The Spirit Ring

I bought The Spirit Ring by Lois McMaster Bujold on a whim.  It was on sale, in a genre I generally enjoy (Sci-fi/fantasy), and looked interesting.  The book is set in a renaissance Europe with one minor change: magic is real. The ramifications of that premise, which is an interesting one, are not fully explored, though they are hinted at in interesting ways. 

The book works through the viewpoint of two protagonists, a male and a female.  The book somewhat toys with how cliche this dynamic is.  While it is clear that they are going to fall in love, based on the story telling formula, the book comes right out and tells you it is going to happen through a magic ring.  The story then changes from a relatively obvious will they/won't they dynamic to the more interesting how dynamic.

The most compelling character in the book though was the villain.  Unlike many books, this humanizes him, without redeeming him.  At one point the book talks about how angels weep for sinners (Side note: The book is very heavy with Christianity, however it makes sense for a story set in that time period) not for the evil, but for the good that is wasted in that evil.  I thought that was a pretty poignant remark.  If I remember anything from this book, it will be that.

The book does not raise any interesting philosophical questions and will not leave you awake at night worrying about the characters, but it is a fun read.  If you are looking for a fantasy book that is fun for all ages, I recommend  picking it up.

Overall, I would give this book a 83%.

The Confusion

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for The Confusion, it does have more major spoilers for Quicksilver, the previous book in the series.

Last month, I posted a review of the first book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver.  As I mentioned before, this is an eight book series collected into three books.  The Confusion contains books 4 and 5, named Bonanza and Juncto respectively.  However, like George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, books 4 and 5 take place at the same time.  Because of this, the book alternates back and forth between the two rather than displaying them in sequence, so the two books can be read as one ordered story.  While it did make the book a little confusing at first glance, I loved it.  It is exactly the sort of thing I would have endeavored to do anyway (and will endeavor to do with Martin's books when I read them again).

Bonanza brings back my favorite character from Quicksilver: Jack Shaftoe, the vagabond.  I was slightly worried that his disappearance in half way through Quicksilver meant that he was only meant to move some other characters to certain positions.  Luckily, that was not the case.  Bonanza contains a great gunfight in 18th century Cairo and generally hops around the globe, showing the reader interesting places as it goes.

Juncto is basically the dumping ground for every character in the series other than Jack and his companions.  There were a few things that made me laugh out loud, such as Jack's brother's commanding officer's (enough apostrophes?) tendency to refer to everything as a training exercise and the introduction of Tsar Peter the Great.  The book also does a good job of explaining how economics worked in the early 18th century.  While Juncto is certainly not as action packed as Bonanza, it is still interesting and entertaining.

I did notice, especially near the end of the book, if you were reading the entirety of Bonanza, followed by the entirety of Juncto, it could get a bit confusing.  Luckily that confusion is completely ameliorated by the construction of The Confusion.

This is a better book than Quicksilver but to find it so, you must put in the effort to read Quicksilver.  This is certainly not a series that allows you to skip around between books. I would definitely recommend this book, it is entertaining and educational.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

Richard Road: Journey From Hate

Richard Road, by Lud Gutmann, is a very interesting book.  I have the good fortune to know the author personally but I will try not to let it bias my thoughts.  This book is intended to be a memoir of the authors young life, something like Trevanian's The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street.  Unlike Trevanian's book, this story is only slightly novelized, with all of the characters maintaining their real names and events as well as the author can remember them.
The book starts in Germany in the 30's.  The author's Jewish parents are becoming increasingly nervous with the Nazi regime.  This part of the book truly shines.  The harrowing experiences and all the things that happened could probably have filled their own book.  This is also the part of the book that is the most heavily novelized because the author was a toddler at the time and did not have his own memories to go off of.

However, that is not what the book is about.  The escape from Germany is simply prologue to real story the book wants to tell: what it was like to be a Jewish farmer in New Jersey.  Unfortunately, this subject matter did not interest me nearly as much as the earlier part of the book.  There were some funny parts and some sad parts and it serves as an excellent period piece for life in 40's and 50's New Jersey.

