Easie Damasco is a scoundrel and an thief, and everyone seems to want him dead. Despite near constant threats to his life, nothing deters him from continuing his life of crime at every possible moment. As a result, Giant Thief is a fast-paced, non-stop action fantasy novel full of comedy that never lets up from beginning to end.

From the first line, we learn a lot of what we can expect from Giant Thief: “The sun was going down by the time they decided to hang me.” This is a great opener – we immediately learn that Easie is the type to look at even the most serious situations in a carefree manner. Also, we see that he’s the type of guy who puts himself in a position where people want him dead. Unfortunately, this quick-draw opening and the subsequent chase actually left me a little bewildered. Who is Easie? Why should I care whether or not he is captured and killed? Even by the end I felt like I had only scratched the surface of understanding Easie as a character.

I had a similar problem with the main villain, Moaradrid. Easie continually referenced the warlord’s evil nature, and was obviously scared of him, but I never felt that fear as a reader. Maybe it was a result of not connecting strongly with Easie, or a lack of information on who Moaradrid was, but I felt more like I was being told the bad guy was bad, rather than seeing it for myself.

In a recent interview Tallerman mentions that he “stripped out more and more of his dialogue with each redraft”, which makes me wonder if perhaps the novel would have worked better had some of this dialogue been left in. I can see the purpose of stripping out “justifications” from the villain, but at the same time if it leaves me questioning the depth of his insanity, the villain becomes neutered.

While it leaves a little to be desired, if you are looking for a funny, fast-paced fantasy adventure that doesn’t rely on cheap magic tricks to get out of every sticky situation, give Giant Thief a shot. Plus Easie is totally a medieval Han Solo, and how often can you say that?

“[T]here are only so many absurd promises you can make to a horse” (357).

Full database entry on Giant Thief. Beware spoilers.

Suffice it to say, I absolutely loved reading this book. It starts slowly, as Heller’s writing style (and the way he jumps back and forth through time) has its own unique rhythm. Once you grow accustomed to it, however, it becomes utterly engrossing. This is an especially odd thing to say because there’s nearly zero plot in the book. Instead, it focuses almost entirely on characters, and the crazy, bizarre, emotional, disturbing, horrifying, hilarious antics that fill their lives during war.

Yes, Catch-22 is a book about war. Or rather, it is a book that takes place during war. Don’t be discouraged, though, if you don’t usually gravitate to such books, because it’s more about the people than the fighting.

All I really want to say is please read this book. It is a beautifully crafted work of literature that has easily catapulted into my top 5 favorite books. I cannot wait to read it again, as it really is a masterpiece.

“It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all.” (363) – Permanent Link.

Full database entry on Catch-22. Beware spoilers.

Since my experience with Stranger last year, I really had no intention of reading anything else by Heinlein. Still, he is considered a master in the genre and there were definitely some promising aspects to Stranger. And if C.S. Lewis is right when he says you can’t criticize a book the first time to read it (shh…don’t tell him I do that every time), I certainly don’t have the right to ignore everything else by Heinlein just because of one reading of one book.

And a good thing I didn’t give up on him, because everything Stranger gets wrong, The Moon is A Harsh Mistress gets right. Mistress tells the story of Mannie, a computer technician who becomes involved in a rebellion whose goal is to free the residents of the Moon from the tyrannical control of the Authority. Heinlein does a great job of introducing the conflict to us, and sets up a scenario in which there is tension about the ultimate success of the rebellion. While this aspect of the book is good, it’s certainly not what really makes it shine.

What does make The Moon is a Harsh Mistress a great book to read is the depth to which Heinlein goes to create a world in which people don’t just visit the moon, but actually live on the moon. Through the process of exposing how Mannie and his friends coordinate their rebellion, Heinlein subtly and thoroughly shows us what it’s like to work, play, marry, love, hate, eat, drink, and make war on the moon. What makes this all great, though, is how his strategy to reveal all this differs from Stranger. Instead of telling us what it’s like to live on the moon, Heinlein shows us, in the small moments between the larger scale of rebellion against earth. It’s subtle, but wonderfully executed, and makes the book a real pleasure to read.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live on the moon, with a 3:1 male to female population, while attempting to rebel against a heartless Terran government (and really, who hasn’t?) then The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is definitely for you. If, somehow, you haven’t wondered that, I still recommend the book if you enjoy an author who uses great characters and an interesting plot to help us earthworms consider the nuances of something as foreign as Lunar life.

