Hippoi Athanatoi

It has been quite some time since I wrote a proper review for a book rather than just sharing shorter impressions. In part, I have Twitter and Facebook and other forms of social media to blame for that, as such outlets make it very easy to offer some kind of commentary without investing too much energy; a tempting prospect when you're left with limited such resources for various reasons. However, I can't deny that a significant factor behind the lack of reviews has been that my reading has been way down compared to what it used to be. I used to order stacks of new books for Christmas, for…

A new novel by Gay Gavriel Kay is something that I (and Elio) always look forward to with eager anticipation. We have been fans of his writing since the Fionavar Tapestry, which remains my favourite work of his (indeed, it may be my favourite fantasy series of all times) even though the later novels undeniably are more polished. There's something about the rawness of the Fionavar Tapestry that always gets me. Of course, it is also a much more traditional work of fantasy than any of his other later novels (save for Tigana) and I am, first and foremost, a reader of fantasy. At the heart of my…

A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, has hit shelves around the world and returned fans once more to Westeros, to see what's become of some of the most vividly realized characters in the fantasy genre. Six years in the making -- or eleven, considering that some of the chapters in this novel were written to be published in the pre-split A Feast for Crows -- and the question on the minds of many of the critics who've reviewed the book for such well-known news outlets such as TIME, the LA Times, the NY Times, and more, seems to have been, "Was it worth the…

Apparently, I am still starved from my long bout of very little reading, because yesterday another book found itself devoured at a rather alarming pace. Of course, Kushiel's Mercy is admittedly not the first Jacqueline Carey book that I have finished in a day, and as I was feeling a bit down yesterday it proved an excellent way of drowning my sorrows. In short, it didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of lasting longer than a day. Picking up almost right on the heels of Kushiel's Justice, which saw Imriel returning from his quest to slay his Alban wife Dorelei's killer, Imriel and Sidonie…