Excellent review from Far Beyond Reality on Janny Wurts‘ Initiate’s Trial, which I read about this time last year. I awarded the novel, the ninth in the Wars of Light and Shadow series, five stars at GoodReads, but never felt adequate to the task of writing a worthy review. I highly recommend all of Stefan Raets’ reviews and regularly participate in the Beyond Reality GoodReads group where he is a moderator. I also highly and heartily recommend the fantasy series the Wars of Light and Shadow by Janny Wurts. Some of the best writing I’ve read, bar none.
Tag: books
Tour Guide for the Silent Tower
Thank you to everyone who voted in my poll to help me decide what novel to recommend as a Member’s Choice selection next month at the GoodReads SciFi & Fantasy Book Club. Despite a tie in the poll, several members of the aforementioned group expressed their opinions in a discussion thread I started last week, which sealed my decision.
So, without further ado, my Member’s Choice selection for a group read in July 2012 is . . .
I took the initiative and contacted the author, Barbara Hambly, who graciously agreed to participate in a question and answer thread, much to my surprise and delight.
I will lead, or rather guide, the discussions online at GoodReads (follow this link to join in early). Or wait the ten days until July and hit the ground running with me and several hundreds (perhaps thousands) of your new fantasy friends as we read The Silent Tower together. All are welcome and I’m looking forward to meeting you and introducing you to a fantastic author.
An ebook edition is readily available from Open Road Integrated Media and at nearly all online book retailers (Google ebookstore $7.99; Kobo $7.69; Barnes & Noble $8.49; Amazon Kindle edition $7.69)
If you prefer a printed edition, please check with your local library, used book store or your favorite online retailer, like AbeBooks.com (who may have some new or nearly new editions available).
Help Wanted: What to Read/Recommend in July
I received the honor of selecting the Member’s Choice reading selection for July 2012 at the GoodReads Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club. I reviewed the bookshelf of read books for the club (over a hundred since January 2008) and then reviewed my five star rated books. I narrowed the selection down to just three, two of which I’ve read (multiple times) and one I have wanted to read for many months.
Choices Three
The group has only read one other book written by Barbara Hambly, but she is a prolific fantasy author that deserves more attention.
I honed in on The Silent Tower because it remains one of my favorite Hambly novels. Here’s a brief synopsis to tease you:
In a world where wizards are relegated to ghettos, it is no surprise to see one murdered in the street. But for Stonne Caris, a young warrior monk who sees the killing and gives chase to the culprit, there is nothing ordinary about seeing a murderer disappear into a black, inky portal. The Archmage sends him in search of Antryg Windrose—a half-mad mage who understands the nature of these passages between dimensions.
On the other side of the Void is Joanna, a programmer as mild as Caris is deadly. She has spent her life in cubicles, staring into computer terminals, as far from heroism as she can get. But when the power that is crossing between dimensions draws her through the Void, she finds herself battling to save a world she never even knew existed.
Average GoodReads Rating: 3.92 stars (on a five star scale) based on 819 ratings
Availability: Only the ebook edition is currently in production (I found the best price at Kobo for $7.69; not DRM-free).
It shocked me to learn that the SF&F book club had not read any of David Eddings‘ works; not even from his hugely popular Belgariad series. He also happens to be one of the two fantasy authors I can get my husband to read and I give full credit to the voice of Sparhawk.
Synopsis/Teaser:
Sparhawk, Pandion Knight and Queen’s Champion, returned to Elenia after ten years of exile, only to find his young Queen Ehlana trapped in a block of ensorcelled crystal. Only the great sorcery of Sephrenia, ageless instructor of magic, kept her alive — but the spell would only last a year, and it’s cost was tragically high.
Now a Prince Regent ruled Elenia, the puppet of Annias, ambitious Primate of the Church who planned to seize power over all the land.
As Sparhawk and Sephrenia set out to find a cure for Ehlana, Sephrenia revealed that there was only one person in the west who could defeat the evil plots against Ehlana. That person was Sparhawk.
Average GoodReads Rating: 3.83 stars (on a five star scale) based on 8,983 ratings
Availability: A mass market paperback edition is still in production. No ebook edition is available.
And last, but definitely not least, I settled upon a novel I have wanted to read for months, but can never seem to squeeze into my reading queue: Guy Gavriel Kay‘s The Last Light of the Sun.
I’m not sure of the protocol with respect to recommending and leading the discussion of a book that I haven’t actually read yet, but Kay has never disappointed me. In fact, he always inspires me and leaves me awestruck.
Synopsis/Teaser:
From his very first books, the trilogy known as the Fionavar Tapestry, Guy Gavriel Kay was recognized as one of the world’s finest and most innovative writers working with the fantasy tradition. In later works he has taken on, with striking success, an alternative history of Europe, which reached a pinnacle with 2004’s The Last Light of the Sun. Set at the hinge moment of Britain’s Alfred the Great’s enlightened reign (he’s known as Aeldred in Kay’s parallel Europe), Last Light is a drama of cultural clash and change in a world shadowed by the presence of faerie but deeply engaged with human questions of ethics and honour.
