The Dead Cat Tail Assassins P Djèlí Clark Some novels appear to have been written back to front. What I mean by that is that the author began by imagining a really great climactic scene, and then tacked some chapters onto the front to introduce the characters and maneuver them into position for the climax. Now to be clear, I have (with  one exception ) no evidence that any of the novels that give me this impression were written in that way. These novels are difficult to review. I don't want to say, "Stick with it. The payoff is worth it." I don't want to say that because I have been too often underwhelmed by novels I was induced to read by reviews like that. So, I am not telling you that you will find the climax of  P. Djèlí Clark 's  The Dead Cat Tail Assassins  worth the chapters you have to read to get to it. But *I* did! Of course I can't really tell you much about that climax without spoiling it. But I will tell you that it is introduced when our hero utt

Mort Terry Pratchett Mort  is, in my opinion, the best of the first four books in  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld  series. It is book four in the series, which means it is the best  Discworld  book I have listened to so far. Mort  is not the first  Discworld  appearance of Death. (Note: "Death" with a capital D refers to the  Discworld  character; with a small d to the phenomenon. If it's at the beginning of a sentence, you're on your own.) Death appears in the  Rincewind  books to complain about Rincewind's failure to keep his appointments.  Mort  is, however, our first extended view of Death. Death is not quite what you expect. He does indeed ride a pale horse -- the horse's name is "Binky" -- and carry a scythe with which he reaps souls. But as his daughter Ysabell says, ‘He’s quite nice if you get to know him.’ And he is! He is not a killer-- he recoils at the suggestion. ‘But you’re Death,’ said Mort. ‘You go around killing people!’ I? KILL?

Carry On Rainbow Rowell I recently read the collection  X-Men . It contains a Foreword by  Rainbow Rowell . Her written voice was so charming, so delightful, that I immediately looked for her books. I settled on  Carry On  because it's the first novel in a series, so that if I liked it, I would have something to carry on 😉 with. I'm sorry to say that I will not be continuing the series. Rowell  describes Simon's origin as follows If you’ve read my book  Fangirl , you know that Simon Snow began as a fictional character in that novel. A fictional-fictional character. Kind of an amalgam and descendant of a hundred other fictional Chosen Ones. In  Fangirl , Simon is the hero of a series of children’s adventure novels written by Gemma T. Leslie—and the subject of much fanfiction written by the main character, Cath. When I finished that book, I was able to let go of Cath and her boyfriend, Levi, and their world. I felt like I was finished with their story … But I couldn’t let go

X-Men (Penguin Classics Marvel Collection) Stan Lee, Jack Kirby (Artist), Roy Thomas, Werner Roth, Don Heck, Neal Adams, Arnold Drake, Gary Friedrich, George Tuska, Ben Saunders (Editor), Rainbow Rowell (Foreword) The  X-Men  were born when  Stan Lee  and  Jack Kirby , Marvel's premiere creators of new superhero comics, noted that superhero teams such as the  Fantastic Four  were box-office, so why not start another one? Lee wrote Then once I figured out what powers they'd have ... how did they get their powers? And they were all separate people that weren't connected to each other, so I knew that would be a helluva job. And I took the cowardly way out, and I figured, hey, the easiest thing in the world: they were born that way. They were mutants. In a world in which nuclear weapons tests had in the recent past released lots of radioactivity in to the atmosphere, this appeared to make a lot of sense.  As a card-carrying geneticist, I have to tell you that essentially nothin

A Mathematician's Apology G.H. Hardy First, a word about the title. "Apology" is not here used in the most common modern sense of "an admission of error or discourtesy accompanied by an expression of regret", bur rather in the older sense of "a formal explanation or defense of a belief or system, especially one that is unpopular".  G.H. Hardy  is in no way expressing regret or admitting error for being a mathematician. In fact, he makes it clear that it is the thing in his life that he is most proud of. His purpose is to explain for non-mathematicians what a mathematician does and why it is valuable. Briefly, this is what he has to say A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas... The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. B

