The Ring of Solomon, by Jonathan Stroud

Okay, so, we've already established that I heart Bartimaeus. I find him delightful and wonderful and lovely and all sorts of other good adjectives. But it turns out that I like him a heck of a lot more when compared to lesser beings rather than when he's just being awesome all the time. It's kind of like how you can't wait for summer to come and be warm all the time, until summer gets there and you're sweltering and envisioning snowball fights.

So, yeah. This is, I guess, the fourth Bartimaeus book, though it's not directly related to the other three except for its protagonist. This one takes place in the time of Solomon, who is the boss of a magician who is the boss of Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is all collecting ice and stuff until such point as he meets a wannabe assassin called Asmira, whom he rescues and convinces to convince his boss to free him. Well, the boss "frees" him into a bottle where he's meant to stay trapped, but then Asmira summons him up all magician-like and then instead of letting him be free she coerces him to help her kill Solomon.

The plot is definitely excellent, with the intrigue and the subterfuge and the awesome. But while I enjoyed Bartimaeus and his trickery, I couldn't have cared less about Asmira, who is quite possibly dumber than Nathaniel and not nearly as entertaining when bad things happen to her, because who cares?

On the plus side, I'm still also in heart with the narrator, Simon Jones, and his soothing voice got me through several hours of stickers and data entry. So... yeah. It's a fun read, even if you haven't read the other books, but I wouldn't say it's as good as the trilogy proper. So go read that instead.

Recommendation: For fans of fantastical swashbuckling, and of Bartimaeus.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, What's in a Name Challenge)

Ptolemy's Gate, by Jonathan Stroud

Eep! Oh, hey again, Bartimaeus, back so soon? I suppose that's what happens when your story is so good...

Soooooo in this book, we've popped forward in time a bit again. Nathaniel is as insufferable as ever, Bartimaeus is sick of suffering him, and Kitty is a burgeoning magician. Wait, what? Yeah.

Story-wise... hold on, I'm going to have to look this up. Doo doo doo. Oh. Right. Okay, so there's a war on in America, and Nathaniel is the new minister in charge of making up stuff that gets people to sign on to fight in the war. That's a fun job. But of course, people aren't happy and there's civil unrest and whatnot. Also, more non-magic types are discovering a resistance to magic that lets them escape demons unharmed or see them even while they're disguised. Not terribly useful for the magicians. Also, Nathaniel is alerted to the suspicious actions of some lower-level government types and goes to investigate. This last bit is the important one, but I quite enjoyed seeing how it all played out so I won't say any more.

Now, if I had been reading this book in print, I have to say I might have given up on it. Most of it is wonderful and up to par with the rest of the series, for sure. But somewhere in the last third of the book, Stroud goes off on what seemed, listening to it, to be a long and tedious tangent about the "Other Place" where demons spend their time when not being enslaved. I was interested to know what it was like, sure, but after just a few sentences of description, I was like, okay, I get it, let's move on? Please? There's also a lot of metaphor and meaning imbued into this Other Place, and I would have at least put the book down and walked away after a few pages of that.

But luckily, I was listening to it at work, which meant I could just ignore the book for a bit and focus on the other tedium around me. :) Then, when the action kicked back in, I was ready to go! Of course, when the end happened, I may have become a bit less productive... I won't say it's an especially good ending, but it was very satisfying. Unlike a few other series I could name...

Recommendation: This series is totally worth your time. Go read it now.

Rating: 8/10 (though the series is a 9 on the whole)

The Sea of Trolls, by Nancy Farmer

Sooooooooooo. This book. I wanted to like it a lot — there's Norse mythology and bards and Beowulf and a titch of magic and adventures and Adventures and seafaring and it's all fairly exciting. I think I just read this at the wrong time.

See, the book I finished right before this was The Amulet of Samarkand, and part of my fangirl gushing over that book was the way that everything was so opposite of what I expected from a fantasy novel and so dark and intriguing. This book? Exactly what you'd expect of a fantasy novel, not dark, not really terribly intriguing. It's a sort of action book, primarily, and I just wasn't mentally prepared for that.

