Book reviews

Book review: Burning Paradise

Yes, I know, an actual review of an actual book I read. I started reading it on January 19, so it took almost a year to complete (according to my Kobo it was 6.8 hours of reading).

Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars (it’s 4 stars on Goodreads because they don’t do half stars)

It took me a long time to get through this relatively short novel, but that was entirely on me. My attention span has been depleted this year–and I don’t even go to TikTok!

That said, this is a weird story that combines alien hive minds with an alternate history version of 20th century and early 21st century Earth, in which a hypercolony of aliens in orbit have been intercepting and subtly modifying communications to prevent wide-scale conflict, so there is no World War II, relative peace has lasted a hundred years and people’s lives are relatively safe and secure, even if some technologies, like satellites and the internet have never been developed.

But with humanity’s worst impulses suppressed, a secret group called the Correspondence Society has been investigating and identifying what is really going on. From there, the story launches into following an extended family as they get involved in a gambit to break humanity free of the hivemind, regardless of the possible fallout. Wilson intermingles science fiction and horror here, with a strong “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” vibe (a good thing). The characters are complex and not always what they seem–a recurring motif.

That said, there is something so weird about the plot that it was ultimately hard for me to embrace–and I don’t necessarily see that as a negative. Wilson paints an alternate history that is peaceful, but filled with subtle repression, and seems to ask if that’s good enough for most people.

If you like Wilson’s work, you’ll likely enjoy Burning Paradise. Readers new to him may want to be prepared for a story that is at turns bloody, philosophical, and just generally a downer.

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Book review: The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 1: 1950-1952

The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 1: 1950-1952 by Charles M. Schulz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first volume of The Complete Peanuts, covering 1950-1952, and I was always curious to see how the strip started out, since I didn’t start reading it until decades later.

Right from 1950 it combines the innocence of small kids with the existential crises of adults, all while never showing an adult. The kids are variously mean, complimentary to each other, helpful, hurtful–often in the same series of strips. Snoopy looks like a real dog! The characters of Lucy, Linus and Schroeder are all introduced as babies, but grow quickly. By 1952 we see Lucy yanking away the football from Charlie Brown for the first time, but Linus doesn’t have his blanket yet, no have we seen Sally, Franklin, Pig Pen or many other characters.

Amidst the bad jokes, clever wordplay and gags, the thing that stands out most is the art itself. Schulz drew the strip with an eye for both economy and detail, the lines crisp and confident, characters expressive in both body language and their faces. Simply put, he was an artist who happened to draw a comic strip, and it showed.

For anyone interested in the comic strip form–not just Peanuts–this is a fascinating look back at the art as it began to evolve over 70 years ago. Highly recommended.

A perfect example of the droll, adult humour.


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Book review: Structuring Your Novel

Structuring Your Novel by K.M. Weiland

NOTE: I normally have a link to my Goodreads review, but the site is down as I post this. I'll remove this note once it's back up and the links can be put in.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ll be honest, I read this book for two reasons: because it’s short, and I was curious what a more nuts and bolts approach to novel writing would look like (I got it with a big book bundle that I was looking through after finishing my last read). I have read many books about writing novels, so by this point it takes something with a little extra to make my socks really roll up and down.

Structuring Your Novel doesn’t really have that, but it is a perfectly cromulent introduction to novel structure for a new author. The book is divided broadly into three parts:

  • Breaking down the classic three act structure
  • Breaking down scene structure, specifically the scene/sequel duo
  • A final section, curiously, on sentence structure

Initially I found the book overly restrictive in how it demands a novel must be written, but for new writers, this is probably a good thing–learn the rules before setting a blowtorch to them. Weiland even notes that some well-known authors don’t use the three-act structure–but actually do! They just do it without realizing it, because it’s the natural way people tell stories: a beginning, a middle, an end. This seems entirely logical.

The scene/sequel thing is also very fundamental: stuff happens, then the characters react, or more broadly, ACTION and then THOUGHT. Logical!