Buried Deep and Other Stories Naomi Novik Naomi Novik 's  Buried Deep and Other Stories  is difficult to summarize, so let me begin by describing how it feels to read  Novik . As I read I was reminded over and over of the feeling of reading  Ursula K. Le Guin  or  Jane Austen . There was nothing specific that reminded me of those authors. (One of the stories is a  Pride and Prejudice  pastiche, but I never had the impression it was something  Austen  could have written.) Rather, it was the feeling of an intelligence both sharp and deep under the words. And more, one too canny to tell me everything, but who expected to be able to leave essential things unsaid, in the expectation that I would figure them out. The stories are diverse. Most of them are fantasy, but at least one, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche focused on Irene Adler, is not. ( Novik , by the way, argues that "[fantasy] is after all the superset of fiction, and not the other way around". Although she has logic on h

Black Panther (Penguin Classics Marvel Collection) Don McGregor, Rich Buckler (illustrator), Billy Graham(Illusitator), Stan Lee, Jack Kirby(illustrator), Ben Saunders (Series Editor)   The Marvel character Black Panther came into existence in 1966, in two issues of  Fantasic Four . Those two issues (written by  Stan Lee  and drawn by  Jack Kirby ) are included in this collection, and not to put too fine a point on it, they're stupid. But they introduced T'Challa, King of Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced African nation. He was lying around, waiting to be used when in 1973 a new author,  Don McGregor , voiced a complaint about the Marvel comic  Jungle Action , which he describes as "a collection of jungle genre comics from the 1950s, mostly detailing white men and women saving Africans or being threatened by them." He thought it was a shame that Marvel was printing such Dreck in 1973 and said so. It is a Universal Truth that if you complain about something

The Masquerades of Spring Ben Aaronovitch When you begin  Ben Aaronovitch 's  The Masquerades of Spring , you will immediately recognize the tone as  Wodehouse ian. (Unless, that is, you have not read  Wodehouse 's  Bertie and Jeeves  books or seen the TV shows based on them. If that's you, do yourself a favor and correct this oversight immediately. I particularly recommend the series starring  Stephen Fry  and  Hugh Laurie   free on Youtube .) Our narrator Augustus Berrycloth-Young is unmistakably based on Bertie Wooster. A graduate of the magic school at Casterbrook, Gussy is fond of using magic to remove policemen's helmets from policemen's heads, etc. The action takes place shortly after Gussy's arrival in New York City around 1925. (We know from  Aaronovitch 's  Moment 14  that Gussy traveled to New York in fall, 1925.) The story begins when he is visited by his old schoolmate and our old friend Thomas Nightingale. Nightingale has come to New York to tr

Daredevil (2015-2018) Drew Goddard, Marvel, Netflix I spent the last week binge-watching this series (three seasons of 13 episodes, so about 39 hours). That was not the plan when I started. I was going to watch an episode a day for as long as it lasted. That plan went out the window after I watched the first episode. I couldn't stop. It was SO  good -- I needed to know what happened next. So, I watched it pretty much continuously for a week, pausing only when life got in the way. One warning, though -- it's very violent. The violence is very personal, with people getting repeatedly punched into the face until bloody, etc. The premise is that Matt Murdock is the son of a boxer in Hell's Kitchen  -- that's a Manhattan neighborhood. Hell's Kitchen may in the mid-twentieth century have been the kind of gritty crime empire depicted here, but I do not for a moment believe it's like that now. Murdock is blinded by an accident at the age of 13. But his other senses are

The Wolves in the Walls Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean (Illustrator) ** spoiler alert **  "If the wolves come out of the walls, then it's all over." "What's all over?" asked Lucy. "It," said her mother. "everybody knows that." Neil Gaiman  and  Dave McKean  are the brilliant team that wrote and drew the terrifying  Coraline . They teamed up again for the less terrifying but equally brilliant  The Wolves in the Walls . It will not be immediately obvious to you when you start reading that it's going to be less terrifying than  Coraline .  McKean 's pictures are pretty scary. In fact, the wolves *DO* come out of the walls. Lucy leads her family back into the house, into the walls. It turns out that the wolves are just as frightened of the people coming out of the walls as the people were of the wolves. In the end, the consequences of the wolf invasion are that Lucy's father's second-best tuba is ruined by strawberry jam, and Lucy&#