The real issue with this book is that it appears to want each chapter to be self-contained.  Information is repeated multiple times throughout the book, unnecessarily.  In addition multiple chapters go off on tangents near the end, which provide interesting information, but ruin the flow onwards to the next chapter.  All of this would be OK if the book was set up or billed as a collection of short stories but it is not.

Despite this, the book was interesting overall and it does an excellent job of painting the childhood of the author.  If the phenomena of Jewish farmers in New Jersey interests you (as it does some people) you will probably gobble this book up.  If stories of Jews in World War II interest you, this book will be enjoyable.  If biographies of early life are something that is enjoyable for you to read, then this is a fair sample of the genre.  Otherwise, this book is probably not for you.

I would give this book a 70% overall.

Those In Peril

I recently finished reading Those in Peril by Wilbur Smith.  He is a prolific author and has written over 30 novels.  The only other book by him that I have read, however, is the book Monsoon.  Monsoon is a novel about a family in eighteenth century Europe and their adventures.  I recall it being a good book.  One of the best parts about it was that it just kept going.  Many places, other authors would have stopped the story and continued it in a sequel but Smith just kept going.  It was a fun book; definitely a good beach read.

The same could be said about Those in Peril.  However, Monsoon is a much better novel.  Those in Peril has a few major flaws.  The first major flaw is the book is borderline racist against Muslims.  Almost every single Muslim in the book is a terrorist full to the brim with hatred for America.  There is even a scene showing life in a Muslim town with some people being punished abhorrently for crimes.  There is a throwaway line about how not all Muslims are like this and how this is just an extremely radical sect but it is halfway through the book and surrounded by atrocities.  The second major flaw is that there is very little shades of grey in the characters of this novel.  The protagonists appear to be skilled at everything: from being crack shots to wine connoisseurs to fly fishing experts.  Meanwhile, the antagonists heartlessly kill people, discuss the best way to rape their victims, and are pedophiles.  While this does make it easy to root for the good guys, I like my characterizations to have a little more depth.  The third problem, which is minor compared to the other two, is that the dialog seems a little unrealistic. There were multiple points where the lack of a contraction was jarring. On a similar note, the author uses single quotes instead of double quotes when people are talking.  I cannot really explain why, but I find that annoying.

This may sound a little silly after what I just said, but if you can put aside these issues the book is a fun read.  Smith is the expert of having his books have more than one climactic scene and some of the suspense is intense.  There is a well written scene about half way through the book where they have to fight some essentially feral dogs while waiting for a helicopter rescue.  In addition, when the good guys do win, it is quite the victory.

I would say that if you need a book to read on the beach this summer and you happen to come across this one, give it a try.  However, I would not go out of your way to read it.

I would give this book a 60% overall.

Quicksilver

I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson.  I am well on my way to having read everything that he has ever written.  My most recent read in his bibliography is Quicksilver, which is the first book in his Baroque Cycle, a historical fiction series.  The Baroque Cycle is a trilogy in eight parts (to paraphrase the Hitchhiker's Guide series) and as a whole spans from the 1660's to the 1710's, chock full of enlightenment era goodness.  Quicksilver contains the first three books of the eight: Quicksilver, The King of the Vagabonds, and Odalisque.  Of these three, I would say that the middle one is clearly the best.  It pains me to say so because I do enjoy mathematics and physics and much of the first and third books deal with a young Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz they did drag somewhat.  In contrast with that, most of the second book is told from the third person limited point of view of a vagabond.  The story flows better and is more entertaining for sure.

