The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

First: I didn’t finish this book. Now, for me, this is very unusual. Most of the time I give a book a fair chance, and want to judge it only after I read all of it. But not this one. These days, I have limited time to read, and so what I read better be entertaining for me. Or gets shelved again.

I liked Glokta. Well, a bit. You can say he was my favorite character. Had the most depth. Which was relative in this book. I always root for the quasi-bad-guy, so that was easy. I liked how Glokta thought about his work (a torturer/inquisitor), how he used to be a golden boy, but got maimed and crippled by torture, returned, and decided to deal out his share of truthfinding.

Logen Ninefingers started pretty good early in the story… and diminished into a strangely uninteresting ‘barbarian ruffian with a heart of goldish’ kind of person. He just faded out. No real action, no real fighting, certainly no doubt or angst or uncertainty. Wallpaper. Perhaps he’ll get fleshed out more in the 25% I didn’t read.

Bayaz was funny and had some potential, but screeeeeamed ‘stereotypical enigmatic fantasy wizard’ to me. Which I dislike.

All through the barbarian-crew sections I kept seeing [a:Terry Pratchett|1654|Terry Pratchett|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1235562205p2/1654.jpg]s Cohen the Barbarian and The Silver Horde. I love them, but these (I even already forgot their names) were bland. No life.

Maybe I’ll try this book later. Maybe soon. But I want to spend my precious time reading books that make me want to know what’s going to happen, books that keep me from putting them down. I want to care for the characters, or at least have a strong feeling about them. This book doesn’t do that.

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Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since my earliest youth I have weird vivid and recurring nightmares. One theme is being hunted for sport, having to find and kill my friends or be killed. Not long ago I finally dared to read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It fit in with my dreams, and that was disconcerting. But it was an elegantly written book that made you think. I liked it (the first one) I really did. It did give me some kind of ‘closure’ or ‘background’ to my dreams, even though that may sound strange. So when I found out that people where mentioning this book, Battle Royale, and that it looked way too much like The Hunger Games, I wanted to read it. And I liked it, a lot. But let’s discuss that.

The bad:
1. Translation
This books translation is awfull. I hope that there will be a re-issue after The Hunger Games movie has aired. A re-issue translated by someone who can actually translate the language, idiom and such, instead of merely skimming around the edges. At times I thought Google Translator could have done a better job! Clumsy, weird choice of wording etc. It felt very unnatural at times.
So, it may be that the translation is in fact accurate and the late-writer was a half-illiterate with a publisher that didn’t employ any editors or QA at all, or the translation is rubbish. Call me crazy, but I go for the latter.

2. Guts and G(l)ory
While this book is about the guts a winner of a cruel game like this one must have, it is mostly about the guts of the other players being splattered around the pages. It is one of the most gory books I’ve ever read. A spatter-movie in book-form. It serves a purpose and you have to view this in a cultural context (Japanese, directed at young adults) but I think it’s too much. My taste is much more refined than this, and weren’t it for the great storytelling, I wouldn’t have liked the book at all. Now this isn’t because I can’t stand a drop of blood or suspense in a book. Books by Bridget Wood are for instance much more cruel and devious. But they splatter less.
A good horror movie usually is good because of abstainance of excessive gore and blood, and clever use of psychological suspense.
That is what this book lacked. The author went for quantity instead of quality in the violence department.

3. The names
Oooookay, call me an ignorant western world biased reader, but I had a hard time at the very beginning with the names. I’ve read a lot of books based in Japan, but come on… Yuko, Yuka, Yuki and Yukie as seperate names, most of them in the same scenes?? I had a laughing fit when I started to read the lighthouse scene. When it should’ve been poignant. Surely even Japanese names can have more variation to them? I really understand why the studentnumbers are necessary ;-) It’s way easier to remember the numbers.

The Good
1. The Story
The author plunges you almost directly into the story, and this is a good thing. There are too many people in the story at the beginning, too many alike-sounding names. Too much pre-game-story-building would have turned me off the book.
So instead it plunges you right into the game.
The story is fast-paced and gives most of the players some background. This is nice. In The Hunger Games, everthing is so black-and-white. Katniss is good, the rest of the world outside District 12 is bad. Everyone of the contestants is out there to win against all costs.
Here in BR it’s different. Almost every contestant gets a bit of backstory, explaining the persons behavior. Even the cruellest become a little bit more human, understandable. They are not excuses from their deeds, but the readers knows now why they are/act as they do/are. It makes them human.

