I don’t typically read a ton of steampunk, and that’s mostly because I’ve read a few too many where the steam and the punk is ferociously beaten over our heads. The gears are made of steam and the steam is made of oil. And there are goggles within goggles. Steal the Sky is steampunk, but…
In keeping with Knife of Dreams, I have completed The Gathering Storm in ten days. Wow! If I was impressed with the increased pace and storytelling in KoD, then I was blown away by the graceful handling of this novel by Brandon Sanderson. I thought he did an absolute justice to the series. I knew that…
Here is a novel that I am unsure about. Having previously read other robotics texts, I know that this is among my favorite, but I cannot say if I really enjoyed this, or if it played with my emotions too much for me to be legible in deciding. There were definitely so faults. I…
It has been a few years since I’ve read Compendium 2, but I picked up exactly where I left off, and I found that the degree of writing remains at the same level of quality. The volumes included detail the rise and fall of a now widely popular antagonist, and introduce one who seems to…
There is part of me that realizes that the criticisms against this novel are legitimate. There are typographical and formatting errors that could be fixed. [edit: It seems as though I was reading an older edition. I cannot verify if all of the issues are gone in newer editions, but William Hertling contacted me and…
Cassandra Clare, you have once again torn my heart from my body, and while it still beats, you have crushed it with your characters, their pains and sufferings, and your stories. Lady Midnight, which takes place five years after the events of Heavenly Fire blends nicely a new story following a new(ish) cast of characters,…
This eleventh novel in the epic series takes the cake for quickest read. Yes, I was more regimented in my reading. I managed to read 760 pages in ten days flat, where usually WoT books take me weeks, if not months! So this is definitely one of the better books in the series, especially considering…
I started this as a means of researching robot novels for my own work and am glad that I did. I have never seen robots in this quasi-organic state as Ashby portrays them in VN. The characters and their relationships are unique and feel real. The dynamic of Portia to Amy was one that both…
Sometimes you finish a book but you just don’t know what to think. That confusion is how I feel right now. Because on one hand, Quiet in the Realm has a strong story, but on the other, it is so marred by its deficiencies that the story is hidden and hard to see. To start,…
Alamut was an interesting read. I cannot say that I loved it with fervor, but I definitely enjoyed my time with it, and can say with certainty that it ranks among my favorite non-genre fiction novels. At its heart, Alamut seeks to explain the rise in fascism (specifically Mussolini’s fascism, as it was written in…