I suppose one little month can’t get much worse than this past November. Following soon after the depressing election came a bureaucratic nightmare threatening health insurance, a case of shingles and, by far the worst of all, the death of a close relative after a long illness. But the one book that brought back a […]
Embassytown by China Miéville
When I first read China Miéville’s Embassytown, which I now regard as a nearly perfect novel, I didn’t get it. The story seemed to move quite nicely to an anticlimax, I thought, where a potential massacre turns on a dime because of language. My fault – I was expecting the normal sort of adventure and […]
The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville
I’m a fan of China Miéville‘s fiction, but when I first started The Last Days of New Paris, I was a little baffled. There was a woman riding a velocipede/centaur heading straight into a line of mannequins in a can-can row behind which Nazis were shooting at her, all this in 1950. The prose was […]
Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse (Book 3 of Between Earth and Sky)
One of the great themes of Rebecca Roanhorse’s impressive third volume of her Between Earth and Sky trilogy is the struggle of humans to use godlike power without being destroyed by it. In Mirrored Heavens, the major characters either reach for such power or have it imposed on them, and all pay a heavy price. […]
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
While reading Nghi Vo’s beautifully crafted and deeply imaginative The City in Glass, I kept wondering where the story was going, even what it was for. Don’t get me wrong, this short novel is completely enjoyable and brilliantly written, but I was missing something that was hard to pin down. On one level it is […]
Taking on My Fantasy TBR – Assassin’s Apprentice and The Book That Wouldn’t Burn
With ever less time for blogging due to various physical annoyances, I’m limited in what I can contribute to Wyrd & Wonder this time around and so decided to offer an overview of two books in my stretchable comfort zone. I may return to one or both of these for fuller discussion at some point, […]
