The Warded Man (Book 1 of The Demon Cycle) by Peter V. Brett (4 stars)

I'm giving this 4 stars because it was highly entertaining and kept me wanting more. It's pretty trashy though. Some spoilers ahead.

Brett brings us to a post-apocalyptic Earth where demons (corelings) rise up from the earth every night and kill any humans that aren't shielded by magic runes (wards). Here begins my first beef. The demons are smart enough to systematically test a ward net for weaknesses, but not smart enough to kick some dust or mud onto the wards, rendering them useless? This would surely happen accidentally, and they display capability to learn - one coreling tracks Arlen across vast distances and maintains a vigil outside the city walls. So how have they not crushed this flimsy defensive system? Also, how have people been using wards for generations but never thought to put them on clothes or weapons?

But, suspending my disbelief about the wards, the world is very interesting, and I wanted to find out more about the demons. They remain one-dimensional purely evil beings through the whole book, which is kind of a shame, but this is addressed in the later books.

The characters are good, and the development is significant, in fact most of this first book is character development. The exception is Leesha, and the treatment of women in general.

I get that this is essentially the dark ages, which wasn't exactly a great time for women's rights, but Leesha's POV is 80% about who is trying to rape her today. And when something serious does actually happen, she brushes it off and has sex with a stranger a couple of days later in the least plausible sequence of the entire novel. I don't think there's a single female character that escapes the clumsy sexual descriptions.

4 stars.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (3 stars)

This Booker prize winner attempts to give us a satire on American life using a teenage narrator whose language is full of four letter words and malapropisms, "skate goat" being one of the most well-used. Vernon is a naive Texas teenager caught up in a mass murder-suicide by his best friend Jesus.

The satire is dark and grating, but never actually got me laughing. Vernon's character is well constructed and full of age-appropriate naive fantasies about escaping to Mexico with the hot girl from school, and a ridiculous (but completely in-character) willingness to ruin his life rather than own up to bowel problems. I felt sorry for him, and frustrated by him, but I never enjoyed reading through his eyes. The refrigerator obsessed mother, Bar-B-Chew-Barn-addicted mothers-friend, and TV-repairman/reporter/super-villain were exaggerated caricatures that should have been funny, but just weren't.

Many people have compared this novel to a Confederacy of Dunces, but it isn't remotely in the same league. Ignatius was a spectacular character, made me laugh out loud a number of times, and is so memorable I find myself recalling him completely out of context. Vernon is completely forgettable, but certainly realistic. Honestly though I think an overly-educated character acting in a ridiculous way has more appeal to me than an idiot being an idiot, so perhaps Pierre just picked a tougher assignment.

The biggest contradiction in Vernon's character is the occasional poetic phrase that will slip out. DBC Pierre is obviously an impressive writer and manages to maintain the dumb teenager voice but apparently couldn't resist pulling back the veil occasionally:

A strip of buffalo leather scrapes into the room, tacked around the soul of Sheriff Porkorney.

A receptionist with spiky teeth, and a voicebox made from bees trapped in tracing paper, sits behind a desk in the waiting room.

I remember once calling my daddy to collect me from a place, but was sad when he came because I’d since grown to love the place. Death takes me like that.

3 stars.

Bossypants by Tina Fey (3.5 stars)

It's funny, but I wish I'd gone for the audio book instead, apparently it's really good. So much of comedy is in the delivery and body language that even the best stuff can usually only get me to 'heh' whereas seeing the same thing in a sketch could have been a belly laugh. Some of my favourite quotes:

Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable—a two-week transatlantic crossing—seem bearable. There’s no need to do it now. There are planes. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you ride on a stagecoach for two months but there’s all-you-can-eat shrimp. You wouldn’t take a vacation where you have an old-timey appendectomy without anesthesia while steel drums play. You might take a vacation where you ride on a camel for two days if they gave you those animal towels wearing your sunglasses.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me.

3.5 stars.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss (3 stars)

This is a side story to the Kingkiller chronicles, that Rothfuss actually says you may not want to read. Talk about an intriguing hook to get people to read it :)

It is in fact, one of the most unusual books I've ever read. It's pure character development for Auri, and it's amazing that it got published at all. Not because it's bad, but because most people picking it up probably won't like it. In fact, Rothfuss' account of how it came to be published is quite an interesting insight into the publishing process itself.

If you don't read it, you're not really missing out in terms of the broader series. But if you were always curious about Auri and are prepared for a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of story with lyrical 3rd-person prose, then go for it, but don't expect it to be an easy read.

Better still, the slow regard of silent things had wafted off the moisture in the air.

Auri is an obsessive compulsive vigilante repair-girl, sewer beachcomber, and monk rolled into one:

And if you were careful, if you were a proper part of things, then you could help. You mended what was cracked. You tended to the things you found askew. And you trusted that the world in turn would brush you up against the chance to eat. It was the only graceful way to move. All else was vanity and pride.

3 stars

The Martian by Andy Weir (5 stars)

There's some book openings that just give you a feeling.  Like this is going to be a good read.

