The Brain that Changes Itself is a remarkable book for several reasons. M.D. Norman Doidge presents several cases of extraordinary events that constitute proof for the book's thesis: that the brain is plastic, easy to remold, to adapt to the data you feed it. What is astonishing is that, while these cases are not new and are by far not the only ones out there, the medical community is clinging to the old belief that the brain is made of clearly localized parts that have specific roles. Doidge is trying to change that.

The ramifications of brain plasticity are wide spread: the way we learn or unlearn things, how we fall in love, how we adapt to new things and we keep our minds active and young, the way we would educate our children, the minimal requirement for a computer brain interface and so much more. The book is structured in 11 chapters and some addendums that seem to be extra material that the author didn't know how to properly format. A huge part is acknowledgements and references, so the book is not that large.

These are the chapters, in order:

• Chapter 1 - A Woman Perpetually Falling. Describes a woman that lost her sense of balance. She feels she is falling at all times and barely manages to walk using her sight. Put her in front of a weird patterned rug and she falls down. When sensors fed information to an electrode plate on her tongue she was able to have balance again. The wonder comes from the fact that a time after removing the device she would retain her sense. The hypothesis is that the receptors in her inner ear were not destroyed, by damaged, leaving some in working order and some sending incorrect information to the brain. Once a method to separate good and bad receptors, the brain immediately adapted itself to use only the good ones. The doctor that spearheaded her recovery learned the hard way that the brain is plastic, when his father was almost paralyzed by a stroke. He pushed his father to crawl on the ground and try to move the hand that wouldn't move, the leg that wouldn't hold him, the tongue that wouldn't speak. In the end, his father recovered. Later, after he died from another stroke while hiking on a mountain, the doctor had a chance to see the extent of damage done by the first stroke: 97% of the nerves that run from the cerebral cortex to the spine were destroyed.
• Chapter 2 - Building Herself a Better Brain. Barbara was born in the '50s with an brain "asymmetry". While leaving a relatively normal life she had some mental disabilities that branded her as "retarded". It took two decades to stumble upon studies that showed that the brain was plastic and could adapt. She trained her weakest traits, the ones that doctors were sure to remain inadequate because the part in the brain "associated" with it was missing and found out that her mind adapted to compensate. She and her husband opened a school for children with disabilities, but her astonishing results come from when she was over 20 years old, after years of doctors telling her there was nothing to be done.
• Chapter 3 - Redesigning the Brain. Michael Merzenich designs a program to train the brain against cognitive impairments or brain injuries. Just tens of hours help improve - and teach people how to keep improving on their own - from things like strokes, learning disabilities, even conditions like autism and schizophrenia. His work is based on scientific experiments that, when presented to the wider community, were ridiculed and actively attacked for the only reason that they went against the accepted dogma.
• Chapter 4 - Acquiring Tastes and Loves. Very interesting article about how our experiences shape our sense of normalcy, the things we like or dislike, the people we fall for and the things we like to do with them. The chapter also talks about Freud, in a light that truly explains how ahead of his time he was, about pornography and its effects on the brain, about how our pleasure system affects both learning and unlearning and has a very interesting theory about oxytocin, seeing it not as a "commitment neuromodulator", but as a "demodulator", a way to replastify the part of the brain responsible for attachments, allowing us to let go of them and create new ones. It all culminates with the story of Bob Flanagan, a "supermasochist" who did horrible things to his body on stage because he had associated pain with pleasure.
• Chapter 5 - Midnight Resurrection. A surgeon has a stroke that affects half of his body. Through brain training and physiotherapy, he manages to recover - and not gain magical powers. The rest of the chapter talks about experiments on monkeys that show how the feedback from sensors rewires the brain and how what is not used gets weaker and what is used gets stronger, finer and bigger in the brain.
• Chapter 6 - Brain Lock Unlocked. This chapter discusses obsessions and bad habits and defective associations in the brain and how they can be broken.
• Chapter 7 - Pain: The Dark Side of Plasticity. A plastic brain is also the reason why we strongly remember painful moments. A specific case is phantom limbs, where people continue to feel sensations - often the most traumatic ones - after limbs have been removed. The chapter discusses causes and solutions.
• Chapter 8 - Imagination: How Thinking Makes It So. The brain maps for skills that we imagine we perform change almost as much as when we are actually doing them. This applies to mental activities, but also physical ones. Visualising doing sports prepared people for the moment when they actually did it. The chapter also discusses how easily the brain adapts to using external tools. Brain activity recorders were wired to various tools and monkeys quickly learned to use them without the need for direct electric feedback.
• Chapter 9 - Turning Our Ghosts into Ancestors. Discussing the actual brain mechanisms behind psychotherapy, in the light of what the book teaches about brain plasticity, makes it more efficient as well as easier to use and understand. The case of Mr. L., Freud's patient, who couldn't keep a stable relationship as he was always looking for another and couldn't remember his childhood and adolescence, sheds light on how brain associates trauma with day to day life and how simply separating the two brain maps fixes problems.
• Chapter 10 - Rejuvenation. A chapter talking about the neural stem cells and how they can be activated. Yes, they exist and they can be employed without surgical procedures.
• Chapter 11 - More than the Sum of Her Parts. A girl born without her left hemisphere learns that her disabilities are just untrained parts of her brain. After decades of doctors telling her there is nothing to be done because the parts of her brain that were needed for this and that were not present, she learns that her brain can actually adapt and improve, with the right training. An even more extreme case than what we saw in Chapter 2.

