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book reading reviews

All You Need is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka

As is often the way with me, I got this book because of a podcast. Specifically Pop Culture Happy Hour were reviewing Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt movie this got made into, and one of the contributors – Glen Weldon I believe – said that it was worth reading this book as it was short and he implied it had a different ending.

So I bought the book, read a few chapters, set it aside and didn’t pick it up again until after I’d seen the movie – which was last week. I enjoyed the movie and so decided to read the book, and did.

A couple of decades or so into a global war with an invading alien race called the “Mimics”* Keiji Kiriya is a newish recruit in the United Defence Force (UDF). He’s a “jacket jockey” which is an infantry soldier in a powered exo-skeleton suit called, you guessed it, a jacket. We see him go through his day from waking up, through training, preparing for battle, fighting and subsequently dying in what seems to be a futile attempt to hold the Mimics back on the coastline of Japan. Did I say dying? Did I just give away a spoiler? Not really, as this is the premise of the book and film – we discover very early on that something is different about Kiriya, after that first death on the battle field he keeps going back, re-living the day over and over. So it’s a kind of Groundhog Day with aliens and war. We follow Kiriya as he tries to work out what’s going on, how to get out of the time loop, how to defeat the Mimics and what all this has to do with the near-mythic UDF soldier who crosses his path, Rita Vrataski, the so-called “Full Metal Bitch”.

OK. So first off I can say that both the movie and the book are fun and are different enough that if you’ve experienced only one (or neither) then it’s definitely checking out the other (or both). That said this is not a review of the movie, and I won’t be listing the differences between the two.

All You Need is Kill
 is a fun, pacy, quick read. It has a certain tone to the language which is almost noirish in its grimy, toughness that I liked. It suited the story. It’s not deep but we skid along on the surface so quickly that that doesn’t matter. The time loop business was not over-used – that is to say, it didn’t become overly convoluted in a way that made my brain hurt (yes Primer I’m looking at you!) but served the purpose of the story. It’s particularly effective that what we end up with is a battle-hardened, war-weary veteran in the body of what the rest of the world sees as a raw recruit.

Like a lot of SciFi at this level the logic of it all doesn’t bear too close a scrutiny but that’s not what you’re interested in. And if you are this is probably not the book for you. If you want a fun little romp with aliens and fighting and so on then it may be.

I’d have like to have seen a slightly more nuanced view of women in this book, which you could argue is misogynistic. I think it’s mostly not but in a teenage boy’s naive, “it can’t be sexist if the women are kick-ass fighters too” kinda way. Then again nuance of any sort isn’t really that much in evidence here.

7/10 – all you need is a better title.

(*not really sure what they’re mimicking)

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Lot Beta – Tom Merritt

I came across this book because Tom Merritt is one of the presenters of the Sword and Laser podcast to which I subscribe. More specifically I also follow the S&L group on Goodreads and it was there he posted a link to a book trailer video. I followed the link, was curious… and here we are.

The story of Lot Beta is a space opera set in a part of the universe controlled by a vast mining corporation. The hierarchy of the corporation is interesting in that it is, for the most part, hereditary, especially the senior positions. This is supposed to be because of the way the colonization process took place with people leaving behind their home planets on generation ships. I think there’s another reason as well but maybe I’ll come back to that.

Anyway a senior position opens up on “Sat A” by the death of the previous head of this unit*. Normally of course he would be succeeded by his child but this particular COO did not have one. Or did he?

And so begins a tale of a boy with a hidden past who is suddenly thrust into a position of power by a birth right he didn’t even know he had.

He says in the front matter that this was a NaNoWriMo book. I think that this shows, and not necessarily in a bad way. It’s short and has a big central idea but a lot of the avenues it could have taken aren’t expanded on, especially toward the end. Whether that was because the author was “pulling to the finish line” or simply he didn’t want to major on those parts of the book I’m not sure. What I do know is that a lot of the first half of the book is full of corporate politics and bureaucratic wrangling and power plays. Which may appeal to some but I found I was over it relatively quickly. It was well done I think just not really my thing. How our main character uses the vagaries of the supply trade agreements to assert himself over central control was cleverly worked out but for me, not as interesting as some of the later passages about space battles, mining settlement trouble-shooting and dealing with smuggling issues. In other words the action-heavy versus the talky-heavy sections of the plot were not evenly distributed.

