Books I Bought in 2005
I'm afraid book reviews are on hiatus. You will find
here brief reviews of books through 2011, longer reviews through fall
of 2014, and then nothing. Sorry! I got distracted trying to
finish a game and then never got back to reviewing.
I acquired 82 books in 2005.
- Robson, Justina
- Natural History
First few pages grabbed me, rest of book lost me. Promising premise from POV
of construct intelligences, but the plot went flailing around and the
characters weren't interesting.
- Bear, Elizabeth
- Hammered
Big murky angst -- old soldier hard-done-by. I found myself skipping large
tracts of history and world-building, which may explain why I finished the
book wondering what everyone else saw in it.
- McDevitt, Jack
- Chindi
Another one of his archaeological thrillers. Explore, explore, explore the
ancient alien artifact and then realize that you're about to die horribly
unless you solve the survival puzzle. A formula, but I like it.
- Caine, Rachel
- Chill Factor (Weather Warden, book 3)
Massive fluffy fluff. Inexcusably fun. Read it if you're hooked on the
Weather Bitch already.
- Feiffer, Jules
- By the Side of the Road
Children's book. A boy's parents threaten to make him get out of the car; he
does; it turns out unexpectedly well. Warms my heart -- go ahead, analyze
me.
- McGee, Harold
- On Food and Cooking (revised)
The Big Blue Book of Food (Alton Brown is sometimes seen ostentatiously
carrying it), now turned red and encyclopedic. It has at least a paragraph
on every plant that human beings eat.
- Stross, Charles
- The Family Trade (The Merchant Princes, book 1)
Beginning of his multi-universe Mafia series. This is good old-fashioned fun
-- current-day American falls into fantasy world, righteously reinvents
civilization. Lots of fiddly magic rules.
- McDevitt, Jack
- Deepsix
Another one of his archaeological thrillers.
- McDevitt, Jack
- Omega
Another one of his archaeological thrillers. No, I can't tell them apart
from a year's distance, why do you ask?
- Zielinski, Stephan
- Bad Magic
I want to re-read this. Snarky urban street magicians. I was hooked from the
moment I met the invisible wizard walking through a hospital burn ward,
peeling pain off of patients' skins and dropping it into a liquid-nitrogen
thermos for later alchemy.
- Harrison, M. John
- Light
Started to read this and was immediately repulsed, so I stopped. It wound up
on my (extremely short) "I was willing to throw this into a book sale" list.
- Harrison, M. John
- Tourism
Short story chapbook. I remember admiring the surreality but not getting
into the story.
- Nix, Garth
- Drowned Wednesday
Continuing his kids' "Keys" series. Steam-fantasy fun, but (as a friend
noted) the author spends too much time throwing adventures at his
protagonist and not enough having his protagonist do anything.
- Berg, Carol
- The Soul Weaver (Bridge of D'Arnath, book 3)
The first book in this series is still the best, but this one is still
readable. Magical kid raised by evil mind-controlling monsters. I admit I'm
now completely sick of the one evil magical substance that negates wizard
powers.
- Dunnett, Dorothy
- Niccolo Rising (House of Niccolo, book 1)
- The Spring of the Ram (House of Niccolo, book 2)
Start of Dunnett's Other Series. Vast historical tapestry; characters
grinding against each other and throwing out huge showers of brilliant
sparks. A more interesting romance-tension than in her first series. Dunnett
is the pacing queen: you show me another romance which spends this much time
setting up the background of the One True Pair before they even notice each
other.
- Snyder, Zilpha Keatly
- Below the Root
- And All Between
Old kids' SF series that I've always loved. (I found the third book several
years ago.) Sweet happy elves living in the trees are menaced by horrible
goblins who are escaping from their underground prison. Yes, I said SF.
Definitely written for young people, but it has politics, archaeology, and
cultural change before it's all over.
- Foglio, Phil; Foglio, Kaja
- Agatha Heterodyne and the Monster Engine (Girl Genius, book 3)
Last time I mentioned buying these collections, a bunch of people told me I
was stupid for not buying the monthly books. Zarf says "Ha!" (The monthlies
are no longer in publication. Instead, the Foglios are doing it as a web
comic, which... I still haven't started reading. Will get around to it.)
- Green, Simon R.
- Hex and the City
I came in somewhere in the middle of the Nightside series. The author really
wants to show us lots and lots of mind-blowingly cool things. He's not that
great at actually blowing my mind. The off-handed funny bits work much
better than his transcendental ones. However, bitter fantasy P.I. is still a
tasty snack.