2. Thoughtprovoking
And that is what this story is all about. Humanity. How do humans react in a horrible situation like this: trapped on an island, having to kill oneother or be killed. They are friends, they are children. Not many of us would refuse to play the game. I know I would play, if it meant a tiny chance of seeing my family again. I would loose ;-) but I would try.
We humans are no angels. Extreme situations bring out the worst ánd best in us. Unfortunately, the worst is usually the strongest.

This book, and others like it, stay with you. They permeate your thought when shopping, going outside, among other people. They make you think. Not only about the game and the contestants, but also (and more importantly) about the government. Panem et circenses, bread and games, is with todays media saturation more than ever a hot topic to be aware of. What do we sacrifice for cheap entertainment? What are we willing to accept for entertainment? What are we willing to accept for our own simple wellbeing? What are we willing to ignore as long as we have our entertainment?

This book caused a lot of unrest in Japan after it’s release, more so after the movie came out. Japan is a troubled country, with an entire generation of youths spinning out of control. Having to resort to extreme measures like something like this game, may have been a real option, in a parallel universe. We see it in our ‘reality shows’, the lust for more and more extremes. The need to be more shocking, more real, more dramatic than the last show. The need of the media to control the population through fear. Almost everyhing on tv is about fear. It’s there to both entertain and control. This is even more true on Japanese tv than on American.

I’m afraid we aren’t far from seeing the first kill-shows on tv. And like the romans of yore, most of the people would only demand more blood. And gore. And guts. The stringy bits.

Hello copycat
Well, I have to confirm that Suzanne Collins really copied a lot of this book. When you’ve read both, it’s hard to miss the the similarities.
It is more than just the premise. She can spin a beautiful story about being inspired by watching tv and greek mythology. Alright, I could swallow that. I did, actually, untill I read this book.
Everything is here, with some variation. Everyting in the first two books relates to elements in this one book. Even the leg wound (view spoiler)[ and (suspicion of) sepsis, the bom, the return of a former winner, the forming of groups, the strung wire across a large span of land for escaping the game, and more (hide spoiler)]. It’s undeniable, and the fact that she tries to deny ever having read this book or seen the movie, is unbeleavable to me.
It isn’t an exact copy and from the half of the book it diverges a bit more. And, and this is important, The Hungergames has an entire different feel about it. It feels more polished, focusses on the future and media-influence instead of just government. It has more romance (however hollow that became in books 2 and 3) and is a real ‘hollywood’ novel. It also has a lot less violence and erm well splattered guts.
I like both of them, they complement each other. Reinforce one message. Which message that is, can differ form person to person.

Verdict:
I really liked this book. Will I re-read? I don’t know. Probably not. It doesn’t really have re-readability quality, like eg. Steven Eriksons books. But it is a book that will remain with you for the rest of your life.

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The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I raced through this book in very little time, considering that I listened to it while working. The fact that it took me only 2 days, says something about the quality.

First the good:
The audiobook is very well narrated by Michael Page. He really voiceacts and has a good pleasant voice/accent (to my ears). His voice reminded me of Johnny Depp. It is just perfect for this book. Publishers undervalue the importance of a good voice for an audiobook, often they are low quality and boring.

The plot is nice, but not surprising.
As I said in the in between updates: the world reminds me of the book Cyrion (compilation of stories by Tanith Lee). However, Cyrion made more of an impression on me as a “brilliant” thief/conman. The tone of Lies is light and tasty. Easy to digest. Intriguing enough to want to keep reading. It got me hooked from the first ‘page’ (audiobook again). That’s a big plus.

The character of Locke is mysterious and captivating, and we don’t get to know much about him in this first book. Not enough for my taste. There are large gaps in his history. He is charming, clever and a loyal friend. The dialog between the characters is snappy and full of catching one-liners.

