What does political intrigue, brutal murder, and a bully all have in common? As you might expect, they all play heavily in The Emperor’s Blades. Aside from that, they’re all elements of fiction that I generally dislike. And yet I liked The Emperor’s Blades. Not despite these elements, but rather, for the most part, because of them.
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Despite being a relatively new book, I might be one of the last fantasy nerds to read The Name of the Wind. I’ve heard plenty of hype, but also enough grousing that I went into the book with roughly no expectations.
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A little over four months ago I started developer boot camp at Academy Pittsburgh. Dave took my first day of school photo and I hopped in the car and drove to Allentown an hour earlier than necessary, a list of worries as long as my arm swirling in my head. What if the cost—free—belied that there was something wrong with the program? What if I didn’t like my classmates, or worse, what if they didn’t like me? What if my tangential history with programming wasn’t enough, and the course sped along, leaving me in the dust? What if the course ended up being a three-month waste of time, and I left without the ability to get a job?
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Recently, Dave and I started watching a new show: The Legend of Korra. I watched a few episodes of Avatar with my little cousin, and generally enjoyed them. As I’ve seen some funny images from The Legend of Korra over the years, I was geeked to sit down and finally give it a proper watch.
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Star’s Reach is a post apocalyptic book that follows Trey, a ruinman who scraps pre-war buildings as he searches for, essentially, the Lost City of Atlantis of his time. Along this journey he accrues a number of friends and followers, sees countless cities, and discovers some of the biggest questions of his age, though whether or not he can find answers hangs over him throughout the book.
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A book hasn’t reached off the shelf and grabbed me like The Library at Mount Char in years. The cover, the blurb, the first page—it hooked me and reeled me in, leaving me up hours past my bedtime a few nights in a row.
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The Pawn of Prophecy, the first book in David Edding’s famous Belgariad series, was the first character-driven fantasy book that resonated with me. I was a mere middle-schooler at the time and, aside from classics like The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, was new to the world of fantasy.
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I love character-driven stories. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy an engaging, intriguing plot, but to be one of my favorite books, the characters have to be so dynamic, funny, and/or loveable that I’d happily watch them buy groceries. These are the books that I come back to every few years, because no matter how familiar I am with the story, the characters feel like old friends.
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Labor Day weekend was a combination of quaint anachronisms and stunning performances at the Second Annual Big River Steampunk Festival in Hannibal, Missouri.
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Jeffery Russell’s debut novel, The Dungeoneers, has a blend of humor that tickles my chuckle glands in a way that only Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series has done before.
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