Book Reviews

Matt on January 25th, 2012

When I introduced my daughter to the dystopian perils of Katniss Everdeen a couple years ago, I was warned. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, was tough stuff and filled with terrible situations and violence that may be too much for young readers like her. I have since spent my days hearing all about how [...]

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Steven Pressfield gathered acclaim for his novel Gates of Fire (among other works). There, he tells the militaristic tale of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. In The Profession: A Thriller, Pressfield fasts forwards to the near future. It’s still a mess of oil, sand, Islam, and mass media. His twist is the evolution of warfare [...]

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Matt on September 29th, 2011

Umberto Eco, famous for his medieval mystery The Name of the Rose and slightly less well known for occult classic Foucault’s Pendulum, managed to sneak in a different, remarkable book on my shelves. The Island of the Day Before is Eco’s thorough exploration of an age of exploration and of the baroque. He navigates among [...]

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Matt on September 29th, 2011

Rumors of my demise … probably never happened. Nonetheless! New book reviews coming up, including: The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco Purity of Blood by Arturo Perez-Reverte The Last Run by Greg Rucka That means I’ve read the books already, and need to write up my reviews. Oddly, I have about the [...]

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Matt on April 14th, 2011

The Walker of Worlds blog has a review of one of my favorite series, Queen & Country. Check out Stephen Aryan’s review of Queen & Country: Definitive Edition Volume 2. I’m not surprised Stephen liked it! Queen & Country is amazing.

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The Imperfectionists: A Novel by Tom Rachman hits a place dear to me – newspapers. I spent my college years learning to be a newspaper man in one of the best damn college newspapers in the country, The Daily Iowan. But, like the paper and staffers in Tom Rachman’s novel, my journalism career was doomed [...]

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In the fourth installment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series, George R. R. Martin veers from his juggernaut of a fantastic story, slowing down to pick up the pieces left over from A Storm of Swords. Here, with only a select cast of his trademark and ever-expanding (and sometimes murderously contracting) pageant [...]

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While we’re living in interesting times, we might as well enjoy the show. Brave New Worlds is a great companion to an increasingly acrimonious and digital world. Editor John Joseph Adams  has assembled a relevant anthology of dystopian short fiction for the 21st century. The anthology assembles dystopian classics along side more contemporary works. Included [...]

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Matt on January 7th, 2011

Full disclosure: I’ve met Matt Forbeck a few times. I can’t say I know him well, but what I do know is he’s an extraordinarily nice guy. Angry Robot Books just recently released Amortals by Matt Forbeck in the U.S. It’s been making rounds in the UK on reviews, and is currently gathering up good [...]

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Matt on December 29th, 2010

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey is a fantastical twist on the kinds of books my father loves, those hardboiled detective fiction paperbacks set in L.A. amid murdered starlets, corrupt rich moguls and whiskey soaked sleuthing. Here, Kadrey’s twist is a celestial playground where diabolists and federal saints carry on a secret war, while meddling magicians [...]

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