On my last official day with my Grade 8 class, I did not want to teach them more about fractions. Instead I had asked them to submit a question they had about mathematics—anything, from something they’d learned earlier in the year but didn’t understand to a question that had been simmering since sixth grade. The cards I got back were all across the scale, from earnest to uninterested. Quite a few were about pi. I decided to take the questions and weave them into a broader narrative about the use, purpose, and history of mathematics. I wanted to talk about how we figured out math and discuss some of the milestones in mathematical discovery. Prezi has become a pretty big deal at my university’s faculty of education, but until now I had avoided it. I decided that I should probably make at least one before I was finished my undergraduate degree. Plus, my partner student teacher had the Grade 8s make their own prezis for a history project. So I made my first prezi to talk to Grade 8s about math.

Part of my goal as a teacher is to expose my students to the wider world of mathematics, to impress upon them that math is more than just skills and concepts they learn out of a textbook in the fulfilment of curriculum expectations. I want to make the usefulness and purpose of all that math explicit—and I want to go even further and show that math can be beautiful. Finally, it’s important to provide a sense of history and context to all this math. Because the history of mathematics—and the lives of those caught up in it—is intensely fascinating. Or at least I find it so. Stories of love, betrayal, comedy, and tragedy pervade story of math. Because doing math is ultimately an act of discovery and of creativity—and those acts are what make us human.

Amir D. Aczel recognizes this in A Strange Wilderness, which is a history of mathematics disguised as a biography of mathematicians. He makes it his mission to relate the stories behind the math, such as Pythagoras’ travels and interesting diet to Archimedes’ famous bathtub epiphany. (Lucky for me, my Grade 8s had not heard the Eureka! story, despite having just concluded their unit on fluids. So I got to tell it to them for the first time!) This is a laudable goal, and one that coincides with my own. Owing to the way it’s taught in school, we often treat mathematics like received wisdom, far more than we do even science. Mathematical concepts just exist, passed down to us by the teacher and the textbook. It’s difficult, if you don’t actually go out and look for it, to realize that someone had to ask the questions and make the leaps that gave us these concepts. These people were all living, breathing individuals at some point in history, with the same mundane concerns as any human being. For reason, though, through a combination of genius and effort and luck, they made a lasting contribution to our wealth of knowledge as a species.

Aczel brings a wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm to this endeavour. I discovered a lot of cool things about names I already knew, and I met a few fresh faces as well. I marvelled at the chain of events that led to people like Isaac Newton becoming the juggernauts of their day. Newton’s mother, after abandoning him for a new husband, apparently pulled him out of grammar school to live on a farm. It was only through the intervention of his uncle that he returned to finish his education and end up at Cambridge. I shudder to imagine how history would have played out differently if Newton had stayed on a farm!

Of course, a book this size can’t do justice to the history of mathematics or all the mathematicians involved in it. Aczel seems to do his best to hit the high notes. That being said, he makes some curious decisions about who to leave out. In particular, the book seems to start off strong but lose steam, and by the time we reach the twentieth century, great minds like Lebesgue, Zermelo, Russell, Hilbert, and Gödel get cameos if they’re mentioned at all. I don’t know if this is just a consequence of the rather dense nature of twentieth-century mathematics compared to the previous centuries or if Aczel was worried about the complicated nature of the math. Certainly he focuses less on the math itself and more on the mathematicians, as is the case with the final mathematician, the reclusive Alexander Grothendieck. I guess you can’t please everyone, of course, and Aczel does his best while trying to keep the book to a manageable length.

As you might be able to tell, I’m passionate about the history of mathematics. While I’m sure Aczel is too, I have to confess that the stories in this book come across much drier than they should. Maybe it’s a result of reading so many short biographies back to back—it’s just a steady diet of mathematical dessert. Whatever the reason, as much as I enjoyed A Strange Wilderness in small doses, it took me longer to read than I expected. There’s something to be said for books with narrower scopes and their ability to take a detailed look at the lives of a select few.

In combination with other resources, for it is certainly not exhaustive, A Strange Wilderness is a fine book on the history of mathematics. People who aren’t that familiar with (or comfortable) with math shouldn’t have a problem reading this book. Aczel will often discuss the details of the mathematics that his featured geniuses discovered. However, he characterizes the most esoteric items (like group theory) in very general terms, and even when he gets a little more specific (such as with his discussion of Leibniz and Newton’s calculus), it’s never too technical. The math in this math book consists mostly of shout-outs, an understanding of which is far from essential for enjoying this book.

As usual, it comes down to what you want out of your mathematics book. If, like me, your interest in the history of mathematics burns bright and you’re familiar with quite a few of these lives already, then there are probably better books dealing with more specific topics. You can certainly discover new things in this book, but it won’t blow you away. This is definitely a good starting point, however, for those who know that mathematics has some interesting stories to tell but just aren’t sure where to find them.

With its hundredth anniversary just last month, Titanic was all over the media, much to my dad’s chagrin. He doesn’t understand why everyone seems so fascinated by Titanic (the ship or the James Cameron movie). I personally don’t care much for the movie, but I can see why the ship has captured so many imaginations. It was a huge testament to human ingenuity—and hubris. Its sinking was a monumental event in the early twentieth century. Not only was the loss of life considerable—and perhaps preventable, had the ship been equipped with enough lifeboats—but the psychological toll for the survivors must have been particularly harrowing.

Of course, no matter how awful the situation, it could always get worse. You could get rescued by a ship unwittingly transporting vampires.

Now, I don’t quite have Titanic fever, and vampires aren’t my favourite beast in the mythological stable. So I probably wouldn’t have picked up this book if it weren’t for my Angry Robot subscription. But I did, and it made for an interesting if unremarkable read. Carpathia has all the makings of a good book, but it’s missing a spark to elevate it above that.

Our protagonists survive the sinking of the Titanic only to discover that the ship that rescued them—the Carpathia—happens to be infested with vampires trying to get back to the Old Country. Some of the vampires see the Titanic disaster as an opportunity for a free meal, but they risk exposure, which the vampire leader does not condone. Soon enough, Quin, Abe, and Lucy find themselves hunting, staking, and battling vampires in a fight for survival just when they thought they were saved.