- Dunnett, Dorothy
- Race of Scorpions (House of Niccolo, book 3)
Niccolo gets in more trouble.
- Borgstrom, Rebecca
- Hitherby Dragons: Primal Chaos
Collection of (self-published) short bits from designer of Nobilis. I
guess she's better known now for her fiction. You can find these on her web
site, and there are many great ones, although I still haven't figured out
the serial story that many of them comprise.
- Dunnett, Dorothy
- Scales of Gold (House of Niccolo, book 4)
Niccolo causes more trouble. Did I say "causes"? "Gets in."
- Westerfeld, Scott
- Touching Darkness (Midnighters, vol 2)
Sequel to kids-with-powers dark fantasy from last year. Good followup; the
kids-eye wow-adventure oh-gods-they're-coming-out-of-the-walls viewpoint is
now expanding, as the protagonists learn more about the history of the town
they live in. Want more.
- Kibuishi, Kazu
- Daisy Kutter: The Last Train
Graphic novel -- a rather gonzo western with giant robots. Laconic lady with
a shotgun. Lot of card-playing. I like this artist's style, and I don't just
mean that visually (although I'm having trouble explicating what I do
mean).
- Dunnett, Dorothy
- The Unicorn Hunt (House of Niccolo, book 5)
Niccolo. Trouble.
- Baker, Keith
- The City of Towers (The Dreaming Dark, book 1)
Baker is the guy who invented the "Eberron" campaign setting for D&D. I
bought this book because, well, actually because I used to know him
slightly. It's not great -- reads like a D&D tie-in novel, even though
technically it's tying into a universe that the author invented himself. Put
it this way: a mind flayer shows up, and you're supposed to freak out.
- Morgan, Richard K.
- Broken Angels
More sex and ultra-violence and bodies-as-commodities. The author gets goth
points for setting his story in a lethal radiation zone, so that all the
characters spend the book slowly dying (at least, their bodies are).
- Kibuishi, Kazu (ed.)
- Flight (vol 2)
Collection of stand-alone graphic short stories, slightly themed. I liked
some of them, which is what they were clearly aiming for.
- Green, Simon R.
- Drinking Midnight Wine
Standalone book, but I can't remember anything that sets it apart from his
other stuff, except that it doesn't mention the Nightside. Can't remember
much about it at all, really.
- Yolen, Jane; Nielsen Hayden, Patrick
- The Year's Best Science Fiction and
Fantasy for Teens
True that. A lot of excellent stories. When someone asked me who the hell
Kelly Link was, I was able to say "She wrote the very fine lead story in
this teen fantasy anthology I just read." Also, Kipling.
- Dunnett, Dorothy
- To Lie With Lions (House of Niccolo, book 6)
You know the drill. (Looking back, I find that these are some of my favorite
books of everything I read in 2005. So don't get the idea that the short
reviews are bad reviews.)
- Arakawa Hiromu
- Fullmetal Alchemist (vol 1)
Beginning of a manga series that so many people have talked about that I
don't think I can say much. I think I need to read more of it to really get
into it; unfortunately, this is about the point in the year when my budget
constricted sharply, so I haven't read past volume 2.
- Herbert, Frank
- The Dosadi Experiment
Good old stuff from the good old days. I finally know why you should never
sue a Gowachin. Really, the Gowachin legal system is the big draw here --
Herbert invents a full-bore alien legal system, something their entire
culture is based on, and he has the balls to make it feel real. The actual
plot concerns a tempered-by-fire race of ultimate badasses, a theme which
Dune did better.
- Smith, Clark Ashton
- Poseidonis
Collection of short stories from when "weird fantasy" was a genre. I think
more people should read these simply because they influenced everything, I
mean, right through Lankhmar and into the Discworld.
- Dunnett, Dorothy
- Caprice and Rondo (House of Niccolo, book 7)
- Gemini (House of Niccolo, book 8)
To be honest, I thought the series was dragged out a little. Dunnett ties up
the big romance in book 7 (or maybe it was the end of 6). She then spends a
book wrapping up plot threads -- which, yes, she's been spinning (or in some
cases hiding) since the very beginning -- but the momentum bleeds out of it.
- Marks, Laurie J.
- Earth Logic
Odd-beat fantasy about a large family (of multiple definitions) living in
the middle of politics. (A fantasy nation held by foreign invaders over
multiple generations.) Charming family, satisfying working out of the "you
know, we could just stop fucking each other over" kind of story, somewhat
marred by the fact that the title character's plot arc is "When shall I get
off my ass?" (Answer: at the end of the book.)
