An immortal wizard walks into the World Series of Poker... : "The Incrementalists" by Steven Brust and Skyler White

It sounds like the setup to a bad joke. A guy sits alone in a bar in Vegas, waiting for his next poker game to start. He flirts with the waitress, has a drink, thinks about the fact that his ex-girlfriend recently committed suicide; nothing really to set him apart from the sludge of humanity around him. But underneath his baseball cap sits a mind that's been reincarnated through dozens of bodies over the course of many centuries-- a mind that remembers every era of history and every time he used his magic to change things for the better. And the best part is, our wizard isn't alone. He's got 200 friends just like him-- a secret society who's been magically nudging people toward working for the greater good, operating between the lines since the dawn of time. This is the premise of Steven Brust and Skyler White's The Incrementalists-- the foundation for a story that is simultaneously fantastical and everyday, mixing magic both wondrous and mundane. 

Punch-Drunk and in a Funk: 'Crux' by Ramez Naam

The year is 2040, and the latest drug to hit the streets is Nexus, a bionic enhancement that allows human brains to network like computers. Kade, Rangan, Ilya and Watson are the geniuses behind the newest upgrade, and they're living like kings-- until a secret branch of the government sends an agent to shut them down. You can read all about that in Nexus, the first book in Ramez Naam's cyberpunk trilogy; this review deals with the sequel, Crux, which finds two of our hacker friends dead, one imprisoned, the other on the run for his life, and the government agent who started it all working against her former employer just as hard as the hackers she once tried to subdue. Throw in a few guys with ties to shady government agencies, some terrorists, some freedom fighters, and some people who are some or all of those things at once, and you've got a recipe for a whirlwind of a book that, unfortunately, came out sort of half-baked.

Heaving over the Hump in Hump Day

So there will be some Cool Shit I Found Online here, but first I have to say something. 

#gpoy

Right now I'm trying to shove lunch in my face one-handed while answering a work email and approximately a billion personal emails, calling my hairdresser back to confirm my haircut for Saturday, and writing this post. You guys, my life has gone from zero to sixty in the best way possible. I started a new job as a project assistant at a local university, and I. Fucking. Love. It. It's the perfect job for someone who's anal retentive with a little bit of ADD-- my job is basically to come in, let my boss dump a to-do list on my head, and then put on Spotify and take care of business. Armed with FileMaker, Photoshop, and (I shit you not) an entire room full of office supplies, I am helping an entire department get ready for their big event of the year (a conference that happens the week before my birthday) and I am kicking ass at it. Not to toot my own horn-- well, actually, I heard my boss tell her supervisor that I'm "awesome, really really awesome" today, so I think horn-tooting is well within my rights. XD

Anyway, the upshot of this is that the past few weeks have been a major whirlwind, with insanely busy work weeks bracketed by weekends full of actually Doing Stuff-- going to visit my grandmother, going to Ikea to buy a wardrobe and dresser, putting the wardrobe together and realizing when it was 80% done that we had put the legs on wrong and had to back up to being 30% done and fix it, that kind of thing.

This is kind of a big deal for me, because (as some of you may know) in the spring I was let go from a job I adored for what amounted to political BS reasons, and it left me sort of at loose ends for a while, wondering what was next for me. And it's a huge relief to feel like I've found a niche, a job I am just as good at as I was at my old job, maybe even better. The pay isn't quite as good, but I work two miles from my house so I'm getting outside and getting exercise regularly, I'm no longer spending upwards of two hours a day in the car, and-- this is really the clincher-- I never have to go to a mall on a Saturday again unless it's to buy things.

Can you hear my sigh of relief? I kind of give one every time I remember that I can enjoy weekends again.

The downside of all this activity is that I haven't had as much time to surf the internet for treasures with which to delight you in between my reviews. Hopefully now that I'm past a big part of the training stage of the new job and am settling in to the actual doing the job part, that'll change. But for now, here! Have some links!

'A Thousand Perfect Things' by Kay Kenyon

Hey everyone, sorry for my absence the past few weeks-- I went on vacation and then started a new job, and it's taken me until now to get my blogging brain stuffed back inside my head. :)

I'm returning with a review of A Thousand Perfect Things by Kay Kenyon. I want to start by saying that this book surprised me. I've never read anything by Kay Kenyon before, so when I got the ARC of her newest book I didn't know what to expect, and my reaction was mixed.

Like a lot of books, I started it on the train on my way to work, which made it really awkward when I started crying less than twenty pages in. So, something I haven't talked about here is that my grandfather passed away in July, at age 85 and after a long battle with heart and lung disease. We were very close; I'm still trying to metabolize the fact that he's gone, and I'm pretty sure I'll be trying for a long time to come. So reading about our protagonist Tori and her bond with her grandfather was a wrench-- even more so when Sir Charles takes sick and dies (the part that had me in tears-- good work, Ms. Kenyon), leaving behind a family who thought he was crazy, and an idea that consumes Tori's focus and is the basis for the entire story to come.

