A Green Mushroom

I liked the Cosmere Collection a lot, but it's not going to be for most people.  The Cosmere is the greater interconnected universe that Brandon Sanderson has slowly been building in the background of a lot of his novels and novellas.  He's mentioned that they're all connected and only recently have some of the connections been mentioned in the text of his work. This is a short story collection all about that.  It's a series of short stories and novellas from his various worlds in the Cosmere. Some of them are brand new for this collection and some of them I've read before as stand-alones.  But, they're all good. If you've read the majority of Sanderson's work then you owe it to yourself to pick up this Cosmere Collection.  If you haven't read any of his work or only a few books then definitely skip this one for the moment and keep it in mind for later. But for the Sanderson fans out there, this one is great!

Guards! Guards! was my very first Terry Pratchet novel.  He has multiple series that all gently interweave in the same setting and I was told this was a really good place to start. And I really liked the beginning of the book.  It was fun to figure out the setting and it was actually really humorous which isn't something I normally go for it books.  But in the first third of this novel it worked for me.  I also loved the ending and the way all the stories wrapped up. My problem was with the middle of the book.  I thought the whole novel could have been reduced in length by a third if a lot of the wasted time in the middle was cut out.  It's just a pacing thing. Now I'm thinking about possibly reading more of Prachet's stuff.  I just wonder if it's better paced than this book.  I can tell there are a lot of things in his writing that I like, so I should probably give him at least another novel to try to hook me.  I'm just not sure wh...

The Alcatraz series is the only writing of Brandon Sanderson's that I hadn't checked out.  I finally remedied that. Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians is about a kid named Alcatraz who suddenly finds out he has magic.  It's very Young Adult.  I like Young Adult books when they're closer to the higher part of the Young Adult age range.  Alcatraz is near the lower end. I felt like this was a book that my kids are almost ready for, not one meant for me.  Although I bet I would have loved it if I was 11-13. I wouldn't recommend this one for adults but if you have kids just hitting the Young Adult reading age this one would be a great book to pick up.

The latest Star Wars Expanded Universe novel, Catalyst, is a direct prequel to the upcoming Rogue One out later this week.  It wasn't great. I mean, it was ok.  It wasn't horrible or anything.  But, it also wasn't a good book on it's own. Mostly, Catalyst is just an introduction to two of the characters that will be in Rogue One.  It follows Krennic (that guy in white from the trailers) and Galen (Jyn's father).  They both have an engineering background.  Krennic is a military man and in charge of overseeing the Death Star building.  Galen is a super intelligent scientist doing energy research with kyber crystals.  Galen is a pacifist who wants to use his research to provide power to everyone.  Krennic slowly ropes him into helping with the Death Star main weapon without Galen ever figuring it out. And that's most of the book right there.  Not a lot else happens.  There are parts with other characters but they don't r...

Paper and Fire is really good.  Between it and the first book, Ink and Bone, this book series has shot up to my favorite novels that I've found this year. Paper and Fire picks up about six months after Ink and Bone leaves off but it works really well.  In terms of story development nothing major has happened in between but it starts kicking off right when the book begins. It's always hard to review later books in a series without giving spoilers for the earlier ones.  But, I really like this series.  I read through Paper and Fire super fast because it hooked me and now I immediately want the next book!  Unfortunately, I have to wait for it to come out since I'm already caught up. If you haven't already, you should check out The Great Library series.  I'm loving it.  Go grab Ink and Bone and see what you think.

The latest Star Wars novel, Ahsoka, came out in mid-October and I finished it in two days.  I always love picking up the newest Star Wars book and it's been really fun keeping up with all of the new canon since Disney pushed the giant reset button on the universe. Ahsoka was an ok book.  It didn't blow me away with awesomeness but it wasn't bad either.  It will definitely be for some people and not for others. To me, it felt like a long story arc from one of the TV shows, Clone Wars or Rebels, that has been moved over into novel format.  It bridges the gap between those two shows and reveals what happens to Ahsoka during that time period.  For that, I love it, just because I always want to expand my Star Wars lore. But, I feel like it would have been better in show format.  I could easier see this as a bonus story arc in either of the shows.  It's probably a consequence of the main character being a unique character to Clone Wars and Reb...