- McKillip, Patricia
- Od Magic
My guess is that this was written to be McKillip-for-newbies. Rather simple
and blunt plot (compared to, say, Ombria in Shadow.) Made me want to
re-read Ombria in Shadow.
- Eschbach, Andreas
- The Carpet Makers
Literary SF, by which I mean "marketed to non-genre readers". Or maybe I
mean "downbeat series of moments-in-the-lives-of a bunch of people I
disliked". Recommended if you thought Use of Weapons was Banks's only
worthwhile novel (but not if you merely thought it was his best).
- Reynolds, Alastair
- Century Rain
Standalone novel about a post-nanotech-holocaust Earth which finds a portal
to... a pre-holocaust Earth. Then everyone chases each other around for a
while.
- Hoffman, Nina Kiriki
- A Stir of Bones
Hoffman has a style, and she's sticking to it. In this case, the shy but
ultimately friendly entities are various hauntings of a haunted house. All
turns out very well.
- May, Julian
- Conqueror's Moon (The Boreal Moon, book 1)
I remember plot elements from this but not the actual story. Politics
fantasy. I will continue reading the series, paperback only please.
- McCarthy, Wil
- To Crush the Moon
End of his Queendom series. I've described this as "subsumed by an Eeyoric
compulsion to show technology going horribly wrong", but the actual problem
is that the storyline is powerful when stuff is collapsing, but wanders
blindly when it comes to dealing with and fixing things. The original
Collapsium had the fixing-things as a set-piece puzzle with political
machinations; in this book, it's just spackle.
- Glass, Isabel
- The Divided Crown
Sequel to a book I didn't know about. Rather thin fantasy; some good scenes,
but fails to hold together for a newcomer to the universe. Leans heavily on
magic items to keep the story interesting.
- Clemens, James
- Shadowfall (The Godslayer Chronicles, book 1)
The notion of magic derived from the bodily humors of gods must have sounded
like a good idea. The actual details of when you need god-pee versus
god-snot are not, as it turns out, something I needed to dwell on. That
aside, a readable high-fantasy trilogy opener.
- Schroeder, Karl
- Lady of Mazes
If A Fire Upon the Deep was the last word in The-Future-as-Usenet, this is
the last word in The-Future-as-Livejournal. A civilization elects to
maintain itself as multiple non-overlapping cultures in the same physical
space -- everyone runs sensory filters to screen out foreign elements, so
they can associate with their own kind of people. The plot is less cool than
the setup: people from this (meta)-culture run into other high-tech
cultures, and things get less convincing.
- Stross, Charles
- The Hidden Family (The Merchant Princes, book 2)
Second world-walking Mafia book. More of same, still good.
- Stross, Charles
- Accelerando
I actually just finished this in December, despite having bought it in July.
Fix-up of a sequence of short stories from across the Singularity -- and the
author doesn't duck the issue, either. This was what Schroeder was trying
to do. Information goes everywhere, social conventions turn upside down,
corporations and lawsuits turn sentient and start having arguments with
irate Ponzi schemes. Despite the title, the narrative rate-of-change stays
fairly constant -- we stick with human protagonists even after humanity has
become a sidethought in the Solar System. And despite Scalzi, I think this
would be a fine first novel to hand to an SF-non-reader (as long as he was
modern-tech literate. Ok, a computer geek.) (However, the big finish was
unconvincing.)
- Davidson, Avram
- The Kar-Chee Reign / Rogue Dragon
Rather odd very-post-holocaust dark-age myth, where the holocaust was aliens
coming down and strip-mining the planet for thousands of years without
let-up. I'm not sure what the point was, aside from the idea that human
civilization could be absolutely eradicated while leaving some humans
around. Then it turned into standard plucky-human adventure.
- Meaney, John
- To Hold Infinity
Police procedural, or something like it -- well, there's a serial killer to
track down -- in a massively augmented human aristocracy. Decent, but I
don't remember the plot being particularly plausible.
- Meaney, John
- Paradox
- Context
Rags-to-riches-to-rebel-leader story in a literally stratified civilization.
Core gimmick is a collection of oracles who can see the inescapable future.
This is not carried through in any believeable way, nor are the social
consequences, nor are the way the oracles are defeated. Also, the author
spends pornographic amounts of plot space on the hero's jogging habit.
- McCarthy, Wil
- Murder in the Solid State
Did I read this? I must have. (Reading books on transatlantic flights is
obviously not the optimal retention regime.) Oh, right, nanotech researcher
is framed for murder. Book mostly succeeds in convincing me that the author
had a bad experience with a patent lawyer. Skip it, skip Bloom, go
straight to Collapsium where it gets fun.