The story is of a kid called Jack, who becomes apprentice to a bard, which in this world is not just a teller of tales but also a bit of a magician, using the tale-telling business to tap into the... I don't remember... crap... Google says Yggdrasil (pronounced eeg-druh-sill), which is right, but there was another name for it. We see how much attention I paid while listening to this book. Sigh. Anyway, the stories have some magic to them that can have varying effects on the listeners. But that's not really the story. The story is that at some point, the bard to whom Jack is apprenticed is attacked and in the ensuing chaos Jack and his sister get kidnapped and taken aboard a slave trading vessel and eventually gets to a Viking village and then he slights the queen but good and then has to go on an epic quest to fix the slight and then spoiler alert he succeeds and goes home.

So there's a lot of stuff happening here, and it's all quite predictable because you can tell it's meant to be a riff on old Norse mythology and whatnot and according to the internet the print book mentions this explicitly at the end, and also mentions that what I felt was a really horrible sort of throw-away joke at the end was actually kind of the point of the book and wow that is neither in the audiobook nor implied by the text itself.

Taken as a sort of epic poem, the book is pretty good, though it drags in parts. I quite enjoyed the Norse setting that I haven't seen too much of elsewhere, and I enjoyed the humor that Farmer puts into her writing. I had some problems with the aforementioned joke, which almost ruined the book for me (I'm not sure if I would have felt different knowing about it in advance), and with the main female character whose role in the story was apparently to be kind of lame and then blossom into a lamer person. Ugh. There are apparently sequels to this book, even though the book itself can stand alone, but I won't be reading them.

Recommendation: For those interested in a bit of Norse mythology and lore and who like an Adventure.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud

Dude. Why had I never heard of this series until my former supervisor mentioned it to me? Where has Bartimaeus been all my life???

I know what the problem is, actually — this book came out in 2003, which is pretty well smack-dab in the middle of Harry Potter Mania, and therefore I couldn't possibly have heard of it, what with all of the HP fans living in my house at the time. (No joke, the ratio of people in my family to copies owned between us of one HP book from the series is less than one.)

The Amulet of Samarkand is also about magic, you see, except that it is not at all the same as the magic in the HP world. In this world, magicians are almost wholly a terrible people, swooping into big cities and subjugating those without magic powers and assuming a rather Slytherin air toward pretty much everything. But the irony here is that even though the magicians claim to have all of this magic power, what it really is is that they have the power to summon up demons (daemons? I don't know, I listened to this book) that have the actual magical ability, and then the magicians just enslave them for however long they like to do their bidding. That's a lovely thing, isn't it?

So, the conceit is dark and awful and also awesome (in the strict sense of the word, because seriously, wow), and then Stroud goes and upends my fantasy-reading sensibilities by making everything that happens quite un-fantastic. There is no deus ex here; if it looks like things are going to go badly for the protagonist, they will. If it looks like they're going to go reasonably well, they will. So many times while listening to this book I thought, "Oh, now the author will reveal some great and/or terrible secret that retcons everything," because that is my training, but no, all of the crazy twists and turns I invented were totally ignored, because Stroud is a better writer than I.

Oh, what's the story, you say? Well, basically Our Protagonist, Nathaniel, is a magician's apprentice who aspires to greater heights but effs the eff up when he decides to summon a hilarious demon called Bartimaeus to go steal something for him. The stealing goes awry, and then it turns out that what was stolen is WAY more important than imagined, and then of course the stealee is not pleased.

It's a pretty standard plot. But Stroud's writing and Bartimaeus's awesomeness and the consequences that could actually happen to an actual person are the most important bits. Oh, and the audiobook narrator is fantastic. Highly recommended.

Recommendation: Read this if you like fantasy but want a little more realism with your magic.

Rating: 10/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan

I've been in sort of a reading funk for the past week or so — I have a lot of books that I could read, but none of them are calling out to me. So I, of course, sent an appeal to the Twitterverse for something I should read. The Lightning Thief was the first response that piqued my interest, but of course with the movie out and all there was no chance I was going to get the book from the library any time soon. But then Fate smiled down upon me, and while I was at class that evening, I found a friend who had just finished his library copy of the book and even had it sitting in his car! I promptly borrowed the book and finished it in two sittings (a girl's gotta sleep!).

So that's a good story, but I'm afraid it might be better than the story behind The Lightning Thief. When I was in the middle of the book, Scott asked what the book was about, and I responded immediately with "It's like Harry Potter, but not as good." This could be my old-person self talking, because goodness knows that the story in A Wrinkle in Time is kind of lacking but I love it anyway, but I just really wasn't sold on the book.