I've read a lot of books this year, just like I always do, but none of them were truly fantastic.  Most fell into the mediocre to ok range.  A few were good and a few were total duds. That changed when I read Ink and Bone.  It's easily my favorite book that I've read this year so far.  I knew almost nothing about it going in except that I had liked some of the author's work before and by the end of the book I wanted to know what happened next!  Rachel Caine does a great job kicking off a new series with Ink and Bone. Ink and Bone is set in a world where the library of Alexandria never burned.  It continued to grow in both scope and power until it controlled all knowledge in the world.  All technological advancement had to come from the library and so this alternate timeline finds a much different world than the one we live in. The printing press has been suppressed and instead people have to check out books into "blanks" that function similar...

It kinda released under the radar but three new Harry Potter novella came out digitally about a month ago.  I read them all and enjoyed them a lot. They weren't full fledged stories but instead little vignettes about various events and people in the world of Harry Potter.  It helped flesh out a bunch of the characters that are key to the series.  I especially liked the sections about different subjects of magic and how they work in the world.  Things like getting all the details about what it takes to become and Animagus or finding out more about potion making were really cool. I've read some of the other short tie-in books before but these were much better.  I can easily recommend them to any fan of the series.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a decent story, but it's not great. I'm wondering how much of my feelings toward this are because it's a play and only the script was released to the public.  I'm curious about how I would feel walking out of the play instead of finishing up reading the script. But, the script is the only thing available to me at the moment so that's how I took this story in.  For me, it relies too heavily on the "cool things" from all the past Harry Potter books and not enough on it's own original creations.  They have a whole magical world to explore and instead they revert to the things we already know. It's like being constantly nudged and winked at while saying "Remember this thing?  Hey! How about this thing?  Remember how much you liked this?" I'm hoping the writer just needed to get this out of their system to tie the original generation together with this new generation of characters.  Maybe th...

I'm keeping up to date with all the new Star Wars novels and Aftermath: Life Debt is the latest. I think this book is better than the first Aftermath novel but it's still not great.  I just haven't been able to buy into any of the author's unique characters for this series.  Luckily, this book pulls in Han, Chewie, Leia, Wedge, and some others.  That helps it so much.  They're interesting and established characters where all the new unique characters feel like bland stereotypes. But the one thing this book does brilliantly are the interludes.  There are a bunch of them throughout the book and they give quick little vignettes about what's happening around the galaxy.  I found myself excited for each new one coming up. After finishing the book I think I can see where this series is going.  I'm fairly sure it's leading to the Battle of Jakku which is covered in Lost Stars.  It's essentially the last stand of the Empire before the galaxy fal...

I really liked Bloodline.  If you follow me you know that I read almost every Star Wars book that hits the market.  This one is right up there with the best ones I've read. And it didn't really surprise me that it was.   Bloodline is by Claudia Gray, the same author who wrote Lost Stars which is my favorite Star Wars book to date. Bloodline follows Leia sometime about half way between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.  It fills in so much information about the politics of the New Republic, hints at the formation and structure of the first order, and let's us see a key point in Leia's political career.  It's a fantastic book to start bridging the gap between Episode VI and Episode VII. While I'd love to learn more about what Luke and Ben are doing during this time period I never felt like this book had to go there.  There are enough interesting events going on with Leia that I was captivated throughout. If you're a Star Wars fan I recomm...

Empires of EVE: A History of the Great Wars of EVE Online is the overly long title for the first EVE Online history book.  It's really cool! EVE has consistently been a game that I love to read about but can never actually manage to get into the gameplay of.  I've played a month or two here and there and it just never seems to grab me.  But, it's super fun to read about! In this book the author covers the major nullspace history and faction wars between the beta of EVE and around 2009.  He hints that there may be more books down the line but this one covers the launch of the game all the way through the first Great War. It's amazing how much thinking, planning, tactics, and spying go on in this game.  It's especially cool to see how each group adapts to changes and upgrades in the game as time goes on. If you're one of those people, like me, who love to read about EVE then definitely consider taking a look at Empires of EVE: A History of the Gre...

After slogging through The Three Body problem I thought I would try to find a sci-fi book that would grab my attention.  I looked at my list of books to check out and saw that Ancillary Justice was super highly rated on Amazon so I got it. I could not get into Ancillary Justice at all. The book starts with disconnected events, none of which are interesting, and a main character that doesn't actually have personality because it's a computer in host bodies. I really tried to get into it.  I even did my typical second attempt at a highly rated book I'm having trouble getting into... I listened to the audiobook instead.  Generally this will give me a better sense of characters once I hear them voiced and it lets me get through parts of books that are a slog since I can have the audiobook playing while I'm doing other things too (like playing a game). But since the main character is a computer the narrator speaks very monotone and very computer-like.  I unders...

