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★★★☆☆ Introducing Rincewind and Twoflower and The Luggage

The Color of Magic Terry Pratchett I have an ambiguous relationship with Terry Pratchett and the Discworld . On the one hand, I have enjoyed everything I've ever read by Pratchett , some more than others. On the other hand, Pratchett is so relentlessly and extravagantly hyped by his supporters that it always put my back up. ( Pratchett himself is innocent of the hype, claiming that "his greatest service to literature was to avoid writing any.") The Discworld is equally daunting in a different way. It consists (according to Amazon) of 41 books. I didn't want to commit to a 41-book series. Pratchett , no fool, understands the reluctance of readers to embark on such a journey, and claims that "The Discworld novels can be read in any order." I will not say that he's lying, because it is certainly physically POSSIBLE to read the series in any order, but he is definitely indulging in some heavy-grade misdirection. I know because I tr...

★★★☆☆ The Great Geometer

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius Patchen Barss If I were asked to name the greatest physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, I would probably choose three: Richard Feynman , Steven Weinberg , and Roger Penrose . (I am a neuroscientist and a mathematician with a long interest in physics. I'm not the best person to choose great physicists, but I'm not the worst.) Thus when my local Theoretical Physics Institute (every town should have one!), the Perimeter Institute , announced a public presentation by Patchen Barss , a science journalist who has written this biography of Penrose , I immediately snagged a ticket. Barss wounded my confidence by emitting that cliché of the science popularizer: that you make science interesting by telling the "human story." Oh, please! I don't read a biography of Penrose for the sake of the human story. Why do science popularizers find it so hard to believe that there...

★★★★☆ Alana in show-biz

Saga, Volume 4 Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Illustrator) If you're like me, your first question on seeing Saga, Volume 4 is, "Who is that woman on the cover?" That, my dear friend, is Alana. About halfway through Volume 3 Alana and Marko had a brief conversation about The Circuit, which is a performance venue of some kind that people can tune into with a virtual reality helmet. Before she became a soldier, Alana harbored ambitions of performing on the Circuit. Now that their lethal pursuit has been temporarily distracted or put out of commission, they're focused on making some kind of living. Marko encouraged her to audition. So now Alana is performing on the Circuit, and what you see on the cover is her bewigged with wings bound and hidden in order to perform. She's the family breadwinner. Marko is a househusband, staying home and taking care of Hazel. The Marko-Alana-Hazel story in this volume is a bit dull. Without giving away any spoilers, it's kin...

★★★★☆ Clothes make the Victorian girl

The Case of the Missing Marquess Nancy Springer The Case of the Missing Marquess is the first book in Nancy Springer 's Enola Holmes series . Thus, its main business is to tell us who and what kind of person Enola Holmes is. Mystery purists (I am not one) may be disappointed by the shallowness of the mystery of the Missing Marquess, which is less than half of the book and which Enola solves almost instantly simply by virtue of being a teenage kid herself (like the Marquess -- well, actually, he's 12, but close enough) and guessing correctly what he would do. The much bigger mystery, which is not solved here, concerns Enola's mother Lady Eudoria Holmes, who is also the widowed mother of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Lady Eudoria is known to associate with suffragettes, and to wear "rationals" -- that is, comfortable and practical clothing of a type that is widely considered inappropriate women's wear in Victorian society. On Enola's 14th birthday Lady Eud...

★★★☆☆ Lacking the common touch

100 Selected Poems: John Keats John Keats Well, that was disappointing. I am ready to admit that this is an "It's not you -- it's me," case. Since I suspect that some other readers, even readers who love poetry, may likewise find Keats disappointing, I will try to explain why he disappointed me. Thus you can judge whether you, too, might suffer the same fate. First thing to say is that the young John Keats was not really that great a poet. (By "young", I mean up to and including Endymion .) That, of course, is a judgment many readers will disagree with, but don't discount it! It was Keats 's own judgment. In his preface to Endymion , he says "I apologize for the lousy work, but I just had to get this out of my system." (Obviously I'm paraphrasing.) You may dismiss that as false modesty, but I am more inclined to accept it as the judgment of a man who knew what he was talking about, especially because the quality of his poetry abr...