Matt Forbeck’s vampires are old-school, Stoker-esque creatures of the night. All the classic powers from Dracula: transformation into mist or into a bat, hypnosis, vulnerability to wooden stakes and sunlight and fire, and even sleeping in a coffin filled with dirt from one’s homeland; these are the hallmarks of a vampire in Carpathia. Indeed, the connection to Stoker goes even deeper, as the last names (Harker, Holmwood, and Seward) hint at from the beginning. To be honest, since I haven’t read Dracula, this connection didn’t do a lot for me. However, I appreciate that Forbeck’s vampires don’t sparkle and, you know, are actually kind of like how vampires should be.

Forbeck manages his protagonists’ transformation from sceptics to believers in a very natural way. After witnessing one vampire disposing of a body—at sea, this is as simple as throwing it overboard—Lucy and Quin alert the captain to the presence of a murderer on board. Eventually, they stumble into a cabin that appears to be the scene of some horrific crime. One of the vampires attacks Abe, but thanks to Quin’s quick action, he survives. This leads them to gathering the doctor as an ally, and as the three of them become reconciled to the existence of vampires, they have to decide how to investigate the threat to themselves and to the ship.

Likewise, we get some good characterization from the vampires too. They are unquestionably monstrous, motivated by a bloodlust and inflated by a sense of immortality and power. Yet they are cunning, and their instinct for self-preservation usually wins out over the desire to feed. The lead vampire, Dushko, is a savvy businessman who wants to lead his people back to the relative safety of the Old World. To do this, he knows they need to keep a low profile on board this ship, where the cramped conditions make them vulnerable if discovered (as we eventually see). But Dushko, the old and experienced vampire, is not the only one with opinions about how the vampires should live. Brody Murtagh would rather start a war with the humans and show them their place in the food chain. This point of contention proves dangerous—and fatal—as the book goes on.

Despite this careful cocktail of conflict, however, I had trouble seeing the point of the book for the first half of it. So Quin, Abe, and Lucy survive the sinking of the Titanic, and there are vampires on board the Carpathia. So … what? It took too long for us to go from rescue to the discovery of the vampires, and my interest began to flag. This problem arises again later in the book, after the vampires are no longer a secret and all hell breaks loose. Forbeck’s quite good at the set-up, but once he has set everything in motion, it all seems to move erratically and without any sense of a bigger picture. As much as I enjoyed individual moments in the book, it never really gave me a unified sense of satisfaction.

Also, I hated the love triangle among our three protagonists. I knew from the moment the two men and their woman companion were introduced that this would be a love triangle kind of book. Of course, I don’t object to love triangles per se—when used creatively and appropriately they’re just as interesting as any other trope. But the “I love her but she only has eyes for my best friend, so I will stay strong and silent” trope is just so overdone. To be fair to Forbeck, Quin’s very real brush with death galvanizes him to confess his love to Lucy. But that’s not enough. Combined with the mortal peril Abe suffers during the vampire attack and the eventual resolution of the love triangle, this relationship just felt like too much of a cliché.

Much like my experience with Amortals, I was initially going to give Carpathia two stars. It’s a good book, just not really one that piques my interest. For that reason, I began to reconsider my evaluation and wonder if three stars would be more appropriate. But unlike Amortals, Carpathia doesn’t leave me with any larger thematic concerns. It is a tasty blend of action, horror, and thriller, but beyond the story there isn’t much here. If you’re fascinated by fiction about the sinking of the Titanic or want to read a book with some Stoker-esque vampires, then Carpathia might work well from you. Just don’t expect anything more than what’s exactly on the box.

“The Revisionists” is the name of my next band.

Time travel is a very broad trope in science fiction. There are so many stories to tell using time travel and so many ways of doing it. I love time travel stories (particularly Doctor Who), the nitty-gritty, wibbly-wobbley, timey-wimey type of stories that can leave you utterly confused and gasping for breath by the end. For all their intricate potentialities, however, time travel is really only good for two things: observing history, and fucking with history. Everything else is just variations upon the theme.

Since stories always need conflict, and conflict is hard to do when one is an observer, most time travel stories lean toward the latter. (You can still do clever things with an observer premise, but it’s seldom as fun.) When one travels back in time, it’s to change the past—hopefully with an eye of making the present better. In The Revisionists, our protagonist wants to stop people from changing the past. Zed works for the Government, who have taken Leibniz literally and believe they have found the best of all possible worlds. So Zed stops “historical agitators”, or hags, from screwing up that utopia. Except, as he protects various important Events in contemporary Washington, D.C. that lead up to the catastrophic Great Conflagration, Zed begins to learn things make him question his loyalties.

From here, The Revisionists can go one of two ways. Through Zed’s first person (and therefore unreliable) narration and the limited omniscient narration following Tasha, Leo, and Sari, Thomas Mullen presents two possibilities. First, Zed is a time traveller from an undisclosed time in the future, as he claims. Second, Zed is actually his cover identity—Troy Jones—suffering from paranoid delusions brought on by the trauma of losing his ex-wife and daughter in a traffic collision. The time travel trappings are all part of an elaborate conspiracy fantasy Troy has constructed and is now living. True to postmodern form, Mullen declines to collapse the wavefunction and tell us which interpretation is “true”, leaving us to decide for ourselves. This is supposed to be artsy and clever and make the book that much more appealing. Unfortunately, neither interpretation leads to a satisfying experience.

Let’s assume, then, that Zed is actually from the future. Thomas Mullen tells us exactly nothing about how time travel actually works in this universe. Apparently there is a “ritual” of some kind that allows Zed to be recalled to the future (or a future). But we’re spared any of the technobabble infodumps characteristic of most time-travel stories. Mullen is similarly vague about the technology Zed possesses. He appears to have cybernetic enhancements: he can communicate telepathically and wirelessly infilitrate neary computer systems; he has some kind of internal database that he can access using mental commands or eye gestures; and he can detect non-contemporary individuals by scanning for the DNA. He doesn’t carry a lot of futuristic technology on his person—ostensibly to avoid accidental contamination of the timeline—with the most exotic tool being “flashers”, small grenades that appear to disintegrate everything within a limited radius.

None of this is very impressive or satisfying from a science-fiction standpoint. Furthermore, the monolithic and suspect Government that Zed protects is a very vague sort of dystopia. I’m tired of this trend: it’s lazy worldbuilding. There’s something to be said for not specifying the nature of the cataclysm preceding one’s post-apocalyptic society—perhaps it makes the author’s vision of the future more accessible. However, this does not excuse a failure to explain the post-apocalyptic society itself.

