Ruin and Rising Leigh Bardugo The Shadow and Bone Trilogy  holds together better as a whole than each individual novel does on its own. Having finished  Ruin and Rising , it is now clear that there was an overall plan for the series. It revolved around the quest of Sankt Ilya Morozova (which is only now fully revealed) and the three amplifiers he created. In  Shadow and Bone  Alina was given a picture of Sankt Ilya in an old book that showed him with three animals: a stag, a sea serpent (the Sea Whip), and the firebird. The stag was revealed to be an amplifier, i.e., a magical item that could amplify the magic of a Grisha bonded to it. The climactic events of  Shadow and Bone  revolved around the staghorn collar made from the horns of Morozova's stag and bonded to Alina. The Darkling put Alina and Mal up to the hunt for the stag and killed the stag himself, giving him, as he believed, control over the collar and thereby Alina.  Siege and Storm  be...

Once There Was Kiyash Monsef Marjan Dastani is an orphan. Her mother died of cancer when she was eight years old. Her mother's death broke Marjan and it broke her father Jamsheed. Eight years passed, then her father was murdered. That was three months ago. Marjan is still grieving, and hers is not a gentle grief. Marjan does not grieve gentle -- she grieves hard and she grieves angry. Marjan's father was a veterinarian. He had a small, struggling practice in Berkeley. Marjan, being still in High School, has no formal training in veterinary practice. Her father, however, let her watch while he treated animals, and even asked her assistance. Even without formal training, Marjan is a practically trained vet. Marjan's father frequently left Marjan to herself for days or a week while he left town on unexplained trips. Now, months after her father's death, she receives a phone call, and a request to travel to England (along with a first-class air ticket). At the airport a dig...

The Well of Lost Plots Jasper Fforde The third book of  Jasper Fforde 's  the Thursday Next series  is called  The Well of Lost Plots , so it behooves us to clarify what that is. Book two,  Lost in a Good Book , spent much of its time on the exposition of an infrastructure for moving around within and between books. Certain gifted people -- our Thursday is one -- can, by reading the text of a book, transport themselves into the book, where they can interact with the characters, take action to change the plot (although this is frowned upon), or just hang out. There is, in fact, a whole large organization to facilitate this sort of thing. The law enforcement authority is called Jurisfiction, and they work in a structure called The Library. The English Library has 26 floors above ground housing all published books (alphabetized by author). In addition, it has 26 below-ground floors housing books that have not yet been published. This below-ground library, where all...

Little Knife Leigh Bardugo Little Knife  is a Ravkan folktale (about 5500 words). I found it  here , but it is included in the collection  The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic . Little Knife  is a twist on the classic folktale in which suitors for the hand of a princess are asked to complete absurdly difficult tasks to prove themselves worthy. In this case, the princess is Yeva, the daughter of the Duke of Velisyana, a girl so beautiful that everyone who sees her wants her. The Duke, a merchant, asks suitors (the Prince and the townspeople) to complete tasks that will profit him in his business. Unusually for these stories, Yeva questions her father, asking how these tasks will find her a good husband. The Duke puts her off with answers that aren't really answers. Yeva, no fool, recognizes the evasion. One of the townspeople is a Grisha sorcerer, a water summoner. He uses the River that runs through Velisyana to excel in the tasks the Duke sets....

The Too-Clever Fox Leigh Bardugo The Too-Clever Fox  is a Ravkan folktale (about 5600 words) mentioned in  Siege and Storm  as a comparison with Nikolai. I found it  here , but it is also included in the collection  The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic . The hero of  The Too-Clever Fox  is Koja, the runt of a litter of foxes. His mother means to eat him after birth, but he flatters her and lives. There follows a series of very short stories (typically a few paragraphs each) that serve to introduce Koja. You will recognize him. He is Coyote, Anansi, Br'er Rabbit, Puck, the Monkey King, Hikoichi-san, and of course  Reynard . He flatters, deceives, makes deals and makes friends, and manages to survive a dangerous world. The story kicks into a higher gear when Koja faces a real challenge, someone as smart and deceptive as himself. For once he finds himself in real danger, and needs help from a friend, who is not only clever, but ...