At this point it’s probably appropriate to point out something important about the structure of the book. Which is that it’s based on a well-known myth but set in space. The author himself has mentioned this elsewhere on Goodreads but not in the book description so I feel I’d be spoiling to point out exactly which myth it is. I can see how this idea would be the sort of thing one might come up with for NaNoWriMo. It gives you a ready made plot outline to work to. It did make me think at times though, once I realised just how closely to the source he was sticking, whether he would have done certain things if he hadn’t been following this pattern. A couple of the analogues he found were quite clever {spoiler} but then there were sections I think don’t make sense at all unless you realise what it’s based on {spoiler}

It was fairly enjoyable overall. Short and readable.

6/10 – The legend of … in space!

Oh nearly forgot. The title alludes to something in the book which is a set up for a truly awful pun. {spoiler}

*I was never 100% sure whether a “sat” was an artificial satellite like a space station or a natural one like an asteroid. Plus I think there were planets but whether they had a different designation and how they fit into the corporate structure was unclear, or I simply missed it.
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A Study in Scarlet – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


OK so this one I read only a month ago…

And it was for a book club and it was relatively short so I thought why not.

Do I need to give much background or a synopsis? This is the first Sherlock Holmes story. I’d never read any before. Of course I’ve seen lots of different adaptations – or bits of ones. I’ve certainly seen the modern version with Cumberbatch and Freeman, the first episode of which was based on this story and re-titled “A Study in Pink”

In fact I might have enjoyed this more if I hadn’t seen that because they were so faithful to the original that I pretty much knew who the murderer was and how he did it all along.

Having said that this book has an odd structure worthy of note. About the first half is the introduction of Holmes to Watson and then the story of the investigation of the murder, up to and including the capture of the guilty party. The story then switches suddenly to several years earlier in America and we get a sort of western with some Mormons and small town politics and power struggles. This eventually gives us the back story and motive for the killings. I quite enjoyed this section even if the portrayal of the Mormon culture was clearly a harsh caricature.

It’s odd for a modern reader because in any current crime story – especially on film or TV I suppose – the unveiling of the killer, the reasons for the crime and how the detective solved it would all appear in quick succession. Here we get the first, the ‘American interlude’ for half a book and then the other two. That felt odd.

Well it was an OK read and I can say now I’ve read Sherlock Holmes. Not sure I feel the need to read any more though.

6/10 – reasonably good, especially in the second half.

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The Never List – Koethi Zan

I’ve been a bad boy – I read this book almost two months (TWO MONTHS!) ago and I’m only now writing it up. So sorry. Here we go:

I picked this book because it’s written by the wife of one of the presenters of one of my favourite podcasts – The Slate Culture Gabfest. She was on the show to talk about the book and it sounded intriguing. It was the kind of book I might read anyway and it was just about to come out so I thought I’d give it a go.

The Never List is the story of a woman who was abducted and kept in a cellar for years. However the story begins a decade after she was freed and her kidnapper was imprisoned. Now he’s up for parole and she wants to make sure he doesn’t get it. He’s also been writing to each of his victims and she believes this could be more than the apparent remorse it purports to be. This sparks the beginning of an investigation and an uncovering of a much bigger intrigue. It seems her abductor may have had connections to a crazy cult and may even be trying to direct events on the outside. Determined to stop him she sets off to find out more.

So this book functions on at least two timelines. We have the story of the investigation in the present but then we’re given flashbacks to what happened years before. So what is happening now and what had happened are both suspense parts of the novel.

I did enjoy this book. It was well written for the most part. I think the early sections especially work really well. Later on the plot takes over and it becomes a little implausible. Zan spends time telling us about how the hero became a virtual recluse, working from home and rarely venturing out, only opening her door to a very select few. She has to overcome this fear of the outside world in order to go on her investigative journey and whilst initially we see her struggling with this psychologically, it gets a little forgotten. She’s soon taking planes, renting cars, sleeping in hotels and generally running around the country as if that’s the most natural and easy thing in the world for her. Maybe not quite but it felt like her agoraphobic tendencies had been a bit forgotten.