Average GoodReads Rating: 3.79 stars (on a five star scale) based on 2,291 ratings
Availability: Several versions are in print, including mass market paperback and trade paperback editions. An ebook edition is also available, but quite pricey at $12.99.
Selection Conundrum
My dilemma remains. I cannot decide which of the above novels to put forth to the group for next month’s Member’s Choice selection. I selfishly lean towards the Kay novel, because I really would rather read something new. But I equally yearn to introduce more readers to either Hambly or Eddings (at least his less well known Elenium series). I have a few days (less than a week) to make up my mind, so I’m soliciting your opinion through this blog post and the poll below. Votes and comments welcome.
[polldaddy poll=6308298]
Book Review: Throne of the Crescent Moon by Ahmed (4 Stars)
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
Read in May 2012
I liked Throne of the Crescent Moon a lot. I loved the characters. I liked the setting, although the world building relied on references to Earth-like locations in our own Middle East, including the cultures and legends that thrive therein.
The magic found in this world contained some supernatural elements: an Angel-touched shapechanger; something similar to a demon helping an undead (or reanimated) man create ghuls (vaguely like zombies but different) using pain, torture, etc. (blood magic or necromancy); some alchemy; some aura-like internal magic; and, an invocation style magic wielded by the main character.
A murder mystery with apocalyptic consequences. Lots of action sequences kept me turning the pages. And as much as our young dervish might strive mightily for stark black and white choices, all of the characters find themselves compromising their principles and morals for the greater good and survival.
I can’t wait for the next installment in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms series.
Book Review: Insurgent by Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I eagerly awaited the arrival of Insurgent. I devoured Divergent last fall in hours, unusual in that I normally read two to three books simultaneously over the course of a week or so. I put all my other reads on hold when I picked up Divergent. I almost repeated the process with Insurgent, reading half of the book one weekend and finishing it the next. Quick and easy reading, but a bit disappointing turn in the plot at the end left me with an aftertaste I still can’t rinse out of my mind.
I gave Insurgent four stars here at GoodReads, but I will most likely settle on a 3.5 star rating on my personal objective scale. Parts of the book brought tears to my eyes, but they did not outweigh the moments of frustration I felt with Tris. She personifies recklessness in the extreme.
I’m trying to avoid spoilers, so I won’t express the specific reasons for my distaste or displeasure with the final revelation in the last few paragraphs of the book. I may have to go back and re-categorize this novel, and place Insurgent on completely different shelves.
If there is a sequel, and I haven’t gone looking to determine if there will be one, I hope more background is provided to justify the premise revealed at the end. Too many questions, and not the ones I expected to be answered; just a whole barrel of new ones on top of the old ones.
Author Interview: L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Excellent interview with one of my long-time favorite fantasy authors, L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
WoT’s Up, Tor?
My favorite fantasy publishing imprint, Tor, caused a stir earlier this week by announcing the demise of DRM in early July 2012 in their entire list of ebooks (printed under Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen imprints). I’m only slightly disappointed that I have to wait until July. I’m torn, though. I had planned to purchase, next week in fact, the second book in the Wheel of Time series, The Great Hunt, from Barnes & Noble for my Nook Color, to facilitate my role as a discussion leader at the GoodReads Fantasy Book Club Series group. We are wrapping up our discussion of the first book, The Eye of the World, these last few days of April. I have until Monday to make up my mind. Do I re-purchase the DRM’ed ebook through B&N for my Nook (for convenience sake)? Or do I crack open the hardcover languishing on my shelf (and deal with the weight and lighting issues)?
Prior to the ebook emancipation proclamation, Tor released the color sketch created by Darrell K. Sweet, who passed away before completing the cover art for the final Wheel of Time novel, A Memory of Light, due out early in 2013.
But the real icing on the WoT cake came today, when Tor made an excerpt of the Prologue from A Memory of Light available: Click here to read it.
Sweet Sixteen – KC Library’s Booketology and HBP’s Tournament of Villains
Booketology Round 2 Results & Round 3 Bracket | Kansas City Public Library.
Oh, the agony … of defeat. Last round, in the Science Fiction category, The Hunger Games bit the dust before the unstoppable Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But at least my personal pick for all time greatest epic fantasy novel ever written didn’t fall to mere rabbits. This round, however, The Lord of the Rings faces very stiff competition from that upstart Harry Potter.
And it remains a mystery (at least until Monday morning and the votes are tabulated), whether Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot will solve the Case of the Sweet Sixteen Surprise.
Cast your votes now and be entered in a drawing for a Booketology Prize Pack of one copy of each of the eight books that advance to the Elite 8 round, plus a basketball autographed by Kansas City author Whitney Terrell. (Click here for rules and details).
And just in case you weren’t having enough fun already voting for your favorite books, stop by Half Price Books Tournament of Villains, also in the Sweet Sixteen of the third round. Polls close in a few minutes, at 2:00 p.m. Central.
