Never Let Me Go

Most of the books I read could be compared to junk food. Light, sweet affairs which dissolve quickly and let me rant excitedly about, whether I love them or hate them. Though I don't see myself trending towards the classics anytime soon, it really felt good to read a real piece of literature, which is what Never Let Me Go is. And I feel like unlike the sugary books I more often read, I will be digesting this one for the rest of my life.

I believe Emma was curious about whether this book would have been better if the overall concept and storyline hadn't already been spoiled for her before she started reading it. I did not know the book's concept before I started reading, and I believe it did in fact make my experience more powerful.

The deftness with which Kazuo Ishiguro weaves his narrative defies description. Suffice it to say, he manages to tell you what he is doing to you, the reader, directly without you even realizing it until it is too late. You are already trapped in the narrative related by this book's main character, Kathy and you are doomed to experience the book as if it were your own past.

The book explores regret, tragedy and interpersonal relationships. Growing apart and of life and of death. Its varied characters ooze humanity and every single one of them is engaging.

The book is not entirely without flaw, and I would feel remiss to not mention where I saw them. The climax of the book involves a final set of revelations which seem to fall short of explanaing a few of the later plot developments, but upon further reflection this sort of ties back to the theme the book strives for, of good things coming to an end and of tragic unfairness brought on by unthinking apathy and selfishness. A stronger reason here very well could have undermined the power of this book, but I felt unstatisfied. That very well could have been the point.

Second, there is another instance of anti-intellectuallism on display, although this one is so incredibly slight that you could be forgiven for missing it. I just have a problem with the default assumption that somehow the people who dedicate their lives to medicine must be total inhuman monsters, and that somehow science inherently requires and benefits from dehumanization. Again, this bias is incredibly slight, practically an offhand comment or two just a few times in the whole book.

Final and most egregious is that there is no resistance to the events depicted. I could not believe that these characters would act so passively in reaction to what they experience. I can't help but think this must be a product of the difference between my culture as an American and the culture of the writer as British and Japanese. It might be my biased perspective, but it almost seems like characters are resigned to inaction because they don't want to be in defiance of any rules... that they don't want to rock the boat or inconvenience anyone else. Again, it could be merely a product of my different cultural perspective, but the placidity was the only thing these characters had which wasn't completely, spellbindingly human to me.

This is a singularly good book. It would not be hyperbole to say this book changed my perspective on life itself and I truly thank Emma for leading me to it. 5/5

Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber

This book collects several short stories about the pulp fantasy duo Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, detailing their histories and how they came to be partners in adventure.

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are sort of credited as the grandfathers of the modern day fantasy protagonist as the self-interested antihero, but in this case I think they're the type of grandfathers that make everyone uncomfortable and tell racist jokes.

This review should contain no significant spoilers.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

I'm about ten years late reading this first novel of the Dresden Files. The Dresden Files is a paranormal detective story replete with Noir archetypes. Our hero, Harry Dresden, is a wizard for hire and private investigator.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

The third and final installment of the Hunger Games series concludes the story decisively. In my opinion, this was the weakest of the series for a variety of reasons.

While I appreciate the intensity of the characters being driven insane by their adventures, their lack of agency in a lot of what they do and what happens to them is really frustrating. This plays into the fact that this is not and never was a rebellion that belonged to Katniss, she just played a small part in it.

Perhaps I read the first two books wrong. I interpreted the scenes involving beauticians and fashion in the first two to be examples of the celebrity obsessed decadence of the Capitol as a mirror to the subsistence of the districts. In this book, her primary contribution to the war effort isn't in her physical ability to kill without peer... it isn't in her brilliant mind or vicious personality... it's her appearance in front of a camera, and once again things like outfits, presentation, and inspiring emotions through acting matter more than anything else.

New characters keep being introduced, but we keep failing to get to know them as well as we used to. People like Boggs, Messalla, Jackson, Homes, Castor, McGillicutty, and Cressida are all people in it and I couldn't tell you one character trait of any of them. We meet Finnick's friend Annie and I think she gets a single sentence of characterization. Heck, we finally really meet Gale and pretty much all we ever learn about him is that he's an asshole.

Most of the interesting and formidable problems introduced in the Hunger Games with formulating this rebellion were solved outside the character's understanding or control. We're told their actions had relevance, but except for one or two moments in the book seem to actually hinge on their participation. The characters we know don't arm the districts, communicate between them, mobilize them in an organized fashion, plan an overall strategy, or anything like that. Most of their time is spent hallucinating in hospital beds.

The... thing... that Coin may or may not have done (to use Emma's terminology) just doesn't make sense, no matter how you slice it. Neither side had a good motivation for doing it, and had no reason to expect it to even work if they had. It was just necessary for the book to reach the final conclusion and felt really contrived.