The other thing that stood out to me was that there’s almost no description of what he did to his victims. It seems to have been physical torture rather than sexual abuse, although they are kept naked, but I’m not sure whether we’re meant to infer a combination of both. When I read Blacklands I said how I like the fact that the author respected the victims enough not to glamourize the perpetrator. I guess Zan may be doing the same her but given the genre it felt a little coy.

Finally there were some law enforcement issues that stretched credulity – an FBI officer who handed over sensitive information virtually on request.

So I guess I thought I was going to get a harrowing psychological examination of the impact of a crime, and it started out that way, but it eventually turned into more of a what-will-happen-and-how-will-they-catch-him thriller. A fairly decent one, plausibility issues aside, but a different book than what I was expecting. What I was expecting was the ending which I guessed so that was a shame.

7/10 – a pretty decent thriller.

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The World of Ptavvs – Larry Niven

This book is part of a new mini project I’m doing over the next month or so which concerns re-reading. I’ll cover this in more detail in another post shortly but for now all you need to know is that I chose this book at random from a shortlist.

The World of Ptavvs is one of Larry Niven’s early books in the ‘Known Space’ universe. It opens with an alien, Kzanol, escaping from his ship which is about to crash by getting into a stasis suit which will keep him safe, with no time passing, until he can be rescued. Unfortunately that takes a rather long time, 2 billion years in fact. He is eventually dug up on Earth and is named the “sea statue” and becomes a cultural artifact. However when he is accidentally let out of the suit he wreaks havoc trying to find his other stasis suit in which he left a valuable tool. Kzanol is part of a race that enslaved other races using mind control and he uses that talent to try to recover the other suit.

I enjoyed this book. It’s short and a quick read and although, like all early Niven it’s not great on character, it has a lot of ideas. I’ve left out quite a lot in the description above. There’s a chase through the solar system, inter-system politics and possible war, a man who becomes convinced he is Kzanol and Pluto being set on fire. It’s also very interesting how primitive some of the future tech is. They have spaceships with fusion drives but the on-board entertainment is a video game which involves connecting lines between grids of dots on a screen.

In a reflection perhaps of when it was written (1966) the politics surrounding who gets to have and control what’s in the second suit take on a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction aspect.

As for the re-read aspect I’m not going to comment on that now but I made various notes.

7/10 – big ideas and a fun romp through space, if a little dated.

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The Wee Free Men – Terry Pratchett

So… Discworld #30 (there are currently 39) so hurray for progress! Maybe I’ll catch up by the end of the year.

Wee Free Men concerns a young girl, Tiffany Aching, who lives in a sheep-farming part of the Disc known as The Chalk. He grandmother was a wise if somewhat awkward old woman who knew a lot about sheep. Tiffany stumbles upon evidence that another world is about to collide with the Disc. It’s not going to be pretty and someone needs to do something. Tiffany decides that someone will be her.

Along the way she’s aided by the Nac Mac Feegle, who are the Wee Free Men of the title. We first met these in Carpe Jugulum and they are, I suppose, entertaining though I could never quite get over the obvious stereotype they draw from.

Wee Free Men is another Discworld YA book and again I had the feeling it wasn’t aimed at me. Doubly so because the protagonist is a young girl and there’s a lot in there about not being taken seriously because you’re a) a girl, b) smart/bookish and c) not interested in being a girly girl. All of which is fair enough and a great thing for its target audience, it’s just not who I am, obviously.

That said I did like Tiffany. I also liked her grandmother, who was similar to but identical with Granny Weatherwax (who makes a brief cameo). It’s no huge spoiler to say that a large part of the book took place in a world where dreams and reality inter-mingle and I felt like I’ve seen that done a lot better, including by Mr Pratchett, before. I did however like the the scene where an over-indulgent queen gives a small child every kind of sweet he could ever want, and he freaks out because as soon as he chooses one he’s automatically not choosing any of the others – which is kind of how I feel about choosing the next book to read 😉

7/10 – a Discworld book about witches – therefore fun.

