The Last Emperox by John Scalzi
Let’s be honest here, if you are reading a review about the third book in a trilogy, you already read the series too. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this one. I really enjoyed the series but I can’t help but think that this one was a little rushed. It felt like a very abrupt ending and one that didn’t really go where I thought it would. I generally do not try to predict where I think a book or series is going […]
The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
Murder by Other Means by John Scalzi
The Dispatcher (5 stars) This story holds up on re-read. I haven’t read my first review of this audiobook, so it’ll be interesting to see how it lines up, but I do remember liking it the first time I listened to it. First, I think Zachary Quinto needs to narrate more books. He has this marvelously dry voice that is both soothing and unobtrusive. It’s easy to listen to without being boring. And he has a great ear for voices. Second, I will read anything […]
The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
My Mum is a Twat by Anoushka Warden
Bella Bella by Harvey Fierstein
Intimations by Zadie Smith
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton
Leviathan by Paul Auster
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Light of Day by Eric Ambler
Omeros by Derek Walcott
Humiliated and Insulted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rumble Fish by SE Hinton
Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani
The Cruelest Month – 3/5 Stars This is the third Louise Penny “Inspector Gamache” detective novel, and I think it’s a decided dip in quality from an overarching look at it. The mystery itself, quaint, small town, punctuated with poetry and art and other little considerations is perfectly interesting. At a seance, from a combination of fright and maybe poisoning, a woman is found dead. There must be an elaborate set of circumstances to come to pass to have her die, but if they were […]
Red Shirts by John Scalzi
Bingo Review 17: Red Red Shirts (‘red’ is in the title, and occasionally referenced in-text) is basically Star Trek gone meta, really meta. I would divide the story into two parts: the part where certain members of the crew of the Intrepid start to notice some strange patterns surrounding the away missions: certain crew members always are fine (relatively) while certain others are nearly guaranteed to end up dead. But why is that? Ensign Dahl is the driving force behind trying to solve this strange […]
Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi
It was interesting to read this after finally having read Little Fuzzy, the original novel Scalzi reimagined, that forms the basis of the story of this book. They were essentially the same story, but had key differences that made them entirely different reading experiences. Scalzi’s version of the story is much less sweet, for one. It’s much more anti-capitalist, though I wouldn’t quite say anti-colonial, and it’s less about answering the central question of “What is sapience?” and more about how the Fuzzys find a […]
The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3) by John Scalzi
A good ending to the series. This hasn’t been my favorite of Scalzi’s series (I still hold a very fond place in my heart for Old Man’s War), but it was overall a great read. It also takes his usual smart-ass style and amps it up to a thousand. The tongue-in-cheek tone makes for a nice contrast with the serious subject matter, and makes it so that when a character is doing something serious, you feel it more than maybe you would otherwise. I’ve been […]