There is much more in the book. I am afraid I am not making it justice with the meager descriptions there. It is not a self-help book and it is not popularising science, it is discussing actual cases, the experiments done to back what was done and emits theories about the amazing plasticity of the brain. Some things I took from it are that we can train our brain to do almost anything, but the training has to follow some rules. Also that we do not use gets discarded in time, while what is used gets reinforced albeit with diminishing efficiency. That is a great argument to do new things and train at things that we are bad at, rather than cement a single scenario brain. The book made me hungry for new senses, which in light of what I have read, are trivial to hook up to one's consciousness.

If you are not into reading, there is an one hour video on YouTube that covers about the same subjects:

[youtube:sK51nv8mo-o]

Enjoy!

I started reading the book knowing nothing of its author or contents or, indeed, the publishing date. For me it felt like a philosophical treatise on revolutions in general, especially since the names of the countries were often omitted and it seemed that the author was purposeful in trying to make it apply to any era and any nation. Only after finishing the book I realized that Darkness at Noon was a story published in 1940, by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British author who was briefly part of the German Communist movement before he left it, disillusioned. The main character is probably a more dramatic version of himself. As an aside and a fun coincidence, in July 2015 the original German manuscript of the book was found. All the since published versions are based on an English translation after Koestler lost the original. Even the published German version is a retranslation from English by Koestler himself.

The book is difficult to read because it is packed with deep philosophical and political thoughts of the main protagonist. Like a man condemned to purgatory, Rubashov is a former party leader now imprisoned by the very regime he helped create. While waiting for his interrogation and sentencing, he maniacally analyses his life's work and meaning, trying to find where the great revolution failed and why. One of the last survivors of "the old guard", he realizes that the new version of the party is a perversion of his initial ideals, but a logical progression of the principles he followed. He remembers the people he himself condemned to death and tries to understand if he had done the right thing or not. Still faithful to his views that tradition and emotion should be ignored and even eliminated, progressing by logical analysis and cold decisions, he tries to collect his thoughts enough to find the solution, not for himself, but for the failed revolution.

Darkness at Noon is a relatively short book, but a dense one. The author makes Rubashov feel extremely human, even as he remembers his own moments of monstrosity. Repeatedly he reveals to the reader that he thinks of himself as an automaton, as a cog in a machine and that he feels little about his own demise or success, but greatly about the result of the thing bigger than himself in which he believes. Yet even as he does that, he is tormented by human emotion, wracked by guilt, pained by a probably imaginary toothache that flares when he feels his own mistakes and regrets his past actions. He never quite gets to a point to where he is apologetic, though, believing strongly that the ends justify the means.

