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Norylska Groans: Book Review

I just finished reading Norylska Groans, by Michael R. Fletcher and Clayton W. Snyder. This is a grimdark fantasy novel set in a Russian inspired industrial setting. The reader follows two characters as they struggle to survive in a system that seems to conspire to crush them without any regard for their personal circumstances. Paired with this is a unique magic system that involves manipulating memories and personality traits. Given my own interest in themes of identity, this definitely caught my interest. No Spoilers Setting The setting of this book is one of the stronger elements of the story. I am not only referring to the concepts behind it that I mentioned above, but the execution of said concepts. The descriptions are vivid and oppressive, mixing winter and industrialism to create a horrifying backdrop for the story. There was one quote about the mixture of black ash and white snow turning everything grey, comparing that to moral complexity, which I thought was quite apt. Anothe...
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We Need To Talk About Kevin: Book Review

I finally finished reading We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. It took me about two months of scattered reading to get through the first quarter of the book, and then I finally got the audiobook and burned through the rest in the course of three days. I've definitely found that syntax can really mess with my ability to read prose, given my predilection to analyze and pick things apart. The sentence structure in this novel was so difficult that it was a chore to read, even if the story were engaging. This story is about a mother coming to terms with the fact that her son committed a mass shooting. She never loved her son, Kevin, and so she decides to send a series of messages to her estranged husband in order to sort out her place in the events, even considering the possibility that she might have played a role. Overall (No Spoilers) I did not plan on writing a review to this book because I was not entirely sure what I wanted to write about. Paradoxically, this is the ki...
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Death Note: Manga Review and Discussion

I just finished reading the Death Note Manga by Tsugumi Ohba, which is almost a decade after watching the anime several times through, so I was actually quite familiar with the story going in. This was one of those life changing stories that shattered my understanding of storytelling, so I wanted to go back and revisit the story to see if the merit still held up after writing my own books, and reading countless others since. What we have in this story is a game of cat and mouse. It starts when a high school student finds a Death Note that allows him to kill people when he writes their name down inside, while thinking of their face. He starts killing people in the name of justice in order to create a new world where only kind and good people live. L, the world's greatest detective, recognizes this pattern of deaths and understands that someone is behind this. What follows is the investigation, as the two track each other down in an attempt to capture the other. Scheming I was partic...
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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being; Or, Life Reviled: Book Review

The following is a quickie review I wrote on Goodreads a while back. Overall, I thought the book was good. It doesn't really function as a narrative, so much as it does a philosophical treatise for the author's variant on anti-natalism. The plot is bare-bones, adopting an adventure story structure (traveling from one place to the next). But instead of fantastical locations, the story indulges in varied philosophical debates about the morality of life itself. As a narrative, I thought it was fairly lacking. As a treatise, it was good, though I have disagreements. Let's start with the positives: I enjoyed the prose. It was competently written, and even simply written, taken alongside the occasional esoteric terminology that I had to look up. My kindle often failed to find the definitions of the words in its own dictionary. It was reminiscent of R. Scott Bakker's later works, which did the same thing, though Bakker was much more complex in every respect. All the same, like...
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The Spectre of Determinism: A Story of a Life

Just over a year ago, I was diagnosed with epilepsy, something that has the potential to progress to grand mal seizures, meaning I could lose consciousness and convulse on the ground. That is a story of its own, I suppose. But this is a different story. After being diagnosed, I was put on medication, and I had to be switched to a new one after the doctors decided that the previous medication was not sufficient to address the problem. A few days ago, I experienced a mild seizure, or what you could call an aura, and the doctor increased the dosage of this new one. A couple days later, seemingly unrelated, I had to print, sign, and scan a document—and then send it to my doctor. I fulfilled this obligation. Or so I thought. That leads to yesterday. Yesterday was a completely normal day. I had the morning shift at work. I was not able to work on one of my projects that day, but I planned on working on the other that night, and there were several books that I was reading as well. Basically, ...
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The Madness of Crowds: Book Review

I just finished reading The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny. This is a mystery/thriller novel  in a larger series called Three Pines. Inspector Armand Gamache is at the center of the story, a man of principle and character, who lives in the titular tight-knit community. In this particular entry, he is asked by an old friend to run security for a speaker who proves to be particularly controversial. From there, the story explodes, as people begin to react to the speaker's presence and message in volatile ways, leading to a body, as you can imagine. Overall (No Spoilers) This was meant to be a quick and simple read for me. But it turned out that it really wasn't. The story was getting on my nerves from the outset for writing craft reasons; then, it started to show moralistic tinges that rubbed me in the wrong way. Instead of the quick read, I got over-analytical, and it took way too long to get through. This is probably because I read it rather than listened, but I wanted to get...
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The Power That Preserves: Book Review

I just finished reading the final book in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever. The Power That Preserves is probably the darkest story in the series, with the first one starting out at the Land's default state. In the second, the reader begins to see the slow decline, with the climax of that coming into full view in this entry. Covenant comes to the Land for his third time, for one last push to stop Lord Foul, something that was hinted at in the very beginning of the first entry. Forty-seven years have passed from that moment, and now everything has come together. No Spoilers Characters As is obvious from the first two entries of this series, as well as from Donaldson's writings on what fantasy is, characters and themes are probably the most important aspects of the story. Worldbuilding, too, but I think that is better covered in the part on themes. This is where Donaldson delivers on his story in spades. Thomas Covenant I speculated that Covenant was not the actua...
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