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked.

The author Andy Weir is a programmer and space nerd who spent a lot of time thinking about all of the engineering that has gone into space missions.  Especially all of the planning, technology, and redundancy to handle emergencies that never really gets exercised.  So he wrote a book where lots of stuff goes wrong, and put one of the world's best mechanical engineers/biologists with a MacGyver-esque flair for improvisation in the central role to exercise the shit out of everything.

But the real superstar here is the science and engineering.  No cutting corners, no deus-ex-machina, no dumbing down, just one man's spectacular brain against a million ways to die alone on Mars.

I don't want to give away any plot here because there are a lot of great surprises.  If you have a engineering, science, or computer science background you will be up until 4am reading this, and feel like high-fiving someone. A lot. It's hard to explain how excited I was about this sentence:

They want me to launch “hexedit” on the rover’s computer, then open the file /usr/lib/habcomm.so

Or when the ASCII man page plays a prominent role in Watney's design of a communications protocol with, shall we say, extremely limited design constraints.

Watney (and I assume Andy Weir himself) has a dry, sarcastic sense of humour that is actually pretty great.  It does a lot to keep the book entertaining. There are many times that the book seems headed for tedium, but Weir senses this and heads it off, often by switching perspectives back to Earth, or just making something else go wrong.  Be prepared to suspend your disbelief about how many things can go wrong, and how smart one human being can possibly be.

There is no character development in this book. At all. And I didn't care in the slightest. It's a nerd fantasy where all the information engineers have in their heads, usually only marginally useful in everyday life, all of a sudden becomes life-saving. So if you want a love story, or a deep emotional connection, read something else.

The ending could have been a little less action movie-like, it was one of the least plausible parts, but by that stage Weir probably could have done anything he liked and I still would have given it 5 stars.

Some of my favourite quotes:

How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.

As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.

5 stars.

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (4 stars)

This book is remarkably prescient given it was written in 1975. Some consider it to be the grandfather of cyberpunk. In it Brunner coins the term "worm" for a self replicating computer virus, and imagines a world where data connectivity is king and people can plug-in to the same lifestyle all over the world. Not only are jobs and houses frequently changed, but children are often loaned out and looked after by a series of different parents.

no matter where you go, there are people like the ones you left behind, furniture and clothes and food like the ones you left behind, the same drinks available across any bar: “Say, settle a bet for us, willya? Is this the Paris Hilton or the Istanbul Hilton?”

Our protagonist is Nicky Haflinger, who is a government trained computer hacker prodigy that can create new identities at will, and becomes a champion of transparency and free access to all information for all people. In Brunner's world it's access to privileged information that brings power and wealth.

In some ways this has always been true, but Brunner was forward thinking enough to imagine something like today's world where our governments, insurance companies, banks, supermarkets, hospitals, phones, coffee shops, book sellers, TV networks, and shopping malls are all collecting vast amounts of data about us and using it to their advantage.

"It isn’t knowing that the machines know things about you which you wouldn’t tell your straightener, let alone your spouse or chief. It’s not knowing what the things are which they know."

Out of all the calls taken, nearly half—I think they say forty-five percent—are from people who are afraid someone else knows data that they don’t and is gaining an unfair advantage by it.

This novel is definitely very thought-provoking, it's an ideas book, more than a character book. The only person we learn about in any depth is the protagonist, and even then it isn't clear if we're seeing the real character as it's all happening under the guise of an interrogation. Brunner spends lots of time on exposition and much of the action happens between chapters.

Nick's desire to free information has some real parallels with recent leaks and revelations about how governments, police, and companies are using surveillance to further their own ends:

"The idea came up that it took the advent of the H-bomb to bring about in human beings the response you see in other animals when confronted with bigger claws or teeth."...Well, if it’s true that our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus than you find among our four-legged cousins?”

The writing isn't easy reading, but it's incredibly thoughtful and full of memorable quotes. I'll leave you with some of my favourites.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

#1: That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must. #2: That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than one of us can know.

In this age of unprecedented information flow, people are haunted by the belief they’re actually ignorant. The stock excuse is that this is because there’s literally too much to be known.

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."

One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It’s of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it’s very important to a person. And every surge of your tide is reducing the variety of shapes a human being can adopt.

4 stars.

Cibola Burn by James S.A. Cory (3 stars)

4th in the expanse series.  Space Opera gets traded for planetary battle with bizarrely fanatical evil corporate villain.  This novel is definitely filler, but it was still entertaining. Although....killer slugs? Really?

I didn't really like any of the characters in the spotlight in this book. It felt like Basia was another cookie cut from the Melba flawed-bad-guy mold, which was quite tedious to read. Elvi's overplayed infatuation with Holden was cringeworthy, as was the resolution: got laid, fine now.

I have no idea if the biological terms Elvi used were accurate at all, but I suspect biologists reading about her analysis and breakthroughs would have been face-palming at the pseudo science.

3 stars.