The premise is that Percy Jackson, our hero, is actually a hero — like in the Greek myths and all that. We meet him before he knows this, when he's just an ADHD kid getting in trouble at school all the time because he makes weird things happen without trying. After some more backstory, a monster/car chase, and the death of Percy's mother, Percy ends up at a summer camp for "half-bloods" (illegitimate god-spawn) where no one wants to tell him a damn thing about anything.

Ahem. That part really bothered me. I mean, I get it that you don't want to give away the whole book right away by explaining everything, and that it's fun to do the exposition later, but seriously, every time Percy asks someone a question, they're all like, "What? You know the answer. Don't tell me you don't, that doesn't make sense," even the people who know that Percy doesn't know anything. Annoying.

Anyway, then stuff happens and Percy ends up on a quest to return a lightning bolt and... ugh. No, this part's bad, too. Well, quest: good. Returning lightning bolt: good. But! At the beginning of the quest, there's all this worry about how Percy can't even take a cell phone with him because the gods can track that (what?), but then he and his quest-mates meet up with, like, a millionty-twelve gods anyway. Also: they are gods. I think if they care about what Percy is doing they can find him.

Ahem. Aside from all of that, the concept of the book is decent, and if you want to learn more about the Greek myths, this book is the way to go. Lots of good information in here!

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2005, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
medieval bookworm
Age 30+ ... A Lifetime of Books
Maw Books Blog
Back to Books

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman (5 September — 7 September)

I was really super-interested in this book, which was billed to me as "What if Harry Potter were really real, but the students all had to go work in the non-magic world when they graduated?" A depressing thought indeed! And that's a pretty okay billing, but the book is more like "What if you spent your whole childhood hoping for magic, and then you got it, and then you realized that it was pretty boring, and then you resigned yourself to real life, but then the non-boring magic you'd hoped for happened, but then it was nothing like Narnia anyway?" Two depressing thoughts indeed!

Unfortunately, though I really liked the book as I was reading it, I was left with a sense of annoyance at the end. I think it was because of the disjointed mess that is the plot as described above. There are a lot of good ideas here, but they don't all fit together as well as they maybe could. I don't want to say that Grossman didn't do his best, because I honestly don't know how he could have told this particular story differently, but I think maybe he should have told a different one.

The beginning is excellent. Our hero Quentin gets to a Princeton interview to find the interviewer dead, but the paramedic on the scene has envelopes for him and his friend James. Only Quentin takes his, and, after opening it, he finds himself on the grounds of what he thinks is Fillory, Grossman's version of Narnia and the setting for Quentin's most favorite books ever. It's not, though, it's actually a school called Brakebills and Quentin is there for the entrance exam. After a really long exam and some argument among the professors, Quentin is admitted. He spends the next four years learning magic, making friends, and doing some stupid things that don't turn out nearly as well as he hopes.

But then Quentin and pals graduate, and are learning to deal with the real world, which I think is an entirely interesting premise to begin with, but Grossman throws in a free trip to Fillory and suddenly the book is a quest novel. And then it gets weird, and I don't want to say anything to spoil it because it gets interesting, but it's also disappointing in the end and I just don't know. And there are a whole bunch of guns in the first act that totally fail to go off in the third even though they could have been very very very interesting plot points, and that frustrates me immensely.

As I'm typing this I'm realizing that I liked the book even less than I thought I did! This is terrible. It's not that I hated it; I was riveted to the pages every chance I could get because I really liked the characters and the setting and the writing. But if I could, I'd go back in time and tell myself to skip it.

Rating: 5/10

See also:
Blogging for a Good Book

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Cursor's Fury, by Jim Butcher (17 February)

The third in the Codex Alera series.

Tavi gets into yet another scrape in this book! Surprised? With the First Lord still thinking about kicking the bucket maybe someday in the future, the high lords of Alera have been bickering about who will succeed his heirless-ness. The First Lord wants to just get the whole uprising thing out of the way, so he chooses one of the two front-runners to become his legal heir in an attempt to draw out the other, Kalare, and force him to fight early. It works far better than the First Lord intended, and soon there are a lot of dead people lying about.

