Dan Simmons Hyperion is the tenth book of the “Books 2010” project. It’s a pretty hefty sci-fi book – the 1990 Hugo Award winner – and it has a nifty bit of writing that I like because it lets me show off some stuff I learned back when I was getting my English degree…
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This is book two of Naomi Novik’s “Temeraire” series, and a return to the Napoleonic Wars and the Dragon Corps. This novel deals less with the military aspects of the world, and more with the diplomatic fallout of the first book.
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Every so often, Amazon will have a free Kindle book available for a limited time. Usually it’s the first book in a series, and they’ll time the giveaway to coincide with the release of a new book from that series. I’ve gotten a couple of books this way. Some of them I’ve read, shrugged, and deleted; others I’ve sought out the rest of the series. This book was one of the latter.
It starts out as a rollicking* high seas adventure of Britain in the Napoleanic wars. This has been a fertile source for fiction, giving us the Royal Navy adventures of the Horatio Hornblower novels, the Royal Army exploits in the Richard Sharpe books, and now the Royal Flying Corps books of William Laurence.
Yes, yes, I know the RFC didn’t exist until World War One. But when you’ve populated your historical-fiction world with dragons, it only makes sense that they’d be used as an air force.
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Book seven of 2010 is Charlaine Harris’ fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel. I actually finished this yesterday, but I didn’t want to double-up on posts. Also, since my wife hasn’t read this book yet, I’m going to try to avoid spoilertastic details, which means this review is going to be pretty short.
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When you find a picture like the one in this week’s comic there’s very little that needs to be added.
Book six of the 2010 reading season is the third novel in Charlaine Harris’ series of Sookie Stackhouse novels. I have to be a bit extra-careful about my review of this one – my wife wants to read it and I hate to give spoilers.
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Back to P. G. Wodehouse for the fifth book of 2010, and back to the scrambled master / servant dynamic of Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. This time it’s a full-length novel, rather than a collection of short stories, which means there’s fewer opportunities for Bertie to screw things up, but more time in which he can make sure that the screw-up is extremely thorough.
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I learned some important lessons from the movies. In this week’s comic, I share the two most important ones with the world.
It’s back to the Nero Wolfe series for book four of the year. I suppose I should point out that I’m not making any special effort to get through books faster than usual. This is pretty much my standard consumption rate for the written word – I did use the word “voracious” when I started posting these reviews last week.
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