Books shelved under “Fantasy”

Do you ever feel like you have let down a book, not the other way around? That if you had been smarter, funnier, prettier, then the book wouldn’t have broken up with you by text message and started dating your friend, who really isn’t all that much prettier than you and has terrible taste in clothing and music and restaurants anyway? No? Just me? OK. I kind of feel that way about Napier’s Bones.

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My dad occasionally wanders into my room with that look on his face communicating the depth to which the books he borrowed from the library have disappointed him, proceeds to the shelf where my to-read books live until I devour them, and borrows a book before I read it. That happened with The Night Circus. Afterwards he commented that it reminds him of World of Wonders. I can see why. Both books are…

Books about special children with magic powers being manipulated by binary forces are kind of boring. There seems to be a glut of them.

As the 18th century draws its final, decade-long gasps, America looks a lot different than our history remembers. Dutch colonies and Aboriginal nations have become states. Washington was executed for betraying his British superiors; Benjamin Franklin was (though he denied it), a “wizard”. Faith and superstition have formed a tense equilibrium…

Childhood is magical.

There is a myth, or at least a misconception, that this is a result of children being innocent. If you have ever been a child, then if you look deep into your heart, you will recognize this as the lie we tell ourselves to conceal the painful truth. Childhood is magical because it is inaccessible. Once gone, it can never be reclaimed, revisited, redone. It is lost to us except through the…

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. It’s a video game in which you assume the persona of an assassin in Renaissance Italy. (There’s a whole frame story involving modern-day Templars and a machine that lets you relive genetic memories, but let’s not get into that right now.) Although nowhere near as captivating as my gold standard, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed is a fun franchise that I’ve followed since its…

Jay Lake has been hovering around the edge of my observable SF/fantasy universe for a while now, finally entering that universe when I read his Clockwork Earth series. Unfortunately, Mainspring disappointed me, and while the other two books in the trilogy were a big improvement on it, I was not much impressed. Sometime between acquiring Mainspring and reading it, however, I decided to buy this anthology from Subterranean Press.

I like novels more than I…

Two years ago my friend Vivike gave me Kafka on the Shore for Christmas, assuring me that I would like it—and she was right. I also found it confusing and daunting and knew that, in Haruki Murakami, I had found yet another author whose works I will continue to digest long after I devour them with all the tenacity my love of reading requires. So for this Christmas as I considered which book to inflict…

One of the difficulties of pledging allegiance to a sovereign monarch is that whole loss of individual volition. Most of the time you might hardly notice it—but when you fall in love with someone below your station, or when the monarch begins fading and his unscrupulous youngest son sets his eyes on the throne, suddenly this loss of volition is a big deal. FitzChivalry Farseer watches the Kingdom of the Six Duchies fall apart before…

So after finishing The Time Traveler’s Wife I realized that the next book on my shelf was Family Matters. The last Rohinton Mistry book I read cut me up, so I decided that before I attempted this next one, I would need something I was guaranteed to enjoy. Fortunately, my awesome limited edition of Palimpsest had just arrived from Subterranean Press. I first read Palimpsest when it was a nominee for the Hugo Award…

I’ve long been a fan of anthropomorphized versions of Death. This is probably not surprising, since we have been doing this for thousands of years to varying degrees of sophistication. And some do it better than others. I’m a big fan of Julian Richings’ portrayal of Death on Supernatural. He captures the eerie, inhuman quality of Death as a force of nature older than God so well, managing to appear suave and completely cold…

So this appears to be the last book, at least for now, of Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age series. The series is actually two loose duologies: Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water are set in the modern day; Ink and Steel and this book are part of the Stratford Man duology, set in a Faerie-infested Elizabethan England. As my previous reviews of books in this series make clear, I am incredibly ambivalent. Bear’s commitment to…

You’re just going about your daily business, healing people and whatnot, and then what happens? The plague. Suddenly everyone in town is accusing you of being a witch and clamouring for the witch-finder to hang you for consorting with Satan and dancing naked with demons and whatnot. Isn’t that always the way of things? Don’t you hate how people are just so close-minded, even in as enlightened an age as the 1620s? Just because someone …

My previous reviews of the Recluce saga have been brutally honest when it comes to how L.E. Modesitt, Jr.’s writing is disappointing a second time around. So I want to begin this review by praising The Order War for being the best book so far in the series, in terms of both story and writing! After three repetitive, somewhat dull books, Modesitt has finally produced a volume that drew me into the conflict, made me…

This is such an amazing concept, and when I first heard about it, I was taken aback by how unbelievably awesome it might be. Some of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters face off against each other in a desperate race to find a wizard named William Shakespeare. Othello, Juliet, Falstaff, and others believe that “Will” will deliver them from the tyranny of King Richard III. Richard, along with the Macbeths and Iago, plot to kill Shakespeare…

I have never before read anything by Ian R. MacLeod. I have a terrible and impoverishing addiction to purchasing titles from specialty publisher Subterranean Press, and during an all-too-common binge (this time it was Charles Stross titles), I saw this on offer, shrugged, said, "What the hell?" and added it to my cart.

I don't recall hearing much about Ian R. MacLeod either. His name is almost criminally similar to Ian McDonald, however, whose …

Sometimes I wanted to throw this book out the window. Or at someone. It's a hefty little paperback, and my copy is old enough that it the pages no longer lie quite next to each other on the spine, so it looks even bigger than it is. I have no doubt that if it were to hit someone in the head, it could seriously annoy that person and even cause a headache. That's often the…

I am "on a mission", if you will, to re-read the Recluce saga in order, because I most of the first eleven books when I was younger and then lost touch with the series, and now I'm "reconnecting with my fantasy roots". Note, however, that this is one series where the order—at least at first—doesn't matter all that much. One can pick up any of the first three books and feel equally comfortable reading the…

Can we take a moment to bask in how far the Dresden Files, as a series, has come? From its humble beginnings in Storm Front, this urban fantasy series about a Chicago wizard/private detective has become my golden standard for urban fantasy. Over the course of 13 books, the Dresdenverse has expanded from wizards and sorcerers to an epic mythology comprising monsters and magical beings of all kinds—and its characters, plots, and themes…

Valar morghulis. All men must die. And in A Dance with Dragons, everyone dies.

OK, I'm teasing you. But I'm also being completely serious.

N.B.: As always, this review does not contain spoilers for this book, but there are significant spoilers for previous books in the series. I know you're still going to read it though, Dad, even though you haven't read the books and it's going to spoil the TV show for…

N.B.: As always, this review does not contain spoilers for this book, but there are significant spoilers for previous books in the series.

All right, I am going to swim against the tide here and come out in unabashed admiration for A Feast for Crows. This book has had to bear an incredible burden: not only has it been "the most recent book" in the Song of Ice and Fire series for six years,…