Green Men, Red Planet, Grey Lord, Black Dog
After spending a very lazy Saturday avoiding the invasion of little green men from the Emerald Isle by baking bread, reading about life under Mao in China and watching action flix, Apollo and I took a long walk Sunday morning under an increasingly gloomy overcast sky. Oddly, we saw only one other dog, which looked like a miniature version of Apollo. Only three other people were walking during the nine o’clock hour yesterday. We passed by two clocks on our walk, both of which are broken (either not telling time at all or completely incorrect in their display). Here’s a couple of shots of the clock at the north end of Lansing’s long undeveloped Town Centre street:
As Terry and I were about to leave the house in the early afternoon, my father stopped by on a surprise visit, mostly in response to a status update I Tweeted late on Saturday. He wanted the nitty gritty details concerning my success in updating my Autostar hand-held computer control device for my Meade ETX-90 telescope.
A couple of weeks ago, I had downloaded the most recent Autostar Updater software from Meade and finally remembered to attempt the hardware portion of the update. Hardware and I have a long history of adversarial confrontations. Basically, I used several different connector cables between my laptop and the Autostar device: 1) a serial to USB convert cable, 2) a proprietary Meade serial to Autostar cable (looks very similar to a phone jack, not nearly as big as RJ-45 though), 3) the Autostar cable to connect to the Meade ETX-90 and 4) a universal 12 volt transformer and power cable to supply electricity to the telescope. Once all the connections were in place and secure, I fired up the software. I did an auto-detect on all available COM ports and the software found the Autostar on COM5. Then, I instructed the software to download the most recent firmware version (43Eg … an increase of nearly 20 versions over the 26Ec firmware that came on the Autostar when I received it) from Meade and proceeded with the download to the Autostar at the astronomically miniscule data rate of 9600 baud. The update amounted to about 36 kilobytes of data. I have text files that are larger than that. It took fifteen to twenty minutes to complete the transfer. Man, has data transfer come a long ways in the last decade or two.
I gave dad the bread I had made him Saturday, as well as the Netflix envelope with The Adventures of TinTin sealed in it so he could watch that movie and then return it for me to Netflix in a second unsealed envelope I sent home with him.
Without further ado, Terry and I headed to the Plaza branch of the Kansas City Public Library to attend a lecture and presentation by John Carter Tibbets billed as “From Africa to Mars! 100 Years of Tarzan and John Carter.” We arrived just in the nick of time and parked in the tenant parking garage, since I remembered to bring my security badge with me. I happen to work in that same building. As a result of the lecture, I decided to add the DVD of Greystoke to my Netflix queue. I remember watching it in the mid 80s, probably on a VHS tape, but decided now is the time to see it in wide-screen via DVD. I also acquired a movie poster for the John Carter movie, and other memorabilia, courtesy of Tibbets’ recent private screening of the film at a special showing to a select group of Burroughs aficionados. Tibbets closed the session with this wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis, summing up the why behind the timeless popularity of characters like John Carter and Tarzan:
To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much: he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange. He ought to be as nearly as possible Everyman or Anyman.
— C.S. Lewis, On Science Fiction
On the return trip home, Terry and I detoured to Mission Med Vet to pick up Roxy‘s remains. We spent the drive home in silence, cherishing memories of her and missing her deeply.
Book Review: Archangel by Shinn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beyond Reality February 2012 Science Fiction Selection
The protagonist, Rachel, grabbed me immediately. Not only was she a superb vocalist, she reminded me in so many ways of my own daughter, also named Rachelle, and who is also a superb vocalist (mezzo soprano, though, instead of Rachel’s coloratura soprano). As soon as I finished the book, I sent a recommendation off to my Rachelle, hoping she’d read it and enjoy it as much as I did.
The religious references intrigued me (and sometimes made me laugh – did anyone else think that the name of Semorrah was a mashed-up condensation of Sodom and Gemorrah?) and the musical elements fascinated me. I play piano, attempt to sing (not as well trained as my daughter, so I gave it up as a lost cause at this point in my life) and I know basic music theory. My husband has years of training (jazz trumpet and guitar), composes music and has perfect relative pitch; all of which he passed on to our daughter.
On the question of whether this novel is science fiction or fantasy, I leaned towards the former early on. Once introduced to the oracle Josiah in Archangel, I began to believe I was reading a science fiction story (perhaps along the lines of Pern?). But the rest of the novel revealed little beyond that scene with the Oracle. Another clue could also be derived from the ‘smallness’ of their ‘planet’ in area and scope.
I interpreted the singing as magical. The story is mostly a romance, which I normally avoid like the plague, but in this case it worked well.
I have not decided yet if I will continue this series. I’ll have to research my friends’ reviews of it and see if it gets better or if this installment is as good as it gets.
All in all, I really enjoyed Archangel, even if it seemed to be a romance masquerading as a fantasy with hints of science fiction sprinkled throughout.