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Bad Things – Michael Marshall

Bad Things is the book I alluded to in my review of We Are Here – it’s the book where we first meet the character of John Henderson. So having finished We Are Here and having enjoyed it and that character in particular I thought I’d go straight back and read this. One of the nice things about the way I’m reading at the moment is that I can do this and it’ll not make too much of an impact on other plans because I’m getting through books at a reasonable rate. Also the detours are fun.

Bad Things begins with a very bad thing indeed. John’s infant son, Scott, is out playing by the lake that their home looks out over. He’s on the jetty leading out onto the water when John watches him simply collapse and fall into the lake. When John gets to him the boy is dead, but not from the fall or by drowning, he somehow just died.

It’s four years later and John is now a barman in a restaurant halfway across the country. He’s living alone, his marriage not surviving the trauma of Scott’s loss. However one day he receives an email which just says, “I know what happened.” John is drawn back to Black Ridge, where he once lived, and into a mystery concerning the town itself and what really happened on that jetty.

I enjoyed this book. Not perhaps quite as much We Are Here and that’s possibly because this is darker. It reminded me very much of Stephen King with its isolated semi-rural setting and mysterious dark powers that seem to influence ordinary people’s lives. It’s also possibly because the John Henderson of this story is more troubled, less calm and frankly more of a badass, than the one in the later book. That’s possibly because his son’s death is obviously such a huge part of his experience and it’s through the events of this book that he reaches some sort of peace about it.

The story is quite involved and I had a little difficulty keeping track of all the characters. There was a storyline involving people from the town where he was working at the restaurant, and whilst it connected up with everything else in the end, I could have happily lived without it.

The book has that sense of brooding menace of something nasty lurking in the dark that makes it a compelling, if unsettling read.

7/10 – not one for the squeamish or timid, but definitely a good read.

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We Are Here – Michael Marshall

I chose this book because well it was just coming out and I thought it would be nice to review something current for a change. Also it appeared to be a stand-alone and not part of a series like the Straw Men trilogy so it wouldn’t matter that I hadn’t read all his back catalog yet. That turned out to be not quite true (see below).

This is a hard book to review because it’d be so easy to spoil it and I don’t want to do that. I also don’t want to hide most of my review behind spoiler tags so…

We Are Here mostly centres around two couples. David and Dawn are a writer and his teacher wife who go into New York for the lunch that seals his first book deal. It’s a big day for them but on the way home David accidentally bumps into someone in the street. Someone who then follows him to the station and asks him to “Remember me”.

The other couple are John and Kristina. A waiter and bar-maid at an Italian restaurant who’ve been together about 6 months and are at the stage where they are about to either get more committed or possibly split up. Kristina’s new friend from her book club has seemingly acquired a stalker and asks John and Kris for help.

Both these stories concern encounters with people who live in a kind of parallel world. They are there in the background of our lives but often go unseen or unnoticed. But something is changing. They are coming out of the shadows…

I could talk more – vaguely and circuitously so as not to spoil – about the plot but I won’t. Let me talk instead about tone and themes. This is a book about regret, about loss of friendship and the way we forget people. It’s also about what it means to really live in a place and be part of someone’s life. In that sense it deals with some universal and weighty themes and does so well I think.

However it’s not a ponderous literary novel. It’s a thriller. It reminded me of Stephen King in places, which is a compliment. I enjoyed several of the characters. The author writes a middle-aged lady with nine cats who lives in a trailer – and he manages to make me really like her 🙂

It’s not perfect. I think it could have been shorter. Particularly in the middle section where dramatic irony is stretched to the breaking point. Also, I was going to complain that there was an un-fired Chekov’s Gun in the form of very significant events from one character’s past which are mentioned more or less in passing but never really dealt with. However it turns out that this character, and these events, are from a previous book. Also they are mentioned because they affect who this person sees and interprets events in this story, so the gun is fired – it just has a quieter bang than you might think.

