Last Exit to Babylon Roger Zelazny Last Exit to Babylon  is volume four of the masterful  Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny . (For an overview of the series, see  my review of the first volume ,  Threshold .) This volume, covering the years 1978-1981 maintains the high standards of scholarship of the series. Also,  Zelazny  pulls out of the slump of the years 1967-1977, which provided the source material for Volume 3,  This Mortal Mountain . This is no longer the financially insecure  Zelazny  who worked for the Social Security Administration and wrote nights until 1969. In 1969 he quit his day job to become a full-time writer. It was a good decision, although of course it took time for him to be comfortable with it. He is now. His career as a novelist has taken off. In particular, the  Chronicles of Amber , which were to become his main financial success, were making money. In 1975, realizing that as a writer he could live anywhere he ...

Freewater Amina Luqman-Dawson As it happens, I read  Freewater  not long after reading  Octavia E. Butler 's classic  Kindred . Although they are very different books, comparisons are irresistible. Both depict the lives of slaves on an antebellum southern plantation.  Kindred  is not a fun book. The characters repeatedly experience dehumanizing brutality and degradation.  Amina Luqman-Dawson 's  Freewater , in contrast, *IS* a fun book, and yes, I enjoyed it. Of course,  Freewater  is targeted (and well targeted, in my opinion) at middle-grade children. How does  Luqman-Dawson  write a book about the experience of slavery that a ten-year-old kid can have fun reading? You would guess that she softens the depiction. You would be right, but only a little. For instance, a certain racial epithet that appears 56 times in  Kindred  is absent from  Freewater . And certain horrors of the treatment of slaves that are not s...

The Company Robert Littell When I bought  Robert Littell 's  The Company  from audible.com on 29-May-2006, I expected it to be a thinly disguised documentary about the CIA. I wasn't expecting a superb novel. But that is what I got. It is a very long novel: 41 hours and 22 minutes in audio format. If you're an avid reader, you've probably had the experience (all too rare) of reading a long novel and feeling sad when it ended, because it was so good. That was how I felt when at long last I reached the end of  The Company . The Company  tells the history of the CIA from its origins in the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and on to 1995. It is a multigenerational saga of a family of CIA operatives, starting with Jack McAuliffe, in the OSS. Jack is fictional, but many of the characters of  The Company  are historical. See  the Wikipedia page  for a list. The KGB is also a big part of the ...

Hell Bent Leigh Bardugo Hell Bent  is the second, and (as of 25-Jun-2023) last published book in  Leigh Bardugo 's  Alex Stern series . (There will be spoilers for  Ninth House , so stop reading now if that is a problem for you.) These novels take place mostly at Yale University, and almost entirely in the neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, the city in which Yale is located.  Bardugo  graduated from Yale, where she was a member of Wolf's Head, one of Yale's notorious secret societies, and she is still associated with the university. This feeling of place and history is one of the best things about the books. The fantasy premise of  the series  is that the Yale secret societies, particularly the most prominent, which  Bardugo  refers to as "The Ancient Eight", conduct secret magical rites in order to enhance their wealth and power. Furthermore, because these rites are dangerous, there is an even more secret ninth house called Lethe, ...

Ogres Adrian Tchaikovsky Theodore Sturgeon  used to say that there are two types of science fiction stories, "What if...", and "If this goes on...". The question you ask yourself on beginning  Ogres  is "Which of the two is this?" Now, of course when someone says, "There are two types of X..." your mind (or mine, at least) immediately goes to "Are these two things mutually exclusive and exhaustive? Could there be mixtures? Could there be Xs that are neither of the two?" Those were the questions that posed themselves when I began reading  Ogres . Let me begin by saying that  Adrian Tchaikovsky  gets a lot right in this novella.  Tchaikovsky  is one of the best of writers writing hard science fiction these days. Most science fiction is just fantasy+technobabble. Science Fiction authors just make up whatever they want to drive their plots, then fill in with scientific-sounding nonsense where, in a fantasy story, the magical incantations wo...

The Potato Factory Bryce Courtenay I listened to  The Potato Factory  in late 2006 or early 2007. The date I know for sure is 13-Dec-2006, when I purchased it from Audible. I bought books two and three in  the series  a few months later:  Tommo and Hawk  on 10-Mar-2007 and  Solomon's Song  on 21-Mar-2007. (I'm guessing I bought  The Potato Factory  in December 2006 to use up my expiring audible credits, got around to listening to it in March, and immediately snapped up the next two.) I then went on to buy several other audiobooks by  Bryce Courtenay , all of which I greatly enjoyed. I mention all that because it is the strongest recommendation I can give for an author. I read one book, then I spent my money and time on more and more of his books. And it was a lot of time!  Courtenay  writes big novels, in the tradition of  War and Peace  or  War and Remembrance .  The Potato Factory series  is a mu...

