Lee Hunts

Countless millennia have passed, and the Land has been Wounded beyond recognition. All peoples are now isolated into closed off tribes, each Stonedown fighting for their own. They engage in regular human sacrifice in order to live off of the land that is now unrecognizable, even from the nadir experienced at the end of the last series. Lord Foul's control is so totalizing, and so corrupting, that his presence is felt even in the real world. This is the setting of The Wounded Land, the first book in the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. For Covenant, ten years have passed, and his experiences in the Land have changed him utterly. He has written a number of new books, and they all reflect his changes. But his ex-wife returns to him, and she seems possessed. Lord Foul claims her, and uses her to get to Covenant. The exact nature of this is not understood yet, even by the end of the book. The next element of the story is just as significant. A new character, Linden Avery, is introd...

I read my third Dick novel. At this point, I am a bit fatigued. I am beginning to recognize the patterns in how Dick writes novels. Worse, I don't think I can actually write a true review. I did not write a review of Ubik, mainly because there wasn't much to say beyond blind praise. I did enjoy that one, so I at least did a short talk about it. I also read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I was confounded by some aspects of that one. I did write an extended review of that one, and I talked about some of my frustrations. It is in that review that you will find the foundations of my criticisms for this book. They are my criticisms of Dick in general. However, in this post, I just want to talk about a frustration that I have with the marketing of this book. I feel like it could have compromised my ability to like this novel and even write a legitimate review in the first place. Book Description The back cover description of the book was incredibly misleading. This is fairl...

I remember being assigned The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka as reading in high school. I didn't read it then, of course. I do remember the general idea. I remember some of the questions I got wrong when being tested on whether I read it. But I especially remember the opening line. This was originally written in German, so the exact manner in which the line gets translated differs, but it starts by dropping the bomb: that Gregor, the main character, has become a giant bug. And this is what the book is known for. The book then follows the consequences of this fact. Before, he was a traveling salesman. He would wake in the early hours of the morning and sustain the family, but we quickly find that he is not able to do this now that he is a giant bug, or vermin, as some translations render it. I think there are two main points that I want to talk about in this review: namely the theme, and then the perspective. Theme When I went to look at some of the interpretations of the novel, it wa...

An epic, anime inspired rebellion, a meditation on grief, a love story? All of it? The Sword of Kaigen, by M. L. Wang. This is a Japanese inspired fantasy, where a woman has long ago retired from her once violent past to become a housewife at the request of her father. She is now in a loveless marriage with a cold man and four sons who all seem to reflect his characteristics to varying degrees—save for one. She has struggled to find connection with her husband, and with her children, but that might be changing with her oldest starting to question the Empire that he has grown up in his whole life. This is the second perspective: the oldest son, practically a prodigy even though he is only fourteen years old. He is entirely fixated on uncovering his family's key secret, known as The Whispering Blade, a technique that is unparalleled in its power. His father is putting a lot of pressure on him, and he is not sure if he can do it. This book is well praised in the book community, though...

I just finished reading Ubik, by Dick. You know the one. Frankly speaking, this is one of those novels that I think you should just go into blind. I'm beginning to notice a trend, though I've only read two of Dick's novels. Dick likes to smash his novels full to the brim with countless concepts that could be used to make a novel, all on their own. The mere act of describing this novel would make me look like a lunatic. I commented on this in Androids, and I see more of it here. That said, I do think that Ubik, as scattered as it seems to be in the beginning, manages to tie everything in the novel together in a way that is surprisingly parsimonious, and nothing short of absolute mindfuckery. I loved it. There are some things that are unfortunately underutilized, I can't even mention them for the sake of spoilers, but it really just comes down to the fact that Dick is thick with his conceptual construction. So much is there, so it is inevitable that some elements would ha...

I just finished reading the gargantuan novel, To Green Angel Tower, by Tad Williams. I thought about reading this book in parts, given its length. It's apparently up there with War and Peace in its length, and it is neatly divided into four sections—but I was engaged enough that I wanted to just finish the book. The fact that I heavily used the audiobook in conjunction with the ebook helped with that. This book is not only long, but it is the culmination of a trilogy. It finished The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. I have already reviewed the first two entries beforehand, and I will link them below. To briefly recap, I thought The Dragonbone Chair had potential, and it had an amazing climax. Stone of Farewell was not good, save for scatterings of scenes. It was basically the instantiation of middle book syndrome. But because my critique was simply that it didn't need to exist, I was still committed to moving on to the last entry eventually. Right from the outset, I have to s...

I just finished reading The Girl Next Door, by Jack Ketchum. This is a widely known novel, infamous for its content, and for a variety of reasons. It often makes lists of "Most Disturbing Books That I Have Ever Read." It is also loosely based on the death of Sylvia Likens, an actual woman who suffered at the hands of an adoptive mother and a number of her adoptive siblings and even the surrounding neighbors. The book has aroused a rather interesting array of responses, so I want to talk about that as much as I want to talk about the book itself. The Response From the outset, many people who are critical of this book dismiss it as torture porn. It depicts a wide range of horrific acts of violence inflicted on the innocent victim in the story while she is tied up and defenseless. I disagree with this characterization, or I at least disagree that it is only torture porn; I will get into the details down below. All the same, the book takes you to places physically, even sexually,...

I just finished reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. This author is one of the OGs of science fiction, having shaped the genre from the mid-twentieth century on, so I was very eager to read this, as it was my first book of his. This book is about a libertarian revolution on the moon. A colony that is economically linked with earth, and is politically repressed by the so-called "Authority," seeks to liberate itself from its oppressive grip. At the center of this revolution are three people and an AI computer that has chosen to take part in the revolution for its own reasons. So, what did I think of it? No Spoilers I'm not going to mince words. I did not like this novel. At all. In multiple senses, I outright disliked the story: I did not like the characters, except on a shallow level. I did not like the shallow exploration of the ideas; this felt like a whole host of lost opportunities. I did not like the stakes of the story. And I did not like how the...

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...