The Thorn Birds

I was introduced to Colleen McCullough by her Masters of Rome series which basically singlehandedly sparked my interested in Roman history.  However, this is the book she is the most famous for, so, when I saw it on sale, I thought I would give it a read.  The book is very well written, if not exactly my normal genre. While this book is long, it uses that length to make a generational epic that pulls no emotional punches.

While the cover makes it look like a romance novel, it is really not.  There is certainly romance involved but that is not the primary focus of the story.  In the beginning of the book there is a quote about how some birds impale themselves on thorns and sing their most beautiful songs, even as they are dying.  That theme, so blatantly laid out, pervades this book, showing how loss can be empowering.

The book covers a 50 year period, allowing it to show the growth and change of the Cleary family as they suffer their personal victories and defeats.  The writing really gets across the expanses of Australia and both its beauty and harshness.  It also allows the characters to really come alive and to let the reader emphasize with them with ease.

Overall, I would give this book an 89%.

The Songs of Distant Earth

I picked this book up in a little used bookstore in Northwestern PA.  To be honest, I picked it up because the title reminded me of the title of George R.R. Martin's tribute to Jack Vance: Songs of the Dying Earth. However, this book bears no relation to that collection or its subjects but it is a very enjoyable read.  Arthur C. Clarke has said it was his favorite of his novels, which is interesting because authors are often unwilling to name their favorites of their work.

The only other Arthur C. Clarke books that I have read before this point have been the 2001 tetralogy. I enjoyed all of them, except for the last one which was really pretty bad.  This book however, was quite good.  The science in it is quite interesting and the new world is close enough to be relatable while still having some distinguishing features.  It is hard to say that there is anything superlative about this book, but there is certainly nothing bad about it.  The parts of the book meshed well to hold my interest and the end leaves it both ambiguous and hopeful.

Where this book really shines, is in its description of the events that had happened before it began.  There are multiple chapters devoted to the history of Earth in this universe and I would love to see a story told of those days.  That perhaps might be a better book than this one.  But, as I have said multiple times before, I am a sucker for a complete canon.

One of the more interesting parts of this book was that (with a small enough population) they had "perfected" democracy. Everyone was informed enough and able to vote on every decision. They did have a president, but they were chosen by random lottery and nobody wanted the job because it was basically just being the master of ceremonies at events and listening to people complain.  That may be the most influential thing I take away from this to talk about later.
Overall, I would give this book a 87%.

The Hitman's Guide to House Cleaning

Frankly, I picked up this book because the title was interesting and the digital version was only two dollars.  The book was an entertaining read, if a little cliche.  The book is not actually a guide to house cleaning, as the title might imply, though the protagonist is a hitman.  The story follows the hitman as he is laying low after a hit gone bad, showing what he does and the misadventures that befall him.  The novel is written with a somewhat irreverent tone and manages to not take itself too seriously without the negatives that normally entails.

The book is written by an Icelandic author but he translated it himself so it lacks the rhythmic issues that a lot of translated books have.  Which is good news for this book because I think that a subpar translation would have ruined its darkly humorous tone.  There were several parts that made me laugh out loud.  There were also some exceedingly violent parts (he is a hitman after all) but that is not really what the book is about.

I did feel like certain parts of the book would have been funnier if I lived in Iceland and had better context for some of the commentary on the lives of the people who lived there.  It is far from unfunny, but I feel like the jokes would just all be slightly more poignant.

The book does a good job of fleshing out the character and showing why he is the way he is but there are certain parts of the story I felt deserved a lot more attention and certain parts that I felt could have used a little less detail.  The book also ends on a serious cliffhanger (depending on how you take the last sentence) which is generally annoying.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

Ursula Le Guin is somewhat a shame of mine.  I consider myself a big fan of sci-fi and fantasy and yet I have read almost none of her books.  My mother recommended this short story collection to me, saying that I had to read the final story.  It seemed silly to only read one part of a short story collection, so I read the whole thing.  The recommendation was correct: the novella at the end was what made it worth reading, but there were some other good parts as well. 

Perhaps this collection would have been more enjoyable for me if I had read more of the author's work.  Since most of her stories take place in the same universe the shorter ones might have benefited from some context.  None of them were incomprehensible or even close to it, I just wonder if I could have liked them more.

Having never read much Le Guin before, I was surprised at the degree that (especially of the earlier stories) were concerned with sex.  There was a lot of interesting gender roles or changes from our world but it was just interesting how much they revolved around sex.

In my opinion, the best two stories, the title story and the novella, occupied the last third of the book.  The title story is about a primitive culture being exposed to the larger world around them.  It is a science fiction-y look at conquistadors from those being conquist-ed, with a twist.  I liked the stories naive viewpoint.

The novella, called Paradises Lost,  is a very interesting take on what would happen on a generation ship.  Without giving too much away, it has to do with a religion being formed around the concept of the journey and how the ship completely cares for them.  It comes across as completely plausible (while at the same time reminding me of Battlestar Galactica in some ways).  The characters are believable and interesting and I have difficulty coming up with another story that looks at life aboard a generation ship like this.

The theme of the collection is societies different than those found on today's Earth and in that it certainly does a good job of showing off a variety of different societies in the Ekumen universe.  There are some interesting thought experiments contained within the pages of this book but none so good as the final novella.

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.

The Years of Rice and Salt

A while back I did a post about Agent of Byzantium.  I talked about how it was not at all bad but the short story format didn't flesh out the world nearly as much as I wanted it to and how I wished that it had gone further down the path of history.  The Years of Rice and Salt answers most of those complaints, ironically from the opposite direction.  In Agent of Byzantium, Islam is never founded and so the Eastern Roman Empire never falls.  The premise of this book is that instead of one third of Europe dying during the black plague, 99% does.  The book starts when the black plague is just finishing up its course and goes through about 2050 C.E. So it covers about a 1000 years and really fleshes out the world showing how different parts adapted differently.