Full database entry on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Beware spoilers

His misdeeds bring him more than a few stolen goods, however, when he runs across a band of inhuman thieves that don’t take kindly to Max invading their territory. These strange bandits kidnap Max’s little sister as punishment for his indiscretion, forcing him to put what little courage he does have to the test.

Afraid to make the rescue attempt alone, Max must first convince Tom to join the adventure. Even with his perfect night vision, the giant spiders, bottomless pits, and blood-thirsty criminals that stand between Max and his sister may mean that none of them make it out alive.

A Selective History of Max Werner is a young adult adventure for all those who have ever wondered what secrets lay in the deepest shadows, the blackest cave, or the darkest night.

Or so goes the pitch I’m submitting to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award later this month. It surprised me how difficult writing a pitch like this was. In 300 words or less I need to convince someone who knows absolutely nothing about my book that it’s worth reading more of.

How do I distill everything about the book into so few words? Well, unfortunately, I leave a lot out. No mention of the tension between Jenny (the sister), Max, and Tom, or the pet bird that Max rescues, or the footnotes that litter the book with ironic faux-history, or the evil Boss that leads the band of thieves and is the real villain of the book, or numerous other things that might spoil the story. All of it, gone.

Hopefully that will be enough to get me through to the second round, where the judges read the first 5,000 words of the book and can get a better taste of everything it has to offer. Hopefully! (If you have any suggestions for how I can improve the pitch, feel free to offer them below.)

In the meantime if you are interested in reading A Selective History of Max Werner you can find it on amazon. The Kindle version will be free as often as I can make it, so keep an eye on my twitter for when those deals go live. If you don’t have a Kindle eReader (or don’t want to wait until the next free offer) and want to check the book out, just leave a comment below or message me on twitter.

Special thanks to Jocelyn Mathewes for the amazing cover art.

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I think it’s important to note that I listened to the audio version of this book because it is, without a doubt, the reason I disliked it so much. Funke’s story seems pretty good, and if I had read it, I imagine it would have been closer to 3 or 4 stars.

However, it must be said that the narrator Brendon Fraser is, unequivocally, the worst narrator I have ever heard in the 150+ audio books I have listened to over the last few years. Here are just a few examples of why he is so bad:

1. He smacks his lips and chews loudly when characters are eating.
2. He coughs, moans, grunts, squeals, etc. even when the text does not imply these things are happening.
3. When the text does note coughing, etc. he exaggerates them needlessly and tediously.
4. Every piece of dialogue is overacted and extravagant for no reason.

My guess is that Fraser doesn’t actually enjoy reading, and so he feels the need “spice up” the book in order to make it entertaining. Maybe others who don’t often read would enjoy this type of narration, but it was endlessly frustrating and nearly impossible to get through in spite of an interesting plot. If you are interested in this book, please don’t listen to the audio version.

View all my reviews

The upshot of all this is that I have deployed a new quotes page which lets you search for quotes by book, by quote type (I will be adding the first and last line to every book I read in addition to any favorite quotes), by author, or even by keyword. You can also choose to restrict the results to only show quotes that will fit into a tweet. I’ve also provided the means to permanently link to a quote so you can refer to it in the future and to download all the quotes in the database as a .csv file in the event that you want to do your own thing with them.

I will be continuing to go through and adding the first and last lines to all the books I’ve read (ever!) so keep an eye on the quotes page because it will continue to fill out over time. If you are interested in helping out in adding first/last line quotes please let me know. My ultimate goal is for this to become the most robust first/last line resource online and I know I’ll need help to get it to that point. I’m also interested in any quote related suggestions you may have, so feel free to leave a comment or send me a tweet if you have any ideas.

