In the Limelight: Paul Kearney (take two)

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I've been hooked on Kearney from the moment I've read "The Mark of Ran" (first book in the - as of now yet - unfinished The Sea Beggars Trilogy). "Hawkwood and the Kings" and "Century of the Soldier" are the first and the second omnibus editions that contain all five volumes of Kearney's classic and long out of print Monarchies of God series. I'm really keen on reading them as soon as possible but I'm currently involved with another behemoth - "Ash: A Secret History" (Amazon).

If you want to find out more about Kearney and his work I recommend you read our reviews of The Mark of Ran, (Book One of The Sea beggars), This Forsaken Earth (Book Two of The Sea Beggars) or/and The Ten Thousand.

If you need more information on Monarchies of God series you can read through this dedicated thread on A Song of Ice and Fire forums or you can read the reviews on the series from the biggest Kearney advocator I know and who also piqued my interest for the author: Wertzone's review of the first and the second omnibus.

2010 Hugo Award Winners

2009 Hugo Award Winners were presented at Aussiecon 4, in Melbourne, Australia, which was held from August 2-6, 2010.

The Winners:

• Best Novel (TIE!): The City & The City, China Miéville and The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi China Miéville

• Best Novella: “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross
  

• Best Novelette: “The Island”, Peter Watts
  

• Best Short Story: “Bridesicle”, Will McIntosh
  

• The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Seanan McGuire
  

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Congratulations to all the winners!

source (where you can find other Winners & Nominees as well): The Hugo Awards

Carrie Ryan - The Forest of Hands and Teeth (Book Review)

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Zombie apocalypse came and went, but generations later, there is still a group of survivors left – not that zombies are gone, though. Mary is a teenager growing up behind well-guarded fences in the middle of Forest of Hands and Teeth. Her village, run by the Sisterhood, is in constant danger of being overwhelmed, but Mary has other problems: the boy she fancies decided to marry her best friend and her mother just got bitten by one of the Unconsecrated.


When I first heard about The Forest of Hands and Teeth, I was all 'Yay, another post-apocalyptic book!' and was eager to see how this particular zombie apocalypse turned out. The beginning was not what I expected, though - the setting is interesting, but the world of Forest of Hands and Teeth only works if you don't think about it too much. The zombies (or the Unconsecrated, as Mary calls them) are presented as if they were an unstoppable force of nature, even though it's not clear where they all even came from, seeing how it's been generations since the original outbreak, and they seem to be able to swarm even the most prepared villages. People from Mary's village also seem to have a habit of wandering too near the fences, there seems to be an unlimited amount of fence material and the more I read about how the village works, the more similar everything seemed to The Village. Luckily, this village is not the main focus of the book, but instead only provides a background for the protagonist's various problems and dilemmas.

Mary is a typical teenager – stubborn, a bit naïve and capricious. This was why I had a hard time deciding whether Forest of Hands and Teeth is a YA book or not, because she, despite her age, is also a very non-typical YA character, mostly because not only she's far from perfect, I also find her very hard to empathise with. She rarely speaks her mind and abides by the norms of the society she's trapped in, even though she despises them; any rule-breaking she does seems coincidental. She is quick to notice other people's failings, slow to realise her own and most of the time completely passive. Even though she mentions all kinds of sacrifices she's willing to make, those, too, would require only minimal participation from her (for example, agreeing to a 'scandalous' proposal, but not voicing it). I actually found all that pretty refreshing – I'm used to YA protagonists who are rebellious, active, and all in all the person most teenage readers would love to be. I can't imagine that many teenagers would want to be Mary, but she does strike me as a pretty realistic character.

The other Mary's personality trait that I found atypical was her inability to be satisfied with anything that doesn't go according to her various daydreams. She is unhappy with a boy who fell in love with her because he is not 'the one', and never gives him a chance to prove himself; when she finally gets to be with the boy she supposedly loves, she quickly gets bored and starts longing to fulfill her long-time wish to see the ocean. Where a more typical YA character would realise (probably with a little help from a good friend) that they've been too selfish ans try to make amends, Mary chooses her wish over everyone she knows and leaves them to their own devices and unknown fate.

