Reboot delayed

As a bit of a film fan I had decided to do a reboot.  It's the 'in' thing right now, but another film trait I've picked up is the delays.  But I'm going to try and roll it out as soon as I can and resurrect this iteration of the blog.

Coming up are reviews for Moby Dick by Herman Melville, because New Years are a time to renew resolutions people have been chasing, and Watching the English by Kate Fox because I intend to infuse some non-fiction and have an interest in cultural behaviours.

So hopefully I'll be back on the book circuit for 2011!

Currently being repurposed

Apologise to the readers of Obsidian Razor for the delay between posts, I am currently learning a few web magic tricks and making a plan for a re-launch which will be more in line with my original idea for the blog, which will still be a review site but will feature more of the other stuff I am interested in.  I want to make sure I can keep content flowing even with a solo contributor.  I'll still be posting reviews and then re-designing the blog (I hope)!  I have learned a lot and would like to incorporate that into my next design so I have not stopped, but am looking at making output more consistent and re-evaluating the in-house style because I feel I can get better in the reviewing process.

Thank you for reading my ramblings!

David

Book Review: The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell

Title: The Reapers are the Angels

Author: Alden Bell

Publisher: Tor

Date Published: 3 September 2010 (UK) | 3 August 2010 (US)
ARC: 304 Pages

8/10

Temple, who estimates her age at around 16, has never known the world before.  Before the zombies spread and the world went dark.  She is born into that world and still she sees the beauty despite the utter mess of it all.  Or maybe she sees the beauty because of it.  As her latest home is discovered, Temple goes back into the world where she runs into some hunters who have a sanctuary.  One of them, Abraham, has lusty eyes on her and that doesn’t end well leading to his brother, Moses Todd, to hunt her across America while she tries to return a helpless Maury to his home.

I had the vaguest of ideas what this story was about when I won it.  I knew it was about a post-apocalyptic world and perhaps what I described above.  What I didn’t expect was the omission of speech marks usually seen in a Will Christopher Baer or Cormac McCarthy novel, perhaps because of this I became more engaged because they are some of my favourite writers, but too, the use of language evokes a western type of environment.  It felt appropriate for what the world became: dissolute, dangerous, and calls to mind a frontier society.  Never mind that there is no reasoning for everyone to talk like that after a relatively short time, it just fits.  For a novel that will be considered genre, it has a lot of literary merit and experimentation with form and language stitched in amongst some messy violence.

Book Review: The Reconstructionist by Nick Arvin

Title: The Reconstructionist
Author: Nick Arvin
Publisher: Hutchinson (Random House)

Published: 3 June 2010

ARC: 260 pages

7/10

Ellis Barstow’s life is defined by accidents.  Boggs, his boss, believes that accidents are inevitable meaning nothing is an accident.  What brought them together could be proof.  When Ellis was a teenager his half-brother Christopher died in a car accident.  After college, Ellis drifted from jobs until he sees Christopher’s girlfriend at the time of the accident, Heather.  She is married to Boggs and through her he got a job as a Reconstructionist.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Reconstructionist, sure, I have some lingering interest in forensic type things that flares like a rash once in a while.  I enjoyed Mop Men by Alan Emmins so inevitably I had that type of chemistry in mind mind.  It works because of Boggs’s love of literature in the form audiobooks, and his job, and Ellis’s apprentice status, which made it feel like a strange choice to skip a few years.  Specifically the first five where Ellis would get to know Boggs, because of part of the plot when Ellis is by himself and thinking about other characters.  I felt privy to these thoughts, but didn’t feel like I shared these feelings about the people that Ellis was missing.  But I have a hard time deciding if this is preference because the plot is fine without knowledge of those years and what is needed is dropped into Ellis’s memory.

