Patrick Rothfuss on delay of Wise Man's Fear

Patrick Rothfuss, whose first book The Name of the Wind was my favorite read of 2008, wrote a rather long post on his blog explaining the delay in the second installment, The Wise Man's Fear. The Wise Man's Fear was originally slotted to be released in April of this year, but this is clearly not happening. Patrick says he is still in process of writing the book, but making plenty of progress on it. I was impressed with his mention of writing 60,000 words in the past 6 weeks. Nevertheless, it looks like the book will probably be slotted to go out next year since publishing always takes a long time.

Patrick also mentions that the new book is even longer than The Name of the Wind and he spends hours thinking about which word to use in a sentence, so at the very least when the book goes out it will probably be totally amazing. I know I can't wait to read it. He also seems to have decided to hold the sort of contest Brandon Sanderson did for WOT and allow readers to name one of the characters. The details are yet to be posted, but this is pretty awesome :) Too bad Patrick doesn't seem to think Wonkerbee Bumchuck is a suitable name. ;)

I really appreciate Patrick Rothfuss taking the time to draw 5(!) comics and write a long post about the book delay. Yes, I wish the book was coming out in a month or two, but as a software engineer I know how products slotted to go out one year sometimes don't release for another year and a half. I do like to know the author's working on the promised book and not taking an extended vacation on Hawaii. There's really nothing like a little honesty and humor to calm me down to wait for the next book to release.

One More Bite

Title: One More Bite
Author: Jennifer Rardin
Series: Jaz Parks, Book 5
Genre: Urban fantasy, novel
Published: 2009

Recommendation: Read if you enjoyed previous books in the series, but don't expect much beyond another round of ass-kicking.
Rating: 6.5/10

Summary: Jaz, Vayl, Cole, and Albert travel to Scotland where they pretend to be participants in GhostCon. The real mission is to protect the head of a coven, Floraidh, from a mysterious assassin named Bea in order to protect the balance between various factions vying for the spot opened with the death of Edward Samos.

Reactions: Jaz Parks series has been going downhill in the last two books. I enjoyed the first 3 books of the series. They introduced the characters, developed relationships, and provided lots of action for the readers to enjoy. One More Bite is the latest installment of the series, but it seems like Jennifer Rardin has fallen into a predictable grove with her series and left me with mixed feelings at the end of the book.

I think my beef with the book is the fact that it followed the pattern of previous ones and lacked novelty. The four characters who come on this assignment act exactly the same way as they did in previous books. Cole is charming women left and right while professing undying love for Jaz. Vayl is getting it on with Jaz and provides muscle and orders whenever necessary. Jaz is killing everything in sight. Albert is doing the old tough bastard act, while being caring and sensitive underneath. We've been through all of this before, and the characters don't really develop or reveal any new facets now. We learn a few more details about Jaz's childhood and her mother, but it doesn't change a whole lot in my perception of the main heroine.

One Bite More does have its share of witty dialogue along the lines of:

"Swear to God, dog, if this doesn't turn out well I'm buying you generic food for the next month!"

and plenty of situational humor; a disaster at GhostCon is caused by a jeweler attempting to grope and ancient warrior ghost. It is an easy book to read and it didn't have much trouble holding my attention on the action.

I also find it really strange to have Jaz freak out about losing her job all the time. Every time something happens to a car or a plan derails she just goes into overdrive over getting fired. But when the bad guys are trying to kill her, she is fine, she will kick plenty of butt. It seems irrational to be trembling before her boss after that, and I don't really buy the argument that this is the only paying job she could get with her skills. So I just shake my head when this comes up over and over in these books.

Overall this book was not too different from the previous one, there is plenty of sneaking around and kicking butt action. There's humorous dialogue and chemistry between Jaz and Vayl. There are baddies, but I never felt the whole crew was in too much danger based on how all the previous plots worked out. The book lacked originality and character development and I am not sure I care to pick up the next book in the series.

BBC Book List Meme

Picking up this meme from The Antick Musings Of ...:

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Bold those you have read most or all of.
2) Italicize those you've read only pieces of
3) Add a '#' to those you were supposed to have read in school, but didn't.
4) Underline the ones you LOVE.
5) Set small those you plan on reading.
6) Set large those you did not read, but saw the movie!
7) Strikethrough those you really didn't like.
8) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (couldn't actually finish it)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (this, I see, is another one of those badly compiled lists, including the same works twice)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (gave up in boredom about 75 pages in)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Books fully read: 34
Books partially read: 6
Supposed to read but didn't: 0
Books I loved: 6
Books I plan to read: 1
Saw the movie, but didn't read: 2
Disliked: 1

The Graveyard Book

Title: The Graveyard Book
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Children Lit
Published: 2008

Recommendation: Fun read for early teens and adults who appreciate well-written children literature.
Rating: 8/10

Summary: Nobody (Bod) Owens is an orphan raised by ghosts in a graveyard. This is the story of Bod growing up, exploring the world, making friends, discovering himself, and defeating the bad guys.

Reactions: This book received positive reviews from almost everyone, so I've been meaning to read it for a few months now. I've only read adult fiction by Gaiman before (Neverwhere is my favorite) and wasn't quite sure what to expect from a children's book by him.