Really, the only thing that remains as high quality as ever through all this is Katniss. She remains an interesting character right to the end, despite how crazy she's gotten by now. Every character centric scene about her (that doesn't take place in a broom closet or nightmare/hallucination in a hospital bed) rings completely true.

Endings are hard. I wish this had been better, but it did work. The darkness and violence this one was able to go to let it feel like it was a real war, I just wish our characters were allowed to have participated to a larger extent in what happened in it.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

If a sequel is worse than the original, does that guarantee it gets a lower rating than the original?

Catching Fire, the sequel to the Hunger Games follows Katniss through the fallout of having not only won the Hunger Games, but thwarted their masters in the process. These Masters now look to extract their revenge through threats, violence and jackbooted thugs. Katniss is forced to watch people suffer for actions she believes are her own fault, and finds herself paralyzed with doubt.

It continues to be a story about Katniss more than anything else and she and all the other veterans from the first book continue to shock and amaze with their likability, comprehensive personalities and so on. The book's biggest problem lies with the new characters introduced in this book. President Snow is a completely one dimensional villain for the book to personify the cruelty of the Capitol. Where once we had people like Effie, who were casually cruel, but complete personalities, or people like Caesar who had clear moments of understanding of how the Games really hurt people, now President Snow is just a vicious toad with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. In addition, Gale, who we met only very briefly in one scene in the first book, only has one real scene in this book as well. There's supposedly a lot of conflict in Katniss' mind regarding the two boys in her life, and yet we still have yet to really meet one of them! Heck, Gale's mother is more of a character than he is. Finnick is really the only addition to the cast that feels on the level of characters introduced in the first book in terms of quality. His humor adds a lot of levity to this book that is probably the only concrete thing in this book definitively better than the original, and he doesn't sacrifice any depth or complexity to bring that levity.

In addition, this book is not nearly as clever as the first one. Katniss spends a lot of time unable to piece together really obvious clues when once she was able to deduce situations extremely quickly. She won the first Hunger Games because she was smart, but the most potent weapon she employs in the sequel is other people liking her. The Games that the character Haymitch won in the past... the one Katniss concluded he must have won by being smarter than everyone else, is revealed to have been about 50-50 dumb luck and random mass guessing on Haymitch's part. No one in Catching Fire is as smart as they were in the Hunger Games, which is really too bad.

But still... everything else about the first book continues to be great in this book. The strong characterizations, well paced plot, high stakes tension, and exciting action all still work in this book's favor. While it isn't nearly as good as the Hunger Games, I still think it earns a 'mere' five stars while the Hunger Games would be insulted by that few. The only thing that could knock it down a peg to as low as four stars would be the final set of reveals setting up the final book, Mockingjay, and I'm going to generously 'count' those toward the contents of that book instead because they didn't have too much to do with the story of Catching Fire, and are just transitions. I'll save my discussion of my problems with these transitions, and the setup of Mockingjay for when I finish that book.

Naked Heat by Richard Castle

If a sequel is better than the original, does that guarantee it gets a better rating than the original?

Why I do this to myself I have no idea. I read something bad and at the first opportunity to read more of it, I pounce. The sequel to Heat Wave, Naked Heat, is the book Richard Castle ostensibly wrote during the second season of Castle and once again it reads like an episode of the show, rather than a story the character himself would write. It's far less egregious this time, but characters continue to be direct copies of their show counterparts, sexual tension between the detective and the writer who follows her continues to be central to most character-focused interaction.

One problem with this is that during the 2nd season, Castle was intensely jealous of a rival for Beckett's affection, and it was even mentioned Nikki Heat got a boyfriend that Castle was toying around with killing before the end. This character never appears in the book. Also, the last half of the book was supposedly finished while Castle was sleeping with his publisher, but the publisher's character in the book wasn't portrayed flatteringly and mostly Castle wrote Rook just wanting to avoid her. Considering his relationship with that character, he wouldn't have written that character that way, I don't think.

The characters have a few things to say and do that aren't in the TV show, and the mystery itself is much more interesting and intelligently plotted than Heat Wave's was. However, in the end, it's not a new, unique experience that makes use of the medium and reflects the character of the writer. It's just an episode of the show in book form, but at least this one was an okay episode.

I waffled a lot about my star rating for this book. On the one hand, it is better written and more interesting than its predecessor, which earned its 1 star pretty hard. On the other, I still wouldn't recommend it except to fans of the TV show who have already seen the whole show and still want more. I guess I give it three stars for people who are already fans of the show, one star for people who actually just want to read a mystery thriller.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

 Battle Royale is one of my favorite movies, and comparisons between it and this book are going to be inevitable because they share a number of themes and subject matter. In fact, I'd be surprised if Suzanne Collins has never seen that movie. However, while they share some themes and concepts, the focus of each is very different.

