Bookish Thoughts

I really like following up long epics with shorter books. And since I've been meaning to re-read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 for several years now, it seemed like the perfect book to dive into after the Mistborn trilogy. It actually did end up being perfect, sine the Book People at the end reminded me more than a little of Sanderson's Keepers of Knowledge, and I love finding little literary connections like that. I first read Fahrenheit 451 in high school as part of our unit on dystopia (which also included 1984 and Brave New World ). I remembered the basic plot and themes, since you tend to when you've spent a long time with a single book, but a lot of the details had escaped me. There is one scene, though, that has stuck with me through the years. One that became so vivid in my mind, I'd nearly forgotten which book is came from. When Montag is on the run from the cops, he has to cross a wide street. This is at a time when the speed limit, even ...

The third Mistborn novel, The Hero of Ages , is a mostly fantastic book with one glaring error that I can't really get over. I'll start with my complaint so I can end this on a positive note. The world in Mistborn is ruled by two opposing god-like forces, Preservation and Ruin. The choices of these two gods makes thematic sense in the first two books. The evil emperor, the Lord Ruler, took his power from Preservation and then ruled over a society that was largely stagnant for a millenium. There were virtually no advancements made in technology, architecture, government, even fashion. And this was done largely to quench though and allow the Lord Ruler to maintain control. All in all, it makes sense that his power is a product of Preservation. But in the third book Sanderson digs into these gods a bit more and things start to fall apart. Mostly because, at least as far as I'm concerned, Ruin and Preservation don't actually balance each other out. If you ...

I probably should have written this before I finished the third book. At this point, the trilogy is all kind of blurring together, and the second book was definitely upstaged by the third one. It's a little hard to talk about The Well of Ascension without leaking into The Hero of Ages , but I'll try. The Well of Ascension definitely started out a lot slower than the first book. It took nearly 150 pages for me to really become engaged with the story. Sanderson has spent a lot of time fleshing out his world at this point, so mostly we're meeting new characters. But since everyone spends the majority of the book besieged inside a city while I was (mistakenly) waiting for them to escape and head north, it was hard for me to keep going. It certainly didn't help that the cover depicts a scene from the third book. Mostly this book suffers from the same things as almost every second installment in a trilogy. The pacing is a bit off and most of the book exist...

All of those people who were telling me to check out The Name of the Wind a few years ago spent the last year telling me I needed to pick up Mistborn . I knew I'd get around to this series eventually, especially after the last novel won a Hugo. What I didn't realize was how entirely the book would manage to take over my life. I accidentally stayed up until one in the morning reading, which is something I very rarely do. Mistborn is excellently paced with a lot of really cool action scenes and some interesting characters. But the best part is the system of magic, which is unlike anything I've ever seen. The main character, Vin, is an allomancer, someone who can extract special powers by swallowing and "burning" different metals. I really like how much thought Sanderson put into allomancy, from pairing pure metals with alloys to create similar powers to placing realistic restrictions on those powers. The book also operates a bit like a puzzle. The ...

After half-starting a half dozen books in July, I finally decided that I needed to just give my brain a break. No more dense plots or complicated characters. Just some good old-fashioned magical adventures. Harry Dresden was just the thing to pull me out of my summer slump. Like the other books in The Dresden Files , Proven Guilty is a quick, easy read. Some demon is taking the form of movie monsters at a horror convention and feeding off the fear and panic of the convention-goers. Dresden has to figure out who it is before anyone else dies. Along the way he reconnects with his old mentor and picks up an apprentice of his own. The war with the vampires remains stubbornly in the background, and I've just about given up hope that it will be addressed before the final installment in the series. But there are interesting goings-on with the fairies in the meantime that will have to sate me. And I'm pretty excited about Harry's new apprentice, who should have a ...

I'm getting closer and closer to the end of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.  It's a good thing there's another forthcoming book to look forward to. That book is even set to continue to story of Moist von Lipwig, the protagonist of Making Money . Though I think his story may be played out. The problem with Lipwig (and Making Money ) is that's he's a reformed con man, but he's far more interesting when he's conning people. So all of his growth from Going Postal has to be reverted in the first half of this book to make the second half interesting. And even then, things spiral out of his control more than I would have liked. He's ultimately saved by a blindingly obvious Deus Ex Machina (you can see it coming from the first few pages). For all that, the book does tackle some interesting themes, namely banking, and the changover from the gold standard to a much more elusive standard: trust. The book pulls back from really sticking to th...

Kevin got me this book for Christmas because there was a dragon on the cover and the blurb mentioned fairies. It turns out that this is a pretty good metric for determining whether I'll like a book or not. It helped that it also combined elements of historical fiction, making for a pretty cool book overall. Marie Brennan's A Star Shall Fall is actually the third book in a series about the fairies who live under London. I was a little wary about jumping into the series midway, but I ultimately don't think I missed too much. This book does a pretty good job of recapping the important information from the previous books, and it stands on it's own very well. The previous books apparently dealt with a war between the fairies and a dragon, which resulted in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The fairies managed to disable and trap the dragon. However, they weren't able to build a strong enough cage to hold it forever. So when Halley's Comet came by in...