That's actually what made the book for me and what I liked most about it. Mary is stubborn, unreasonable and selfish, but not annoying; the reader may not agree with her decisions, but has to go along with them. True, the setting (and the zombies) is there only to provide a background and other characters are not nearly as lifelike as Mary - mostly, they're only archetypes (the best friend who grows distant, the older brother who loves her sister despite a grudge, the two love interests who (of course) both fall in love with her, the strict teacher …) for Mary to interact with, but Mary herself is a very nicely written, realistic character; the journey to her realisation of what she really wants is what makes this book well worth reading. I can't wait to see what the sequel (The Dead-Tossed Waves) will bring.


4/5



Trin



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Yet another skipped week. Study time = crazy time.

Blogroll Update!

Hey guys, I've been meaning to update the blogroll on Realms for quite some time and now I finally got around to it. I've sifted out the blogs that haven't been updated in more than 6 months (R.I.P) and now have some empty spots to fill. If you think I'm missing an essential or up-and-coming blog that needs to be read, please drop me a line in the comments.

Thanks.

Stephen King - Under the Dome

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On a usual October morning, the residents of Chester's Mill find themselves abruptly cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome. While most people are concerning themselves with confusion and casualties, some of them have other things on their mind: Dale Barbara is now trapped under the dome with the very people he was trying to escape; 'Big Jim' Rennie plans to extend his already significant influence to hold the town under his control, while his son, Junior, discovers that most problems can be solved with murder ...


Under the Dome starts in King's classic style. The narrative is interesting enough to capture the reader from first moment onward; King perfectly depicts the feeling of a small town where most everybody knows most everybody else down to the mistakes of their grand-grand-fathers. There are plenty of characters, which adds to the small town feeling but can sometimes be a bit annoying since it is fairly easy to confuse people with similar names, especially because not all of them play a significant enough role in Under the Dome for the reader to know exactly who they are.

Along with his usual qualities, King seems to have kept all of his weaknesses as well. He still has a bit of a problem with 'show, not tell' principle – he makes almost no distinction between the behavior of adult people in different age groups. Dale 'Barbie' Barbara, the 30 years old protagonist, could easily be aged anywhere from 40 to 80 – he is described as 'Iraq war veteran' and at first, I was sure he took part in the Gulf War. He doesn't act like a young man who grew up during the 80's and 90's – he doesn't care about technology, his way of thinking and acting is universally mature and apparently, he is into apocalyptic fiction:

“[...] It was built in the fifties, when smart money was on us blowing ourselves to hell.”
“On the Beach,” Barbie said.
“Yep, see you that and raise you Alas, Babylon.”

Not that there's anything wrong with apocalyptic fiction (I'm a fan of it myself), but this little piece of conversation just didn't work for me. It's as if Barbie's different characteristics just didn't add up - he did not strike me as a real person, more like a rough character sketch. Kid characters are a bit more plausible, but there is otherwise no difference in maturity, responsibility and general behavior between the characters aged 20, 30, 40 or more. Aside from that, the characters are wonderfully written, with various life stories, personal traumas and moral dilemmas.

Under the Dome is set in the not-too-distant future; this, from what I gathered, means somewhere between 2012 and 2016. It, however, doesn't seem like the people of Chester's Mill keep up with the times: an iPod is referred to as 'one of those computer-music doohickies', kids born in the 00's wish to be characters from Star Wars for Halloween (again, nothing wrong with that, but it strikes me as a bit odd – why not Pokemon, Hello Kitty, Dora the Explorer, anything that is a bit more recent?). And of course, the gift of blank CD's at the end of the book. Even now, this one must top the chart of lamest gifts for your SO (or anyone, actually) ever, and I can't even imagine how lame it will be in, say, 2014. Sure, King needed these blank CD's for plot's sake, but he could've at least said that they were meant for a 'Back to 2000's' party or something.

Speaking about the ending – it's as sudden and unrelated to the rest of the story as endings in King's books often are. King makes a mess out of Chester's Mill, creates a very tense situation which makes the reader eager to see how it will all resolve. The book, however, ends after a sudden turn of events that erases all the previous problems and leaves a lot of little details unexplained.

Despite everything I've just said, Under the Dome is a very good read. Mistakes and inconsistencies are mostly lost during the fast-paced turn of events – Chester's Mill sees more action in just a few days than other towns see in years, so it is easily to get confused and get the feeling that it's all been going on for ages. Some of the characters also seem to have gotten confused – they act excessively or overconfidently, regarding that they have been trapped under the dome for only a few days. Other than that, characters are (mostly) plausible and full of life, with their own stories and reactions to the sudden isolation. These reactions are what King builds most of his story on, and I must say that it's a pretty good story, worthy of a re-read.