The Hunger Games follows the story of a girl named Katariss entered into a cruel tournament where children are forced to fight each other to the death for the entertainment of the higher class. Battle Royale is the story of a 9th grade class judged the "worst in the nation", put on an island and forced to fight to the death by their government.

The explanation of the purpose and mechanics of the contest in Battle Royale are somewhat brief and utilitarian, putting the characters into the mix as soon as possible, and the story took place almost entirely within the tournament itself. The plot was essentially about how each character reacts to the situation based on who they are, what they value, and what they would sacrifice for what they valued. I'll get into why this is so different from the Hunger Games in just a second.

Almost everything about this book is right. Every single character is fascinating, and the viewpoint character is no exception. I found myself speculating about their lives outside the scope of the book, and I felt like I was making informed guesses because they were so real. I was actually dead-on accurate in my speculations when it came to Haymitch. The main two characters are by far the most realized, even among the bunch and discovering more about them was the thing that pulled me through the story in less than a day.

Every instance of exposition, every reveal is done well. We learn things precisely when we need to know them. The initial conditions of the contest aren't revealed until the main character is living them, even though she would've known about them before. If the reader had known ahead of time about that, it wouldn't have held one quarter the intensity it did.

Every character was likable, even the ones which in any lesser author would have been written as unlikable because it's such an easy crutch to do so. I should specify more clearly what I mean by "character" here, because the overwhelming majority of the contestants actually in the arena actually never became characters at any point. Even the antagonist for most of the story wasn't really a character, just a Dragon. A dangerous object to be avoided or disarmed. Even Foxface, who had identifiable traits and interacted with the plot at a few points is someone I still can't decide was really a character or not. The characters who were characters though were simply amazing, and their sheer personhood made this story work in every possible way.


The reason why the Hunger Games is different than Battle Royale is that the Hunger Games was about Katariss, what elements shaped her as a character and put her on the path to the Games, what she was willing to do to increase her chances of winning the Games, and how she felt about the Games. Battle Royale was a census of how various people faced death, friendship in the face of inevitable death, and senseless, breathtaking unfairness. BR didn't need to explain in very good detail why they were in the situation, because it would've taken away from the 'senseless' aspect. The Hunger Games, however, explored the question of the purpose of the Games, their place in the world and it's history, and their role in shaping who Katariss is. The Games were characterized to such an extent that I don't feel it'd be inaccurate to say that the Games themselves are the book's real antagonist.

The Hunger Games was amazing. Eleventy squintillion stars out of a possible five.

And I was telling Emma I thought I might wear out her "1 Star" tag...

Heat Wave by Richard Castle

This book is ostensibly written by Richard Castle, a fictional character and main protagonist of the TV show Castle. He's supposed to be a James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy style blockbuster author, with a focus on Mystery Thrillers. Heat Wave is, within the context of the TV show, the novel he writes over the course of the first season, using the show's other main character as inspiration; Kate Beckett, an NYPD detective.

However, this book is really more of a book written by 'some guy' inspired by watching the TV show than by 'Castle' inspired by Beckett. Every character in the book has a direct analogue to the TV show, to the point where the book may as well not have even replaced the names. Within the context of the book, there's a journalist following Nikki Heat around named Jameson Rook... yeah. Heat and Rook have an intense attraction to one another hiding behind a veneer of sarcasm and mild resentment (on her side at least)

So really, it isn't actually a book, it's one episode of the TV show in book form. It's not a terribly good episode either. The plot unfolds so predictably that it's almost painful. The millionaire industrialist is actually broke. His trophy wife is a former stripper. The virtuous accountant is less than virtuous. The crazy Russian giant loses an identifiable ring in a key location because he needed to lose it there to connect the two crime scenes. The only original idea comes near the end, and it's the only salvagable part of the experience.

Overall, it doesn't read like a book written by the character Richard Castle would, it doesn't give fans of the show anything new for these characters to do, and the plot is noticeably less intelligent than plots on the show tend to be. All the humor falls flat as does the romance. The action scenes are okay though, and those are hard to write. Skip this book and watch the TV show, after all, it stars Nathan Fillion. If you watch it all and can't wait to watch more, the book might be worth your time... all 3ish hours it'd take to finish. It's only about 180 pages long.

Feast of Souls by C.S. Friedman

I have a feeling Emma is going to kill me for this review.

This book is a fantasy novel by C. S. Friedman, the first entry into the Magister Trilogy. C. S. Friedman is the author of another fantasy book series that I was never able to get into thanks to unlikable protagonists and a hazy understanding of what the book's main conflict was supposed to be, but which had a really interesting magic system which drove most of the plot.