Anyway it all comes together in the final part of the book and we get a dramatic action-y ending. It left me feeling I’d enjoyed the ride.

8/10 – a thriller with more than a touch of the mysterious about it.

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So Much Blood – Simon Brett

This is the second Charles Paris story. I bought this together with the first a while back. As I said at the time I was drawn to these by the undeniable charisma of Bill Nighy in the radio adaptations.

It’s summer 1974 and Paris has taken his one-man show to Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a last minute replacement for part of an University Drama Society’s line-up. During rehearsal of one of the other plays an actor is fatally stabbed by what should have been a fake knife in a horrible accident. Or was it an accident.

I’m not sure what to say about this that I didn’t say about the last book. It definitely works as a ‘cozy’ mystery and Paris is a likeable protagonist/investigator. I felt at times that some of the other characters were only fleshed out enough to give them potential motives or a place in the plot. I also felt that the switch between Charles the actor and Charles the investigator was a bit blunt at times and you would have thought that more of his colleagues and associates would have said, “hang on why are you questioning me?” I guess that’s just a convention of the genre that once a character falls into that role we accept that they are able to quiz the other players to some extent. So an effective, if mechanical mystery structure.

The story certainly has enough twists to keep you guessing and enough of Charles, his wit and his love-life to amuse but I guess I did find it a little lacking. It is short though. At under 58,000 words even I read it in a day (~4 hours in fact). It did feel a little dated, the sexual politics more than anything, but not so much that I couldn’t relate.

With so much to read I don’t know if I’ll read any more Paris.

7/10 – a actor’s life that seems to be all about death.

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Storm Front – Jim Butcher

Being a Buffy fan I’ve long been at least vaguely aware of the name of Harry Dresden. When the Dresden Files TV show was announced I think James Marsters name was mooted to pay him – probably mainly by Buffy fans to be fair though. For some reason I was never that keen to catch up on this franchise. Maybe for a time I wasn’t really into reading/watching supernatural stuff. I did read a lot of straight crime fiction for a while there. Anyway the idea came back around again, partly through seeing Jim Butcher on Geek and Sundry’s StoryBoard discussion stream. On an impulse the other day I started to read the first page using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature and well… here we are.

Storm Front is the first of the Harry Dresden novels. Dresden is a modern day wizard in Chicago. He’s a wizard for hire and he essentially works as a P.I. One day he’s approached by a woman who wants him to investigate the disappearance of her husband. At the same time he’s helping the police with an investigation into a particularly brutal and baffling murder. Meanwhile his own actions are being monitored by the White Council, which is the (good) wizards ruling body and is not exactly Dresden’s biggest fan. With all this going on and possibly the emergence of a mysterious new, very powerful magic practitioner it’s all starting to look very busy, and dangerous for Harry.

I have to admit that despite the renewed interest I started off sceptical as to whether I would like this book. At first my preconceptions seemed to be borne out. Some of the supernatural jargon felt twee (‘Nevernever’ for the magical realm) and it felt like it was trying too hard to invoke the twin genres of hard-boiled detective noir and supernatural fantasy (I’m not sure whether the term Urban Fantasy had been coined yet when this book came out in 2000). But I have to admit the book won me over.

There were two reasons for that. First the story builds very well. It’s not slow paced to begin with but it definitely ramps up a few notches by the end. So it had the page-turning plot thing covered.

The second reason was Dresden himself. The character is likeable. He seems like the hard-bitten P.I. cliche on the surface (Marlowe as a Mage?) but the internal monologue you get helps you see past the wisecracks to someone much more complicated, with vulnerabilities and his own fears and issues, and a past. He also gets the crap kicked out of him in various magical and mundane ways and that tends to get you on a character’s side. Not just that you feel for him but that when he’s been beaten down and is apparently out of options he tends to react with a defiant resolution to fight back.

So yes I enjoyed this book and yes I will be reading more of his adventures.

8/10 – a tale of a supernatural P.I. (but not the one about the Vampire with a soul 😉 )