- Cockayne, Steve
- The Seagull Drovers (Legends of the Land 3)
When I finished book 2, many years ago, I said "The author had better get
some redemption into book 3." He doesn't. Dank, depressing, and no character
in the trilogy gets satisfactory sex for more than a week of their entire
lives. Ending goes nowhere.
- Ficacci, Luigi
- Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Collection of Piranesi lithographs. These include the huge, gloomy,
architectural "Prisons" which must have influenced a generation of 3D
videogame designers. Love this stuff.
- Erikson, Steven
- The Devil Delivered
Novella: post-environmental-disaster meditation with Native Americans and
cypherpunks. Didn't grab me.
- Erikson, Steven
- The Healthy Dead
Novella: another Korbal Broach story. Pure log-blunt satire, with the usual
cast of horrible people you wouldn't want to read a whole novel about.
Amusing, but not as many gross-out points as Blood Follows -- too bad.
- Powers, Tim
- Strange Itineraries
Collection of short stories, about half of which I already had. (In his
Night Moves collection.) But even a few Tim Powers short stories are worth
buying. Get this.
- Gentle, Mary
- Under the Penitence
Novella, in the "Ash" universe. There was, let me think, a horribly
dysfunctional parent-child relationship? (No, really.) Gentle continues
her career of gripping stories about people you wish you'd never met.
- Rohan, Michael Scott; Scott, Allan
- A Spell of Empire: The Horns of Tartarus
Early Rohan effort, in sort of the same vein as Avram Davidson's historical
fantasies: let the historical Byzantines (or whoever) talk in modern dialect
and then have a lot of fun. Okay, it's fluff, and Davidson did it better.
And Rohan doesn't invest the boss monster at the end with the power that his
"Spiral" books display. But he's got a collection of charming grumpy heroes
-- many of whom talk in funny accents -- and it's really all good.
- Disch, Thomas M.; McDaniel, David; Stine, Hank
- The Prisoner Omnibus
Who the heck knew there were three Prisoner tie-in novels, back in the
day? (I knew about one.) None of these are really necessary, unless you're a
Prisoner completist. But it's interesting that two different authors decided
to go with John Drake as the Prisoner's real name (thus tying him to Danger
Man for certain).
- Banks, Iain M.
- The Algebraist
His first non-Culture SF story in a while. This is a classic artifact-chase
through a gas giant, although (for a change) the gas gianteers aren't
extinct, they're just secretive jerks. Everyone is fighting over the
mcguffin, so there are huge space battles (unfortunately against a
blood-soaked psychopathic sadist, who is about as interesting a character as
the prop closet he was dragged out of). The vast sweeps of galactic history
are nice, though. Fun read, except that (this being Banks) everyone gets
screwed at the end.
- Rowling, J. K.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Continuing my acquisition of the UK paperbacks as I come across them.
Everyone says this is the most bloated book, which I'm not sure I agree
with; it moves right along, and I didn't think any of the plot lines were
droppable. Okay, the house-elf stuff. Mind you, when I saw the Goblet of
Fire movie, which dropped half the plot threads of the book, I wound up
deciding that the book should have dropped them too.
- Arakawa Hiromu
- Fullmetal Alchemist (vol 2)
Another increment in the multi-dozen-volume series.
- Nix, Garth
- Across The Wall
Short stories. The one in the "Sabriel" universe turns out flat, but there
are some good ones otherwise.
- Duane, Diane
- Wizards At War
Been waiting for this one for years. Yay! It could have been better. Boo!
The premise is that all the adult wizards (in, like, the Universe) are about
to lose their power, so the kids have to take over. Sadly, this premise then
gets dropped -- we don't see what the grownup version of wizardry is like,
just more of the usual running around the universe. Also, last book's Evil
was more interesting and promised some complexification of the series; this
book didn't really follow through. But it wasn't bad.
- Pratchett, Terry
- Thud!
I hate fantasy board games designed by people who think all board games are
like chess but different. That aside: this is more Vimes dealing with more
city politics. Nothing terribly, ha ha, ground-shaking. Well, they can't all
be Night Watch.
- Carey, Jacqueline
- Banewreaker
The infamous big Tolkienesque fantasy with POV mostly (not entirely) from
the Bad Guys. As a fantasy epic, it works pretty well -- I want to read the
sequel. As commentary on Tolkienesque fantasy, it suffers from mixed
assumptions. The Good Guys and Bad Guys are not Tolkien's creations; they
have their own history and their own relationships. But the Good Guys seem
to think they're Tolkien characters, and whine a lot when the universe
fails to match up. (Despite knowing their own history perfectly well.) This
isn't genre criticism, this is the author being smug with puppets.
