Bay Area programmer guy. Lifelong comic book reader, also a big fan of comic strips and webcomics. In prose I mostly read science fiction with a smattering of fantasy, horror, mystery and the occasional nonfiction book. My cats help.
This is my Bookwyrm account. For Mastodon, try @mrawdon@sfba.social
This link opens in a pop-up window
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors …
Could be titled "six stories in search of a novel". Not a bad book, but doesn't do anything interesting with it's carefully-set-up structure.
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of peculiar photographs. It all waits …
A rare book that attracted my attention on the bookstore shelves, I feared that it would end up basically being the original X-Men (teenagers with super-powers!) written by someone who doesn't really understand the genre. What I hoped it would be was a melancholy mystery of a lost and forgotten people. The hero Jacob's teenaged angst and the advent of time manipulation ensured it was much more the latter than the former: once Jacob discovered what happened to Mrs. Peregrine's school, the mystery element is over, and it turns into an exploration of the peculiar students, and the threats they face in the world.
The parallels between this book and Harry Potter are clear (though whether they're intentional is less clear), and the themes of "finding out you're special" and "finding a place where you belong" are integral to both stories, although not as well followed through here. The villains …
A rare book that attracted my attention on the bookstore shelves, I feared that it would end up basically being the original X-Men (teenagers with super-powers!) written by someone who doesn't really understand the genre. What I hoped it would be was a melancholy mystery of a lost and forgotten people. The hero Jacob's teenaged angst and the advent of time manipulation ensured it was much more the latter than the former: once Jacob discovered what happened to Mrs. Peregrine's school, the mystery element is over, and it turns into an exploration of the peculiar students, and the threats they face in the world.
The parallels between this book and Harry Potter are clear (though whether they're intentional is less clear), and the themes of "finding out you're special" and "finding a place where you belong" are integral to both stories, although not as well followed through here. The villains of the story are highly contrived, making them seem like monsters in an old comic book rather than having real menace. Overall the first half of the book is the best, and it goes downhill from there. It's the first in a series, but I'll probably stop here.
For outstanding heroism in the field (despite himself), computational demonologist Bob Howard is on the …
I find the Laundry books enjoyable, but forgettable; I don't even recall what happened in the previous volume. This one might stick with me a little longer, as it seems like the series' overall story is slowly moving somewhere. The supporting cast is stronger than usual, too, and we get some tasty insight into how the Laundry works. The plot follows the format of half the pages of buildup, and then everything goes pear-shaped and our heroes have to scramble to stay alive. Some fine insights into Bob Howard's character and what makes him work as a hero, too. Hopefully the series will only get better from here.