Really, everything in the first two-thirds of the book is fine, if not revelatory for anyone who has been writing for a while. But I question the necessity of the section at the end on how to write sentences. None of the advice is bad or wrong, but it feels out of place in a book about structuring your novel, as if Weiland cribbed from a book on grammar to make this book a little heftier. It’s easily skipped, and I’d suggest any writer who struggles with grammar might want to read an entire book on the subject before trying to crank out a novel. Rewiring is hard enough without having to correct a bunch of grammatical errors as well.

Overall, this is a perfectly fine book for new writers.

Book review: Talent is Overrated

Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought I had reviewed Talent is Overrated years ago, when I first read it, but apparently not.

I took this as an opportunity to re-read it, so here is my review, about a decade or so late.

The book, originally based on a Fortune magazine article, presents a simple premise: That people who seem gifted with natural talent aren’t gifted at all–they just practice more and at a level most people would find untenable, allowing them to excel. The first half of the book explains how deliberate practice can make a profound difference in how adept someone is at a given skill, whether it’s playing a musical instrument, throwing a football, or something else. Author Geoff Colvin does note that physical limits can impose obvious constraints on some tasks, but that generally, if someone practices extensively (hours a day), does so in a deliberate manner (always pushing themselves to learn more, rather than getting super proficient at a certain level), they can rise to be at the top of their chosen field or endeavour.

The second half of the book then goes into the why of deliberate practice, and here it’s less about case studies and more speculation on what compels people to go well beyond what most would do in terms of time and energy investment in their chosen hobby or line of work. Colvin also holds out hope for those wanting to try out deliberate practice by saying it can yield benefits even in those older, although it’s obviously better to start younger.

Overall, I like the premise of the book. It’s logical and there’s plenty of evidence to show that smart, hard work is the not-really-secret recipe to success. It’s just such hard work that only a few will ever fully commit to it, and it’s still not entirely clear why some do. Colvin’s prose is not particularly vivid or arresting, but it gets the job done. The book, written in 2008 (I had a “2018 anniversary edition”, though I could not notice any changes from the original text I read) could probably do with an update, as smartphones and other technology were nascent when it was written, and it would be interesting to see how current tech can help or hinder deliberate practice. Still, this is a worthy and very accessible read.

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Book review: The Between

The Between by Ryan Leslie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Between drew me in with something I’m always a sucker for: a portal to another world accessed through something mundane and ordinary. In fact, the previous book I read, Stephen King’s Fairy Tale, has the same hook, where the portal is inside a shed in a backyard. In The Between, the portal is behind a huge iron door buried…in a backyard! Reading these books may make you think backyards are way cooler than they actually are.

For a debut novel, The Between is pretty good. Author Ryan Leslie finds a tone and stays with it fairly consistently throughout–serious, but leavened by the characters reflecting on the unreal situations they find themselves in. The prose moves between macho pants banter between the main characters of Paul and Jay, and descriptions of the bizarre world of The Between and the rules that govern it, with the latter comprising the bulk of the novel. Leslie does a good job in providing enough detail for The Between to make it feel like an authentic place, while teasing details that suggest a lot more than what the reader sees.

But, as is often the case with a debut novel, it’s got a few flaws that bugged me. There are two that stood out. The first is The Between itself felt like a fusion of several different concepts the author had for the realm, and the inclusion of the ASCII computer game version seemed more a bit of a cheat for the author than something that added to the story, in that it allows a character to have a handy notebook/reference for The Between, but adds little else for the reader.

The other main issue I had was with the main character of Paul. He not only disappears for a large chunk of the story in the middle, but never seems to change at all, or have any real kind of arc, despite performing heroic deeds, especially near the story’s conclusion. The tense relationship that is fleshed out early on between Paul and Jay is also never revisited in a meaningful way once they enter The Between. There is some excellent work in showing how taking up artifacts in The Between confers powers and a specific role to the person wielding them, and can transform the person’s personality. This is used to great effect when Jay gets a knife that essentially turns him into an assassin with an insatiable bloodlust, but this never really gets followed up on at story’s end. Sure, there’s plenty of rousing adventure and the set pieces are full of action and derring-do, but if you take the time to create and explore relationships between characters and have them change in significant ways, I think it’s important to explore the consequences after all the gun fights and stabbings. By the end, I didn’t really know where Paul and Jay stood, except that I guess they were still friends.