All Mullen tells us is that it’s called “the Government” (almost as original as the Capitol, that) and it does not allow its citizens access to much in the way of history. According to Zed, this is for their own good—ignorance, after all, is bliss. Indeed, after his wife and daughter die in an all-too-convenient accident, minions come around to Zed’s abode and eliminate any traces of their persons, from photographs to toys to clothing and scents. This is all very sinister, but it’s still far too vague. We get no sense of who is in charge of the Government, and we meet fewer than five characters aside from Zed.

So, as a time-time travel story, I have to give The Revisionists a failing mark. It’s just so incredibly vague that it’s more the outline of a story than an actual story. This is not good enough to keep me occupied until Doctor Who comes back in the fall. I’ll go watch some episodes of Stargate SG-1 or something.

Then what if we regard Zed as the somewhat deranged Troy Jones? Does this make the book any better? The problem with normalizing The Revisionists and interpreting its science-fictional elements as hallucinatory is that it forces us to view the book as a conspiracy thriller. And, while I admit that I am somewhat of a snob when it comes to thrillers, I suspect that I would not be alone in concluding that this is a fairly lacklustre thriller. The characters are dull. Removed from its trappings of temporal preservation, the plot becomes one of counter-terrorism and counter-espionage, a commentary on the conflict between capitalism’s commitment to globalization and the patriotism expected of the American intelligence ecosystem. There’s never really a sense of impending danger, though. Neither Leo nor Tasha are very good at what they do, and while I suppose they are likeable enough as far as people go, I never became emotionally invested in their stories. I did like Sari and wished she would come to a good end but wasn’t particularly optimistic.

Then there’s the fulcrum of The Revisionists: the tension between the Great Man theory of history and the theory that people are merely the product of their times. I think this issue would be a lot more interesting when explored through the lens of time travel. Attempting to sort through the machinations of Enhanced Awareness, Ltd., or Leo’s employer, Targeted Executive Solutions, doesn’t really provide the same sort of epic scope that such a discussion deserves. As a straight-up thriller, then, there is very little in the way of purpose to The Revisionists.

I take issue neither with Mullen’s writing nor with his ideas, which are themselves pretty good. Rather, he has managed to construct a plot that can be interpreted in two ways yet fails to work on either level. I guess I’m disappointed because I was looking forward to an intense time-travel-themed thriller. Instead, I got a book that wants to pretend to be an intense time-travel-themed thriller and … isn’t quite convincing at it.

One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is funny, at least to my own humour schema. I’m aware that some people will not find this book funny, and that their reactions will vary from a grumpy, “Hmph” to wide-eyed sense of shock to “I’m grabbing my torch and pitchfork to burn this”. I’m the one writing this review, though, and unlike DVD commentary, the views and opinions expressed herein entirely reflect my views.

I first started following the Bloggess on Twitter last year, after someone linked to her post about Beyoncé the Metal Chicken. (That post is a chapter in the book, so congratulations on the free sample. Seriously though, read that post and some of her blog; it will give you a good idea whether this book is for you.) Anyone who asks Wil Wheaton for a picture of him collating papers is someone whose writing I need to read. The Bloggess is a constant source of humour, whimsy, and improbable anecdotes. So when I heard she had a “mostly true memoir” coming out, I knew I would need to buy at least one copy.

I ended up buying two, because in my infinite wisdom I knew this book would be my Mother’s Day gift this year.

Normally I can read somewhat inconspicuously in a crowd or in a social situation where people don’t normally read, such as at lunch or a small party. This was difficult to do with Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, because I laughed out loud at almost every single page. I have a very loud, distinctive laugh. I inhale when I laugh instead of exhale, so I sound like a hyperventilating howler monkey. Or a very upset dog. My laughter usually results in other people laughing (with me and at me), so I think that’s a good thing. But in this case it meant I stopped reading after page 4 on Wednesday evening because I didn’t want to wake my dad. I had to restrain myself as much as I could on Thursday while reading this during my dinner break at work, for the walls between the kitchen and the front desk are not that thick.

In fact, I was so taken by this book that I did something I almost never do and inflicted it on groups of my friends on two separate occasions. Because, honestly, who doesn’t want to hear a man read aloud, deadpan, sentences like, “If someone asked me to pick out my own vagina’s mug shot out of a lineup of vaginas, I’d be helpless. And probably concerned about what exactly my vagina had been doing that constituted a need for its own mug shot”? I’m not just endorsing this book; I’m evangelizing it. This is a book my friends need to read, and I am more than happy to read it to them.

Being funny is difficult. I know this because people have told me, on occasion, I am funny, and it’s usually in response to something I said spontaneously rather than something I said with the intention of being witty. There is a fine line between sounding witty and sounding stupid, just as there is a fine line between genius and madness. Nothing is worse than reading a “humourous” book that is trying too hard. For every Let’s Pretend This Never Happened there are hundreds of memoirs that try to be funny and just aren’t. (But this review is not about them.)

I don’t know why Let’s Pretend This Never Happened escapes that fate. If I did, then I suspect I would use this knowledge to make a lot of money. As it stands, I think there’s just something that feels natural about the way Lawson writes. Although, as the subtitle notes, some of these accounts are fictionalized or adjusted for truthiness, they are ultimately drawn from the best source of inspiration for absurdity: real life. While I do not envy Lawson’s circumstances or experiences, some of which sound pretty inconvenient rather than enviable, I do admire the unadulterated joy, the uncut enthusiasm for living, that suffuses her accounts of those experiences. If you get your arm stuck up a cow’s vagina in high school, then you will be traumatized for life, but at least you can turn it into a funny story.

That’s probably why this book speaks to me. I try my best to be whimsical. That is to say, I try to do random or absurd things that we tend to be trained out of doing as we enter adulthood. It’s part of my essential philosophy of being who I want to be instead of who others think I should be; there’s nothing wrong with being responsible, safe, and mature … but that doesn’t mean you have to be boring. Decorum be damned, I have snowball fights in the winter and wear socks and sandals in the summer! And I will keep doing these things, at least until global warming causes snow to go extinct here.