★★★★☆ Fantasy of a corrupt golden age

The Familiar Leigh Bardugo The publisher describes Leigh Bardugo 's The Familiar as a "historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age". That description is accurate, but gives a misleading idea of the book. The Spanish Golden Age or Siglo de Oro is a name given to the period from 1492 - 1659, during which Spanish art, culture, and political power flourished. It was also the height of persecution of anyone suspected of heresy or Jewish ancestry. "Golden" is not the adjective that will come to mind as you read. The main point-of-view character is Luzia Cotado, a scullion in the household of Valentina and Marius Ordoño. Luzia is the orphan child or parents who were secretly Jewish. From her Jewish ancestors she inherits the ability to make "milagritos". ("Milagrito" is a diminutive of "milagro" -- miracle, thus "milagrito" is "little miracle". There is a lot of Spanish in The Familiar . You don't nee...

★★★☆☆ What a difference a few inches make...

Fed Mira Grant **Spoilers for Feed follow ** (Also spoilers for Deadline and Blackout , but I will protect those in spoiler tags. Fed is an alternative ending for Feed . It is available free from Orbit books as a PDF download. At 53 pages it's either a long short story or a very short novella. When I reviewed Feed , I wrote, "The book ends well". Feed ended with Shaun Mason putting a bullet in the brain of the love of his life, his sister Georgia Mason, because she had become a zombie. (That's the big spoiler for Feed I promised above.) I thought this was a splendid ending. Tragic, yes, Gruesome, yes, but Feed is, after all, a zombie novel. I added the remark, "While I say, 'The book ends well,' I'm pretty sure that many readers are going to be unhappy with the ending." That was certainly true. For instance, one Amazon reviewer, following in the long tradition of people inventing ar...

★★★★☆ Courage and principle, betrayed by history

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South Elizabeth R Varon My first knowledge of Confederate general James Longstreet came as a result of reading Michael Shaara 's splendid historical novel The Killer Angels , which Elizabeth Varon , in Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South describes thus A finely grained fictional account of the Gettysburg campaign, the book conjured the strained relationship of Longstreet and Lee, casting Longstreet as a prescient pragmatist oriented toward the future, who symbolized modern warfare, and Lee as the prideful romantic, backward-looking and resigned to fate. Why had I never heard of Longstreet? Because the USA doesn't want to remember him. At the end of the Civil War, Longstreet, unlike the huge majority of Confederate officers, accepted defeat. Longstreet was a great friend of Union general Ulysses S Grant, and he was inspired by Grant's generosity in victory to behave in such a way as to d...

★★★★☆ Is it over now? I don't want it to be over!

The Case of the Disappearing Duchess Nancy Springer Nancy Springer 's The Case of the Disappearing Duchess , brought the Enola Holmes mysteries to a close in 2010. As is often the case in a series, Disappearing Duchess has two plots. One is the plot of the entire series -- Enola's family drama: her abandonment by her mother, her flight from the tender guardianship of her brothers Sherlock and Mycroft, and her attempt at an independent, free life. This plot is brought to a close in Disappearing Duchess . The second plot is the particular mystery we are solving this time. As usual for self-styled Scientific Perditorian Enola this one is a missing person mystery, and the missing person is of course the titular disappearing duchess. The most surprising thing about Disappearing Duchess is that Enola, Sherlock, and Mycroft must work together openly to find the duchess. Previously this has never happened because Enola didn't trust her brothers en...

★★★★★ Tactical Assault Clown

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up Dave Barry There is one living human who can write prose that makes me laugh so hard I can't breathe. That person is Tactical Assault Clown Dave Barry . Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up had that effect on me at least twice -- an automatic five-star rating. ("Tactical Assault Clown" is right up there with "Combat Epistemologist" ( The Jennifer Morgue ) on my list of creative military specializations. And if you're one of those people who get their knickers all in a twist when someone uses parens inside of parens, you know what you can do about it.) (Yes, I know I'm not funny.) It's not all ROFL funny. In fact, he tells about his father's alcoholism ( that story has a happy ending ) and his mother's suicide ( that one obviously does not ). Later in the book he tries to convince us that his real li...

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