The Saturday Morning Post

I am reading a lot these days. By the end of the month, I will likely have read 11 books and sampled one more. If I review all the books I read or sample, they, for better or worse, threaten to overwhelm this blog. So I have decided to break them down and out into their own post, The Saturday Morning Post. I may also include some book reviews in my Wednesday post if I have nothing else to say, but the Saturday post will be primarily for books reviews.

In the past I listed books in the order I read them, but for this post I think it would be better to jump around a bit to feature only one book, or group similar books together in a post. I will simply note the month I read the books. So where we go. Since these reviews reflect my taste in books, I will restate my tastes so that you can discount my opinions according to your taste in books.

This reviewer's taste in books:

I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

With that out of the way, let's launch this post with a new fantasy book.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence C+  (June 2023)

The first, 200K word, fantasy/ SF book in The Library Trilogy. The story takes place on a dusty world of dried up oceans with humans, humanoids, and bug eyed monsters at war with each other. It set in a magical/medieval type of walled city that lays at the foot of a mountain. The city is small enough to walk through in an hour. Bow and arrows are the weapon of choice at the start of the story, an indication of its technological level. 

Set within the mountain and reached from the city is a library containing billions of paper books from countless places – apparently including Earth – and from untold ages. This library is so vast that it is divided into hundreds of rooms many of which can be measured in miles. Librarians can spend days search for books within it, sometimes getting lost and dying in it. Books are shelved in some rooms on racks of wood, in others, metal or carved stone. And in at least one room are just piled in rows and towers, and in another, scattered like a sea. Some of these rooms are accessible, others lay behind doors that can only be opened with magic of some sort. There are magic machines in the library that can be entered that recreate the world of the book one bring into it. People can apparently live within this machine for years. Oh, and monsters that need to be killed come out of these machines as well. The vast rooms have places that can magically heal wounds. The library also has a staff of magical robots of various sorts and shapes, like crows, dogs, as well as humanoids. Some appear to be broken, others serve the human librarians, sometimes. Oh, and the robot “blood” can open sealed doors. And last but not least, there is a section of the library where one can travel back and forth in time at will – even becoming a flying ghost when visiting the past. This part of the library will also create any illusion that one wants. As you can see, it’s a magic library. Anything goes.

The plot involves the city outside of the library being under increasing pressure from their traditional enemies, a humanoid race from somewhere, who, over the course of the decade which this book covers, close in and eventually gather in the desert outside the walls of the city with the intent of sacking it, for some reason. Only Lawrence knows what this army has to eat while camping in the desert outside of the city for years, and he isn’t saying. As the enemy closes in the city’s scientists begin to use the books in the library to design and build new weapons like rifles, to defend themselves. And nail polish. The final fifth of the book involves on extended battle/action/danger/chase sequence in which we also get dramatic plot twists, revelations, magical rescues and heroic sacrifices, as well as a metaphysical explanation of the library’s purpose that may, or may not, make any sense. It didn’t to me, but that might just be me, I was doing a lot of skim reading by this point, as I found it tedious reading.

The story is told in close third person, with two point of view characters. One is Livira, who begins the story as a 10 year old child refugee from the dried up sea bottom desert whose boldness gets herself assigned to the library. Over the course of the books she grows to become a young woman and a bold and curious librarian. The other point of view character is Evar, who is one of four children, raised by two of those robots, who have grown up to adulthood within one of the miles wide rooms of the library, trapped by doors that do not open. Each of his two “brothers” and his “sister” have great skills taught to them by the book that went with them when, somehow, they entered that machine I previously mentioned as children. All except Evar, our point of view character, who remembers nothing about his experience and has no special skills as a result. As a result, we don’t get to know much about how this machine works.

I am fairly certain that fans of fantasy will find this book very enjoyable given its sweeping scale and plenty of action. Indeed, the only reason why I ordered it up from the library is that it was getting almost universal rave reviews. However, as you can gather from my grade, I was less than impressed, and gave it the “+” mostly for ambition. However, I did read the whole book – though as I said, by the long action sequence at the end, I was skim reading parts to get to the outcome.

I enjoy Livira as a character and found her story far more interesting than of Evar’s. In the chapters featuring Evar, Lawrence kept repeating the same story of their origins over an over again, sometimes within a page or two, but only that story. And in that, I seemed to see the hand of the author deliberately withholding or dribbling out bits of the more complete explanations for the sake of using it at some other point in the story. He was keeping secrets for his own purposes. While not exactly cheating, I found it to be a peak behind the curtain of the story to glimpse the craft behind its construction, which took me out of the story a little.

I’m not a visual person, so that intricate action scenes don’t work for me. I can’t picture them. I find them tedious reading and if they’re long, I’ll skim read to the end. All I need to know is the outcome. I mention this because I had to slog through or read several long sections of wandering around the library discovering mysterious things, plus, as I said, skim read nearly100 page at the end where everything comes together for a conclusion that, in the end, mostly just sets up the next book in the trilogy. Don’t expect a complete story here. It serves to introduce characters and setting up the next one.

I also found the library to be more of a plot device than a believable, organic, or even fantastic reality. The metaphysical/biblical explanation of it made no sense, at least to me. And, well, It seems to be the case here, as with most fantasies, that an author can create anything they care to, and then explain it away with an airy sweep of a hand saying it’s “magic.” Moreover, the world beyond the library is barely sketched it, with little thought put into it, such as, as I pointed out previously, how a barbarian army can lay siege to a city for years from a vast desert – or why. One can only hope that in the next volumes the world beyond the library and its place in it becomes more, dare I say, realistic. Alas, I don’t think I care enough to find out.

Extra bonus book... 

Agent Zero by Jack Mars DNF  (June 2023)

A widowed college professor is kidnapped. The kidnappers, in searching for answers they believe he (unknowingly) possess find and remove a small device that had been surgically implanted under the skin behind his ear. With it removed, he is flooded with memories and abilities that had been blocked from a previous career as some sort of secret agent… 

I am undecided about this book. I wasn’t in the mood for another thriller, so I did not read on beyond this point, but I have nothing negative to say about it, as a thriller, at least so far. I may return to it if or when I am in the mood for a thriller.