Spinning Silver Naomi Novik For the last several days I have been monitoring (and occasionally engaging with)  a discussion of fantasy authors , in which  Naomi Novik 's name has come up.  Novik 's  Spinning Silver  has come in for a lot of praise. It's been on my "to-review" list for ages, and I am moved to do something about that. For orientation, here is my personal  Novik  horoscope: ★★★★★  Uprooted ★★★★★  Spinning Silver ★★★★☆  A Deadly Education ★★★★☆  The Last Graduate ★★★★★  The Golden Enclaves Meh...  Temeraire series Obviously I am a fan (except for the  Temeraire series , which feels to me as if it was written by a completely different author). I even loved the sometimes controversial  Uprooted . I don't really evaluate books based on their faults. If a book is peppered liberally with defects but there is one thing about it that is spectacularly good, I have no problem with giving a five-star rating. T...

The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood I think I read  The Handmaid’s Tale  around 1986, when it first came out and became famous. I found it tedious. I have since looked at one or two other works by  Margaret Atwood , and honestly, I have never enjoyed one. You have probably spotted my problem. It is that verb "enjoy". I read books for enjoyment. Not only enjoyment, but also enlightenment and information, and to broaden my mind. But I also enjoy those things, so the verb "enjoy" should not be taken to imply that I will only read a book that is a ball of fun fluff. (Indeed, if you care to peruse the list of books I have recently reviewed, you'll see a five-star review for  Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering . Let me just state, for the record, that  The Handmaid’s Tale  is less entertaining than  Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos . To me! Of course I speak only for myself.) But  The Handmaid’s T...

This Mortal Mountain Roger Zelazny This Mortal Mountain  is volume three of the masterful  Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny . (For an overview of the series, see  my review of the first volume ,  Threshold .) While this volume, covering the years 1967-1977 maintains the high standards of scholarship of the series, the source material is less impressive. (Let me be clear -- I'm grading on a curve here. Substandard  Zelazny  still knocks the socks off most other writers.)  Zelazny 's short story output decreased in quantity and quality during these years. Indeed,  Zelazny  explains the origin of the final story in this volume, "The Engine at Heartspring's Center", published in 1974, as follows: Tom Monteleone, visiting one afternoon, pointed out to me that I had not written a short story in over two years. So I did this one right after he left to prevent the interval's growing any longer. There were a few reasons for this slump. First, it was...

The Promise Chaim Potok Chaim Potok 's  The Promise  continues the story of the two brilliant high-school age friends Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders into adulthood. Things that happen to kids as they become adults are happening to Reuven and Danny. They are, for instance, discovering the opposite sex -- the same member of the opposite sex as it happens, so there is a little proto-triangle here. However, since Reuven and Danny are not involved with the lady in question at the same time, she ends up strengthening their friendship. More important, Reuven and Danny are moving on to careers. Their choices are rebellions. Reuven's rebellion is small. I expected he would become a mathematician or some similarly secular scholar, but he has decided to become a rabbi and is now in school for that. Danny's rebellion, in the opposite direction, is much greater. He has broken with the Hasidic community led by his father. Instead of succeeding his father as Rebbe, Danny is in school to...

The War That Saved My Life Kimberly Brubaker Bradley The War That Saved My Life  is a love story. That is a true statement, but misleading. When you read "It's a love story", your mind immediately goes to romance, and it is not that kind of love story. The three parties in this love affair are ten-year-old Ada Smith, her brother Jamie, and unrelated spinster Susan Smith. Ada and Jamie live with their mother in London. They are filthy and sick -- their mother, whom we know only as "Mam" is not the nurturing type. Ada has a club foot. To Mam, this is a shameful thing. She keeps Ada confined in their one-room flat, so as not to let the world see her shame. Susan lives alone in a small house in Kent (which is roughly the southeast corner of England). She had a friend, Becky, with whom she lived until Becky's death a few years ago. Susan is estranged from her own father and family. Susan has not gotten over Becky. At night she sits in the dark alone in her lonely...

My Name is Asher Lev Chaim Potok ** spoiler alert **  ...to their art, and to the world. I read  My Name Is Asher Lev  as a high school student, perhaps 50 years ago. I still remember it vividly, though. I think it was the third  Chaim Potok  novel I read, after  The Chosen  and  The Promise , which were so good that I wanted anything by  Potok  that I could get my hands on. Fortunately, I inherited my admiration of  Potok  from my mother, so there were several of his books lying around the house. My Name Is Asher Lev  took place in the Brooklyn Hasidic community that was familiar to me from  The Chosen  and  The Promise . Asher's father Aryeh is something like a personal secretary of the leader of that community, the Rebbe. Aryeh has devoted his life to serving the Rebbe. Asher has a gift: he is a gifted artist. But his gift is demanding. He cannot stop himself from painting, and indeed gets caught stealing...