So it’s heartening to encounter someone else who follows such a philosophy, albeit to an even more public and more spectacular degree. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened inspires, variously, feelings of elation, apprehension, terror, relief, and incredulity. Lawson grew up confronted by a menagerie of animals bobcats, “jumbo quail” (actually turkeys), and raccoons. Those are just the living ones and don’t include the taxidermied creations of her father, such as Stanley the Magical Squirrel. From this … charmed … childhood to her fifteen years in human resources to her fifteen years of marriage (poor Victor), Lawson has an abundance of incredible episodes to share. As she notes throughout the book, some of the stories that sound the least believable are the most factual (TVTropes). (The book has photos to prove it.) Humour books can sometimes feel like too much dessert. This book, however, is a full meal: interspersed with her humour, Lawson includes some fairly serious and significant events in her life. Sharing these stories takes courage too. The Internet can be a harsh, judgemental environment.

The overwhelming emotion I’m feeling, though, is joy. Joy mixed with a helping of satisfaction. It’s as simple as that: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is just really fun to read. My laughter is testament enough to that fact. If you like the sound of the Bloggess’ humour, do yourself a favour and read this book. Or I just might put a giant metal chicken on your doorstep.

One of the more pernicious aspects of epic fantasy is medieval stasis. Even as we celebrate the freedoms made possible through democracy, we revel in escapism to an inherently oppressive setting, where hereditary titles are standard-issue and the plot often involves helping a rightful heir regain the throne. This is but one of the many tensions that arises in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (or Titus) books. The eponymous castle is a grand affair in its own right, but it is the locus of a much grander, older tradition that involves and enslaves the entire castle. Titus Groan will be the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, and one day too he will live to perform the endless rituals set out in the ancient books and prescribed by their Master of Rituals. Gormenghast is more than just a castle or a place; it’s a world suspended in a water droplet.

I wasn’t surprised, when I read all the various introductions and critical assessments in this volume, to learn that Peake was an illustrator and a poet. The imagery and poetry of the Gormenghast books are profound. Peake creates in his description of Gormenghast and its inhabitants an atmosphere of stillness. The isolation of Gormenghast is so total that the people of the castle and the village that surrounds it have turned inwards and become professional navel-gazers. The only exception to this is Dr. Prunesquallor and, in later books, Titus himself. Prunesquallor seems to be something of a traveller; he speaks of having visited other lands. Titus eventually grows up and abandons Gormenghast to explore and try to find something meaningful in his life. For the majority of the books, however, Gormenghast is cut off from the outside world. Its inhabitants go through the motions of life, but it’s more like they are sleep-walking or automata moving on tracks. This sense of stasis is the backdrop against which Steerpike and Titus’ rebellions occur.

Steerpike is my favourite thing about these books. He is a villain but also, in many ways, a protagonist, and a character with whom the reader can identify (at least at first). When we first meet Steerpike, he has escaped from the kitchens and the tyranny of its cook, Swelter. He finds himself locked in a room, his own method of escape a dangerous ascent to the tiled roof of the castle. Gradually Steerpike inveigles himself into the affairs of the most prominent people in Gormenghast. His motivations are pure in the sense that all he is interested in doing is gaining power. The fact that he does this through a series of increasingly complicated plots is a bonus. Overall, watching Steerpike hatch schemes and manipulate people is a pleasure.

Titus, on the other hand, is a more problematic character. He’s just a baby in the first book, and more of a symbol than anything else. In Gormenghast he becomes the protagonist and a hero, confronting Steerpike in a climactic, heavily symbolic battle for the castle and the Groan honour. But this is not enough for Titus; he feels too constrained by the ceremonies and rituals imposed upon him as Earl. So in Titus Alone he strikes out on his own, turning his back on Gormenghast, and transforming from Earl to vagrant.

Titus Alone is like an ultimate identity crisis. It was very difficult to get through or enjoy this book, because it feels so very scattered. Unlike the first two books, its pacing is much faster. Rather than dwell and meditate on each character, Peake rushes through Titus’ encounters and interactions. This, as well as the novel’s relative brevity, make it difficult to do more than dip one’s toes into the water. It’s no wonder why the first two books are almost universally considered superior.

And oh what acclaim and criticism these books have received! If you are a Gormenghast enthusiast or a student of these works, this omnibus edition would make an excellent resource. It contains two introductions, and then at the end of the volume there is a selection of critical essays pertaining to Peake and these works. I’ll be honest: I did not read these too closely. Perhaps this is a response to finally being finished university; more likely I just wanted to be finished with Gormenghast … this series was, as I expected, a massive undertaking, and not a light one.

So it comes down to this: I liked Titus Groan, and to a lesser extent, Gormenghast. (I found the latter one dragged at the beginning, because there didn’t seem to be any direction, whereas Titus Groan is sustained by the trajectory of Steerpike’s schemes.) Both of those are solid four- or five-star works. I didn’t much care for Titus Alone—we’ll give it two stars.

I wish I could say I’ve fallen in love with the romance and surrealism of Gormenghast. I wish I could declare myself a Peake fanatic and turn towards devouring the remainder of his oeuvre. I wish these things, because I can see the castle from where I stand, far away—I can see why people enjoy these books so much. Despite this vision, I can’t replicate those feelings in myself. Gormenghast was an educational—and for the most part, enjoyable—experience, but it didn’t move me as much as it has others.

I couldn't stop comparing this book to the Dresden Files while I was reading it. I feel like this comparison is somewhat—but not entirely—unfair, because unlike the Dresden Files, this is not really a mystery. It's more of an action movie stuck inside a novel. Both the Dresden Files novels and Monster Hunter International deal with urban fantasy and feature a main character with a great voice, but that is about where the similarities end. Harry Dresden is a wizard; he sets traps and flings around magic to fight the forces of evil. Owen Z. Pitt is a monster hunter (and chartered accountant); he wields submachine shotguns and RPGs to fight the forces of evil. I can't help but make the comparison. Dresden Files has just burned itself into my brain as the golden standard for urban fantasy.

With that confession out of the way, I'm going to try not to hold Monster Hunter International up against the Dresden Files, or any other series for that matter. Although there are only so many ways to be original when writing about the classic monsters (e.g., vampires, zombies, werewolves), Correia has still managed to create a story that is entertaining and fresh. Correia has a talent for writing the types of "scene-and-sequel" action sequences that keep the book moving at a healthy pace. When Pitt is fighting monsters, I feel like I'm right there with him, hitting the ground, loading the guns, and coming back up to blow the head off an ugly beastie just before he bites off a piece of me. Monster Hunter International is full of those "fuck, yeah!" moments where the hero, against all odds, comes back with the full force of his awakened fury and doesn't just take down the bad guys but obliterates them. These moments are often accompanied by a somewhat camp utterance, but I think that's an appropriate homage to the monster action genre in general: the hero has to say something pithy just as he or she triumphs.

