Tag: book of the week

Book of the Week: The High King of Montival.

And it’s about time, too. Unfair, no doubt: The High King of Montival is part of a series (the Emberverse*), which means delays. Still: out in a week.

And so Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game: An Essential D&D Starter (4th Edition D&D) is out this week. Err, it’s being switched out. You know what I mean.

Moe lane

*Short version: gunpowder, electricity, and most high-energy chemistry stops working one day – while at the same time not affecting actual people. This would drive scientists and engineers mad, except that most of them lived in areas which promptly started in on starving to death and the survivors had more important things to worry about. Essentially, adventure with a steadily-increasing fantasy quotient.

Book of the Week: World War Z.

I’m going with World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War mostly because I’m re-reading for some reason; I’m not entirely certain why. It’s certainly worth re-reading, but there was no particular triggering event that caused me to take it off the shelf. Odd.

But I’ve not forgotten The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.

Book of the Week: The Forgotten Man.

I forget why I picked up The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression – but I’m in the middle of it now, and it’s pretty good. It’s odd: I know that the Left in 2008 thought that they were electing a combination of FDR & JFK; and I know that I’ve said several times that who they actually voted for was a Spock-has-a-beard version of George W Bush. But I’m starting to suspect that what actually happened is that we finally reelected Herbert Hoover… who didn’t learn a thing from the experience, tanjit.

And so, farewell to The Affinity Bridge.

Moe Lane

Book of the Week: “The Affinity Bridge.”

I just finished The Affinity Bridge: it’s slightly later-period steampunk (1900s rather than the 1880s, which seems to be the default period for this sort of thing) that combines the detective genre with some fairly subtle horror. It’ll be interesting to see whether the series that it’s a part of will go farther into the supernatural: even so, GURPS called this sub-genre ‘Screampunk,’ and it fits.  Good grasp of the time period and a good read, but I’m not sure that I would buy the later books in the series in hardback. Still, it’s the first book in a series which is worth looking at further.

So good-bye, The Evolutionary Void. You had a good run.

Book of the week… A bit of a problem, actually.

I just finished it; it’s part of an alternate-history series (Renaissance fantasy subtype) which I like in spite of itself.  The only problem is the copy-editing and proofreading was… surprisingly bad, for a book that’s from a major SF/Fantasy publisher.  I suspect that standards have slipped a little for the publisher in question.

I got nothing to replace it with, so we’re going to keep The Evolutionary Void for another week. Sorry.

Book of the Week: The Evolutionary Void.

Possibly I shouldn’t encourage Peter Hamilton by picking a book like The Evolutionary Void as Book of the Week – it’s not exactly encouraging him to stop writing 700+ page hard SF books only once a year – but he’s demonstrated a slightly distressing ability to get away with it. Such is life.

Adieu, I Shall Wear Midnight. It was fun.

Book of the Week: I Shall Wear Midnight.

Well, I could go on and on about how I Shall Wear Midnight is Terry Pratchett’s latest Tiffany Aching book (which means that it’s a Discworld Young Adult book that adults can read without shame), but I think that I’d rather scream “NAC MAC FEEGLE!” and go rush the bigjobs. As the Nac Mac Feegle themselves would tell you, that’s more fun anyway.

Ach, read the bluidy series, ye hulking lowland git.

And so, farewell to Tongues of Serpents.