Bear Flag Blog

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie - 7.5/10
A promising start to a "dark" fantasy series. The characters are intriguing, the world is not particularly complex but nonetheless interesting, the plot moves along well. It spoke well for this book that although the pacing seemed a bit slow, I was always interested to see what came next.

Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie - 7/10
Second in the 'The First Law' series. Very similar to the first, good writing, interesting story, intriguing characters. At the end of this one I did wonder, given the pacing, how on earth Abercrombie was going to wrap things up in only three books.

Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie - 5.5/10
...and everything sort of collapses, leaving me cold on the entire series. Lots of exciting things happen yet at the end I could only ask: what was the point?
I like "dark", "gritty" fantasy - I cut my teeth on Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (still some of my favorite books), tore through Glen Cook's Black Company series. Yet Abercrombie seems to inflict tragedy on his characters only for the sake of making the book dark, not because it logically follows or in any way improves the narrative. Narrative events should have meaning, not simply get inserted to maintain a certain tone. As I feared at the end of the second book, he ties everything up with a quite unsatisfactory knot and by the end really leeches out the importance of much of what has gone before - even within this book itself.
Which is a shame, because in the micro the writing is quite good and pulls the reader along. But this book really flubs the macro, leaving me shaking my head.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild - 8/10
Just because I really like it, here's the poem from which the title is taken:

Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

A fantastic work of non-fiction, detailing the colonial catastrophe that was the Belgian Congo, and revealing the individuals involved both in begetting it and in exposing and condemning it. Very well crafted and presented, and performs marvels in gleaning from very scant documentation the daily operations and life in a particularly afflicted place and time.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson - 8.5/10
Reading this book once again had me wishing I could read Swedish, as I know I missed a fair amount in translation. Nonetheless, a wonderful outing, with compelling characters, a really well-woven story, and crackerjack writing. I particularly appreciate it when a novel has the reader making discoveries as the characters do, rather than allowing the characters to possess knowledge the reader does not have, or trying to whip out an "aha!" moment based on information the reader was given but not made aware of its significance. Larsson really brings you along as the story unfolds. A great read.

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson - 8/10*
Also a really compelling book - as with the prior novel, I was eager to get on BART to and from work each day so that I could read more. The asterisk, however, is there because The Girl who Played with Fire doesn't really have an ending. It reaches a climax immediately prior to the last page. From reading the descriptions of the third novel ("picks up immediately where the prior book left off"), it's clear that this book is actually only the first half of the entire story. A great first half, but not a complete story.