needs more demons?

Bossypants is a weird mix: one part autobiography, one part collection of comic essays, with a little bit of serious social relevance, and dash of business book for good measure. Not only does Fey offer some decent advice for managing a creative team, her guidelines for improvisation are mostly applicable to a big-deal sales call. [...]

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This omnibus collection of 3 short novels is a case where a current re-reading failed to live up to the expectations set by the first time I encountered the book.
The Woodrow Wilson Dime is an expansion/re-working of the short story “The Coin Collector” (featured in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime). I think it’s [...]

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I found reading I Love Galesburg in the Springtime an odd, almost dislocating experience. The well-worn Newton library copy that I borrowed was a first printing — nearly fifty years old. But the thematic thread of nostalgia runs through many of these ten stories, perhaps most bluntly stated in “The Love Letter,” in which the [...]

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Nancy Farmer crafts an uncomfortably credible dystopian environment in The House of the Scorpion, mostly with just two speculative elements: viable human cloning (with clones treated as chattel) and an uneasy détente between the U.S. and major drug cartels, with the cartels offered non-interference in exchange for border control assistance. I wanted to not believe [...]

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Like John Connolly’s The Gates, The Accidental Demon Slayer made me think a lot about my preferred ratio of novelty and familiarity in straightforward escapist genre fiction. The Accidental Demon Slayer’s mix is a bit too calculated for my taste — Lizzie’s struggle with her suddenly revealed identity as a chosen “slayer” and its accompanying [...]

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The January Dancer impressed me on many levels. Its milieu has a vividness that reminded me of Simmons’ Hyperion, Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and Banks’ Culture novels, and, as those works do, Flynn’s tackles some familiar sci-fi concepts with literary ambition substantially beyond escapism. Flynn’s world-building is especially impressive — he takes a [...]

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