Like all Stephenson books, this has tidbits of humor sprinkled throughout, really lightening the mood and causing occasional chuckles (there is one part in The King of the Vagabonds involving cuckoo clocks that made me laugh riotously).  In addition, the characters are well formed and the setting is incredibly well executed.  The author uses some enlightenment era jargon ("phant'sy" instead of fantasy for example) and takes every opportunity to explain the origin of words and ideas.  While this novel does play a little fast and loose with the exact players, the historical events portrayed mostly accurate and shape the development of the characters.  Someone who doesn't know much about 17th century European history can still find the story engaging (and perhaps educational too) and those who do know about it will still be left guessing about how the events will shape and affect the characters in the story.

Overall, while the first part was lackluster (compared to Stephenson's other works at least) it was good enough to encourage me to persevere on to the second and that was a good story that was continued into the third.  I am currently reading the second book in the trilogy and do not yet regret my decision to give up on Quicksilver.  It is a large book but an enjoyable one.

While I would not normally divide a book into sections like this, the disparity between the first part and the rest of the book is significant.  I would give the first part a 65%, the second part an 85%, and the third part an 80%.

If you have not read anything by Neal Stephenson, I highly recommend Snow Crash and Anathem.  They are both exceedingly good books.

Snow Crash was written in the early 1990's and predicted many aspects of the internet fairly accurately.  Despite being written so long ago, the book holds up pretty well as a futuristic story.  The book is a fun read, being smart and humorous (the main character is named Hiro Protagonist), and I would recommend it regardless of your technological savvy.

Anathem was, without a doubt, the best book I read last year.  It is a really strange blending of the fantasy and science fiction genres but it is great.  About three quarters of the way through the book I looked back on the journey that brought me from the beginning to that point and was amazed.  I really cannot say enough good things about this book.  The one problem some readers might have is that the book has its own slang and titles (sort of like Clockwork Orange) and it takes 100 pages or so to get used to that.  That would be a bigger issue in a shorter book but Anathem clocks in at just over 900 pages, making it just a minor bump in the beginning.

Sherlock Holmes

The characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson have endured in the public mind for over a century, most recently appearing in a feature film and a BBC television show. Over the past year or so, I have been working my way through all of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. This comprises a total of 4 novellas and 5 short story collections. I have to say, while they are sometimes slightly repetitive and predictable if you take them all in at once, they are enjoyable reads. The short stories make excellent little things to read before you go to sleep or while you are waiting for the bus. The first two novellas, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four (which has a boat chase!) could be considered complete books, one a sequel for the other but the second two novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear, are basically just longer versions of the short stories.

Instead of detailing my thoughts about all of the stories and novellas, I am just going to discuss my favorite in each of the categories in this post.  Perhaps I will come back to others at a later date.

My favorite of the novellas was The Study in Scarlet. This was the first story published and the characters of Holmes and Watson get some fleshing out that they do not get very much of in the later stories. However, what really made this novel shine for me was, unlike most of the other Sherlock Holmes stories, which are generally narrated by Watson in the first person, this one has an entire section on the criminal's background in the third person. This section could make a compelling, if short, western by itself and was a surprising bonus.

My favorite of the short stories was The Adventure of the Illustrious Client. This came from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, which is widely declared to be the worst of the short story collections; however, I did not find it bad at all. In the Adventure of the Illustrious Client, like in so many other Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson is used as a distraction while Holmes does something else. Unlike those other stories, in this one Watson knows he is a distraction and has time to prepare for the role. Also, unlike many other Sherlock Holmes stories, in this one Holmes is not out to solve a mystery but to influence an opinion.

Overall, while there are some repetitive themes in the stories (Watson being a distraction, people believed dead being still alive, among others) each story brings something unique to the table and I am glad that I read them all, rather than just a selection of them.

While some of  the stories are good and others are bad (which is completely understandable considering the sheer volume of stories Doyle wrote) I would give the overall series an 80% with certain stories being all the way up to a 95% and some down to 70%.

Introduction

I love to read.  Both of my parents read to me from an extremely early age and I have a true passion for books and stories.  In my fifth-of-a-century of life so far, I have managed to amass quite the sizable quantity of books and I wanted to share my thoughts of the ones that I read.  If even one person finds a book that they like from this blog, then it will have served its purpose.