Review Archive

Well, this is an absolutely outstanding book. I couldn’t put it down, which lead to me going to sleep well past 3 am every night of my work trip to New York, the return flight from which I’m currently on. I’d been recommended Andy Weir’s The Martian by several friends (and even a few coworkers,) and the synopsis piqued my interest. An astronaut is thought dead, and left on Mars to fend for himself. Talk about an elevator pitch, right? Anyway, the thing that impressed me so much about The Martian was its seamless interweaving of character and plot with hard science fiction the like of which I’d never read before. For those of you unfamiliar with the term “hard science fiction,” it’s scifi that spends its time grounding as much as possible in scientific fact, and in explaining the science behind advanced technology. In the case of The Martian, we have a main conflict

In each of the places I’ve called home, I’ve studied the history of Israel. Detail and focal points varied considerably through each of those forays into the convoluted, delicate, and fascinating history of the country I’m proud to have had as a home, and I reentered that mental state at the encouragement of my father, who recommended Ha’aretz columnist Ari Shavit’s most recent book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. Shavit is well known–and sometimes disliked–by many for his critical eye of the matzav, the situation, in the Middle East. In my opinion, his perspective is a crucial one, and this book does an excellent job of remaining relatively even keeled in despite of the fragility of the topic, which grows ever more tense and fragile as the years go by. It’s an unbelievably difficult subject to discuss, and I will inevitably offend someone with this post,

Habits and hobbies have a way of arriving and departing in waves, do they not? Some months, I won’t be able to finish a single book because I can’t tear myself away from games long enough to read a few pages. Others, like May of 2014, I move from book to book so quickly that I don’t take the time to sit and jot down a few thoughts about them. I aim to rectify that egregious mistake here now. Last month, I read four books, and my thoughts on each can be found below. Redwall – Brian Jacques I had been told by several friends that Redwall would suit me, and they certainly were not wrong. Can one really go wrong in a world of anthropomorphic animals engaged in an epic helms-deep-scale battle, lead by a heroic warrior monk? I must admit, however, that I didn’t love the book as

Those who know me well have been on the receiving end of long-winded–albeit good intentioned–dissertations on the impact that reading Frank Herbert’s Dune series had on me as a high school student. I read them for the first time as a sophomore, encouraged by a close friend who read them simultaneously, and as we both had our inner sleepers awakened by their majestic scope philosophically stirring implications, I fell deeply under the spell of science fiction and fantasy, where you’ll find I still thrive today. The Lord of the Rings inspired me, too, but it didn’t have the raw force that Dune had for me. I knew Herbert had written other works, but hadn’t looked too deeply into reading them, as I had meandered rather deep into fantasy fiction and webcomics, and let my interactions with sci-fi diminish. Until relatively recently, that is. In reading Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, and

I am nearly caught up on Sanderson. The guy just had to go out there and release the monstrously large Words of Radiance, sequel to Way of Kings, which I am rather impatiently waiting to devour. I tell myself that I need to read something else, and so I have! I’ll review that one next. Spoiler alert: it was also very good. But to address the matter to the left here, I’ve recently finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker. It represents a rarity for Mr. Sanderson in that it is a standalone novel, but it holds up to his serialized work (and to his other standalone, Elantris.) He has, yet again, built a world so fantastical-yet-believable that the color-changing hair of the royal line seems perfectly reasonable. I would venture that this is why I like his work so much. He consistently creates such grand visions that, to me, read like the

Mr. Sanderson is in top form in his most recent YA novel, Steelheart. This 400 pager is the first book in the Reckoners trilogy, with Firefight, the second book in the series, is currently nearing completion and will most likely release some time in 2014. For a change, this series’ setting is a little closer to home, in that it takes place on Earth, albeit a slightly different one than we inhabit. A massive, bright red spectral body by the name of Calamity appeared in the skies, granting a selection of the population magical powers–this seems to be a clear connection to the Cosmere–which completely changes the world, and not for the better. Practically overnight, humans who’ve been given powers by Calamity–known as Epics–have destroyed society, rendering the USA into the Fractured States, where nearly all of the population is living at the mercy of one or another super-powered feudal

The Way of Kings is the first book in The Stormlight Archive, which will be a 10 book series that shall compose the main body of Brandon Sanderson’s legacy. This 1007-page monster is Sandersonian in every way. It is direct (at times,) entirely alien yet believable, exciting, visual, and addictive. It’s a fantastic read, and I eagerly anticipate the upcoming release of the second book in the series, Words of Radiance. (I have already preordered my autographed copy.) I may have mentioned this previously, but Sanderson is doing something very interesting with his work, and it bodes mentioning in this post, since it appears more obviously in this book than in the others I’ve read thus far. Sanderson is constructing a large-scale epic fantasy which will be composed of his complete body of work. Each of the stories takes place on a different planet in Sanderson’s connected universe, called the

My eyes open with a snap, and I sit up much too quickly, frantically reaching for my phone, fingers fumbling to quiet the melodious clanging of the “harp” alarm on my iPhone. I slide the phone into snooze and fall back against my pillow–also much too quickly–and the world I see spins violently once before I close my eyes and fall asleep for another blessed eight minutes. My eyes open again, slowly this time, and with a smooth arc, everything I see twists and falls to the left. Reset. Everything I see twists and falls to the left. My eyes catch and reality lurches back to center. Reset. With a smooth arc, everything I see twists and falls to the left. Reset. Everything falls. Reset. I stare at the gap in my ceiling where the skylight is, and for a fraction of a second it remains stationary before it too falls