Still, there’s a lot that works in The Between and I am confident Leslie will take what he has learned from writing it and incorporate it into future stories.

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Book review: Fairy Tale

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I hit a reading slump, as happened when my long commute went away at the start of the pandemic, I often struggle to find a book to get started on. On the one hand, I enjoy giving unknown authors a chance, but this often leads to, if not disappointment, then an underwhelming experience where a book is perfectly decent, but feels like eating a bland meal. It does the job, but nothing more.

In this case, I decided to turn to the author I’ve read more than any other (hardly a novel claim, if you’ll pardon the pun), and tackled Stephen King’s latest, the generically-titled Fairy Tale.

There will be spoilers below. A spoiler-free summation would be: Buy it if you’re a King fan, if you’re not super hardcore about how fantasy worlds should “work”, or if you are a sucker for alternate dimensions/realities–like I am.

The story is divided into two parts. The first third establishes the relationship between Charlie Reade, an athletic 17-year-old high school student, and a reclusive old man named Bowditch, who lives in what is termed a “Psycho house” at the top of a hill on the street where Charlie lives. Charlie hears Bowditch’s cries for help after he has fallen off a ladder while trying to clean the gutters of his house, breaking his leg. Charlie becomes something of a local hero and he and Bowditch form a friendship during Bowditch’s recovery.

After revealing that he has not much time to live, Bowditch tells Charlie about a secret in the locked shed in his backyard, where Charlie had previously heard a strange skittering sound. Describing it as a burden rather than a blessing, Bowditch leaves Charlie his estate, along with some hurried instructions on tape regarding the shed, recorded as Bowditch suffers a fatal heart attack.

Charlie unlocks the shed and enters a tunnel that leads deep down into the earth and eventually emerges into another world with two moons, called Empis.

From here, the story takes on the fairy tale of the name, where the people of Empis, suffer under a curse by a possibly-not-quite-human-anymore king named Elden. The people see Charlie as their saviour prince, which, of course, turns out to be true.

Empis is one of these strange worlds that King likes to write about, mixing high fantasy tropes with anachronistic modern touches, like electric trolleys. King deliberately avoids trying to explain everything. Indeed, Charlie, who narrates the tale, notes this himself, surmising his time in Empis as one with many mysteries left unsolved.

Some might be impatient with the slow burn approach of the story, which spends hundreds of pages in the small town of Sentry’s Rest before moving on to Empis, but in this opening third of the novel King effortlessly makes the mundane not just interesting, but compelling, peppering the story with hints of weirder things to come.

In Empis, the story becomes a retelling of sorts of Rumpelstiltskin, filtered through King’s version of a magical, high fantasy realm where magic exists, both good and dark. There are noble sacrifices, dungeon escapes, gladiatorial games, dubious astronomy, truly evil villains and through it all, King adroitly drops in the kinds of details that make the place and its people feel authentic.

There are also more spiralling staircases in this story than in any other I’ve ever read. If you have an unnatural fear of spiral staircases, be warned!

Overall, I enjoyed Fairy Tale. It may seem trite by now to call any King novel “vintage King” but it fits here. King clearly had a lot of fun creating the world and people of Empis, and fusing it, Dark Tower-style, to our modern one. It even has a happy ending.

Recommended.

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Book review: Them

Them by Whitley Strieber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Whitley Strieber returns with another book about the entities he calls the visitors, and while Them is perhaps a bit unfocused and doesn’t tread much new ground, it does allow Strieber to test out some new theories on what the whole visitor experience may mean. The tone is also generally a bit gloomier than it’s been in the past, with less emphasis on the transformative parts of the experience and more placed on the darker aspects–abductions, violent confrontations with civilians and the military, and whether the intentions of the visitors are benign or more sinister.

On the latter, he at least assures the reader that they’re not probably not harvesting us for food, since reports of abductions have dropped off sharply in recent years and if we were a food source, they’d still be ordering take-out, so to speak.