The Witch of Duva Leigh Bardugo You can buy  The Witch of Duva  for kindle on Amazon, or read it  free on Tor's website . It is the first story in  Leigh Bardugo 's  Grishaverse .  ( The Witch of Duva  and  Shadow and Bone  were both published 5-Jun-2012, but the story  The Witch of Duva  is followed in its book by an excerpt from  Shadow and Bone , which means, I think, that  The Witch of Duva  comes first. OK, debatable...)   At 25 pages it's a long short story. It is only loosely connected to the Grishaverse -- there is no mention of Ravka within the story itself, although on the tor website it is identified as "A Ravkan Folk Tale. The word "Grisha" appears only once, in a mention of "Grisha steel". It is, as the title tells you, about a witch. And as the publisher's blurb tells you, it is about girls mysteriously going missing. By the end of the book you have met the witch, and you have learned why girls...

A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter M Miller, Jr Hear then, the last Canticle of the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, as sung by the century that swallowed its name: V: Lucifer is fallen. R: Kyrie eleison. V: Lucifer is fallen. R: Christe eleison. V: Lucifer is fallen. R:Kyrie eleison, eleison imas! I read  A Canticle for Leibowitz  about 50 years ago. In 1975 it won the Locus Award for All-Time Best Novel -- that may have been what brought it to my attention. It was indeed very good. A Canticle for Leibowitz  is a postapocalyptic novel, possibly the first I ever read (they were not so thick on the ground in the 1970s as they are now). In fact, it is both a post-apocalyptic and a pre-apocalyptic novel. We begin some centuries after the first apocalypse, which was just as a novel published in 1959 (two years after Sputnik) might imagine. The world is now a desert, and there are monsters -- the mutant fruit of nuclear fallout. There is an order of monks, the Brethren of the ...

Front Desk Kelly Yang Front Desk  describes the experiences of 10-year-old Chinese immigrant Mia Tang helping to run a small motel in California. If this sounds implausible, I'm here to inform you that  Front Desk  is largely autobiographical. As  Kelly Yang  writes in her Author's Note Many of the events in Front Desk are based on reality. Growing up, I helped my parents manage several motels in California from when I was eight years old to when I was twelve years old. She goes on to tell us that many of the specific events in the novel really happened to her as a girl. Her About the Author bio reads as follows Kelly Yang’s family immigrated from China when she was a young girl, and she grew up in California, in circumstances very similar to those of Mia Tang. She eventually left the motels and went to college at the age of thirteen, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. She was one of the youngest women to graduate from Harvard Law School. U...

Siege and Storm Leigh Bardugo Shadow and Bone  ended in this way: The Darkling, having taken control of Alina's magic through the staghorn collar, used it to extend the Fold over Novokribirsk, killing its hundreds of inhabitants. This was just a demonstration of his power to compel everyone to submit to him. He then kicked Mal out of the skiff and tried to compel Alina to remove her protection, thus leaving him to be killed by the volcra. With that motivation Alina realized that her merciful treatment of the stag had established a rapport superior to the Darkling's, so she wrested control of the collar away from him, leapt out of the skiff, and abandoned the skiff to the darkness, resulting in the death of almost everyone aboard, but not, we much fear, the Darkling himself. An epilog shows Alina and Mal aboard a ship on the True Sea, fleeing to Novyi Zem. As  Siege and Storm  begins we pick up Alina and Mal where we left them, on the passage to Novyi Zem. A series of adve...

Demon in the Wood Leigh Bardugo, Dani Prendergast Demon in the Wood  is a graphic novel based on a short story by  Leigh Bardugo  that explains where The Darkling and Mother Baghra come from. It is thus a prequel to  the Shadow and Bone trilogy . Read  Shadow and Bone  before  Demon in the Wood  -- but you needn't have read the rest of the trilogy. In her acknowledgements,  Bardugo  asks Is it a hero's origin story or a villain's? I've never been able to see Aleksander [the Darkling] as purely one or the other. He is a survivor who dreams of safety for his people. He is a tyrant who brutalizes and exploits those who trust him most. The story does a good job of showing how the boy Aleksander came to be those things. To be honest, the graphic format didn't do much for me. This is partly me -- words are my thing, not pictures -- so for me the graphic format just amounts to padding. Also, I didn't like the depiction of Aleksander and Baghra'...