There were plenty of these in Monster Hunter International, but I'll highlight a few to give you a taste:

To this day I don't know why at that moment I felt the need to make a confession to my rapidly mutating boss. Even though I was in accordance with Texas state law, I was in direct violation of the company's workplace safety rule.

"You know that 'no weapons at work' policy?" I asked the twitching and growing hairy monstrosity standing less than ten feet from me. His yellow eyes bored into me with raw animal hatred. There was nothing recognizably human in that look.

"I never did like that rule," I said as I bent down and drew my gun from my ankle holster, put the front sight on the target and rapidly fired all five shots from my snub-nosed .357 Smith & Wesson into Mr. Huffman's body. God bless Texas.

Owen later gets fired from work for violating this rule. Then, toward the end of the book, Pitt is fighting a Master vampire, who learns that monster hunters don't bring a gun to a vampire fight; they bring lots of guns to a vampire fight:

"I've obtained the sacrifice, my lord," the vampire proclaimed loudly. Lying flat on my back, I brought my knee back to my chest, lifted my pant leg and pulled the .357 from my ankle holster.

Jaeger looked down at the little muzzle in wonderment.

"How many guns do you have?" he asked in exasperation.

"Lots." CRACK.

As the above passages demonstrate, Correia obviously enjoys guns and shooting. This is not a passion I share with him, but I admit it lends a certain amount of veracity to the story. By knowing the difference—and taking the time to differentiate—between various types of guns, Correia's descriptions are transformed from vague, "I drew my gun. I dropped the gun. I drew another, different gun" to detailed explanations of why one gun is more appropriate for the situation than another. I never felt like it got out of hand though.

Also, the monsters in this book? Tough. Like, really tough. And scary because of that. These aren't the wimpy little human-like vampires from Twilight or even Buffy. Vampires, werewolves, wights, gargoyles—you name it, and it is nearly impossible to kill. So of course, Owen has to find a way. He gets pretty banged up in the process, so Correia has to rely on some handwaving to get Owen healed in time for his next big encounter. Aside from that kludge, however, I really appreciate the "difficulty level" that Correia sets for his characters. Yes, Owen does manage to kill all those monsters eventually (except for the ones that escape to set up sequels), but he has to work at it, even when he's equipped with Abomination, his shotgun/submachine gun/grenade launcher/bayonet thing.

So as an action book, as a monster-hunting book, Monster Hunter International is a clear success. And in general, its characters are engaging and well-rounded as well. I know this, because when the gang all fall into a trap set by the bad guys and have to fight their way out while surrounded by extra-dimensional demons, Correia began seriously threatening to kill off these characters, and I was scared for them. I didn't want them to die—partly because I felt like they were ripe as recurring characters in sequels, but also because I just liked them. And there was no way I would be able to enjoy the ending if everyone but Owen and his love interest died. That was probably the most harrowing chapter of the entire book. Supporting characters are fragile things, because unlike one's main character there is no expectation that a supporting character will survive any battle, climactic boss fight or no. I was fairly confident Owen would win in the end, but Correia made me wonder how many of his friends would die along the way.

Even though all his characters were round, some of them still made me uncomfortable with how close they came to stereotypical. Take Holly, for instance. She is the tough-as-nails stripper with a heart of gold. And Owen often describes how hot she is, and I couldn't help but groan and move on. Similarly, while I commend Correia for giving Owen an intellectual occupation like chartered accountant, he is just such a macho, macho man. Owen can't go more than a chapter without remarking on how wide his shoulders are or on the surface area of his chest or how they have to custom-order his armour or whatnot. I get it. He's strong and masculine and likes to shoot things.

Also, I can't stand how Correia develops, and resolves, the romance between Owen and Julie. Owen acts so dopey around her, and by itself that would be fine. But Julie—who, let us not forget, is technically one of Owen's bosses—already has a boyfriend, Grant. Another hotshot monster hunter, Grant naturally sees Owen as a threat to his alpha-male superiority, and the two of them come to blows. At one point, Grant has the opportunity to rescue Owen from nearly-almost-certain death and declines to do so, operating under the probably rational assumption that there wouldn't be enough time to save Owen anyway. Later, Owen overhears an argument between Julie and Grant where the latter confesses how he keeps reliving that moment and questioning whether he should still have tried to help Owen. As I read that scene, I did a small fist-pump and commended Correia for this turn of events. Until then, like Owen, I didn't understand what Julie could possibly see in Grant. Now there was something deeper, a more sensitive Grant who clearly could learn from his actions! The love triangle was finally becoming interesting.

And then Correia just puts Grant on a bus (TVTropes alert) so that Owen and Julie can hook up. Not a chapter after Grant's heart-to-heart with Julie, he gets captured by the Big Bad to become the requisite monster hunter sacrifice to power the Big Bad's magic ceremony. Suddenly, Grant becomes less than a minor character: we see him again, briefly, when Owen rescues him; then we learn from another character that Grant has decided to leave the organization and go work in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Owen and Julie have already started having sex. After she made so much noise earlier in the novel about how she was in a committed relationship, I just couldn't find it believable that she was willing to get over Grant so quickly.

These flaws tempered my enjoyment of Monster Hunter International but did not ruin the book for me. I feel like this is a series that has potential to improve greatly. Correia has managed to hook me with his skill at writing action scenes, not to mention Owen's voice as a narrator, and that is enough to give him a chance to show me he can grow as a writer. So I'll read Monster Hunter Vendetta (and not just because it also came with the Hugo Voter Packet) and see where the story goes next. While Monster Hunter International did not revolutionize my opinion of urban fantasy or monster-hunting stories, it definitely entertained. I suspect fans of this type of book will find the world Correia has created familiar yet fresh, and possibly even addictive.

My reviews of Monster Hunter International, the series:
Monster Hunter Vendetta →

Round two of Owen Pitt vs. the Old Ones/Elder Gods/Creepy Extradimensional Squid Monsters. Fight.

