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Cewsh Reviews (Books)
Why Did You Review Me?' Said The Wrestler To The Cewsh. 'I Could Not Help Myself. It Is My Nature.' It Said, As They Both Sank Into The Muddy Waters Of The Swiftly Flowing Lulz.
Currently reading
Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests
The Republic of Thieves
A Memory of Light
The Hero of Ages (Mistborn Series #3)
Number of Brandon Sanderson Books Read: 6Number of Times I Have Been Reduced To A Great Sobbing Pile of Mush: 6I'll leave the reviews to my awesome wife, (who has a way of capturing the emotions of things without dissolving into flowery prose that I envy greatly and can not reproduce,) and simply say that I read all 1,300 pages of these books, spending every moment trying desperately to guess what the next twist and turn would be, and I failed. I failed big time. The ending to this book hit me like a freight train, and my mouth is bone dry because it has been hanging open for over an hour.
I thought they really had something with the pairing of Amadeus Arkham and Jonah Hex at first, but this collection as a whole suffers from a deliberate attempt to make it more of a "serial" than a cohesive work.It held true to it's roots in the westerns and noir books it was trying to honor, but ultimately that detracted from a more interesting pairing that they tossed aside in order to pursue it. Disappointing.
This novella by noted internet superhero John Scalzi is short, utterly dependent on you having read his previous works and ends suddenly. It is also among the most moving things I have ever read. The view of humanity through the eyes of someone having it foisted upon them and ultimately coming to terms with the beauty of it was beautiful and bittersweet.I'll never have children, but if I did, this would be on the shortlist of books I would give to them to help them come to terms with the world and their place in it. I don't really have a bigger compliment to bestow than that.
Sanderson handed me a book with 1,200 pages of exposition building to a 200 page climax. This sounds completely and ridiculously insane, and yet resulted in perhaps the most stirring conclusion I've read in years. Absolutely stunning in every facet.
While attending high school, there were a lot of books that I was exposed to that were of vastly varying quality. There was the boring but harmless (The Grapes of Wrath, virtually every short story ever written), there were the works of obvious and stunning quality (Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird) and there were pieces of such maliciously awful tripe that I think they were given to us as a test to see if we would complain (The Great Gatsby, The Great Gatsby Again). But on some rare occasions we would get a book that would really get inside me and alter the way that I viewed the world. Watership Down was one, Cathcer in the Rye was another, but neither had the power of All Quiet on the Western Front.To a teenage boy cresting the waves of manhood, this story of young German kids stuck in a war they can't understand the scope of as Germany is systematically emptied of all of its resources and soldiers is deeply affecting. As the characters in the book changed with the passing of time and each new horror that came their way, in some way, miniscule in comparison, I changed too. As such, this is probably the single most important book I read while growing up. Messages of honor, sacrifice, but more important, of handling things that come that seem unbearable but must be borne. If you are a teacher, please let your kids read this. If you're a parent, get your kid into it. Its a downer and a half, no doubt about that, but its worth it.
Snuff [Discworld]
A fine-to-good Vimes book is pretty much guaranteed to be better than a better book about lesser character. So it is here as Pratchett gives us pure fan service as Sam Vimes, the force of nature, is inflicted upon ne'er-do-wells in the countryside.
I am absolutely stunned by this book.After reading A Gathering Storm, I knew that casting Brandon Sanderson as the man to finish this series had been the perfect decision and I had implicit confidence in him going forward. But even with that confidence, I certainly was not expecting him to craft the first 1,200+ page book I have ever read where I was actively upset that it was not longer. The culmination of the incredible number of storylines has been handled masterfully and without things feeling forced or overly rushed, and the style each of the characters has been imbued with (or rather, reimbued with after the disaster of books 7-11) made it impossible for me not to root for sides that were actually against one another.I have never anticipated a book to the degree to which I now breathlessly await A Memory of Light.
The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time Series #12)
Holy hell, I was not prepared for this.After the total disaster of the books from Crown of Swords on, I officially stopped reading these books about halfway through Knife of Dreams and decided never to pick up another one. The characters had been watered down past recognizability, the storylines moved with glacial progress and the writing had just veered off into tripe territory. But putting this book in the hands of Brandon Sanderson with Jordan guiding him in his last days will need to be remembered as one of the single best decisions made in modern fantasy literature. Sanderson took these characters and didn't just evoke what had already been there, but also expanded them and revived them as fully fleshed out people, recognizable from the progression of the prior books. Then, that done, he actually DID THINGS WITH THEM. This book is packed with so many heart racing, and shocking moments that it brought me back to the first time I read Eye of the World and The Great Hunt. That's a compliment I never thought to pay again.I knew Sanderson was great. I've enjoyed his other works in the past. But bringing this series back from the dead may be his greatest achievement as an author. I can't thank him enough.
Ghost Brigades
I enjoy Scalzi's style and sense of universe more than any Sci-Fi writer since Asimov. I don't think this is necessarily his best work as it bogs down a bit too much in the middle, but all the same the sheer readability of it rare and his ability to seamlessly integrate the jargon of his universe without burying you in terms and numbers is unmatched.
Simply put, this is my favorite book ever written.I wont belabor the point with an essay on it. Please, by all means, RAFO.
The Westing Game
To this day, I still read this book just about once every year. It holds up, even if its for someone 20 years my junior. Witty, and exciting, and just good mystery fun.
Redwall
Magic. Perhaps no series of books better connects the imagination of childhood to the adults wishing to recapture it.
Cadusane is possibly the single most loathsome and unnecessary character that I have ever been presented with in any book that I have ever read. This is saying something.
Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is utterly maddening.Following the first two books which I would hold up as two of the best fantasy novels ever written, the stories IMMEDIATELY became derivitive and dull. A big issue sweeps the land, Kahlan almost gets raped, Richard saves the day in the last hour because he's the only non helpless person in this universe. This was just awful in books like Blood of the Fold, but it wasn't until the Emperor Jagang story kicked in that the books became actively hard to read, all joy sucked out of the pages. So it was with great shock that I read Faith of the Fallen and discovered that Goodkind had taken a dramatic left turn and in doing so may have done his best work to date with the genuinely moving Faith of the Fallen. So I was all ready for Pillars of Creation to pick up where it left off and continue on from there.Instead I got a book about a little girl almost entirely unconnected to the plot until nearly the end of the book. It dragged, it had no resonant quality and it was most assuredly not moving and the choice to abandon his main characters for a full book with so many questions revolving around their well being was, while gutsy, entirely a disaster. All the momentum he earned with Faith of the Fallen was flushed and the books from there proceed with the same dreary monotony the ones before had.A completely failed chance to revive this series, this book is best forgotten entirely.
Hyperion (Hyperion Series #1)
I was enthralled by this book. I could not put it down to the degree that I was attempting to incorporate it into everyday life, like bathing and walking and sleeping. This book was so crazy awesome I was considering offering it a medal for heroic conduct. Then I got to the ending. This book has the single most anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending in the history of contemporary literature. I will not spoil it for you, though it is plenty spoiled already.I have never uppercutted a book before this one.