Eighth book of 2013

Skipping ahead a bit (and I'll probably skip back to talk about "Chew",) we come to the eighth book I read this year.

"Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson

The Final Kingdom is a dark and depressed land. Ash falls from the sky and flowers and green plants are rare or extinct. Society is heavily stratified, and most people are slaves, dejected and without hope. But then a prisoner escapes and becomes a daring criminal. He assembles a crew and comes up with an impossible plan.

First of all, I really enjoy Sanderson's world building in general. I read "The Way of Kings" a couple of years ago, and in both that book and this one, he manages to create entirely new and different worlds with their own rules, creatures, and mythology. And while each has a different feel, none of them are inaccessible or so convoluted as to distract the reader (assuming the reader has read fantasy books before.) Sanderson's use of imagery is strong, and while I would say that his world is quite unusual for a fantasy world, he made it easy for me to picture.

In "Mistborn," Sanderson does some really interesting things with the way magic works. I don't want to give anything away, but it has it's own logic that is fairly easy to follow, and this logic is integral to the plot. Moreover, while he does have include the occasional exposition about the rules of magic, he manages to present it in an interesting way that keeps it light.

I also appreciate his tendency to mix up the traditional "good versus evil" trope with a good bit of gray area. While there is certainly a hero (or two) and a villain (or two,) even these characters are tempered with ambiguity and given a full and complex personality. I know this is almost standard in fantasy novels these days, but it still feels worth pointing out, since I still read plenty of fiction where good is good and evil is evil and blech.

I should also point out that this is the first book in a series, and the fifth book is due out next year. While I purchased and planned to read the second book in this series before I even started this one, I think you could read "Mistborn" as a stand-alone novel and be completely satisfied. Yes, a lot is left unresolved at the end, but that's how I like my stories.

"Silver: Return to Treasure Island"

As promised, here's a review for one of the books I read earlier this year.

I think this is the one the most people wanted to hear about, so I decided to start with it.

"Silver: Return to Treasure Island" by Andrew Motion


Motion does a decent job of recreating the feel of "Treasure Island," but he in trying to incorporate the societal changes that occurred in the real world between the time when the two books are set, he loses some of the sense of adventure and the unknown that the original book invoked. In this book, there are fewer colorful characters to be found on the ship's crew, and the first-person narrative style, while well-done, removes some sense of suspense and mystery.

While it seems realistic for the narrator (the son of the original story's Jim Hawkins) to say, at points, "So-and-so told me this later," or, "Don't worry. So-and-so survived," or "So-and-so later suffered a terrible fate," doing so removes a lot of suspense for the reader. I often found myself rushing through bits of text just to get past what he already said would happen.

Still, I did enjoy the book and the journey back to Treasure Island. There was some swashbuckling and danger, and there were exotic animals and, yes, a few pirates to contend with.

Catching Up

Well, I have fallen way behind on this thing, both in terms of writing reviews for all those books I've read and in terms of keeping it updated with other exciting projects that I'm working on.

I'll add more book reviews later today. I'm up to 10 books for this year so far, but I probably won't write a review for each of them.

After "Kraken," I read:

"Silver: Return to Treasure Island" by Andrew Motion
"Chew: Volume 1" by John Layman
"Death Masks" by Jim Butcher (the fifth book in the Dresden Files series)
"Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson
"State of Wonder" by Ann Patchett
"The Book of Lost Things" by John Connolly.

Phew. That's a lot to catch up on. If there are any there that you particularly want a review of, let me know, and I'll prioritize it.

The book I've just started is non-fiction, and I haven't read a non-fiction book so far this year. This has been a conscious choice; I really like reading history books and science books, but they take me a lot longer than fiction to get through, so I know that reading them will make it harder to reach my reading goal. Oh, well. This one sounded too good to pass up, but it's a long one, too. It's "The Plantagenets" by Dan Jones. It's (shockingly) about the Plantagenet dynasty in Europe.

Other things I've been doing:

I'm engaged! So, wedding planning is going on. We're going to be having a pretty small ceremony and reception at Phipps Conservatory. I'm very excited, but I'm trying to limit my discussion of it on Facebook and the internet since I won't be able to invite many people. I am doing a few crafty things for it, though, so I'll probably post a little bit more about it on here.

Getting ready for Pennsic! Since Eric can go this year, I'm making a few bits of garb for him as well as making a few more bits for myself. This is the first time that I'm trusting patterns/tutorials that other people have posted online, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I'm a little worried about it, because I HATE wasting fabric, and if something doesn't turn out and the fabric's already been cut, I'm going to have to find another project to make with the fabric pieces. There may be a quilted should bag or something.