The book was recommended to me by a friend after he lent me Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.  I didn't get around to reading it for about four years until it caught my eye in the small used book store in the little town where my Dad lives.  Since I have a difficult time leaving a book store empty handed I bought it.  $8 for a hard cover in good condition is pretty good.

Unlike a lot of alternate histories, this book does not make special effort to point out that certain events did or didn't happen.  Perhaps it is partially because this is so drastic of a historical change but I would like to attribute it at least partially to Mr. Robinson's skill at writing.  Despite the massive change, it is a pretty believable history (though Japanese ronin helping Native Americans fend off  Chinese conquistadors is a little far fetched, I will admit).  The history, rather than focusing on the leaders and major events, follows the lives of relatively normal people.

The book covers its time span by having 10 short-story-esque parts with varying amounts of time between each one.  The group of characters are always the same group, reincarnated in different positions.  This would merely be a quirk of the book except that some of the stories follow the characters after death while they have conversations in the afterlife; a seemingly needlessly fantastical flourish.  Each of the characters is then reincarnated as someone whose name starts with the first letter of the last life's name so you end up thinking of the characters as K and B.

One of the themes of the book is that the idea of a one overarching "shepherd" god is a bit naive and that there is holiness in all things.  Multiple different characters express this view and even the ones that don't seem to believe it.  In addition, the book spends a lot of time following the advancement of women's rights in the world and, while not as much the progression of science, the progression of scientific thinking.  It is very interesting.

This book makes for an good read, however, it can come across as a bit dry at times.  Not exactly a fun read, but a nice intellectual one.

Overall, I would give this book a 92%.

1Q84

1Q84 piqued my attention when it first came out.  1984 was one of my favorite books that I was forced to read for school (probably no coincidence that it was the closest to science fiction) and a similar book by a well respected Japanese author sounded quite interesting.  The book hung out on my list for years; basically, I was waiting to see it in a used book store to pick it up.  Finally, one of my friends offered to loan it to me which I gratefully accepted.

The book takes place (most of it, anyway) in an alternate 1984 Japan and for the first two parts flips back and forth between two limited third person viewpoints, oddly reminiscent of Leviathan Wakes in that respect (and almost no other).  The third and final part adds a third viewpoint, whose chapters are written in a slightly more omnipotent style but still keeping the same general method.

This 1984 has a slightly different history (though honestly I know very little about recent Japanese history so I could not tell you how different other than what the book highlights) and has some magical aspects which allows the author to sculpt a much more exciting world than a period piece about 80's Japan would have been.

This book opens wide a window into a fantastical world, taking the reader on a tour of many interesting things in the world.  The problem is that this world asks a lot of questions but doesn't really give very many answers.  Lots of varying things are introduced that seem to have no bearing on the plot.  It seems almost like the author had a succession of cool ideas and tried to tie them all together with a story but realized around page 900 that there was no way that the plot could do justice to all these ideas and so just left a bunch of potential things hanging.  Perhaps this was intentional, possibly setup for a sequel or just the authors way of showing that life in the world will continue after the final page has been turned.

However, if you outlined the actual key plot points and shaved off all of the interesting world building, you end up with a not particularly exciting story.  As I described it when talking with my friend, the plot itself seemed like a story that did not really need to be told.  The world is interesting and I would read a sequel but I would hope that it picked up some of the many loose ends at the end of this book.

Note: The title of the book seems a little weird considering when/where the story takes place.  Perhaps it would make more sense if the book was 198Q.  However, the title is done this way because in Japanese 9 and Q sound similar and so it is sort of a play on words.  An equivalent English title would be 200-Too (pronounced "Two Thousand and Too" and a great name for a sequel).  Also, at 1157 pages, this book has more pages than any other book I have read cover to cover.

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.

Abaddon's Gate

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Abaddon's Gate, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War, the previous books in the series.

As I mentioned in the Caliban's War review the authors said that they wanted to do a different thing with each book.  This book is certainly different than the previous two.  The first two hopped about the solar system.  The majority of this book takes place on one ship that barely moves for most of the story.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, once again, it is just different.

Based on the timing of the blog post in which they discuss it, it looks like the authors recieved an offer for three more books while they were writing this one.  It is exciting because I enjoy this series and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes but there are a couple places in the book where there are visible stretch marks of the book being changed from the thrilling conclusion to now the middle book of the six book saga.

This book, like the previous one, has four characters that are followed from the third person limited perspective.  However, with the exception of Holden, these characters all new (as in the readers didn't even know they existed in the universe before now).  None of them were as well done as Avasarala but I think the average quality of these four is better than those of the previous four.

The combat in this was very cool.  In the first two books, a lot of the combat takes place between ships but in this one it takes place mostly person to person.  While the layout of the battlefield was a little confusing at a couple points, the intricacies of zero gravity combat were well explained.  In addition, this book makes good references to the previous two with the technology and name dropping characters from other books.

There was one plot element that seemed to be basically a red herring, which is fine but it seemed a little like a wasted storytelling opportunity.  In addition, there was a second plot point which appears to have just been dropped.  Perhaps it will be picked up in future books but I have difficulty seeing how that would happen.

I know I spent a lot of page space on complaints here but this book is really pretty good.  It is a lot like the first two but with just enough tweaked to make it exciting and different (and more tweaked than the second one which felt a little like a slightly more complex repeat of the first).

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.