4/5







Trin

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Sorry for not updating in two weeks. I was elsewhere, having fun :P

Genre Classics: Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks (Book Review)

"Consider Phlebas" (Amazon: UK, US)
by IAIN M. BANKS
Format: Paperback, 467/544 pages
Publisher: Orbit (first publication 1987)

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Scottish novelist IAIN M. BANKS is deemed a science fiction powerhouse whose Culture series -- a set of standalone space opera novels that share the same milieu -- represent one of the finest works in the genre. "Consider Phlebas", published way back in 1987, was the first novel set in the Culture. It was originally written in 1984, but has been later rewritten; a fate shared by many of his earlier works. It is, by this day, considered to be one of the finest space opera novels ever written, rarely matched or surpassed even by later Culture works.

Bora Horza Gobuchul belongs to the race of Changers whose members have mastered the ability to alter their physical appearance. As such, they are extremely suited for spy and undercover missions. Bora Horza threw his lot in with Idirans, a pious galactic megaforce that chose to oppose Culture's unaggressive expansionism promoted by the promise of leisure and technological advancement. This is a clash of ideologies that spans across galaxies. Idiran's are a highly hieararchical and militaristic society and they cannot and will not forgo the threat -- may it be imaginary or not -- that the blashphemous sentient machines of The Culture present to the sanctity of Life.

Bora Horza is tasked with a mission to retrieve a renegade Mind that would bring Idirans invaluable technological and tactical intelligence on the state of The Culture. Along the way he employs with a crew of freelancers, gets involved in a kind of relationship, excapes from a mad prophet that rules over a tropical island, witnesess a grand destruction of an orbital, is on a reckless run from Culture agents and many more exciting things...

Now, to be totally honest, I expected more from a novel of Culture fame; but such is usually the fate of exuberant expectations...they shatter. Far from being a bad book in itself, but the high-octane adventure in space that the book does provide in spades, lacks some depth, a type of substance that makes great books out of good ones. Horza is thrust from one "grand scale" action scene to another, with little "slower passages" that would make the protagonist and the characters around him more tangible. I had similar problems with books like "The Ten Thousand" by Paul Kearney and Takeshi Kovacs books by Richard Morgan. I just have this feeling that something essential is missing. But what redeemed this book in my eyes is the ending, because it definitely carries that emotional punch that the rest of the book was missing. It conects you to Horza and the rest in a more profound way than before.

I would label Horza as a partial anti-hero. He's not as obnoxious a person as Thomas Covenant is, but there is this cold detachment and a nasty streak to Horza that makes a reader leery. He is still likable, despite his shortcomings. The support cast is, sadly, severely underdeveloped. They are intriguing, but the author rarely slows down the pace of the story to tell us what makes them tick. The unrelenting pace can be both a curse and a blessing at times. It might make you read the book in one sitting, but it also might make you feel a bit unsated afterwards. Although the ending carries the emotional punch that might be lacking before.

Banks often often stops to vividly describe epic vistas, blown-out-of-proportion entrails of flying cities and space crafts, colossal space battles and scenes of destruction. Worldbuilding is at the same time vast and limited (not overdone; it doesn't impose on the flow of the fable). If you're a visual type you'll get a big kick out of the novel, since the descriptions of scenes are done in exemplary manner. "Consider Phlebas" is without a doubt strongest in its beggining and its ending sequence. One of the novel's other hallmarks is without a doubt it's relentless pace.

If you enjoy vigorously energetic space opera with a clearly set course of action from the outset, morally ambiguous protagonist, crunchy prose, vivid scenery and destruction on behemothic proportions, then "Consider Phlebas" clearly comes recommended.
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3/5


Related Posts:
Review of "Matter"

- Thrinidir -

Graham Joyce - Memoirs of a Master Forger

I first heard about Memoirs of a Master Forger when the title appeared a few times while I was rounding up our ultimate best of 2008 list. The reviews were all extremely positive, so I decided to give it a go. Judging by its cover, I figured that MoaMF will be set, say, in 18th century, with elements of either steampunk or fantasy. Well … I was wrong. When they say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, they say it for a reason.