Now... well, at least I finished the first book of THIS series.

[The rest of this review contains spoilers]

Test of Metal by Matthew Stover

I don't know if Matthew Woodring Stover is hired to write what he's best known for, or if he's simply unwilling or incapable of writing any other way.

This is Test of Metal, a book I'd have passed over at approximately mach 3 if it weren't written by Matthew Woodring Stover, who is easily my all-time favorite author. It's series fiction for the Magic: The Gathering tie-in novels. I have little enough knowledge of the setting or characters, or the events going on around them. I know it's about wizards, and that the setting involves multiple dimensions in some fashion I'm still not clear on. I've played the card game, but the jumbled pieces of setting you get from the cards aren't terribly elucidating. This book does a phenomenal job of exposing what plot elements from previous books matter to the plot of this story, and that made it extremely comfortable to jump into, and that includes the properties of the magical ore that the plot hinges on, Etherium.

This is where the book started feeling familiar.

I might be in a unique perspective, since I've read every book of MWS's except for the God of War novelization, but when Etherium was described, it reminded me too entirely of the malleable, widely applicable crystaline material from the planet in Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. Its ability to respond to the will of the one molding it, and to be applied to such a wide variety of tasks were traits they both seemed to share, as well as part of the action taking place in a location consisting almost entirely of that material.

Anyway, we meet our protagonist, Tezzaret, an artificer wizard and greatest known worker of the Etherium ore. We're really introduced to his character through the discussion of his childhood, when his father was abusive and his mother was killed by an unjust society. Tezzaret's history reminds me strongly of Hari and Duncan Michaelson, the main character of MWS's Acts of Caine series and his father and like the comparison between Etherium and the Star Wars mineral, I couldn't shake this impression.

It comes back to the question of whether MWS hijacked an existing set of characters and molded them into the shape they needed to be in to tell an MWS story or if he was hired to write an MWS story, and he did so. I'm going to stress again, I don't know these characters, but it's hard to believe a coincidence that every character has reasons to act out of character, and half of them get called out on how strangely they're behaving.


There are weaknesses in the setting which I hesitate to lay at the feet of either Stover or Magic: The Gathering alone.

Magic and Etherium in particular have abilities far beyond what seems reasonable, even within a fantastical setting; without the limitations one might expect of them.

Etherium is a magical, mutable ore which can be constructed into magical items with special properties ostensibly springing from their engineering and design, yet Tezzerat can dynamically reshape form and function of this metal widely using only his will, making hoverbikes into suits of armor basically on the fly, or changing the function of a device he can't even see and which is miles away at the time with only his brain. Other times, Tezzerat is capable of reproducing tricks another wizard, a noted master of Telepathy, is known and respected for, and it's never said that Tezzerat is also adept at Telepathy,  simply that Etherium was utilized in some way.

Too many things take place under the auspices of being magic. When it's insufficient to say, "A wizard did it" as the handwaved explanation for an action, I guess the next step up is just to say, "A wizard did it with the help of Etherium." At a certain point, the application of Etherium ceased to be an explanation and became an excuse.

MWS is famous for his crazy-brutal and engaging fight scenes. However, I think he should primarily be lauded for his excellent plot weaving even over his fights. While the story gets a little lost near the end when it decides to be be about time travel and quantum paradoxes, it constantly delivers, and flows together very nicely. You're never given more than you want of any one thing or any one perspective. MWS's trademark of shifting between first and third perspectives shows up, and even slips into second person very briefly. While I understand others complain about this, I love it. It's really unique and gives chapters a lot of freedom to express different ideas and concepts.

Every scene is climactic and exciting, but never so much that it overshadows the next scene, all the way to the end. The fight scenes DO continue to be awesome, in spite of less kung-fu than you'd normally see in one of his books.

Really, the only places this falls down are with the characters, who are less compelling versions of other MWS characters. Also, the outcome/epilogue was hugely frustrating in a very spoilerrific way. Normally, I might say these shortcomings are just inherent to Magic: The Gathering mandated stories, but considering the amazing story he mined out of the absolute shitstorm of Star Wars: Episode 3 for his novelization, I know MWS can do much more with far less.

Read this book if you're already a fan of Matthew Woodring Stover like me, or if you're following the game and its book series already. Otherwise, read the far superior Heroes Die, Blade of Tyshalle, Caine Black Knife novels by MWS instead.

So, I suppose I should introduce myself. This is Bret. I criticize everything harshly. I'm going to start my own blog called Just Lie Back and Think of England: Everything you think is good is actually bad; where I'll primarily review movies, but sometimes TV shows or other random things. I'm planning to focus on the things which are popular despite sucking, like Heroes season 1 or Christopher Nolan movies. Sorry if this review was overly long, meandering or too specific, but that's just how I roll.