God's War

Watching Nyx disarm was a more drawn-out affair. There was the sword she kept strapped to her back, her pistol, her whip, the garroting wire she kept strung in her dhoti, the bullets sewn into her burnous, the bullets strung around her neck. The dagger strapped to her thigh, the pistol strapped to the opposite calf, the three poisoned needles she kept in her hair. He noted she kept the garroting wire she used to tie her sandals, but she pulled out the razor blades tucked into the soles.

God's War by Kameron Hurley: You definitely don’t want to be on Nyx’s bad side. As a bel dame, she serves her country of Nasheen by finding and killing the inevitable deserters from their perpetual war with neighboring Chenja. As a bounty hunter on the side, she often takes on even more unsavory jobs. Unfortunately for her, the bel dame council does not approve of moonlighting. Down on her luck, Nyx, along with her bounty hunting team, takes a mysterious job: one with repercussions she can only begin to comprehend.

The author Kameron Hurley has kept a really good blog for years, and I was excited to see this, her first novel, be published.

Overall Quality: Good. Hurley does a wonderful job of world-building, creating a war-torn desert world powered by bugs and magic. (Yes, bugs. You’ll see how it works if you read it.) The characters are well thought out and interesting.  The perspective of the story is primarily through Nyx and Rhys, a devout Chenjan magician who has taken refuge in Nasheen. He works for Nyx, somewhat grudgingly, and the relationship between the two is one of my favorite parts of the book.

If you like action, you will love this book. Fight scenes, chase scenes, ambushes; the adrenaline never stops. A word of warning though, this is one violent book.

Bus Readability: Good. At just under 300 pages, it’s right about at the limit of one-handed reading. I found that the story worked well for bus reading. It gets confusing at times, but everything is explained as the book goes on.  

Cocktail Party Conversation Starter: If you meet an aspiring writer, you can show them the author’s video of fifteen years of rejection letters:

TL;DR: Bloody badassery; good for the bus. 

Graphic violence and lots of it. Torture (graphic description), racially/religiously motivated beating, severed body parts, and the list goes on.

Empire Falls

Empire Falls by Richard Russo: Miles Roby is a man with problems. Twenty years after leaving college to see to his dying mother, he’s still stuck in the also dying industrial town of Empire Falls, Maine, managing the Empire Grill. His wife Janine is leaving him for Walt Comeau, an obnoxious (but apparently great in bed) fitness club owner. Their daughter Tick is dealing not only with her parents’ divorce, but also with the ramifications of breaking up with Zack Minty, one of the most popular and powerful students at Empire Falls High. Miles’s luck at work is no better than in his personal life.  Despite the best efforts of his brother David and their waitress Charlene, the woman of Miles’s boyhood dreams, the Grill hasn’t turned a profit in years. He can’t even sell the place and move on, since it belongs to Francine Whiting, along with everything else in Empire Falls. Can Miles find a way to a better future than the grim one he sees ahead?

(Believe it or not, that was probably only half the characters.)

Overall Quality: Fantastic. I know they generally don’t give Pulitzers to bad books, but Empire Falls is truly outstanding. If you tend to like character-driven novels, you will love this. There’s not a lot of action in the first three quarters or so of the book, but through flashbacks and internal monologues, each character is explored in rich detail. Eventually you realize that the author has been very carefully setting up all the dominos and in the last quarter of the book, they start to all fall down. The end is incredibly gripping and intense, though also disturbing in a few scenes.

Bus Readability: Pretty good. The book is a little long for one-handed reading (the paperback has almost 500 pages), but the story itself works pretty well being read in small sections. A word of warning though: once those dominos start falling, it’s a hard book to put down. Watch out for getting so engrossed in the story that you miss your stop being called.

Cocktail Party Conversation Starter: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward both play major roles in the 2005 Empire Falls miniseries, the last live-action acting by Newman before he died and the last time the couple were both in the same project.

TL;DR: Great book with compelling characters, but don’t miss your stop.

A brief depiction of a sexual assault; description of child abuse; violence against animals; several violent scenes including a school shooting.

Anathem

Anathem by Neal Stephenson: Stephenson, a favorite author among geeky types, creates an alternate world where intellectuals live in “concents,” monasteries completely secluded from the rest of society except for specific occasions. Fraa Erasmus is excited to see the outside world for the first time in ten years, but he never could have predicted what would begin. Math, science, and philosophy are all key to solving a mystery that will change the concents--and the rest of the world--forever.

Overall Quality: Personally, I quite enjoyed this book. There are some amazing ideas and concepts explored and the last third or so of the book has a riveting plotline. I would love to discuss this book with someone, but I can’t because no one else I know has finished it. This 935 page beast starts off soooooo slooooooow. Really, someone should just write a summary of the first 150 pages and tell people to start there. He also makes up a lot of words, even inspiring an xkcd comic, though that didn’t bother me as much as it did others. And there is a legitimate story-telling reason for the invented vocabulary. (Which doesn’t really help you if you’re so annoyed by “Suur” and “Saunt” and whatnot that you can’t finish the book.) However, if you’re interested in math, philosophy, and alternate universes, I promise it’s worth slugging through the beginning and the made-up words. Despite the slow and somewhat confusing start, this is a great book.

Bus Readability: Pretty bad. In addition to being physically huge, this book does not hold up well to being read in short sections. Sometimes you can’t even finish one conversation before your stop is called. Wait for a vacation to tackle this tome.

Cocktail Party Conversation Starter: Can you cut eight equal servings from a square of cake without using a ruler? There’s a fun geometry proof as the first appendix.

TL;DR: Great book for geeks, but not for the bus.