Reading – Page 7 – The Warbler Books

Redshirts – John Scalzi

February 21, 2016 No Comments

I’ve been meaning to read the work of mega-prolific writer John Scalzi for quite a while, and was never able to get around to it, despite having purchased several of his novels last year. Then, by a happy chance, audible.com had Redshirts available for less than $5 during their Black Friday sale and I thought, “What the hell…I’ll pick it up.” I went into Redshirts confident that I knew the central plot based only on the title and the synopses I’d skimmed of it a while earlier. Turns out that my assumptions only captured one layer of this impressive and fun meta-novel. I usually shy away from meta-izing things, but it feels appropriate here because the term doesn’t really capture what’s going on in the book. Before diving into the layers that make up Redshirts, I’d like to talk a bit about the narration, which contributed to some of the

Featured Author: Jason Chestnut

February 21, 2016 No Comments

Author Jason Chestnut (Facebook, Twitter) is today’s featured Inkshares / Nerdist contest entrant. His book, To Live and Die in Avalon, looks absolutely wonderful. I am definitely getting this one. About the book: On New Year’s Day in the year 1970, the planet Earth was scorched and made uninhabitable by a mysterious alien terrorist force known only as the “Cleansing.” A benevolent race of beings saved over a quarter of the world’s population as well as many of the planet’s animals, cultural artifacts and history and relocated them to a massive space station on the far side of the Earth’s moon. The humans called it Avalon. Fifty years later, the human race has flourished on Avalon, which has now become a hub for humanoid aliens from throughout the galaxy. The remnants of humanity adopted what they believed to be the height of their culture and history…the aesthetics of the 1960’s. Penelope “Penny”

Featured Author: RH Webster

February 19, 2016 No Comments

Today, The Warbler is glad to feature RH Webster, another contestant in the Inkshares / Nerdist contest. Her novel, Lucky, sounds like a wonderful space-romance. Check it out! About the book: This novel is everything a reader could want from a space opera: space ships, romance, mystery, bar brawls, and a high speed car chase! Lucky is the story of down-on-her-luck graduate student Cassandra “Lucky” Luckenbach, who has been stranded on a far-flung, dusty, run down mining colony on the planet known as San Pedro. After working odd jobs around the colony for close to three years, she finally saves up enough money to get back to her family on Earth. She books passage on the freighter Rosebud (the spaceship), unaware that one of the crew members had been killed the night before (the bar brawl). She is offered an opportunity to work her way back to Earth as an administrative assistant to the

Featured Author: Patrick Jamison

February 17, 2016 1 Comment

Inkshares is running another contest with the Nerdist, so I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce the work of a fellow author. Without further warbling, here’s Patrick Jamison’s Infinity Mind. About the book: Mason is a non-violent protester against the dictatorial government of Raquel Velasquez, the reigning leader of El Dorado, the oldest and most secluded colony on Mars. For his actions, he is thrown in jail, beaten to within an inch of his life, then recorded as dead. Waking up in a lab, Mason soon discovers the government’s ulterior motives for his arrest when he realizes he has been surgically altered to have telepathic abilities. He is the first success in an ongoing experiment to create unstoppable assassins — a telepathic police force that will quell all resistance to the Velasquez regime. Despite his resistance, he succumbs to the brainwashing techniques of his new master, Oduya, the right hand

Lurk – Adam Vine

February 13, 2016 1 Comment

After reading The Monstrous, a collection of horror shorts edited by Ellen Datlow, I fancied myself reborn; a fan of a new genre. So when Adam Vine emailed me asking if I’d review his debut horror novel, Lurk, I was quick to accept. Here’s the thing I learned from my second foray into the genre: I’m something of a scaredy-cat. And I shall henceforth wear that mantle with pride. Another thing I learned is that I really enjoy reading horror. It is a peculiar thing, to discover that a genre which has no appeal for me in visual media resonates so strongly in literary form. I should like to study this more closely, but I imagine that it’s not all that complicated. The feeling a page-turning novel like Lurk elicits in me is likely the same feeling most fans of horror get from watching a scary movie or TV show.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

