Book review: Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince
Queued for half an hour friday night to get a copy. It was worth it. Best Potter ever. 'nuff said.
Category Archives: Fiction
My reviews of great fiction books
Book review: The System of the World
The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson is a series of three books: Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World.
These three books together comprise the greatest literary achievement it has been my pleasure to read.
Read them! Read them! Read them!
Book review: The confusion
I've gotta come clean here: I'm a huge fan of Neal Stephensons work, so when I heard that he'd written not one book, but a series of three books each around 900 pages long, I was thrilled. Then I read the first one (Quicksilver), and to be perfectly honest, I was bored. I felt it … Continue Reading ››
Book review: Microserfs
In Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, a bunch of geeks working at Microsoft (hence the title of the book), decide to change their predictable, stable, profitable yet somehow unfulfilling lives in Seattle for a leap into the unknown, starting their own company in California.
Some things remain the same: They still work way too much. They're … Continue Reading ››
Book review: The crimson petal and the white
The crimson petal and the white by Michael Faber is a novel that by all rights I should hate. It's a 900 page long story set in victorian England in which very little happens. I ought to be bored to tears, but in reality the book gripped my like no other book I've read … Continue Reading ››
Book review: The DaVinci Code
It seems like Dan Brown is trying to develop a new format: The ultra-condensed thriller. The action in his last book, Deception Point, took place over 48 hours, and most of the story in The Da Vinci Code unfolds over only 12 hours. Considering this, Brown still manages to pack an enormous amount … Continue Reading ››
Book review: Quicksilver
Well then, reading Neal Stephensons newest book Quicksilver took me a little longer than expected but then it is 900 pages long. It's set in the 1600's amid scientists (called natural philosophers at the time), alchymists, kings, nobles and vagabonds. The cast of characters is enormous and contains both real and fictional people. People … Continue Reading ››
Book review: Hey Nostradamus!
I discovered Douglas Coupland what seems like many years ago (but was in fact in 1997) when I read Generation X, and he remains one of my favourite authors. His style has since been steadily moving away from the hyper-realistic stories of Shampoo planet and Generation X to a more surrealist, subjective and … Continue Reading ››
Book review: Cryptonomicon
Okay, here's a novel in which the central themes are cryptology (making and breaking codes), nerds and world war II. Sounds boring, huh? But Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is an amazing work and it's 900 pages do not contain a single boring passage.
The story is amazingly complex and has as many as five parallel … Continue Reading ››
Book review: Summerland
Michael Chabon is a writer with a talent for writing fantastic stories based squarely in everyday life and american popular culture. This was obvious in his masterpiece "The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay" which had it's roots in the golden age of american comics, but it finds a new, wonderful expression in Continue Reading ››