I’ve continued to read, despite my lack of activity here, though at a reduced rate. Still, I have plenty of material for posts, and I’ll put the most interesting stuff up soon. I’d like this post, however, to be less about catching you up with what I’ve been doing, but you catching me up on what you’ve been reading. What’s the best thing you’ve read in the last few months? What blog posts did I miss that I need to check out? The books section of my google reader currently looks like this:

And I simply know I won’t get around to reading all of those. So I leave it up to you to point me in the right direction.

I could always take my daily NaNo writing and post that as a blog entry, but I can’t imagine anyone would want to read an entirely unedited 30 part novel. So, sorry again for not posting much around here for the last month, but hopefully NaNoWriMo will inspire me again like it did last year, and this place will become flush with posts once again. I have been making my database entries, though, so if you are interested in seeing what I’ve been reading, you can always check that out.

Finally, as a sneak peak at this year’s novel, I’ll leave you with the title: A Selective History of Max Werner.

“We – as readers or writers, tellers or listeners – understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it” (192).

Across the Nightingale Floor and C.S. Lewis’ essay “On Stories” is yet another example. In this essay, Lewis emphasizes that what makes a story great isn’t as simple as a sense of danger or excitement, or not knowing what will happen next. Instead, it is all the elements of that story, combined in their own unique way, that are important.

Thus, if a story is good, you can’t simply replace one exciting element with another (for example, having your life threatened by pirates being replaced by having your life threatened by regular robbers) because the new element doesn’t contain all the implications and history of the original. In the case of our example, even though you could just as easily die at the hands of regular robbers, they don’t bring to the table all the components of a pirate attack (namely, parrots).

So why am I talking about pirates when Across the Nightingale Floor is about a young boy’s journey of revenge in a world full of ninjas and samurai? Because if it weren’t for Lewis’ insight into this aspect of Story, I don’t think I would have realized what makes Across the Nightingale Floor such a good book. I would have still enjoyed it, because it is good, but my recommendation would not have been any more sophisticated than “This book was good. I don’t know why, but there’s just something so much fun about reading it. I can’t wait to pick up the sequel.” There’s nothing wrong with a reaction like that, but it certainly wouldn’t give a very compelling reason why you should read it.

I don’t want to ruin any of the specific moments, but my full database entry has them if you want the details. In general, though, Across the Nightingale Floor is great because of the personal reaction we have to a world full of Samurais, Ninjas, revenge, faith, compassion, loyalty, and just a little bit of magic. Combined, these elements create a Story that is far more than the individual moments that make it up. If you are a fan of Story, this is definitely a book for you.

Full database on Across the Nightingale Floor. Beware spoilers.

There have been a few books I’ve read recently that contained successfully developed unpleasantness. First, Blindness by Jose Sarmago consists almost exclusively of the depravity of the human character once any sense of civilization has been taken away. As one of the characters says “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice” (32). Aside from the few moments of beauty and compassion in the book, I found reading it entirely unpleasant.

Next, there is A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe. As I said when I originally reviewed it, though this work is skillfully executed, I hated reading it. Bird’s reaction to the (possible) mental handicap in his newborn son was utterly repulsive. I didn’t care how wonderful the writing was, I wanted to throw the book down the entire time I was reading it.

On a less disturbing note, but still relevant, in the young adult book The Maze Runner, the main character Thomas is put into a situation early on where he doesn’t know where he is or how he got there, but every time he asks one of the other kids with him, they tell him to “learn it on your own like the rest of us”. This, understandably, annoys Thomas. The problem is, it also annoys the reader. It would have, literally, taken only a few minutes for any person to explain the situation to Thomas, but instead it gets dragged on for over half the book. Note to authors: if you are annoying your main character, you are annoying your reader as well.

So what do these three examples reveal? My first instinct is to say it shows that I don’t enjoy reading books that are about unpleasant or disturbing things. Yet, if that were the case, wouldn’t I have stopped reading all of these books before I finished? I think so. Instead, I think what it shows is that when an author is manipulating me in a purposeful, elegant way I will let them. I won’t enjoy it, but I will let it happen and, if I’m willing to reflect upon it, I will appreciate the author’s ability to render these elements with such force. After all, it had to be just as unpleasant for the author to write it as it was for me to read it. Just don’t expect me to read these books ever again.

How do you find yourself reacting to pleasantly unpleasant moments?