The bad:
Now, I’m reading a lot of rave reviews on this book here on Good Reads. It certainly is a good book, but I don’t think it deserves the 4 and a bit star rating. All through the book you read how brilliant Locke is, but frankly, he isn’t. The “twists” are not that clever, I don’t even get a real ‘con-men’ feel of his crew. They are thieves, clever thieves, but nothing special. Telling readers over and over that something is very clever of even brilliant doesn’t make it so. I expected to be suprised, and I unfortunately wasn’t.
Maybe I’m spoiled in my taste. I’m an avid fan of the tv-series “Hustle”, “Sherlock” or “Coupling”. Those are tvseries, but for a plot it doesn’t differ much from a book. They all do twists, mysteries or cons a lot better/more clever than this book.
The humor in the book is nice, but not the ROFL kind. More ‘smile’ than ‘laugh’. The humor is refined, which suites me just fine.

For my books I look for a writer to live up to the Steven Erikson standard… and Scott Lynch just doesn’t. Not in cleverness/plot. Not in character development.

This is not to say I didn’t like the book, because i absolutely did. I will read the sequel and look forward to the forthcoming third book. It’s a nice light snack for reading inbetween my heavier books. And I love it for that.

(Pardon me for my english, it’s not my native language.)

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Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wholeheartedly agree with another reviewer here on GoodReads: Will someone pleaaaaase take the thesaurus away from mr. Donaldson!
I’m good at reading english, even if my active producing of this language is plain horrible. My vocabulary is very large and divers for a non-native speaker. But these books are just impossible to read without a dictionary. Well, let’s be grateful he keeps repeating the dictionary words and it is a long book :-)

I listened to this book while working. The audioquality is OK, what I didn’t like is that it was another narrator than for the other 8 books. With a totally different accent. Please don’t do that! Characters in a book get a lot of their personality from the narrators voiceacting and changing this is disconcerting.

The Good:
This is an intense book. Starts awfully slow (and I mean SLOW) but when it at last gets going, it is one big rollercoaster. Donaldson does it again: He knows how to get us interested in a story in which you sometime are really really really annoyed with the main character.
How many times I’d loved to grab Linden Avery in her collar and shake some sense in her.
He does that too in the earlier books. Tomas Convenant is a real ass in the first one. Detestable. And while he gets better in the next books, he annoys the hell out of me. But this makes the main characters so incredibly realistic/believable.
Just imagine: you are transported from this world to a fantasyworld, with strange beings and people who insist you are going to save them all. Would you just step up and say, right, let’s start cracking?
No. Well I wouldn’t. I would doubt and unbelieve ;-) and doubt some more. Myself and everybody else.
In fantasy, this aspect of human psychology is highly underlighted. Real people doubt. Most of them derrive their strenght from doubt. Or fail. We all just fail, all the time, on some level. Failure may lead to great things. Because of failure and doubt we strive to be better, but really… we strive to ‘not be in charge and be responsible for ending the world’.

Well, the world is ending, in this book. Absolutely. Just not in one big flash (what a short book it would have been). Linden is totally believable, annoying as she is, filled to the brim with crippling doubt and rage and, yes, despair. Whatever she’s done, everything leads her to more despair. She strives to be better and just can’t. This is very refreshing.
I love the character of Covenant, what he’s become. Reading his parts is a joy. I missed him :-)

The adage “Joy is in the eyes of the beholder’ is absolutely true. This book is rutheless on its characters. I’ve secretly and silently cursed the heavens blue after reading some parts of the book. I’ve cried and laughed. Stephen Donaldson hasn’t lost his touch of creating wonderfull enthralling worlds that take youre breath away. He introduces new vista’s he’s never visited before.
When the book gets going, I really loved it.

The Bad:
Now that’s the thing. When the book gets going. It doesn’t for at least one third of the (very large) book. Said third is sloooooooow. Boring boring boring and slow. Some parts of it are necessary for background on later developments, some are good for character building and Lindens slow spiral into despair and rage. But most of it is unnecessary wordiness. Not A Good Thing.
Later in the book there’s another “gosh let’s have endless slow discussions and do nothing’ part. This is what made me give this book a 3 star instead of 4. The actionparts really deserve a 4,5 star, but not the book as a whole.

BTW: I loved having to use a dictionary, whatever I said in the start of this review. It’s refreshing ;-) Donaldson has gone far from his crude use of language in his Gap and less so in his Mordant books.

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