{"id":3249,"date":"2008-12-22T09:23:15","date_gmt":"2008-12-22T09:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/22\/recent-reading\/"},"modified":"2008-12-22T09:23:15","modified_gmt":"2008-12-22T09:23:15","slug":"recent-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/22\/recent-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was up late watching my Giants play the Carolina Panthers (they won in OT&#8211; now you see the importance of Brandon Jacobs), and today is a Baby Day, so I have no deep thoughts to blog. So here are some quick comments on recent reading:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><cite>The Hero of Ages<\/cite><\/strong> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brandonsanderson.com\/blog\/\">Brandon Sanderson<\/a>. This is the concluding volume of the Mistborn trilogy, and reading it confirms that he was the right choice to finish the Wheel of Time. This book takes a huge, complicated plot, and brings all the various pieces together for a satisfying conclusion. He also does a nice job of complicating the set-up from the original book&#8211; people who initially seemed Pure Evil get some motivation that makes sense, and some details that seemed inexplicable get explained. I look forward to seeing what he does with the Wheel of Time conclusion.<\/li>\n<li><strong><cite>Magic Bites<\/cite><\/strong> and <strong><cite>Magic Burns<\/cite><\/strong> by Ilona Andrews. The first two books of a quasi-PI series set in Atlanta after a resurgence of magic. These are told in first person, narrated by the female main character, and have a few too many ruminations about the ass-kickingness of the protagonist. I was briefly worried that this might be a subconscious bias against the main character being a woman (this is what I get for reading too many blogs), but on reflection, I have the exact same reaction to Simon Green&#8217;s Nightside books. In both cases, I found myself thinking &#8220;Yes, you&#8217;re a badass. Please move along&#8221; far too frequently. They&#8217;re diverting enough, but don&#8217;t bear too much thinking about.<\/li>\n<li><strong><cite>Implied Spaces<\/cite><\/strong> by Walter John Williams. A far-future SF novel about a world in which humanity has figured out how to make &#8220;pocket universes,&#8221; accessed through wormholes, which are used, among other things, for a LARP setting on a grand scale. The set-up is great, but the execution is kind of enh. There&#8217;s a lot of flat-out infodumping, the bad guy&#8217;s motivation doesn&#8217;t make much sense, and despite being set a couple thousand years in the future, all of the historical references are to events in the twentieth century or earlier.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that&#8217;s the trashy genre fiction I&#8217;ve been reading recently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was up late watching my Giants play the Carolina Panthers (they won in OT&#8211; now you see the importance of Brandon Jacobs), and today is a Baby Day, so I have no deep thoughts to blog. So here are some quick comments on recent reading: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. This is&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/22\/recent-reading\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Recent Reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,18,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booklog","category-books","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}