February 5, 2016 No Comments

I’ve now put a second Haruki Murakami novel on my “read” shelf, and while I have several more to work through, I think I’ve read enough to form a solid impression of his work. I’m looking forward to reading the others, but for the time being I can comfortably say that he’s an incredible writer. His stories so successfully instill a sense of floating disconnect from reality that after reading (or listening) for an extended period of time, my perception of the world needs time to recover. More than once, I’ve sat silently in my car at the BART station, minutes after turning off the engine, staring out of the window at nothing, thinking about the surreal world Murakami built under the nose of a normal, functional society. Thematically, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle shares quite a bit with the other Murakami book I’ve read, Kafka on the Shore. Lost cats.

Collected Fiction – Hannu Rajaniemi

January 29, 2016 1 Comment

There’s just something about Scandinavia, I guess. Tachyon published a collection Finnish Author Hannu Rajaniemi’s short stories last year, and while (I believe) it is sold out everywhere, it’s well worth finding a used copy so that you can experience what it might’ve been like if Knausgaard wrote science fiction. While Rajaniemi isn’t quite as good as Knausgaard (is anyone?) he is extraordinarily good, and often employs similar style in his short fiction. Most of the pieces in the collection approach scifi from dystopian angles, and while they are occasionally superficial in a way—the end-game effects of data-hungry social media, for instance-they are nonetheless effective. Raja noemi builds worlds both believable and un-, equally compelling in their frightening proximity to things as they are now and in their far-flung and wild postulations. Rajaniemi has a way of describing even the most spectacular visions with eloquent simplicity, such that his

Physics: A Short History from Quintessence to Quarks – John Heilbron

January 15, 2016 No Comments

In Physics: A Short History from Quintessence to Quarks, John Heilbron sets himself an ambitious task: to cover some 2500 years of scientific development in a few hundred pages. Thinking about non-fiction in terms of pacing seems odd, but one of the things I thought about most while reading Physics was that it was moving too fast for me. Ironic? Maybe. The book jumps rapidly through time, pausing occasionally to linger on critical moments in the history of the study of physics. In a way, that makes it an excellent book for the layperson/enthusiast, since it can point interested readers to periods of time that pique their curiosity in particular. For my part, I now want to read much more about the development of astronomy and mathematics in the age of Muslim intellectualism, the ancient Greek schools, and 19th and 20th century developments. There are portions of Physics where Heilbron

Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates

January 8, 2016 No Comments

Writing about a book as monumental, as vital, as shattering as Between the World and Me is a difficult task. For all its difficulty, it is drop against a universe’s weight in water compared to the difficulty with which it deals, the difficulty MacArthur genius Ta-Nehisi Coates faced in living and writing it. It’s difficult to write about a book like Coates’s painfully honest, stripped-down look at the state of things for the black community in the US. It is difficult especially because it is written as a letter to his teenage son, a letter filled with the fear, pain, and sadness that are part-and-parcel of the black experience in this nation. A letter in response to the confusion, mistrust, and pain his son Samori felt after the lack of indictment in the killing of Michael Brown; one of many such events and subsequent injustices that have only recently begun

Mycroft Holmes – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar & Anna Waterhouse

December 29, 2015 No Comments

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career has extended well beyond the sphere of his tremendous success as an athlete. He is a regular contributor to Time, has starred in many films (even opposite Bruce Lee!), and has written a number of books, the most recent of which, Mycroft Holmes, written with screenwriter Anna Waterhouse, is excellent. Audible.com generously supplied a review copy of the audiobook, which I gobbled voraciously. The narrator, Damian Lynch, was exquisite, and brought to life the multi-ethnic cast of characters with extraordinary skill. His accents were flawless—except perhaps his American, which was a bit cartoonish, but appropriate for its character. His narration was one of the highlights of the experience, and I found myself listening with two sets of ears: one to a great story, and the other to Lynch’s wonderful performance. The story follows a young Mycroft Holmes, elder brother of Sherlock Holmes, on an adventure from London

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