The Aeronaut's Windlass is the first book in a new series by Jim Butcher.  I've loved his writing in the Dresden Files and Codex Alera so I had to give this one a try. The setting is a world of magic with early industrial revolution levels of technology where all humans live in Spires that are essentially gigantic towers very far above the ground.  No one ever goes to the ground because... something.  It's not really explained. And that's how a lot of this book felt... not really explained.  By the end of it I liked the main characters and I'm curious to see where they go next but the big McGuffin they were chasing the entire book is never actually explained or revealed to be anything interesting.  It was a big letdown. But then I started thinking back to Jim Butcher's other series.  They both got really good, but neither of them started particularly strong.  I'm starting to think that, as a writer, he really needs a few books to get into the...

The Secret History of Star Wars is a book I really wanted to like. The author approaches the behind the scenes history of George Lucas and the creation of the original trilogy with an in depth look at the process.  He uses historical documents and drafts of the screenplays along with a ton of interviews and testimony from Lucas and those who know him well. I made it about 40% into the book before getting frustrated and putting it down forever. The problem I had is that the author often retreads the same ground from multiple different sources.  He'll walk through an interesting historical note, back it up with quotes from relevant people, and then seem to start moving onto the next thing... but then go back to the beginning of the subject instead and use different quotes to say the exact same thing.  And then go back and do it a third or fourth time. I wonder if he had a word count that he promised his publisher because it truly feels like he's just adding fluf...

I'm still catching up on some of The Force Awakens tie-in novels that slipped past me in the months leading up to the movie. While I basically read every adult novel of Star Wars as it comes out, I skip over most of the young adult or early reader books.  Generally this has served me well, but occasionally there's a Star Wars young adult book worth my time.  It turns out Before the Awakening is one of those. It's a book broken into three parts, one for each main character in the movie. Finn's story is all about his stormtrooper training, relationships with his squad, interactions with Captain Phasma, and his first deployment.  It's really good backstory. Rey's story covers a few months of her scavenger.  It explains where her mechanical and piloting skills come from as well as giving some more information on how she views the world. Poe's story ties in most directly with it basically leading right up to the point where the movie starts.  We lea...

The Perfect Weapon is a Star Wars novella that left me wanting. It does a decent job of painting the picture of a life as a mercenary or bounty hunter on the edge of the law while the pacing and action are decent enough. My problem with the novella is that it all seems to be leading up to finding out what is so important that is contained in a box the main character has to retrieve.  And (spoilers) in the end she gets the box but doesn't open it. It's a frustrating end to the decent story that led up to it. Instead of adding a unique little facet to the Star Wars universe this novella doesn't really add anything.  You're safe to skip this one.

Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors these days and I just found out that he released this novella Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell a while ago and I somehow missed it. I remedied that situation. My favorite thing about novella length fiction is being able to sit down and read the entire thing in one session.  This one was no exception.  I read through the novella in one night and really liked it. Sanderson creates a new world with a new system of magic and superstition, as he usually does.  It's always interesting to see which direction he takes it.  In this world it seems to be built up around puritanical belief systems.  I'm not a person that likes too much religion in my fiction, but  Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell does a great job of using it as source material but not lingering on it. The story follows Silence, a character who owns a waystop along a dangerous road through the forests and the White Fox, a b...

My regular readers all know by now that I love all things Star Wars. That being said... this is the first Star Wars book in the new canon that is extremely mediocre.  It's not horrible but there's no way I would recommend this one to anybody. Seriously, if you want a recommendation go read Lost Stars .  It's probably my favorite Star Wars book ever and it's in the new canon extended universe. Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company is supposed to be a tie-in book to the Battlefront game that releases today.  Actually, it's a very generic sci-fi military novel.  I've never been a big fan of military books.  These are novels that spend the whole time focusing on what it's like fighting on the ground and being one of the troops.  Twilight Company is no exception. There are a bunch of undeveloped flat characters that you spend the whole book with.  They're ground troops in the war against the Empire but they rarely tie into the overall ...

This was an awesome book.  I don't often read or listen to non-fiction novels but I make exceptions for people or authors that I really like. I like a lot of Felicia Day's work and I'm always interested in seeing the next thing that she creates.  This was a good chance to find out more about her and the creative process she goes through.  It was very fascinating. I'm always interested in hearing about how people work and how creative work is accomplished.  This book gives a good feel for both in Felicia Day's work. I listened to this one as an Audiobook and it's definitely the way to go, because the author is also the narrator.  I love when that happens.  When the author is the narrator you can be sure that the correct tone is carried through in the reading of the piece of work. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how creative work gets done, the beginnings of video web series in the infancy of Youtube, or if you're just a...