Monster Hunter Vendetta continues the storyline from the first book in the series. This time instead of rushing to stop the shadowy Lord Machado from opening a portal to the realm of the Elder Gods, Owen must stop a shadowy English necromancer from opening a portal to the realm of the Elder Gods. It sounds very similar, I know, but there are some important differences—in this case, the necromancer has a past with Monster Hunter International. Oh, and he wants to send Owen through the portal as a gift to his Elder God master, the Dread Lord. Owen, understandably not interested in such a trip, has to find out how to stop this necromancer. But it’s not easy: there’s a spy inside MHI, and Owen has a protective detail assigned to him from the Monster Control Bureau. And Grant Jefferson is back at MHI after his brief stint in Hollywood, apparently eager for some more monster-hunting action. Nothing is ever easy for a monster hunter.

There’s a lot that makes Monster Hunter Vendetta an improvement on the first book. Lord Machado was an over-the-top cipher of a villain, a kind of nebulous presence that felt like a bad retread of all the most camp Dark Lords from epic fantasy (TVTropes). The villain in this book is far more menacing because he’s much more human. He’s someone that the more experienced hunters know, someone who was once close to them but has since turned to the dark side. Like Machado, his allegiance to these darker powers has given him great abilities and near-invulnerability. But his motivations are more human, more understandable, and that makes him a much better antagonist. Moreover, I like how Correia is building out the breadth and depth of MHI’s history even as he moves the main plot forward.

Also, the very uncomfortable love triangle between Owen, Julie, and Grant isn’t around this time! Grant’s back, but not really as a rival love interest. And Owen and Julie’s relationship is stable without being overbearing or melodramatic—there’s just the right amount of affection and concern for each other. Instead, we get to learn more about Owen’s relationship with his parents, particularly his father. It’s nice to see that relationship changing as his parents learn the truth behind Owen’s new job. Unfortunately, it also encompasses the most problematic part of the book.

I’m somewhat tired of prophecies in fantasy. I much prefer the Random Bystander to the Chosen One. I don’t like prophecies because they are difficult to do well. Most of them are gloomy, so if the hero the fulfils the prophecy then it’s a bummer, and if the hero somehow twists or averts the prophecy then it feels like cheating. (In an extreme case, the prophecy is self-fulfilling but essentially harmless, which is a tease.) Prophecies are anathema to free will, which is a quality required in a strong protagonist—why should I care about Owen Pitt if everything he does is prophesied anyway?

To be fair, Correia doesn’t go quite so far and makes it clear that a lot remains up in the air. Owen’s birth was arranged in an extremely improbable fashion, and he’s been steered towards this point in his life. It seems like he’s blessed with some extra leeway that helps him survive in difficult situations—not impossible to kill, as another character is quick to tell him, but he’s somewhat tougher to kill. OK, fair enough. And foreshadowing a future climactic encounter with an evil entity is, I suppose, a good way to create interest in the next book. Nevertheless, I can’t help but being disappointed to learn that so much of Owen’s development has been predestined. It makes him … less impressive.

My faith in the protagonist thus shaken, I took refuge in the ancillary parts of Monster Hunter Vendetta. There’s plenty left to enjoy. Correia continues to put his own unique spins on how mythological creatures have adapted to living alongside an urbanized humanity. In the first book, we visited elves, who are now trailer park inhabitants with a serious sugar craving. Now we get to meet gnomes, who have embraced gangsta culture with a fervour; we also learn that some Internet trolls are trolls. These humourous asides are essential in a book where innocent bystanders die in zombie attacks and Otherworldly creatures devour people’s memories.

I can’t decide which of these two books I liked better. I guess I liked them about the same amount. Monster Hunter Vendetta improves in many ways upon the first book, which is as it should be, but I don’t think it goes quite far enough. I look forward to reading the next book in the series and hope Correia keeps the momentum going.

My reviews of Monster Hunter International, the series:
← Monster Hunter International | Monster Hunter Alpha → (forthcoming)

We’re at an interesting point in our history when it comes to spaceflight. We bravely ventured as far as the Moon, but now we cling to the skin of our world, skimming our atmosphere in shuttles and space stations. We are at an impasse, waiting for that next step, that next flurry of activity that will open a new chapter in human spaceflight. It’s looking like commercial spaceflight is the new frontier. Even so, it remains for debate whether humanity will ever spread among the stars. Our bodies are frail enough on a planet with standard gravity—we aren’t really made to live in space for the time required to get anywhere. If we ever do colonize other star systems, I suspect it will be on their terms, not ours.

If we do spread out, we shouldn’t assume Earth will be in the centre of the universe any more. Indeed, if our colonies encounter intelligent alien species and begin interacting with them, they will be on the forefront of human development, and Earth will be the respected old backwater. This is the case in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. It’s one of the ideas that stuck with me from the book: most SF either treats Earth like the capital of humanity’s empire/federation/club or regards Earth as some kind of myth lost to the past. This middle road is a refreshing take.

Earth is quarantined; no one who leaves can come back. The Colonial Union, light-years ahead in terms of technology thanks to its alien contacts, tightly restricts emigration, with priority given to citizens of countries that are overpopulated. For the Americans, the only way to become a colonial is to join up in the Colonial Defense Force—and they only accept people on their 75th birthday. The CDF wants soldiers with life experience. Because the universe Scalzi envisions is teeming with intelligent life—most of it at odds with us for all the good planets.

I come to this book having read a smattering of Scalzi’s short fiction and his novella The God Engines, which I didn’t like that much. Indeed, his short stories have often tickled me but never really impressed me beyond remarking on his cleverness. But I love following him on Twitter and reading his blog. And if there’s anything his writing, both on his blog and in his stories, demonstrates, it’s a sharp sense of humour.

That humour pervades Old Man’s War, particularly in the voice of the narrator, John Perry, and it’s the metric by which you will love or lament this work. I’m firmly in the former camp: I devoured this (admittedly slim) work in a day, happy to keep reading chapter after chapter of Perry coming to grips with his new life.

What I love about Scalzi’s writing is the way he can use and allude to pop culture without actually mentioning any specific works:

This got an involuntary chuckle from several recruits. Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz could have come from central casting. He was exactly what you expected from a drill instructor—large, angry and colorfully abusive right from the get-go. No doubt in the next few seconds, he would get into one of the amused recruit’s faces, hurl obscenities and demand one hundred push-ups. This is what you get from watching seventy-five years’ worth of war dramas.