On the outside the book is beautiful. My edition (pictured above) comes as a hardcover with nice thick pages and the illustrations in the book are very well done. The book seems to be targeted to pre-teen or early teen boys. The book is 320 pages long with a rather large font and the illustrations. Each chapter starts a shorter story arc of events that tend to be fairly contained but together make up the whole story. I imagine this is a great format for a bedtime book -- you could read one chapter every night and have a good place to stop each time.

I have never been a fan of ghost stories or horror movies in my childhood. I still haven't read all that many ghost stories. Reading the first chapter I had some doubts as to whether this is a book I would enjoy due to the rather gruesome start of the story, but I got into the story somewhere around chapter 2 and didn't look back.

One big reason I enjoyed the book a lot was Bod, the boy protagonist. He came off quite realistic and had this perfect combination of recklessness and obedience at the same time. Sometimes Bod came off a little TOO good, but he stayed likable throughout. Another character I liked even better was Bod's mysterious guardian Silas. He appeared to be more of a parental figure than the two "parent" ghosts who adopted Bod and weren't mentioned nearly as much in the book.

The plot as expected was fairly straightforward to match the intended audience. I was slightly surprised on how the book actually ended, leaving the reader to wonder what would happen next. Perhaps there will be a sequel -- I would certainly buy it.

Overall it was a quick, enjoyable read for a cold winter night. It's the sort of book that makes one comfortable and nostalgic remembering childhood adventures and the thrill of supernatural.

First Line:

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

Other Reviews: Fyrefly's Book Blog, Confessions of a Book Whore, Lynda's Book Blog, Stainless Steel Droppings, Fantasy Book Critic, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent

Lost and Found

Title: Lost and Found
Author: Sandra McDonald
Published: Strange Horizons, 2003
Genre: Science fiction, short story
Url: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030526/lost_and_found.shtml

Rating: 9/10

Thoughts: I stumbled onto this short story accidentally, looking for some more information about Sandra McDonald. The story is quite short and its premise is that a father of a family builds a search engine. He builds the sort of search engine that finds things in the physical world. "Where are my car keys?", "Where are my stud diamond earrings?" asks the family first. The machine always answers. Eventually the questions become harder, more important, more significant. Until the final question is asked...

The story is really heartfelt and the speculation opens up even more questions than it answers. I like the way the story is written, it plunges the reader into the family atmosphere almost immediately. Overall, a very nice short piece of fiction, I definitely recommend it.

The Outback Stars

Title: The Outback Stars
Author: Sandra McDonald
Genre: Science fiction, novel
Published: 2007

Recommendation: A fun read for those who like military science fiction or space adventures.
Rating: 8/10

Summary: Lieutenant Jodenny Scott becomes an officer on the Aral Sea where she is put in charge of Underway Stores. The department has a bad reputation and Jodenny takes on the task of changing the department around. She doesn't yet know that she will have more problems on her hands than she expects.

Reactions: I've read a number of positive reviews for The Outback Stars and I wasn't been disappointed. The book is what it promises to be: it's a fun romp through space with military atmosphere, dangers, mysteries, and politics.

I chose this book for my 7-hour trip home, and it makes a very good airport novel. It's easy to read and it made my 5-hour flight a lot more fun than it might have been otherwise. The story progressed nicely throughout the book, and kept me occupied for all 386 pages of the paperback with small plot arcs twisting together nicely into a larger story. The end if not too surprising, was nevertheless satisfying.

I liked both Jodenny Scott and Terry Myell, the two protagonists, and there was obvious chemistry between them from the very beginning. Jodenny is a strong character who has resolve and a sense of duty, but at the same time is willing to bend rules to get things done. Compared to her, Terry seems almost soft, he is not macho, but smart in a quiet way and often quite sensible. He also has a spiritual side, tied to Australian Aboriginal myths, that is unusual and shows up unexpectedly throughout the book.

The Stars Down Under is a sequel to this book and it's out already, so I am thinking of picking it up for the trip back.

First Line:

If Jodenny spent one more day on the planet Kookaburra she might try to kill herself again.

Other Reviews: Fantasy Debut, Items of Interest

Dollhouse

I have to say I am a huge fan of Joss Whedon. I've watched all of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly at least twice from start to finish. You will not be surprised to find out that I've been looking forward to Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse for quite some time now. And of course I had to watch the premier on Friday when it came out.

I've really enjoyed the first episode. Not to say that it's without flaws, but I feel the show has a lot potential for character development and interesting plots. In the first episode we meet Echo (Eliza Dushku) who is an "active". An active is a person whose personality may be overwritten to create a personality for hire by those who can pay. I did have some trouble not thinking Faith when I was watching Echo, but I guess it's to be expected.

The plot seemed fairly fun too. We watched Echo in her personality as kidnapping negotiator attempt to save a little girl. The fact that her personality had its own flaws and weaknesses made things more interesting. The show certainly had no trouble holding my attention.

There were a couple of other familiar faces on the show. Tahmoh Penikett (Helo on Battlestar Galactica) plays a cop who is searching for Dollhouse, but is getting a lot of heat for pursuing a case many don't believe even exists. Amy Acker is also on the show as one of the doctor of Dollhouse (she used to play Fred in Angel).

Other reviews for the show seem to be mixed, but I really hope that we will get to see where the show is going. It's going to be very disappointing if Fox cancels the show in the style of Firefly. So I am definitely watching the second episode next Friday.