary keeps things pretty fun. For example, Amy Sedaris lists the suggests the following topics for a blind date:

• Does the sun make noise?
• Do you tip a cobbler?
• How do you tech hope?
• When can we see each other again?

These fairly random lists permeate the book from cover to cover and range from funny to somewhat tasteless. A lot of time is spent on dealing with drunk people and making money off of the guests. By about mid-book I was started to wince at all the mentions of the tip jar for your house.

There is a lot more discourse in the beginning of the book, whereas the last third is pretty much just recipes. I am somewhat tempted to try out the cheese balls recipe mentioned quite a few times, but the fat content of the recipe is more than a little scary.

The recipes are somewhat balanced, there are some very simple ones (i.e. mashed potatoes or baked chicken) and some slightly more elaborate cakes and dishes. For myself I didn't find that many interesting new things to cook. Many of the items just didn't seem that interesting from cooking viewpoint and were targeted towards casual cooking. Perhaps I should give them more of a chance, but I felt disappointed that recipes were not that tempting. Though I suppose that's more practical than a fancy cookbook where you don't have ingredients to prepare half the meals. Somehow I find the latter a more interesting reading though.

Overall the book was decent, but didn't sweep me off the feet. You might enjoy her humour more than me, so if the date conversations list made you laugh and you are looking to expand your recipe pool, perhaps it's a good book for you.

Michael Laurits is: Drowning

Title: Michael Laurits is: Drowning
Author: Paul Cornell
Published: Eclipse Two, 2008
Genre: Science fiction, short story

Rating: 6/10

Thoughts: I have to get this off my chest first: this story is hard to read. The names feel awkward: Laurits, Lief, Nofke. There's also a lot of tongue twisting and just plain awkward phrasing. But in the midst of all that there is some interesting Douglas Adams style humour -- warring Atheist coalitions entering a minor war over whether an arrival of a messiah would change their views. Unfortunately, the funny background didn't have much to do with the rest of the story in which Michael Laurits while drowning manages to transfer his consciousness into a social network. The story has some interesting ideas, but it fails in execution and the ending feels off. Worth reading just for the one paragraph dealing with warring Atheist terrorists though.

Daemon

Title: Daemon
Author: Daniel Suarez
Genre: Techno thriller
Published: 2009

Recommendation: Good action, plenty of technology, but I wouldn't spend money on it.
Rating: 6/10

Summary: When Matthew Sobol dies, a daemon is unleashed upon the world. It's a distributed program Matthew Sobol wrote that now takes charge of the world and makes the protagonists play a role in its game.

Reactions: I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, the premise of the story is pretty interesting. Daemon is a distributed program that reads news and reacts to real life events to achieve its goals. It's able to manipulate people, events, and other technology in complex ways. There are many ways to go with that premise. Unfortunately, I feel the author took his ideas to extremes and lost me in the process. There were too many stretches in what Daemon could do, particularly in the second half of the book.

In a previous post, I shared my opinion that Daniel Suarez is looking down on sci-fi when he claimed this book not to be sci-fi. That was premature judgment on my part as the book is indeed a lot more of a detective/thriller novel than sci-fi. But that is what made the technology stretches stand out so much for me. The setting is very realistic, gritty, down to earth. It sets expectations and then breaks them. That just didn't work very well for me.

On the positive, the book is very well plotted. The pace is very good, the ratio of descriptions to action and dialogue was handled well. The novel nicely changed focus between different characters. And yet it took me a really long time to finish this book. While I felt entertained when I was reading, when I put the book down I didn't feel the pull to get back to it.

At least part of the reason I didn't feel the need to return to the book are the characters. I just didn't particularly care for any of them. Matthew Sobol's complete disregard for human life made me dislike him. Pete Sebek, the detective investigating Daemon, was mostly getting my pity. And most of Daemon's operatives were quite off-putting (intentionally, but still). The character that I feel I should have liked the most, Dr. Natalie Philips, a very smart NSA operative, was much too arrogant to be likable. I have to say Roy Merritt is probably my favourite character. He kicked ass. A lot. Sadly he is a fairly minor character.

Now to the technology aspect of the book. Daniel Suarez certainly gets props for knowing technology. At least for the first half of the book, he mentions methods and exploits that are very realistic. No one hacks into FBI in under 60 seconds while getting a blow job in this book. On the other hand, I felt there were too many technology segments present that did not actually need to be described. I knew what Suarez was talking about and I didn't care, so I don't see why people who have no idea what an SQL injection attack is would care that Gragg entered ' or 1=1 -- into the password box. On the other hand, maybe it's more fun when you are learning something new. I just found the excessive detail unnecessary to the story.

Overall, it was a decent read but it wasn't quite my style and I don't think I am likely to pick up the next book in the series.

How To Talk To Girls At Parties

I am in the middle of several busy weeks at work and not progressing a whole lot with Daemon. But I came across a short story by Neil Gaiman and the title sounded interesting, so I present:

Title: How To Talk To Girls At Parties
Author: Neil Gaiman
Published: Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, 2007
Genre: Science fiction, short story
Url: How To Talk to Girls At Parties

Rating: 6/10

Thoughts: The story starts with a couple of teenage boys heading to a girl's party. One of the boys is stressing out over how to talk to girls when the other remarks:

"They're just girls," said Vic. "They don't come from another planet."

Knowing that this short story is a piece of science fiction, I immediately got a very strong suspicion that they won't be "just girls". A reader figures out it's not a typical party pretty quickly, but the protagonists are too busy trying to get in some smooching. It's an interesting juxtaposition of teenage and alien cultures, but to me the whole story felt a bit off. I couldn't quite get into it, nor do I feel I could put together the pieces of what Gaiman was showing in the story. To me the ending felt incomplete, and I ended reading it rather puzzled, feeling like I should have been told more of the story. Well, perhaps you can make more sense of it.

The Killing Dance

Title: The Killing Dance

Author: Laurell Hamilton

Series: Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, Book 6

Genre: Urban fantasy, novel
Published: 1997

Recommendation: For fans of the series who enjoyed the plots and the mysteries, you can skip this one. If you want more of Anita, Jean-Claude, Richard romance, then it's a book for you. For those who haven't read the series, this book wouldn't work well as a stand-alone.
Rating: 6/10

Summary: Edward calls up Anita to let her know someone has tried to hire him to kill her for half a million dollars. He comes into town to serve as her bodyguard and several attempts on her life end up with the assassins dead, but they don't stop coming. At the same time Richard is still facing the dominance fight with Marcus. And Jean-Claude has not given up on Anita.

Reactions: Sadly, the series seems to be going downhill. Most of the book focuses on the love triangle between Jean-Claude, Anita, and Marcus. A lot of pages are spent working up the tension between everyone involved. For the first time in the series there are some quite explicit sex scenes. I may have been complaining that it wasn't very modern of Anita to not have sex, but in this book the plot gave way to the romance and I wouldn't call it an improvement. Way too much time is spent on everyone's sexy outfits and describing various body parts.

While some of the books had decent plot twists at the end, I found this one to be obvious from the moment we find out there is a time-based contract on Anita. There are a few small surprises along the way, but not nearly enough time is spent on the mystery. In addition, Anita becomes more of a killing machine in this book than in the previous ones. There used to be more deduction involved, but in this case she just shoots her way through until the end of the novel.

I am considering whether to stop reading the series. While Dexter is an interesting show, watching a character I once liked deteriorate to the point of a sociopath is disappointing.

First Line: The most beautiful corpse I'd ever seen was sitting behind my desk.