not been good with book reviews

[rone]

palecur turned me onto James Alan Gardner.  Expendable is his first book, and it's OK; interesting ideas, characters that could be interesting but aren't too well developed, a bit too much angst for my taste.  Vigilant is much better; an old character reappears and is solidified, and the story is much more compelling and interesting.  Good SF.  Paul also lent me Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, which was grim and gritty but definitely entertaining.

Moving Pictures is possibly the worst Discworld book.  It was wretchedly boring; it seems to me that parodying the movie industry is very difficult without good insider knowledge (for example, Mamet's State and Main).  Reaper Man was much better, but not among the top in the series.

I'm currently reading C. S. Friedman's In Conquest Born.  I've decided that "space opera" is code for "fantasy, but with spaceships instead of horses and aliens instead of elves".  The book alternates between good bits and nearly melodramatic bits.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

We've got Moving Pictures somewhere here, but I never read it because Sam told me it was pretty bad.

Reaper Man was one of the first I ever read, and I liked it a lot; I think it was the first one I read in which Pratchett tried to inject genuine pathos into the story, and that came out of left field and surprised me. But the "mall entity" subplot was sort of a one-joke thing.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yep, i felt the same way about the mall thing.