Book Review: Horns by Joe Hill

Title: Horns

Author: Joe Hill
Publisher: Gollancz (16^th March 2010)

Hardcover: 448 pages

8/10

Ignatius Perrish is the sun of a famous musician, the brother of a celebrity talk-show host, and had the love of Merrin Williams.  He was blessed, and then he lost her.  Merrin was raped and murdered and Ig was left as the only suspect because of a very public argument.  He was never tried for the crime, but everyone thinks he did it.  A year later he got drunk, did some bad thing, and then he woke up with horns at his temples and the ability to pry the most terrible secrets out of people.  With this he decides to find out the truth.

Horns didn’t unfold in the way I expected, which made getting to know the characters an interesting process, it didn’t unfold like a thriller and parts of it are about growing up and childhood friends with only the slightest hints to the supernatural nature Ig would later acquire.  The start of the story is the morning after Ig discovers his horns, so the first impressions you get from many of the characters is also the most terrible.  This lends a pregnant texture to dialogue and character interactions that occur earlier in chronology.  Although I sometimes grew impatient with the childhood or alternative viewpoints presented, I think it was more to do with the mood I was in when I chose to read, because they lend the story some important emotional textures and revelations and made the story about more than Ig’s quest and about the world he inhabits.  A world where he seems to be the only strange thing although you know this isn’t true, not just because Jude from Heart-Shaped Box, Hill’s first novel is mentioned (and amusingly dismissed as a mediocre musician).

Book Review: Who Is Mr Satoshi? by Jonathan Lee

Title: Who Is Mr Satoshi?
Author: Jonathan Lee
Publisher: William Heinmann LTD (1 July 2010)

ARC: 298 Pages

7/10

Rob ‘Foss’ Fossick had been haunted by the death of his wife, Chloe, for years when his mother died.  Shortly before her death she showed him a shoebox with a package she had meant to deliver to a Mr Satoshi.  So he faces his fear of crowds and his anxiety and travels to Japan in search of Satoshi to deliver the package and to unravel the mysteries of his mother’s past.

Lately I've been reading a lot of stories based in Japan (both fictional and non-fictional), so I came at this story in a different way.  I had more of a grasp of the food, but at the same time, I’m not sure I got a sense of location, so Foss never really felt in an odd place, maybe due to his informal tour guide Chiyoko, which is appropriate because I feel this story is more about the characters.

Foss tells the story in first person; he is a mass of nerves due to the accident in which his wife dies, and now he keeps himself in a chemical fog with pills.  I felt this was handled well as he isn't supposed to be an expert on them and he has no reason to be, but more could have been made of this trait or the effects which seems to slide away without leaving much of a mark when he runs out as it coincides with his emotional development.  The story is his arc as he re-discovers people, the wider-world, love, and the nature of longing by distancing himself and exploring things through proxies.

The New Arrivals #3

Numero 3 is a mixed bag including a compact disc, and a PS3 game, books I bought and books for review.  Phew, I am going to be busy with upcoming reviews for The Reconstructionist and Who is Mr Satoshi? coming up in a few days.  (Transformers is a little repetitive, but I'm taking my time with the single-player campaigns and multi-player has fun incentives to level up classes).

Top Row: Lisse - Catching a Tiger (Sony Music), Maneater, Prey - Thomas Emson (Snow Books), Transformers: War for Cybertron (High Noon).  Bottom Row: Sweetheart - Chelsea Cain (Pan), The White Queen, The Red Queen - Philippa Gregory (Simon & Schuster), The Passage - Justin Cronin (Orion Books)

With Thomas Emson, I decided to take a chance on buying the first and second books in a series without reading previous works, because I've been a life-long fan of werewolves. Don't let me down Emson!

Years ago I won a copy of Heartsick by Chelsea Cain. I liked it but wasn't rushing to keep track. Recently, I won Evil at Heart and so I bought Sweet Heart. Going to read them all from the start.

The Passage, I pre-ordered a while ago - it's a brick and about vampires.

And finally, thanks to Ally and marketing from Simon & Schuster for The White Queen and The Red Queen.

|Thomas Emson Website|Transformers Game|Philippa Gregory Website|
|Chelsea Cain Website|