Memoirs of a Master Forger is a story of a man named William Heaney, whose name is also being used by the author of the book. He is a random person from 21st century and his life isn’t going exactly as he’d imagined. His wife left him for a TV chef, his son is growing up into a snobbish brat, his job is boring and the forgery his friend Stinx is working on is hardly going well – the latter because Stinx’s woman has just left him and despite it being the third time in a row, Stinx still seeks refuge in drink.

Will is not really the master forger mentioned in the title, although the memoirs are undoubtedly his. He is just the guy who sells forgeries when Stinx completes them. Ok, he does write poems for another friend, Jaz, but since they are, in his own words, really bad poetry, I don’t think it counts. Will’s main characteristics are donating money to a local homeless shelter and the ability to see demons, the latter obviously being enough to put this book under ‘fantasy’ section. The demons are only mentioned in an offhand manner, though, and are most probably just a metaphor for human suffering.

I guess this is the reason why I was pretty disappointed with Memoirs of a Master Forger. It’s got little to do with forgeries – the only forgery beside the really bad poetry is a Jane Austen first edition that seems like a minor, unimportant side plot and mostly just another thing that does not go as planned. It’s not about demons, either, even though there was some promise to that, but the narrative is simply not unreliable enough to be of intrigue.

The book follows a typical formula where the setting is a contemporary society and the main character is a random person with whom the reader can easily identify. He is not entirely average, though, because average is uninteresting and nobody wants to read about that. He has his flaws, but still clearly a nice guy. His life is not completely dull for the same reasons the protagonist is not entirely average. Whatever happens, be it good or bad, is just uncommon enough to be interesting but could easily happen to the reader as well. Following the formula, the ending can be either a happy one (reader: ‘oh, the world is a nice place after all’) or a somber one (reader: ‘huh, I shall reflect upon this’). I notice books follow this formula fairly often; it seems to be very popular in contemporary fiction, probably because the reader can easily picture himself in main character’s shoes. Aside from the obvious benefits, this also carries the ‘something extraordinary could happen to you as well’ message, which, I think, is something readers generally like. While this formula does not necessarily predicate a lack of writing skills (on the contrary – a skilled writer can, with a few variations, convert this formula into a very good novel) it can often lead to an otherwise mediocre novel becoming a success.

And, of course, Memoirs of a Master Forger has a happy ending where every wrong is righted and everything is just swell. There is no bitter aftertaste or feeling that it could all be undone any second now. The problems are all solved and the general feeling is that everyone will be happier from that point on. No fears, no doubts, just fields of shiny happiness. Blergh.

Don’t get me wrong, Memoirs of a Master Forger is a nice enough story written in a flowing style, but I really don’t see what’s so great about it. The forgery/demons bit is original enough, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the narrator could be a bit more unpredictable, the characters less generic and the plot more than just a path to happy ending. All in all – average.

Trin

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I guess I'll never manage to do something on time, but late is still better than never. This review is a bit old, but I hope you'll enjoy it nevertheless :)

And ... we're back.

As I promised in my April post, RoSF will update regularly again, beginning with next week. There will be at least one review per week, possibly more. Hope you will enjoy them and spread the word that we're back from the dead. :)

Until next week,

Trin

Snippy Snippets: "The Separation" by Christoper Priest

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"The Separation" by CHRISTOPER PRIEST is a prime example of great and mind-boggling alternative history fiction. You get caught up in a story narrated by two identical twins through their journals and a few external publications on the lives of the two. The story is about the lives of Jack (the bomber pilot) and Joe L. Sawyer (the pacifist ambulance driver) during the WWII England. They have a love-hate relationship and they are both in love with the same woman. The war and their personal differences separate them, but as we follow their journal entries and external ("objective") facts are introduced along the way via newspaper articles and other official publications, we realize that a lot of the information we picked up along the way really contradicts itself. Priest does not spoon-feed the reader with the right answers, but leaves you to juggle with your thoughts and come up with a reasonable explanation for what was really going on. The writing is superb as well. A great page-turner even though the book offers limited action. If you want a breezy read full of adventure this probably isn't it, but what it offers is high quality drama, a well-written and highly enjoyable prose (the red herrings and the conflicting facts are masterfully woven into the fable so they don't disrupt the flow of the novel at all), and a sharp mind to connect the dots at the end to come up with an answer for the factual discrepancies. A great, heartily recommended read! Somewhere in between 4/5 and 4.5/5.