Tavi is away from the fighting this time, serving as the First Lord's spy in the military even though there's no way Tavi can fight (no furies, remember!). Luckily, he's assigned to a prototype Legion made up of soldiers from all parts of Alera, a Legion that is not meant to see battle. Except... Kalare is not just fighting on his own. He's brought in a race called the Canim (dog-like creatures, naturally) to do some of the dirty work for him and it falls on the First Aleran to fight them, mostly under the unexpected command of Tavi.

Other stuff happens, too, of course, but I think the Canim battle is the most interesting part, especially with Tavi leading the way. The book also finally settles Tavi's lineage (which made me go, "Duh! Should have seen that one!") and shows you much of the First Lord's cunning, something that the characters are always just arguing about. Well done, all in all, except for this little tiny major thing that happens at the very end and makes me want to scream in frustration. Bah. We'll see where Butcher goes with that in the next book...

Rating: 7.5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson (9 February — 11 February)

This book was awesome. The end.

Okay, okay. But really! Awesome! I was drawn in from the first line of the first chapter (not counting the prologue, because that was whatever): "Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity."

Indeed. Raoden has been taken by the Shaod, which used to turn random people of Arelon into the supposed gods of Elantris, but which stopped doing that ten years previous and now turns its victims into perpetually decaying (but never dying) hulks of flesh. Raoden finds himself thrown into Elantris, now little more than a prison where gangs fight over the ritual food newcomers bring (everyone is very hungry, though they don't technically have to eat) and every injury, no matter how slight, lasts forever. Instead of becoming crazy like many Elantrians, however, Raoden chooses to make a better life for those inside ans see if he can't find out what caused the death of Elantris in the first place.

Meanwhile, Raoden's betrothed, Sarene, arrives in Arelon a week before her wedding, but only just in time for the prince's funeral. Oops. Sarene, whose political marriage is still valid due to a fancy clause in the contract, decides she's still going to do what she set out to do, which is keep Arelon and her home of Teod protected from those who would destroy them.

Also meanwhile, those who would destroy Arelon and Teod send out a priest called Hrathen to pave the way for the conquerors — those of the religion of Shu-Dereth. Hrathen is to convert the Arelenes within three months or the people will face death. His carefully laid plans start to unravel, though, with the influence of Sarene, Raoden, and a religious zealot called Dilaf who is out to destroy Elantris.

So there's a lot of story here. But it's all really well told and all of the pieces Sanderson gets you curious about tie together at the end quite spectacularly. There were a few things I found extraneous and rather deus ex, but I will forgive those because everything else was so, well, awesome.

Rating: 9.5/10
(Chunkster Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Academ's Fury, by Jim Butcher (26 January — 28 January)

This is the second novel of the Codex Alera series wherein elements can do awesome things if you know how to use them.

Tavi is now at the Academy, training to become a Cursor but still getting his butt kicked by bullies since he doesn't have the ability to furycraft. When the First Lord falls ill, it falls on Tavi to figure out a way to keep the warring factions from finding out and declaring a civil war.

Meanwhile, Tavi's aunt, Isana, is headed to the capital with news for the First Lord — creatures called the vord have begun to take over Calderon and are probably headed for the capital city as well. Her brother, now Count Bernard, and his men are fighting them off as best they can, but it might not be enough.

Certainly as good as the first book. Butcher adds in a few more puzzles that make me want to keep on reading the series and starts slowly answering the questions I had before. I'm very curious to find out just what's up with Tavi's heritage.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2005, Chunkster Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Furies of Calderon, by Jim Butcher (20 December — 27 December)

This is the first of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series, not about wizards for hire but about a fantasy world where people can control the elements through spirits called furies.

In this first book we meet Amara, a Cursor (still not clear exactly what that means) of the First Lord of the Aleran people. She is performing her Academy graduation exercise of infiltrating a rebel camp and finding out what they are planning when she is thwarted by an unexpected source — her mentor, who has been by her side in planning the investigation but also by the side of the rebels in leading Amara into a trap. She escapes to the Calderon Valley, where...

Tavi, a teenager who is well past the age for coming into furies but who does not have any. Tavi has let some of the sheep from his uncle Bernard's farm stay out all night, impressing a girl instead of herding them as he is meant to, but when he and Bernard go to find them in the morning, they find instead a Marat soldier, something not seen in the Calderon Valley for years. Bernard is nearly killed and Tavi must figure out how to survive a violent storm and return to the farm to warn everyone of the impending danger.