Apart from one late chapter, this book does not cover his own experiences, except mentioning them where relevant to others he discusses.

The first half of the book consists of letters pulled from the 200,000+ Communion letters archive, with each followed up by an analysis. Each case is chosen to help illustrate a particular aspect of the visitor experience, and the overall impression one gets–if the assumption that everyone having these experiences is not simply experiencing these things in their minds–is that the visitors are not a monolithic entity with a single purpose, but rather an assortment of factions, some with more noble goals (help us evolve), others less so (using us as playthings).

A point Strieber drives at repeatedly, is that the visitors themselves are responsible for all the secrecy concerning their presence, and governments and their agencies have been compelled to play into this, creating a system of classification that has perhaps forever insured the full truth of what is happening will never be known. The tremendous amount of money the Pentagon spends that goes unaccounted for is no flight of fancy, and Strieber suggest it may be funding vast projects the public is utterly unaware of.

One of the more interesting aspects of the visitor experience that Strieber has talked about before is how it might relate to death, but while he brings it up multiple times here, he makes no further attempt to better explain or theorize on the connection, steering the reader toward other books of his, such as The Afterlife Revolution. Understandable, perhaps, but still disappointing.

The second part of the book mainly covers how the government and military have helped to cover up what is happening, then ends with a chilling chapter on how Strieber himself has been targeted recently for harassment, via hacking of his website, as well as intrusions into his home that compelled him to journey overseas to finish the book. It ends, as he notes so much of the visitor experience has, without any clear answers.

If you’ve read his other books on this topic, you won’t find a lot that is truly new here, but he still explores the subject in a way I find measured and compelling, never making bold claims about things he does not know, but neither standing back as a supposedly detached observer. As I’ve said before, if this is all an act, it is convincing enough to be indistinguishable from reality.

My biggest complaint is that the book never really pulls together in an overall narrative, it reads as more an overview on several broad aspects of the visitors, UAPs and government secrecy. But it covers these things well, and the book is an easy recommendation for anyone interested in the topic of the visitors or UAPs/UFOs.

(And yes, the title is a direct reference to the 1956 science fiction film about giant ants, Them.)

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Book review: Press Reset

Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Press Reset follows people working at some of the biggest publishers and developers in the video game business, and in doing so author Jason Schreier paints a rather depressing portrait of a dysfunctional industry that works on a boom and bust model, with layoffs and studio closures regularly forcing workers to seek out new employment, often requiring them to move to different cities, states or even other countries.

Amid the stories of mismanagement (and a few are epic, especially the tale of 38 Studios) some bright moments occur when small groups of devs band together, go indie and find success on their own terms, even as they grapple with some of the same long term stability issues, albeit on a smaller scale.

In the end there are a few suggestions on how to make the work environment better for the artists, programmers and others who make video games, notably through unionization (which has started to happen since Press Reset was published) and the idea of studios only having small core “creative” teams and hiring contractors for pretty much everything else, like level construction, art generation and so on. This is also happening to a certain degree.

For some people featured in the book, the ultimate solution for them was to simply get out of the video game business altogether, moving into jobs that pay better, provide more stability and generate less stress. Press Reset is an excellent, detailed look at an industry that should really be better for workers than it is, considering video games have been around for decades, and generating billions in revenue for many years.

Recommended.

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Book review: Gotta Read It!

Gotta Read It!: Five Simple Steps to a Fiction Pitch that Sells by Libbie Hawker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This short book is about pitches. The story kind, not the baseball kind. I got it as part of a book bundle and I love short books, so I dove in.

And it’s fine. Hawker provides plenty of her own pitches as examples and while it may seem ego-driven at a glance, it’s nice in that there is an authenticity to the pitches. She’s not “writing to the crowd”, she’s providing examples of work she has relied on directly to help sell her novels.

The writing style is light and the book can be finished in an afternoon, all the better to apply the lessons therein. I don’t foresee myself making use of it much with my own writing, but for those who may need to work on and use pitches, this is a concise and worthy resource.