- Thrinidir -

Not dead (yet)

Thrinidir linked me this today and while I'm not really thrilled about it, I'm not really surprised either. After all, it's been more than 4 months since our last update here on RoSF.

My plan at the end of 2009 was to take a short break, say, for two to three months. I planned to resurrect the blog sometime in March, maybe early April, and try to update regularly - at least once in every two weeks, preferably more often. Truth is, I still have no more time than I had in December. I have about five or six reviews written and waiting, I just never seem to find the time to type them (or, more often, I simply forget about them). I also have about 7 exams coming up and am juggling my time between college and hobbies.

Thrinidir has been pretty much WoW-oriented for the past year or so, which basically means that regarding this blog, I'm mostly on my own. This makes keeping this blog up much less fun and at the same time that much harder. While I enjoy reviewing, I don't really want to keep a blog that updates once in a month and a half. I want to do this properly, and right now, I need more time for that (or another pair of hands to help me, but that's unlikely).

So, just so you know: RoSF is not dead, just hibernating :) I will begin to regularly update it again once I pass most of my exams for this year, which will be somewhere around end of June/beginning of July.

Until then, have fun :)

Trin

Dan Simmons - Drood (Book Review)

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"DROOD" (Amazon: UK, US)
by DAN SIMMONS
Format: Paperback, 816/784 pages
Publisher: Quercus / Little, Brown and Company (Feb 2009, first edition)

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Last summer, I've written a post regarding books we like and how hard it can be to review them – can you remain objective? Should you remain objective? Drood is one of such books and I can't really decide whether I'm infatuated with it or it really is that good.

"Drood", like "The Terror", is neither fantasy nor science fiction – it's historical fiction, but unlike " The Terror", "Drood" concentrates more on 'historical' than on 'fiction'. Our narrator is Wilkie Collins, who introduces us to his life as a writer, one of Charles Dickens' closest friends and a member of 19th century's London upper class.

"Drood" presents Dickens and Collins in the time when they were both already established writers, praised all over England, neither of them short on money or company. Their lives, as well as everyone involved, are subject to their various whims and thus often a fine source of gossip; while Dickens dismissed his wife and forbid her to enter his house again, Collins is unmarried but has two lovers who don't know about each other. While both authors readily cooperate, they just as readily dismiss each other's work as petty, unimaginative or just plain bad writing. The older they get, the wider the gap between them becomes – with a little help from the mysterious Mr. Drood, whose past and skills obsess Dickens.

In most reviews of "Drood" I've read, people mostly complain about "Drood" being too long and mostly just Dickens' biography. Neither of these bothered me. I actually enjoyed how SIMMONS took his time and 'spent' many pages to create a perfect atmosphere and explain the background of the story. Admittedly, this was probably a bit easier for him than if he set his story in a fictional place, because a lot is known about 19th century London and its upper class, but it still takes a certain amount of skill to present it as intriguing and engrossing as SIMMONS did. "Drood" hardly reads as a history textbook or a biography, more as a work of pure fiction. One of the possible reasons to why its length didn't really bother me might lie in the fact that I've recently read a lot of first-part-of-the-series novels, and they rarely left me satisfied because they centered more on action, offering an immediate, but not lasting satisfaction, and less on explanation and wholeness – there is enough time for the latter in one of the sequels. "Drood," though, is a standalone novel, and as such has to offer some explanation, background and so on.

As for the biography part of criticism – well, I can't really say, since in all those years I spent in school, we only mentioned Dickens a couple of times. And when I say mentioned, I mean exactly that – we listed his name along with other writers of his era, but we never got further than that. We never had to read any of his works, and I never knew that Wilkie Collins existed. Because of that, reading "Drood" was in a way like watching a great documentary; biography was just a logical part of the book and I found it more interesting than boring.

As mentioned, SIMMONS takes a step forward from "The Terror" here; by introducing an unreliable narrator, he successfully manages to blur the line between facts and fiction and thus piquing reader's interest. The book starts as a tale of two 19th century writers' everyday life, but slowly evolves into a gripping and unexpected tale, full of suspense. Highly recommended.

