The Warbler Books

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

2015 Year in Review

December 25, 2015 1 Comment

This year has been terrific for the Warbler. I decided—I believe in November of last year—to read and review one book every week. While I haven’t kept to that weekly cadence, I’m proud of what I accomplished as a reviewer and as a reader. I read forty-three books this year. I published thirty-four posts on the blog, and am a couple books behind in my review schedule. 2,197 different people from around the world viewed the Warbler 3,525 times in 2015. It’s marvelous to see how the site has grown—turns out that regular posts bring more viewers. Stats aside, some wonderful things have happened this year: The Warbler is now on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Medium. I’ve developed a working relationship with two publishers, Tachyon and Inkshares Audible.com contacted me and began sending audiobooks for review I’ve begun receiving review galleys from several publishers through NetGalley, including Tor/Forge, Oxford University Press,

Of Sorrow and Such – Angela Slatter

December 11, 2015 No Comments

One of the biggest unforeseen benefits of ramping up review cadence and outreach on The Warbler is the opportunity I’ve had to read so many different works by authors of whom I hadn’t heard, in formats outside the long-form epic fantasies I long favored. Through this new, widened lens, I’ve (re)discovered that novellas are wonderful things. Angela Slatter’s Of Sorrow and Such is one such thing of wonder. Slatter is an award-winning Australian author—a doctor of creative writing—with an impressive list of published short fiction, flash fiction, and anthologies in her CV. Of Sorrow and Such is published by Tor’s new imprint dedicated to short fiction, Tor.com Publishing. Of Sorrow and Such occupies that special space in speculative fiction, wherein a fantastical, dystopian, or utopian setting is a vehicle for the expression of raw human experiences. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great story in it, but the novella deals with hard, human

Slow Bullets – Alastair Reynolds

December 4, 2015 No Comments

When he was a graduate student in astronomy, Welsh writer Alastair Reynolds published four short stories that marked the beginning of his career as an author. While working at the European Space Agency, he began work on what was to be his debut novel, Revelation Space. He’s been a published writer for almost 30 years, with over forty published short stories and twelve novels. But I hadn’t heard of Alastair Reynolds until I saw the cover of Slow Bullets in Tachyon’s catalogue. The cover intrigued me—a spaceship seemingly in good repair that, when examined closely, exhibits signs of decay, over a planet covered in swirling storm clouds that shows no sign of advanced life: no lights twinkling from cities on the night side. No speckling of settlements on the light side. The description of the novella hooked me as well, with one line in particular: “Their memories, embedded in bullets,

One Who Waits – John Robin

November 29, 2015 No Comments

When I started writing reviews for Inkshares, I made a daily habit of perusing the site for appealing projects. Among the projects I found interesting was Blood Dawn, by John Robin, an epic fantasy with hints of horror and what appears to be a mountain of world building behind it. Through various mechanisms, John has quickly gone from author-whose-book-I-preordered, to collaborator-and-group-mentor to the Inkshares community at large, to co-blogger, and finally to part-time employer. In that time, I’ve exchanged a substantial number of typed words with John, and I say, confidently, that he is the genuine article. He can write, he cares deeply about the craft and community, and is inspired by the shifting world of publishing. He’s a go-getter, and when it comes time to put my own self-marketing hat back on, I’ll be going to him for some pro tips. Now, on to One Who Waits. One Who

An Apprentice to Elves – Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear

November 20, 2015 No Comments

I want to preface this review with a caveat, whereby I am fully aware that reading only the final book in a trilogy can be a risky affair. In truth, I wasn’t even aware that Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s An Apprentice to Elves was part of a trilogy until I was about halfway through the prologue. It’s risky for two reasons: 1. You might not get character motivation, intensity of risks and threats, or lore that was better defined in the other books. You might think the characters overreact to things as a result. Undefined terminology might knock you out of the story as you scratch your heard, trying to define a made-up word. 2. In the (likely) event you enjoy the book, you might not enjoy reading the first two, having already spoiled the ending. I place myself more in the second camp than the first, though I did

Into the Darkness – Jay Allan

November 10, 2015 No Comments

When I commuted to work by car—a 20-mile drive that took anywhere from one to two-and-a-half hours—I was in a pretty deep pit, emotionally speaking. There was something oppressive about the drive. There was a misery in sitting in stop-and-go traffic, watching the drained faces of other commuters as they snailed along to their respective workplaces, wearing expressions of defeat identical to my own. I can only scratch the surface of how commuting affected me emotionally and, in truth, it’s only relevant to this review for one reason. Audiobooks were my saving grace during those years. A beacon of light and creative expression in a world that grew increasingly gray around me. They took the restless, dissatisfied part of my mind away, to adventures on beautiful worlds, to catch a glimpse of promethean fire, to feel something other than crushing boredom. What I’m saying is that I love audiobooks. So

Perfect State – Brandon Sanderson

November 5, 2015 No Comments

This will be a slightly spoileriffic review, so beware, I suppose, if you haven’t read it and would very much like to. Perfect State is a novella that takes a new look at an old classic of philosophy: the brain in a jar. My understanding of popular interpretations of the theory are limited to that one Philosophy class I took—then quickly dropped—in college, and The Matrix. Perhaps I’m no expert in the subject. I have, however, pondered the topic with friends at great length, late at night (especially in college), only to get lost in the maze of what is reality, anyway? Interesting conversations, those. What I find particularly compelling about the brain-in-a-jar theory is that following any number of logical threads leads to some fundamental questions about experience and subjectivity. If we are indeed disembodied brains, our experiences the result of electrical stimuli, are they still real experiences? Is reality itself not a series of

Shadows of Self – Brandon Sanderson

October 27, 2015 No Comments

The thing about Brandon Sanderson is not just that he is prolific, nor is it the fact that the quality of his books improves with every release. Those are spectacular and admirable things that make his (many, many) fans so very happy. But it’s more than that. It’s the scale of his grand universe, and the exciting worlds he’s created that grow in complexity, and the enthralling casts of characters that fill them. Shadows of Self is the second book of the second Mistborn series. That is to say that it’s the fifth book in the long-form series taking place on Scadrial, one of the planets in Sanderson’s Cosmere. (The Cosmere, if you’ve forgotten, is his universe.) The grand Mistborn series is being split by era, from a sort-of-Victorian, to a post-industrial western, and finally to a spacefaring culture in an 80s-ish setting (if I’m remembering that last one correctly). The series

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