The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

So it's been a little while since I read Guillermo del Toro's The Strain and The Fall, but after finishing The Night Eternal I had to go back and do a little brush-up to see if I was remembering them accurately. I'd rated The Strain four stars on Goodreads, its successor three, which are solid ratings that mostly held up under a second scrutiny. I had high hopes for The Night Eternal, but sadly it didn't live up to the hype, and forced me to reassess my rating of the entire series.

It starts off so promisingly, too. The Strain was touted upon its release as "the book that makes vampires scary again", a bounceback from the supposed decline the neckbiters have been on since Bela Lugosi first donned an opera cape. And while I agree that the Cullens, Salvatores, Spikes and Erics of the pop culture world haven't been balanced out by an appreciable weight of run-for-your-fucking-life scary vamps, Del Toro and Hogan sought to tip the scales and ended up overbalancing them. As the series goes on the emphasis is very much on quantity rather than quality-- the characters devolve into predictable tropes; the plot gets bogged down in sidetracks that are boring, transparent or both; and the lion's share of the work seems to have gone into describing battles in as much cinematic detail as possible rather than giving any emotional weight to the characters' development. It is possible to have scary vampires and still tell a good story, and I'm going to point out the main areas where I think GDT and CH went off the rails.

cool shit i found online, part 2

pretty sure 12-year-old me chose French
because of the food. but in my defense,
i didn't know what a burrito was back then.

Happy Monday, lieblings! After listening to a dude on the bus this morning chattering away on his phone in German, I'm wishing I hadn't let all my foreign language chops fall by the wayside. I used to be nearly fluent in French, dammit, and I knew some really horrible-sounding Russian curses for awhile there too...

But I digress. It's time for round 2 of Cool Shit I Found Online. Any suggestions for a name for this series would be appreciated, otherwise this runs the risk of sticking. And I can do way better than CSIFO for an acronym.

• Good timing! Not long after posting my Casino Royale review, I came across this list of 5 great spy books and this list of 10 international crime noirs, none of which I've read. Yet. 
• Like Tor books? Well, at Tor.com they're celebrating their fifth birthday by letting you download all 151 stories published on the site for free. :D
• The Atlantic spawned a discussion last week about favorite and memorable first lines. The Guardian jumped in and now I'm curious what you guys have to say. One of my all-time favorites will forever be from Lois Lowry's inimitable The Giver: "It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened." What's one that's always stuck with you?
• Feminist Yog-Sothoth.
  
  
  Yeah. That's a thing now.
• In "Charles Dickens is a wanker" news, he's probably responsible for popular imagination's concept of scary clowns. I knew I hated him for a good reason. Other than Great Expectations, I mean.
• And in "Oh my god, my childhood" news, the actor who voiced Mr. Freeze on Batman: The Animated Series passed away this week. I think Freeze and Magneto were my first introduction to the deliciously murky world of bad guys you can't help loving (as opposed to Clayface, who just straight up scared the shit out of 8-year-old me).
• Speaking of scary, reading this article about 25 years of Hannibal Lecter made me remember that I hadn't ever gotten around to those last 3 episodes of Hannibal. So I did. And then I remembered why I never watch TV shows as they're first airing; I frakking hate cliffhangers. I hate waiting. Damn you, Tumblr, for sucking me into this mess!
  
  To slake my rage, I had to go look up some spoilers about what Bryan Fuller has planned for future seasons, but it only made me more impatient. Anyway, the article is really good, especially if you're a fan of crime novels and psychological thrillers. (And if you're a fan of 'Hannibal', this article on the food styling for the show is pretty cool.)

And that's your lot for today. Got any cool shit you found online you think I'd enjoy? Drop it in the comments!

'Casino Royale' by Ian Fleming





I was in middle school the first time I saw a James Bond movie. My brother and I were hanging out at our grandparents' house on New Year's Eve and some network had on a marathon. "For Your Eyes Only" was, to my twelve-year-old brain, a feast. Dramatic, suspenseful, ridiculous, full of explosions and just enough sex to get all my hormones and adrenaline fizzing at once. I was enthralled, not only by the spectacle, but by the character of Bond-- this dashing rake who charmed his way into opium warehouses and ladies' ski suits with equal felicity, fought bad guys while running, driving or rock climbing, prevented the sabotage of the British navy and looked great doing all of it.

In that light, maybe it's weird that I'm only just now digging into his source material-- starting, of course, at the beginning. Casino Royale happens to be one of my favorite Bond movies, so I was excited to sink my teeth into the superspy's origin story. As much for my own self-analysis as anything else, I was curious to investigate the source of Bond's popularity. What is so engaging about this man, this figure, that he's managed to occupy a significant place in our cultural consciousness for over half a century? Based just on Casino Royale, at least, the sad fact is that I have no idea.

'A Matter of Blood' by Sarah Pinborough

The opening act of Sarah Pinborough's urban fantasy horror trilogy is dark. It's gory, it's harsh and unflinching in its descriptions of an ugly world; no romps with city-dwelling fairies here. It's urban fantasy at its most brutal, illuminating a bleak potential future where-- as our killer makes a habit of pointing out-- nothing is sacred. It's that idea of the sacrosanct that winds its way throughout the book, touching each of the characters in turn, leading the jaded Detective Jones to a thorough examination of not only the ways in which his society is broken, but in which he is as well.