~Trin~

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I'm totally out of practice, guys. I don't remember the last time I read so little. I've read maybe 10-20 books since June, which is just SAD. I have written 2 (unfinished) reviews. Sucks to be me, I guess?

Six feet under...and digging my way back out

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So what have I been up to the last couple of months that I haven't been blogging? Nothing much really. I'm stuck in a rut and I'm slowly digging my way back out of the mire. Even though I've been procrastrinating on an exponential level I still haven't been completely idle where reading is concerned - I've been close enough to stone cold idle though - and while I don't have the drive or the energy to write full-blown reviews let me give you a quick recap of what I've read lately and what are my thoughts on the books.

After I've reviewed DAVID LUIS EDELMAN's "Infoquake", that was way back in June, I've tackled (for the 7th time now) the mind-boggling saga Malazan Book of the Fallen. "Reaper's Gale" is not the best book in the series, but it is still a substantial effort by the fantasy powerhouse that goes by the name STEVEN ERIKSON. I'm not going into the details, so if you are unfamiliar with the series you can go and catch up on some of the older reviews I've written ("Midnight Tides" is actually the opening review for this site; at that time I was still learning the ropes of how and what to write so it is most definitely too long and unfocused, but it went a lot of effort into writing it). "Reaper's Gale" is, in my opinion, a weaker work than the initial four novels, but feels tighter and more focused than both"Midnight Tides" and "The Bonehunters". Malazan Book of the Fallen definitely remains a hallmark of modern fantasy, and "Reaper's Gale" only solidifys this notion.

After the hefty Malazan novel I had a taste for something smaller in volume, but not necessarily lighter of content. I found what I was looking for with URSULA K. LeGUIN's "The Dispossessed". It's no secret that I'm a fan of her work. "The Left Hand of Darkness" was a terrific work of fiction and one of my favourite reads of all time and while I wasn't as enthused with "The Lathe of Heaven" -- another of her masterworks -- "The Disspossesed" reminded me of LeGUIN's lucid insights into the human condition and her brilliant characterization skills. The ending was lukewarm in comparison with the rest of the novel, but a very strong work of fiction on overall, totally deserving of the Masterwork title and all the awards it got back in the day. Highly recommended.

"Heroes Die" and "The Blade of Tyshalle" by MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER are certainly works of fiction that I shouldn't have postponed reading for so long. STOVER -- a close example to PAUL KEARNEY in this particular case -- is another gem of fantasy literature who deserves more widespread recognition (and audience). He has a devoted following among the genre fans, which comes as a no surprise to me, but his works never cut it as deep into the mainstream as have titles from some lesser authors. His Star Wars novels, namely "Traitor", "Shatterpoint" and "Revenge of the Sith", are considered among the best works that were written in this particular shared world, but again, author's renown usually rises and falls with the original work he writes...which brings us to THE ACTS OF CAINE. The Acts of Caine are, by this moment, an unfinished fantasy series that consist of the following novels: "Heroes Die" (1997), "Blade of Tyshalle" (2001) and "Caine Black Knife" (2005, Act of Atonement: Book One). Book Two of the Act of Atonement, "His Father's Fist", is forthcoming. There is a rumor of more books about Caine to be written and he has recently signed a deal to write a novelization of a popular "God of War" videogame (Kraitos, the character you play in the game, has Caine written on it forehead really), but I digress. Caine is Badass, period. Following Caine's story is an absolute joy ride, but what makes these books good aren't the inventively portrayed acts of distilled bone-crushing violence, but the fact that you care about Caine and what happens to him. STOVER is a smart writer and his characterization is quite on the spot. Where STOVER fails in "Heroes Die" is the pretty straightforward plot and the feeling that he could expand on the world-building (the ideas are good, but the author rarely deviates from the fast moving plot and Caine's story), which makes the book a bit "provincial". But all this doesn't lessen my opinion of the novel, since STOVER addresses all the shortcomings of book one in "Blade of Tyshalle" and disperses all the doubts I had that Acts of Caine won't meet the high expectations I had about them. Truly remarkable.

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I have no idea what I'll read next, but I'll let myself be surprised and I hope I'll be able to write a review or two in the near future and brake this stupor I've gotten myself into. Until the next good book is read...
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~ ThRiNiDiR ~