The Daughter of Time Josephine Fey For a novel billed as the "best crime novel of all time" (not a meaningless boast, see  Wikipedia ),  Josephine Tey 's  The Daughter of Time  was a disappointment. I picked it up because of its appearance in  Death at Morning House . It is the fifth novel in  Tey 's  Inspector Alan Grant  series, and I will not be reading any more of the series. Inspector Grant is laid up in hospital and is bored out of his skull. (Been there, done that.) He becomes interested in the famous matter of the  Princes in the Tower  and, with the help of a young American history student, Brent Carradine, at the British Museum, undertakes to investigate the question. (May I just say how refreshing it is to read a novel by an English author that contains an American character who is both intelligent and pleasant, instead of the default stupid and obnoxious American.) What Grant and Carradine purport to discover is that historians are all idiots who know noth

Captain America Jack Kirby (illustrator), Joe Simon, Stan Lee, Jim Steranko (illustrator), John Romita Sr. (illustrator), Ben Saunders (editor) Captain America was born in 1940, when  Joe Simon  (writer) and  Jack Kirby  (artist) published a crude anti-Nazi propaganda comic. Notably, the USA would not declare war against Germany until a year later. (Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the USA of course declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on the USA, and the USA in response declared war on Germany.) There was still a lot of pro-German sentiment in the USA in 1940.  Kirby  and  Stan Lee  revived Cap in 1964. In my (sure to be unpopular) opinion,  Kirby 's artistry is uninspired. His Steve Rogers is a big blonde handsome man -- boring. His Captain America is a dork. Don't take my word for it. In his Foreword,  Gene Luen Yang  writes Captain America: the hero with no fancy guns, no gamma-ray rage, no adamantium claws. The hero who wears little wings on the sides of

Equal Rites Terry Pratchett The first two books of  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld  series revolve around a wizard, Rincewind. Rincewind is a uniquely incompetent wizard; in fact, his claim to being a wizard is debatable. Most of the wizards of the  Discworld  are pretty bad at their jobs, or indeed, at almost anything. These are not Tolkien's "subtle and quick to anger" wizards -- these wizards wouldn't recognize subtlety if if bit them (which, let us admit, is not a thing subtlety is apt to do). Wizards are not the only magic users of the Discworld -- there are also witches. There are no women wizards. The Discworld is not a place that believes in equal rights for women and men -- the title is a pun on this. And besides, witchcraft and wizardry are quite different types of magic. The story begins when a dying wizard, Drum Billet, comes to the town of Bad Ass to bequeath his staff to the not-yet-born eighth son of Gordo Smith, himself an eighth son. Eighth sons of

On a Red Station, Drifting Aliette de Bodard Aliette de Bodard 's  On a Red Station, Drifting  has the virtue of being relatively simple. "Relatively" means "compared to other  Xuya Universe  stories". It takes place in an empire at war. As usual, there are a million dangers and a million characters, interacting through a complex system of rules and etiquettes that are nearly impenetrable to anyone who didn't grow up in a Vietnamese family. But that is all translucent. It's not transparent -- if, like me, you have a vanilla middle-class American upbringing, you're gonna work to see through it, and even when you do, what you see will be colored by  de Bodard 's background and story-telling. That's a good thing! But fundamentally, it's a simple story. There are three main characters: Quyen, Mistress of Prosper station, her cousin Linh, a former scholar and magistrate down on her luck, and the Honoured Ancestress, who is also the mind of Pro

A Conjuring of Light V.E. Schwab In  Victoria Schwab 's  Shades of Magic  trilogy there are four worlds, identified by the color of their Londons: Black (a dead world), White, Red, and Grey (ours). The only people who can travel between the worlds are powerful magicians called Antari. In the previous two books of the trilogy we met three Antari: Kell (from Red London), Lila Bard (from Grey London), and Holland (from White London). Book 1,  A Darker Shade of Magic  is mostly about Kell, although we also meet Lila and Holland. Lila is the subject of book 2,  A Gathering of Shadows . Book 3,  A Conjuring of Light  tells Holland's story. I am not going to say that  Conjuring  IS Holland's story, because there is so much going on here, with the roles of Kell, Kell's brother Rhy, and Lila also very active. Still, Holland is at the center of this story. Of the three Antari, Kell is the Saint. Lila is the Thief. Holland is the Badass. At the end of  A Gathering of Shadows  Lila