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill Abbi Waxman The Bookish Life of Nina Hill  recounts thirty days in the life of Nina Hill, one chapter at a time. Nina is a bookish person -- she works in a bookstore, runs several book clubs, and knows books. Fans of children's and young adult literature will recognize many of the authors Nina loves and will be tempted to look up those they don't recognize. (I speak for myself here.) The publisher's blurb is a fairly good summary of the plot, so I will not bother with that. The only thing I don't like about the blurb is this paragraph It's time for Nina to come out of her comfortable shell, but she isn't convinced real life could ever live up to fiction. It's going to take a brand-new family, a persistent suitor, and the combined effects of ice cream and trivia to make her turn her own fresh page. The publishers seem to be suggesting that there is something wrong with Nina's "shell", as they call it, that it is to ...

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Ken Liu The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories  contains 15 stories, selected from more than 70 (according to the Reader's Guide) written by  Ken Liu . Although they are diverse, there are recurring themes and they have what I will vaguely call a consistent feel -- I suspect that if I read another  Liu  story without knowing who wrote it, it would feel familiar. Most but not all of the stories use elements of Speculative Fiction (F&SF). Some of the stories concern aliens as weird as  Liu  can think up, but most are about humans and Earth. Most in one form or another concern the meeting of cultures, and in most cases those cultures are China, Taiwan, Japan, and the USA. My favorite two stories were the title story, "The Paper Menagerie", and "Good Hunting", which was the basis for my second-favorite episode of the animated series "Love, Death, and Robots".  (My favorite episode was "Three Robots" becaus...

Moment 13 – Peter and Zach, The Folly, 14th February 2018 Ben Aaronovitch Moments are one of the greatest innovations of  Ben Aaronovitch 's  Rivers of London series . They are very short, and originally were not stories at all. A typical moment simply presents a specific character at some place and moment in time. They are, in my opinion, a brilliant idea, although a more traditional reader might miss the lack of the usual story trappings such as a plot.  Aaronovitch  has not felt compelled to stick rigorously to this idea, which is a good thing, I think. A few moments are actually stories. We can usually expect a new one for Christmas and for Valentine's Day. This year's Valentine's moment can be found  here . (I don't know if that link is permanent.) This one contains a story, although it is ostensibly only 15 minutes at the Folly: from 3:56 - 4:10 am. It is the transcript of an investigative interview between Peter and Zach -- Lesley's occasional lover. It i...

Alexander Hamilton Ron Chernow I read this book eleven years ago for a book club I belonged to at the time. This was long before  Lin-Manuel Miranda 's musical. It was one of the best biographies I've ever read. Hamilton is a fascinating and mostly admirable character, who, like most of us, did some very stupid things at times. It is also interesting to see what politics was like in those times, how much has changed and how little. I was fascinated to learn, among other things, that Hamilton put calculus on the college curriculum: [Hamilton] was no less directive when it came to curricula, declaring that the engineering school should teach “fluxions, conic sections, hydraulics, hydrostatics, and pneumatics.” "Fluxion" was Newton's word for what we now call a derivative in calculus classes. Amazon review Goodreads review  

The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism from the PostScript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery Karl Popper I read  The Open Universe  between 1987 and 1990 -- I know that, because I remember why I read it. I was a postdoc in Cambridge during those years and complained to one of my colleagues that philosophers, despite their vaunted claims to be the princes of logic, are often not very good at it -- their arguments are often logically flawed. My colleague told me that if I read  Karl Popper 's  The Open Universe  I would find the logic flawless. I did, and I didn't. I pointed out some of the logical flaws to my colleague, and he agreed I had a point. The Open Universe  is  Popper 's argument against determinism. Now, if you're hoping to read an open-minded discussion of the determinism/nondeterminism question, this is not the place to look. It is clear right from the start that  Popper  despises the very thought of determinism, and ...