Books shelved under “Fantasy”

I love Ursula K. Le Guin’s first two Earthsea novels. A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan are among my two favourite fantasy novels, and together I think they form an essential duology that showcases some of the most compelling and truthful storytelling about identity and finding oneself. So it was with some trepidation that I read The Farthest Shore.

In the third Earthsea novel, magic is dying. Our protagonists are a…

This is totally unrelated to the content of the book, but I keep wanting to call this Sum: Forty-One Tales from the Afterlives, after the band Sum 41. And I kind of feel like David Eagleman missed out on some tie-in gold there. Call me, Eagleman.

Let’s start with one huge positive of this book: it’s short. I’m saying that’s a positive not because I disliked the book—quite the opposite, in fact.…

Saga first came onto my radar last year when it was nominated for a Hugo Award. (Volume Two was nominated this year!) In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was included in the Voters Packet.

I didn’t read it.

I don’t read many graphic novels. I understand why people like them, and part of me wishes I read more—but obviously that’s not a big enough part, or else I actually would. Simply put, I am…

Now, I am a lucky and spoiled person who is reading Saga collected in volumes, rather than reading each issue as it is released like a chump—er, I mean, true fan. I guess it’s comparable to binge-watching a show after the entire season has been released rather than watching it week-by-week. In the end, you get to the same place. But the experience is totally different.

Saga, Volume Two raises the stakes after Volume One…

I read The Runelords, or at least The Sum of All Men, when I was much younger. I like to revisit books I think I enjoyed when I was younger but don’t remember now. If I like them still, hoorah; if I don’t, then I get to better understand how I have changed over the years. The Sum of All Men falls in the middle of that spectrum: it’s an enjoyable book with…

Every ongoing but somewhat formulaic series has its tipping point, that moment where the overall story arc and mythos of the series’ world begins to subsume the individual plots of each book. For The Dresden Files it was Summer Knight, the fourth book, which adds faeries to the Dresdenverse. For the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, that tipping point is here, with Dawn’s Early Light.

On the surface, there is little to make …

I started re-reading the entire Temeraire series recently. I didn’t post a new review of His Majesty’s Dragon, because I felt my original review said everything that needed to be said. Throne of Jade, however, has been lingering on my to-reread shelf for years, a somewhat hyperbolic five stars attached to it, no explanation. So it’s only fair I give it a review it deserves. Yes, I’ve downgraded it to a satisfactory three stars.…

I shouldn’t like A Fistful of Sky as much as I did. It’s a weird book. Nina Kiriki Hoffman is able to bend all the tropes of fantasy novels set in the contemporary world ever so slightly. The end result is something odd, strange, but no less wonderful. Gypsum LaZelle and her family are an interesting group of people for whom magic is supposed to be a gift—except when it’s not.

The idea of a…

I wasn’t going to go out of my way to read The Magician’s Land. I’m so ambivalent about this series. But there it was on my library’s New Books shelf … it seemed almost rude not to borrow it. At the very least I was hoping to find closure. Honestly, I got more than that. This is a series that has steadily improved over the three books, with The Magician’s Land probably offering the…

I want to like Brandon Sanderson’s books more than I do, because I feel like he is trying to do interesting things with high fantasy. He is working hard to create fascinating fictional worlds with well-designed systems of magic, to emulate the high fantasy of our forbears but clean out some of the cobwebs that have gathered in the corners of the genre. I can grok that. And I do enjoy his writing; I really…

Blood and Iron, not to be confused with the urban fantasy novel of the same name by Elizabeth Bear, is the first entry in a trilogy by Jon Sprunk about fantasy nations at war. Our hero is Horace, a shipwright and carpenter stranded on the shores of a hostile empire, at their mercy, who suddenly finds out he can do magic. What ensues in the slow self-destruction of the capital city of this kingdom…

Oh dear God I want to kill Kvothe.

I don’t want him to die. I want to kill him.

I would like to excise him from this book. Could I possibly get a Kvothe-less version of The Wise Man’s Fear? Is that a thing? Would that work? It would hopefully be better than this.

I’m twitching, a little, because of course, back in my review of The Name of the Wind, I praised…

I love libraries! I hadn’t planned to get the illustrated version of this, or probably read it at all. But then there it was, on my library’s New Books shelf, staring at me … and I stared back … and I borrowed it. Because that’s what libraries let you do. They let you take books, as long as you promise to bring them back. It’s amazing.

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains…

I rediscovered this while sorting out my overflow bin of books to read. I hesitated, because since buying it years ago, I’ve learned that the series has been re-edited and republished in doorstopper form, apparently to its benefit as a story. Still, it was there, and I wanted something not too heavy to read.

The Hidden Family picks up right where The Family Trade left off (literally, because they used to be one book). Whereas …

This is something I probably never would have read had it not been nominated for a Hugo Award. I generally eschew tie-in fiction—I have enough fiction set in original worlds to read. The Butcher of Khardov is set in the world of Warmachine, which Wikipedia reliably informs me is a “tabletop steampunk wargame.” So, Dungeons & Dragons on steroids.

The cover art and illustrations scattered throughout the story reinforce this perception. Orsus Zoktavir is…

My ePub copy of this from the Hugo Voters Packet had really messed up formatting, but I perservered anyway, because this story is awesome. Six-Gun Snow White is the classic Snow White fairytale reinterpreted through the lens of the Old American West. Snow White is the ironically-named child of a silver mine owner and a Crow woman, Gun That Sings, who married him against her will so that he would leave her people alone. Gun…

Mmm, it’s good to dip back into the Laundry Files universe for a little while. Charles Stross is in fine form with Equoid, a delightfully creepy take on unicorn mythology guest starring a young H.P. Lovecraft. Bob Howard is itching to get out of the office, and in a classic case of careful-what-you-wish-for, he gets sent to a country farm with a unicorn infestation. Zombies and tactical teams and chaos and destruction ensues.

The…

Hot on the heels of “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly,” I started “Fade to Gold.” I think I like this one even better. It is definitely a more straightforward narrative, and it feels like some kind of fable. Benjanun Sriduangkaew delivers a sucker-punch kind of tragedy: a lone soldier, a woman, is making her way back to her village when she encounters a fellow female traveller. But the traveller is actually a …

I read Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead last summer when he was first nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. I remember getting a good deal of enjoyment from it during a few sunny days reading outside. It was fantasy, but not as we’ve become accustomed to know it. Gladstone’s Alt Coulumb was a twisting maze of legal deals entwined with magical contracts. The worldbuilding was simply superb, and the plot had me hooked. So…

Could not deal.

I looked at my progress today and realized I was only slightly more than halfway through. Every time I go to read it, my eyes feel heavy. Enormous paragraphs of description and narration make for a style of story that just does not work for me at the moment. I need something more quickly-paced, something that grabs and takes me along for the ride.

This is not a bad book. But it’s…