I liked it. It is not a political manifesto, but a deep rumination on political ideas that the author no longer adheres to. While I am sure many people have tried to use it as a tool against Communism, I find that the book is more than that, treating Communism itself just like another movement in the bowels of humanity. It is almost irrelevant in the end, as the story goes full circle to trap Rubashov in a prison of his own mind, with many of the characters just reflections of parts of himself. In the center of it all stands a man, an archetypal one at that, the book raising his fleeting existence higher than the sluggish fluctuations of any revolution or political ideals.

I read on Wikipedia that Darkness at Noon is meant as the second part of a trilogy, but from the descriptions of the other two books they don't seem to be narratively connected. I certainly didn't feel I missed something discussed in other material. Highly introspective, the story is often thought provoking, forcing one to put down the book to think about what was read. It is, thus, very cerebral: the emotions within are not the type that would make one read feverishly to get to the end and the end itself is just a beginning. I warmly recommend it.

Every Heart a Doorway started well. Here is this girl that arrives at a specialized institution for "wayward children" - runaways, boys and girls that somehow don't fit into the slot their parents have prepared for them. Like many young adult stories, the main protagonists are young people into a place that accepts them as they are, but is still formal, with strict boundaries. In this case the idea was that the youngsters each have found the door to another world, a world that not only is completely different from ours, but is perfect for them. They have spent some time in it, only to accidentally leave or to be thrown out, with no way to return. After some times years in that place, changed to their deepest core, it is difficult to readapt to the real world, which makes their parents send them to this kind of institution.

From here, though, Seanan McGuire just piles up the tropes, while the careful writing style and setup from the beginning of this short 173 page story decays into a rushed and inconsistent ending. Just like Hogwarts, the house is managed with ancient British style rules, fixed meals, absolute authority, etc. There are children and there are adult teachers. The headmistress is someone who went through the same thing and decided to help others, but outside of that she's just as certain of her point of view and as self righteous as any of the parents that abandoned their offspring there.

And there is this... style, this way of describing the interaction of characters, which annoyed the hell out of me, without being bad as a writing style. You see, the young girl that arrives at the institution is time after time met by people who finish her sentences for her, show her that they think they know better than her, and she accepts it, just because she's the new girl. With that level of meek submission, I wonder why her parents ever wanted her gone. Her perfect world - a place of the dead where she was a servant of royalty and the skill she had learned best was to stay completely still for hours lest she upsets the lord of the dead - was also about total submission, and she loved it there. Most of the people that explored other worlds were similarly bonded to dominant characters that have absolute control over them.

In the end, children start to get killed and the response of "the authorities" is to hide the bodies and instruct youngsters to stay in groups, while the main characters suddenly can use their skills in the real world, as it was completely normal, but fail to use them properly to find the obvious killer. The scene where a skeleton tries to tell them who the murderer is - even if that should not have been possible in the real world - but can only point a finger, so they give up after one attempt of communication is especially sour in my mind.

So yeah, I didn't like the book. I felt it was a cheap mashup of Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Grey, polluted by the author's fantasies of submission and not much in the way of plot or characters. And it's too bad, since I liked the premise immediately.

I've quickly finished the second volume, Metro 2034, by Dmitry Glukhovsky, in the Metro series of books, after reading and being captivated by Metro 2033. To me it felt more geared towards the sci-fi and the writing lore than towards the social satire from the first book. It felt less. There are fewer main characters, fewer stations, less character development, less monsters. The few people that do populate the book are so archetypal that even the author acknowledges it in the guise of a character nicknamed Homer, an old guy that searches for stories and sees his entire adventure an odyssey to be written in a book and his companions filling up the roles of Warrior and Princess and Bard.

Don't get me wrong, I liked it a lot, but I felt that the first book acted as a caricature of current society, with its many stations that each adhered to some philosophy or another, while the second veered quite a large distance from that and went purely towards the catacomb sci-fi thriller. There is still enough philosophical discourse in Homer's musings and it is interesting to see the post apocalyptic world seen through the eyes of someone that lived before as well as with fresh eyes: a girl that only knew one station her whole life. But the book was tamer and I am not the only one to think that.

Now, I scoured the net for some Metro 2035 love, but to no avail. I found a Polish audio book, but nothing else. It is ridiculous how much one has to wait to get a translation of a book written in Russian or how difficult it is to get even the original Russian text.