Along the way he meets up with Amara, she explains what's going on, and adventures are had, as they are in any good fantasy book.

I quite liked this book. The pacing was decent, the plot connected well, and the characters were interesting. There wasn't any of the "and then Tavi comes into his furies right when he needs them most!" that I was expecting, and little details fell into place really well. I especially appreciated the fact that the book was only 450 pages long, because those epic novels (see next post) can get a little tedious. Butcher cut out the fat but left in all the tasty protein (whoo metaphor!) I was looking for.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2004)

Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher (16 November)

Man, what a crappy weekend for reading. I mean, it was a good one in that I read about 700 pages and finished two books this weekend, but I was really disappointed by those books.

This one especially! Grave Peril is the third in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, and I very much enjoyed the first two books. Sadly, this one just did not work for me.

The plot here is that Harry Dresden, a wizard for hire, gets drawn into a case where ghosts are attacking people, someone is probably attacking the ghosts, and there's a demon that attacks people in their nightmares. Not a bad premise.

But! There are about eleventy bajillion red herrings in the book that don't all sort themselves out in the end, there's at least one continuity error, and in the end everything is solved by love or something stupid like that. Butcher is an engaging writer, for sure, and I definitely wanted to know what happened in the end, but then it was stupid and I was sad. It's sort of like when VeggieTales is on TV and you know that there's going to be a corny tie-in to God at the end of the episode, but those vegetables are just so darn cute that you keep watching it anyway.

I'll probably pick up the next book in the series in the hopes that it will get better, but if it doesn't I guess I'm done. Sigh.

Rating: 6/10

Superior Saturday, by Garth Nix (15 September — 20 September)

This is the sixth of seven books in the Keys to the Kingdom series, and as such it's hard to talk about this one in particular without spoiling the others. So. The general idea of the series is that a 12-year-old boy called Arthur Penhaligon is whisked out of his normal life and charged with saving the world.

To do this, he must go to a world called the House, built by one called the Architect, and free the separated parts of the Architect's Will. He must also defeat some upstart Trustees and take control of their Keys (hence the series title). Each Trustee rules over one of the days of the week on Earth, though that period of time is much longer in the House. As the Trustees mess with the house (essentially tearing it down in their need to fight with each other), things on Earth aren't going so well, either.

In this one, obviously, Arthur is out to rescue part six of the Will and wrest the Sixth Key from Superior Saturday. There is also a plague in Arthur's hometown, and Superior Saturday is readying to attack at the stroke of her midnight.

These books are meant for younger YA readers (I found this one in the children's section, sigh), so they are very short and very formulaic. I quite enjoy them for both of those reasons, and because they are entertaining.

Superior Saturday irks me a bit because, as the penultimate book in the series, it breaks from the mold and does not resolve the capturing-the-keys part of the story, leaving that for the next book, Lord Sunday. I've waited a while for this book to come out, but if I'd known it would have that ending, I'd have waited a while longer — there's not enough story in these large-type 250 pages to really satiate me.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher (30 July − 3 August)

This is the second book of the Dresden Files series. The supernatural culprit this time is werewolves, as you might have guessed by the title. A few people show up dead, ravaged by not-quite-wolves, and Harry is called in to figure things out. He is first lead to a gang called the Streetwolves, nerdy college types who have decided to become werewolves and who are led by a not-at-all-human werewolf called Tera with a proclivity for walking around naked. He also finds a businessman who is cursed to become a wolf at the full moon and who has irked the mob boss from the previous novel. Also, a misunderstanding leads his cop friend to arrest him as an accomplice, making finding out which wolf did it a little more complicated.

Rating: 8/10

Storm Front, by Jim Butcher (4 July − 6 July)

This is the first book in a series called The Dresden Files, about a wizard who investigates paranormal crimes. It was recommended to me by a librarian, and I quite enjoyed it.

The wizard is called Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, and he's got a lot of baggage − he has killed a few people in his time, had some uncomfortable interactions with black magic, and has a pretty crappy love life. In this book, he's out on two weird cases: in one, people are dying by having their hearts explode, and in the other, a guy who is sort of into magic disappears and his wife wants him found. The Chicago mob gets involved, and also demons, and a skull that contains a spirit who knows all about potions. It's a little bit all over the place, but it's totally fun. I've got the next book in the series lined up on my shelf.

Rating: 8/10