No specific movies mentioned, so it doesn’t really age the book, but we as readers know what Perry means. (Maybe we won’t in fifty years and this book will seem incredibly camp—still, I like the timeless feeling this invokes.) And if the above paragraph was Scalzi hanging a lampshade, then in the paragraph that follows he decorates and gilds it:

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, you dumb shits. I know you’Re enjoying my performance at the moment. How delightful! I’m just like all those drill instructors you’ve seen in the movies! Aren’t I just the fucking quaint one!”

The amused chuckles had come to a stop. That last bit was not in the script.

This self-awareness resurfaces periodically throughout the book. It would be easy for Scalzi to overextend himself and become overbearing. Your mileage might vary, but I like it because it helps us identify with Perry, which would otherwise be difficult for two reasons. Firstly, most of us haven’t lived for 75 years, lost our wives, and decided to sign up for an extraterrestrial army. Secondly, John Perry is a bit of a Mary Sue (TVTropes).

Scalzi has an interesting time trying to write in the voice of a 75-year-old man. Most of the time it comes off exactly as that—a much younger man writing like a 75-year-old. For an ersatz voice, however, it’s pretty good, and Scalzi adequately ascribes motivations, memories, and regrets to Perry. We know why he enlists in CDF and what keeps him going. But I wish he weren’t so competent at everything. That drill instructor? Turns out he’s a huge fan of Perry’s work in advertising. It’s a hilarious moment but is the first in a remarkable set of triumphs for Perry. This dude just can’t avoid becoming a hero. And it sucks, because I wish I could laud Old Man’s War as some kind of captivating novel with a strong protagonist. The truth is, John Perry is the worst part of this book.

The best parts of this book? Everything else.

I’ve already mentioned the setting, with its marginalization of Earth’s place in the larger scheme of humanity. I love the little bit of moral uncertainty Scalzi holds up when it comes to the deployment of the CDF. The Colonial Union has an aggressive, expansionist policy when it comes to planets, and they don’t balk at kicking aliens off a planet they want or even bombing an alien homeworld back to the Industrial Revolution to get them out of the colony race for a while. In many senses, humans are the bad guys here. But this book isn’t really about that so much as it is the narrative of one man caught up in this system. I mean, Perry is already pretty intolerably successful—if he singlehandedly managed to change the course of Colonial Union policy, I don’t think it would have made the novel any better.

Scalzi also throws about technological motifs like they’re going out of style (and some of them are). We’ve got “skip drives” that invoke multiverse theory and tachyons (yay, tachyons!); mind uploading and body transferring; cloning and intense genetic manipulation verging on trans/posthumanism; and weak AI. His is a gestalt vision of the future, a little bit from every walk of the genre. In other hands it might be an unpalatable mess, but Scalzi manages to make it come together into a more unified sense of our technological development.

We see this in the Ghost Brigades, perhaps the most important novum in Old Man’s War. I don’t want to go into detail owing to spoilers, and since it appears that the next book in the series is all about them. But the Ghost Brigades are a source of interesting psychological questions for the reader to contemplate—not to mention much-needed character development for Perry. With them, Scalzi taps into a fact true for most of our history but not always obvious to the majority of us: the military often drives our technological innovations, and the amount of ethical dialogue they have with the rest of society is always in flux.

I don’t visualize things while reading, but I do understand what people mean by the term “cinematic”, and Old Man’s War definitely fits that label. Indeed, it’s being made into a movie by Wolfgang Petersen. This is definitely a book that will work well as a movie (there’s a reason I finished it in a day). Scalzi knows how to structure not only scenes but chunks and chapters as well. The result is an entertaining story full to bursting with cool science-fictional premises. Old Man’s War isn’t perfect, but as Scalzi’s first novel and my first novel of his I’ve read, it is definitely a pleasant experience.

My reviews of the Old Man’s War series:
The Ghost Brigades →

My experience with The Kite Runner is almost the reverse of my experience with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Instead of starting dubious and warming up to the book, I started very invested and gradually felt more distant. Khaled Hosseini is skilled at manipulating emotions—but when you strip away this manipulation, what’s left is rather unimpressive. That is to say, while reading The Kite Runner, I was moved. I felt for Amir and his plight and for all the terrible things happening to these characters. In retrospect, however, there are just so many problems with this book.

As a child, Amir is a fascinating character. He has the stereotypical distant father, and hence he yearns for his father’s affection and acknowledgement. Hassan, a Hazara servant, is his constant companion and is totally devoted to him—but Amir perceives Hassan as a rival for his father’s affections. This culminates in a betrayal so cowardly and foul that its repercussions break about servant and master, and Amir regrets it even after he and his father have immigrated to the United States. Watching it happen is heartbreaking: I wanted to reach into the pages and force Amir to be brave, to behave differently, to make things right.

It’s difficult to call Amir likable—even as an adult he’s more bland than anything else—but as a child he remains a sympathetic character. We all have regrets, because we are imperfect people. Moreover, Hosseini captures that essential truth that the world of children is inscrutable to adults. Terrifying things happen to children that they never communicate to their parents, not just out of fear of reprisal but because they don’t know how to talk about it. These fears compound, necessitating lies and half-truths, poisoning relationships. And then there are the villains, those like Assef, against whom one feels powerless. The scene with Assef at Amir’s party, that veneer of civility after everything that has happened, and Amir’s father’s complete ignorance of the subtext, is chilling.

Villains of childhood are different from villains of adulthood, though, especially when it comes to fiction. When Assef resurfaced later in the book as a member of the Taliban, I almost groaned. He had metamorphosed from a cold, empty child into a caricaturish bad guy. Assef’s casual ethnic hatred is almost sociopathic in its single-mindedness. In childhood this was brutal. In adulthood it makes him a very empty character, which is a disappointing way to portray a confrontation with the Taliban.

I had a lot of praise for the comprehensive way in which Hosseini portrays the successive regimes of Afghanistan in A Thousand Splendid Suns. I’m glad I read The Kite Runner, because it provides an interesting parallel story to the later book. However, as a result of Amir’s long absence from his country of birth, his grasp of the situation is necessarily less nuanced and less fulfilling. This isn’t a book about Afghanistan so much as a book about someone, who happens to be from Afghanistan, returning home to redeem himself for something he did as a child.

