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[book review] Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse
The book starts out strong with a grandiose and poetic description of the creation of the planet, and then starts to fall flat toward the middle-end. I had to force myself to keep reading. But it picks back up again toward the end-end with some rather profound reveals and it made me meditate on the functionality of religion, for a while. There is a ( Read more... ) -
[book review] Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy (God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture) by Kameron Hurley
Umayama was terraformed thousands of years ago by settlers from the moons who originally left an ancestral planet lost to memory. The twin suns burn cancers into anybody unwise enough to go unrobed for a few hours and most of the planet is a brutal desert. Most of the settlers followed the same Earth religion and though their vernacular languages ( Read more... ) -
Persona Q, Shadow of Persona 3 & 4
I’ve been enjoying Persona Q-it’s a fun dungeon crawler with fanservicy bits-but I haven’t felt the same sense of awe I felt playing the original games. All of the spin offs work like supplementary material to the original game, fun in their own right, but now they seem to bury the main game. Maybe that’s why lately I’ve felt disengaged from the ( Read more... ) -
[manga review] The Flowers of Evil by Oshimi Shuzo
Kasuga Takao is suffocating. Nobody in his small town or middle school seems to realize they are stuck in a meaningless existence and the weight of this knowledge isolates him. He reads Baudelaire and has unspeakable desires the likes of which nobody else in town would ever understand. He truly feels a man apart, and above, bearing the weight of an ( Read more... ) -
[book review] Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin
Things played out much as hand-wringing intellectuals predicted: the sea levels rose, industrial society collapsed, and pollutants of the industrial age wreck ecological havoc thousands of years after their use. An anthropologist travels into this far future to study the Native American-esque Kesh, who inhabit a valley in what is now Northern ( Read more... ) -
[book review] Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett (Discworld)
Re-visit; originally read 2003-2004. I finally got another copy after my original 'disappeared ( Read more... ) -
[book review] A Song of Ice and Fire Books #1-5 (Game of Thrones series) by George R. R. Martin
The ornery part of me resisted reading this series because it seemed like mediocre pulp, and after a lifetime as a fantasy reader I was quite full on pseudo-Medieval Eurocentric high fantasy. But the show was starting on HBO and I hate watching things before I've read the book (if the book came first).
ASOIAF is high fantasy pulp--but it relishes ( Read more... ) -
[book review] The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry
(Yes, THAT Stephen Fry ( Read more... ) -
[manga review] Twin Spica by Kou Yaginuma
In the near-future, the Japanese space program is rebuilding itself from the ashes of the crash of its first rocket. The deeply disillusioned have split off from the project, bitter and guilty, but there are several involved who still desperately want to go into space--even after something so horrific. And they are the ones who bear the backlash ( Read more... ) -
[book review] Parabolis by Eddie Han and Curt Merlo, with thoughts on indie publishing
I'm torn between my adolescent tendency to fuck the system at any and all times and the fact that most of the self and/or vanity-published books I have read are awful. So at Comikaze, as at all cons, I browsed all of the authors' tables, took bookmarks, flipped through books trying to make snap judgments, while talking to bright-eyed and eager and ( Read more... )