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Book review: So You Had to Build a Time Machine

So You Had to Build a Time Machine by Jason Offutt

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this more than I did. In the end it was a light, uneven parallel dimension romp that has tons of stuff in it, but doesn’t really hold together that well.

Also it is more about alternate universes than time travel, so the title is sort of a fib, too. 😛

On the plus side, the smirking, sarcastic tone is carried off well. The characters all seem to know how ridiculous everything is and more or less roll with it. This does mean that “serious” character moments tend to come off as maudlin or out of place. As the “Miller waves” that prompt shifts in time and space grow more frequent, the changes grow more dramatic, from small stuff like street names changing to Earth being overrun by orcs. Apparently.

And this is also where the story lost me. Look, I don’t expect hard science fiction in a work that is clearly filled with gonzo tech and lots of hand-waving on how or why it works, but I still felt there was no coherence and the author just started throwing in weird stuff for the sake of being weird, with one character, a hulking bakery owner known as Brick, tossing off a line about how maybe worlds filled with dragons and such actually exist because writers aren’t imagining them, but are somehow tapping into the cosmos and really seeing them. Sure. So this means you get (spoilers, sorry):

– Dinosaurs
– Orcs
– Zombies
– Giant insects
– The Devil (?)

All of these could still work, I just felt the explanation for them was too glib to buy in, and it hurt the story.

I also felt the characters were treated strangely. I swear Brick starts out as one character and ends as another entirely. Skid, the purported hero of the tale, is an ex-circus performer who specializes in throwing knives. She uses this skill in the story, which is good! But her character seems almost emotionally defective and needs to be bailed out by brick, like a powerless princess. I wanted to see her kick ass, and she does kick some asses, but (heh heh) the number of asses felt too low. Other characters disappeared for long periods of time, only to resurface later without explanation (or to any real effect), possibly to signal the randomness of all this parallel universe stuff, but it just didn’t click.

Finally, the ending was strangely anti-climactic. It just happened and was done. It literally involved pushing a button. You could make pushing a button exciting. This was not exciting.

Still, I do appreciate that the author went for something a bit tonally different from your usual alternate dimension fare, and I admire both that and the fairly consistent wise ass tone that is carried throughout (though it should be noted that if this tone is something that would grate on you, stay far, far away).

Overall, I can neither recommend the book, nor warn anyone away from it. It’s not bad, just flawed and falls short of what it could have been.

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Book review: Write Novels Fast: Writing Faster With Art Journaling

Write Novels Fast: Writing Faster With Art Journaling by Shéa MacLeod

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is short. It’s less of a book and more of a booklet–which is not a criticism, but more a heads-up to anyone looking for a comprehensive take on art journaling.

MacLeod has found a process that works for her, outlines it in simple detail, and importantly includes numerous photos of her art journals to show exactly what she is going in terms of how she organizes pages and the material that becomes her novels. There is a level of enthusiasm and amiable goofiness here that makes art journaling appealing, particularly for people who may have tried and failed with software solutions like Scrivener. I think some people are just more visual or hands-on, and that physical connectedness is what helps spark their imagination and gets the actual writing flowing.

I feel like I was like this when I was younger, but now I’m not so sure. I am tempted to try, and MacLeod’s slim book is a fine example of one approach to take. I can give this a recommendation, assuming you can get it on the cheap. It really must be emphasized how short it is! Most people could probably fly through it in 15 minutes. Still, what’s here is decently presented and could help some who are stuck with their current plotting methods.

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Book review: Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker

Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker by Kieron Gillen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is exactly what it says on the tin–a story about a group of teens who are returned as adults to a realm where their tabletop RPG is a real world. The concept is a favorite of D&D or D&D adjacent nerds, but Gillen’s writing elevates the material beyond its hackneyed premise. It is very dark, but in that darkness the characters feel authentic and make mistakes and judgment calls that never feel driven by the needs of the plot.

The art by Stephanie Hans is bursting with color and drama, perfectly matching the grim setting.

Recommended, with the caveat that Volume One does not have real closure–you are fully intended to move on to see the rest of the story.

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