Amir’s journey of redemption, from Pakistan into Afghanistan and then back out again, is far less interesting than the childhood that got him to this point. Depictions of the Taliban regime aside, Hosseini succumbs to the temptation for symmetry in Amir’s experiences. For example, there’s the injury he sustains to his lip that mirrors Hassan’s hare-lip from when they were children. It’s a kind of karmic retribution—and it’s very trite. And he goes and rescues an orphan and tries to bring him back to the United States. Meanwhile, he’s left his wife behind and hasn’t called her in weeks—and when he does, she accepts his harebrained scheme to adopt this orphan with an incredible equanimity. There’s a complacency, a sense of biddableness, to Hosseini’s characters that can be unsettling at times.

I don’t mean to convey the sense that the resolution of this novel is too easy or too rosy. Hosseini is never afraid of depicting the challenges inherent in what Amir wants to do, with an American bureaucrat frankly describing how impossible it will be for him to adopt Sohrab. Similarly, when they finally get Sohrab to the United States, he remains a seriously damaged child—as it should be. The road to recovery is a long one, with victories measured in millimetres and moments.

In this sense, Hosseini has a fair grasp of the intricacies of loss and suffering. He also grasps how to show rather than tell, with simple descriptions of characters’ actions standing in for narrating their feelings. He needs these skills in order to manipulate our emotions—but this manipulation is so blatant, such an overt part of the book, that it leaves a bad aftertaste. The Kite Runner is moving, powerful, and probably worth reading. It also lacks subtlety, however, and comes across as very contrived. I can understand why it has affected so many people and become such a recommended book, but at the same time it has flaws that keep poking me every time I try to love it.

Darujhistan is the last of Free Cities remaining in the Malazan Empire’s conquest of a continent. A squad of elite Bridgeburners enters the city covertly to sabotage it and pave the way for Malazan’s army. Ignorant of all this, the mages, assassins, and councillors of Darujhistan are locked in a tense struggle over the fate of the city. And meanwhile, forces on the level of gods and demons, Ascendants and the inhuman, immortal races of the T’lan Imass and the Jaghut, gather to do battle on a scale that beggars the human mind.

This is the setting for Gardens of the Moon. The cast of characters is immense enough to require a categorized Dramatis Personae, and the story is similarly sprawling. Giving a straightforward summary is challenging; the above paragraph is about the best I can do, along with the following breakdown of the conflicts. There are essentially three levels of conflict in this book: the Malazan imperalist expansion, the political strife within the Malazan camp, and the involvement of Ascendants and other non-human combatants. The first conflict serves as a setting for the other two. The Empire’s conquest of the Free Cities is nearly complete. But Empress Laseen continues to move against anyone still loyal to the memory of the emperor she assassinated, which includes the Bridgeburners. Sergeant Whiskeyjack’s squad has been sent on a number of missions designed to get them killed, and they are close to the point of desertion—or sedition. Mixed up in the free are scheming High Mages; the Empress’ Adjunct Lorn; and her aide, Captain Paran, assigned to take command of Whiskeyjack’s squad only to become a tool for an Ascendant instead.

Steven Erikson weaves magic throughout the story. The magic of Erikson’s world is both structured and orderly but also very raw and connected to primordial forces. Wizards access warrens, pathways in the fabric of the world that possess certain arcane assocations—one warren is good for healing, another for sky magic, etc. Most wizards only have access to one warren; a select few can manage more than one. But magic doesn’t stop with the mages: no, there are all sorts of supernatural beings involved in this story. There are non-human species, like the Tiste Andii and the T'lan Imass. There are the Ascendants, avatars of god-like entities that interfere with mortal affairs as part of their own, larger designs. A soldier gives good advice at the beginning of the book: don’t get noticed. Don’t give the gods a reason to find you useful, because you will get used. Ganoes Paran ignores this and spends a good deal of his life being used.

Erikson’s thoughtfulness extends beyond his use of magic to the world he has created in general. The peoples and cities of Gardens of the Moon feature admirable diversity that isn’t always present in epic fantasy works. The various non-human species are all different and have different lifestyles and goals and relationships with the human factions. While we don’t get much exposure to cities other than Darujhistan, Erikson implies that it is a very unique city, both in terms of its wealth as well as its balance of power among the nobility, the mages, and the assassins. If there’s one area where his worldbuilding falters, it is probably his portrayal of magic and ritual, which seems exempt from this wonderful diversity. Everyone uses warrens; everyone talks about the same group of gods. In a world as vast as this one, it would make sense for different societies to develop their own rituals for accessing the supernatural forces and their own stories about those forces.

Although the story sprawls, the plot of Gardens of the Moon is relatively simple: Empress Laseen wants Darujhistan to fall; some people want to stop that from happening; Ascendants get into the mix and mess with everyone’s plans. What causes problems for the reader is having to choose a side. At the beginning, the Malazans are nominally the protagonists. Yet they are conquerors, imperialists bent on taking cities by military force just to expand their dominion. So should we cheer them on for that? Maybe we should be cheering for the people of Darujhistan, the delightful characters like Crokus and Raillick and Kruppe! Except that some of the Malazans, such as Whiskeyjack’s squad, are perfectly fine individuals, and we want to see them succeed. As a result, I sometimes found myself cheering for two characters whose aims were diametrically opposed. Oops.

I think this speaks to the level of investment Erikson can encourage, assuming one makes the effort to stay involved in the story. To be sure, this is not a simple book or a light read, and I can see why some people would find that unattractive. Erikson walks a fine line when it comes to exposition, and it’s possible he sometimes includes too little instead of too much. (On the other hand, there are some times when he digresses into things that seems rather irrelevant to the larger story, even if they do deepen our appreciation for the world he has created.)

One of the advantages to this complexity is that there is bound to be at least one subplot a reader will like. Whether it’s Crokus’ hapless and doomed love story or Paran’s journey towards autonomy and self-determination, there is no shortage of stories here to be told. Erikson successfully conveys that every character has a history, even if we don’t know all the details—Whiskeyjack and Quick Ben are great examples of this, because we learn just enough about their pasts to whet our appetites, and nothing more.

Erikson could have simplified the story, cut some characters, made the book shorter and easier to follow. It might even remain a good book after such changes; it’s impossible to say. As it is, Gardens of the Moon is definitely complex, but if you are willing to make the investment, it pays off. While not for every reader, Gardens of the Moon is the start to a series that promises to fascinate and captivate those who enjoy vast and roomy fantasy.

My reviews of the Malazan Book of the Fallen:
Deadhouse Gates → (forthcoming)