Posts from 2013 :: Page 9

The last few Dresden Files novels have been a bit hit-or-miss with me. That is a painful admission. For the longest time, Jim Butcher was one of my favorite authors, and the Dresden Files included some of my favorite novels. But then… yikes. To me, some of these last books have just not been good. CHANGES started to put things right again, and GHOST STORY had its moments. But then came COLD DAYS (Amazon)…

…and it was freaking amazing.
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A good while ago, I had my first run at buying sushi. I’d sampled it before with friends and such, but had never purchased any myself. Apart from initially mistaking the twirl of wasabi for some tasty guacamole (How? Looking at it from this side of things, I honestly have no idea) it was a great experience. When I was finished, I decided to try the other interesting-looking thing on the plate. The one that looked like marinated flower petals. I found that it was sweet and actually pretty good, but then arose the over-powering taste of… soap? Later, a good friend told me what I had actually ingested.

The connection? My impression of this book in two words: candied ginger.
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I love Westerns. LOVE them. I grew up reading Louis L’Amour and watching John Wayne movies. When I got older I found I loved the more mature stories in the genre. You know, Unforgiven and the like. Can you even begin to imagine how excited I was when Joe Abercrombie announced his next novel would have Western themes in it? And it would be called RED COUNTRY? If that doesn’t scream Western-styled violence, I don’t know what does.
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Romance? I know. I can hear the tumult of the masses lurching in defiance from here.  Since when does EBR review romance novels?  Answer:  since King started writing them while his publisher was marketing them as otherwise.  There was nothing even remotely romance-related to this book that I came across prior to getting into its pages.  Not on the outer cover, not inside the cover, not in any official summary of the book.  Not anywhere.  In fact, despite everything that made my deductive reasoning lean toward the contrary, I didn’t even fully accept that the book was a romance until the very end.  Not until the last sentence of the book.

And did that bother me?  Immensely so.
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This is easily the most difficult review I have had the opportunity write.  I start it off much the same I way wrote the review for the previous WoT book.  It’s difficult to write a review solely on A MEMORY OF LIGHT (Amazon), without considering all that has come before.  Opening the cover of this book, and reading those first words, all the way to finishing the last words and closing the book, has been been an inevitability hurtling (sometimes crawling) at me for 17 years or so.
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