Fortunately, she doesn't waste too many pages on that stuff.
- Irvine, Alexander C.
- The Narrows
WW2-era espionage thriller, only the protagonist is a blue-collar worker in
Detroit. And he's working on the golem lines. Irvine spends more time on the
hero's shaky marriage and cuter-than-kittens daughter than on chase scenes,
but there are plenty of German spies and shady characters in bars, don't
worry. I wish the magical elements had hung together more tightly, but this
is still an excellent story.
- Le Van, Marthe (ed.)
- 1000 Rings
Variations on a theme of "you can put it on your finger". It's a silly
little bargain-table art book, but man, this should be a required text for
designers. You wouldn't believe some of this stuff. Some of them are even
practical as jewelry.
- Caine, Rachel
- Windfall (Weather Warden, book 4)
Still big fun. Oh, the pain, the immortal djinn is dying for her, or she's
dying for him, or they're dying for their baby, or something like that.
- McKillip, Patricia
- Harrowing the Dragon
All the short stories she's been writing all this time. It's great to see
her covering ground other than the ethereal high fantasy that her novels all
seem to fall into. (Since Fool's Run, anyway.)
- Martin, George R. R.
- A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, No. 4)
It finally arrives. It is half a book. Half a really, really long book. Half
a book's worth of stuff happens. Considering that we won't meet these
characters again until 2010 if we're lucky, I wish more of them had been
involved in anything significant. I mean, yes, a lot of important stuff
happened, but I felt like a lot of time got marked. Plus (as someone else
noted) Cersei's head is way more boring to inhabit than Jaime's.
- Elliott, Kate
- Jaran
For years everyone told me this was good. Surprise! It's good. High-tech
woman stranded among the horse nomads. The nomad culture really comes alive,
and then the people in it all come alive on top of that and are great to
hang out with. There's a tall dark romanticly-prickly stranger to have a
romance with, so that all goes as expected.
- Green, Simon R.
- Paths Not Taken
Nightside story arc continues. You can see why these books come out so
quickly; it's an episodic serial, not a series of novels. Adventures
continue; they still don't bear thinking about with any rigor, and the angst
is as clunky as the romance, but you get your snark where you can.
- McDevitt, Jack
- Polaris
Once again, historical artifacts turn up a mystery. For a change, they're
less than a hundred years old -- stuff from a research ship whose crew
mysteriously disappeared. The author manages to give away his mcguffin to
the readers a half-book before the protagonists clue in -- perhaps they were
distracted by wondering how many vehicles the bad guys could sabotage before
they were reduced to deflating the unicycle. However, still a decent read.
- Langton, Jane
- The Mysterious Circus
When I was very small, I read The Diamond in the Window, which was
perfectly delightful. Shocked the hell out of me when I realized that the
author is still writing sequels. I think I found this out too late, because
this one is not very nifty. The cast has gotten larger, which is fine, but I
think the target audience has gotten younger. For no obvious reason; the
original kids are still around and several years older than when they
started. Also, the Big Bad is thoroughly mundane.
- Langton, Jane
- The Swing in the Summerhouse
To check my memory, I picked up the immediate sequel to The Diamond in
the Window, and it is as perfectly delightful as ever. Eddy and Eleanor
take more of Prince Krishna's magical journeys, including the one he hasn't
quite worked the bugs out of. Thoreau quotes are reified left and right, and
if the parables are all obvious, so what; the joy comes through.
Interestingly, there is no Big Bad, and the story still works fine.
- Wilson, Robert Charles
- Darwinia
I was spoiled for the ending and decided to buy this anyway. In retrospect,
I don't see why people complained; the author starts dropping hints no later
than the midpoint of the book, and gets explicit well before the end. On the
other hand, the resolution isn't nearly as interesting as the setup. It
winds up as a struggle up Mount Doom, and then the amulet is chucked in and
that's it. And I did want to know about how general society developed
afterwards. And more detail about the religious arguments. Okay, I see why
people complained.
- Heatter, Maida
- Maida Heatter's Cakes
Contains the Queen Mother's Cake, and many other things I need to bake
someday.
- Monette, Sarah
- Melusine
The book I am halfway through as I write this! I liked the first half. One
of those fantasy novels set in Paris instead of London. The Revolution is
nowhere in sight (but I'm only halfway through) but we're ass-deep in
aristocrats, decadent playboys, and wizards. Also gutter thieves, whores,
and necromancers. Tasty stew.
Last updated January 4, 2006.
Books I own
Comments on books I bought in:
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Zarfhome
(map)
(down)