I've heard of Metro 2033 from a movie link that said Hollywood wants to adapt the book as a feature film, which in fact is really ridiculous: not only is the book famous, it has several sequels, it spawned a video game franchise and many authors have join to write inside a shared Metro universe. So how didn't I know about it? The reason, of course, is that it is written by a Russian: Дмитрий Глуховский. The book was published in 2005 in Russia, but only in 2010 was it published in the US, similar to how Japanese movies or other culturally different art trickles to the predominantly English culture. Meanwhile, the concept has grown so much that there are more than thirty books written in the universe. It's like falling down a rabbit hole. I used to love Russian sci-fi when I was a child and I have not realized how much I missed it until I started reading this book: simple people yet complex characters, with deep philosophical concerns, problems that are rarely solved through sheer force, depressing settings where everything falls apart yet makes people strong and interesting and puts them in the foreground.

Metro 2033 describes a parallel universe where World War III has happened and the few Russian survivors have hidden in the large network of the Moscow subway system. Radiation, biological weapons and other factors have turned the surface into a toxic place, filled with monstrous mutants and terrible creatures, while underground each metro station has developed its own unique culture and mythology. The beauty of the book is that it reads more like a satire of the history of the world and less than a post apocalyptic story. There are religious fanatics, fascists, communists, people who have rejected technology and others that value knowledge and books more than anything else, traders and mystics and people with strange powers. I felt that the author himself didn't really mean to create a credible after war world, as he didn't linger on where the power comes from or how the food is grown or other such technical details, instead focusing on the human spirit, the many myths created to explain the state of the world and radiographed the world in this pathetic microcosm made of barely surviving people.

Somewhere in the middle of the book I got a little bored. I have to admit that the long paragraphs and the many details of some scenes make for difficult reading if you are not in the mood. I loved the book while reading it at night, but had trouble focusing when trying to read on the street or when walking the dog. Yet by the end I am really glad I read the book. I can't imagine reading next anything other than the sequels and I lament the very real possibility that I might delve into the other dozens of books and short stories written by other authors in the same world.

In order to explore the world of Metro 2033, you may start at the Metro2033 web site, of course, where there are beautiful 360 photos of the current Moscow subway stations. Also, you may try the game, which feels a bit dated from the promotional videos, but apparently has a good plot. Of course, exploring the book universe sounds like a better idea, yet most of the spinoffs have not yet been translated into English. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to start reading in Russian...

Liu Cixin is Chinese, which makes reading his work not only a pleasant science fiction pastime, but also an intercultural experience. That is because Chinese people are weeeeird :). Just kidding, but it does make for an interesting experience. Even with good English translation, the mindset behind the writing is clearly different from the Western writers I usually read.

I have read Devourer first, a short story, to see if I enjoy the writing style, then I read the first two books in the Remembrance of Earth series: The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest. It is clear that the author likes to think big, some even compared him with Arthur C. Clarke. In both stories Earth enters in contact with alien species which are vastly superior and devastatingly indifferent to the fate of the human race. While Devourer really reads like a Chinese story, you know with the emperor and the adviser and so on, it retains the same fear of irrelevance as the huge books in the trilogy.

To me it felt like The Three-Body Problem was more accessible, while The Dark Forest has a change of pace and style, but it very well may be because of the translator. It was easier to imagine scenes from Asian movies - with people shouting hysterically at each other to prove their loyalty to one group or the other and "generals" and all that jazz - while reading the second book than the first. Even so, throughout the reading I had these weird feelings of wrongness sometimes when things happened in a certain way because the protagonists were Chinese. Yet this was not relevant to the story or the enjoyment of the books. Also many Chinese cultural references were both instructive and eye opening. As an example, The Three-Body Problem starts in the middle of the Chinese Cultural Revolution which is just as appalling, if not more so, as our Nazi era.

I cannot talk about the stories without spoiling them too much, so I won't. Enough to say that they are all hard sci-fi, even if some of the elements there are not so scientifically accurate. Clearly for Liu Cixin the story took precedence to high technology, which is a good thing.

The third book in the trilogy, Death's End, will allegedly appear September 2016, from Tor Books. However, I have mixed feelings about it. The story almost ended with the second book. Do I really care what happens next? Will it be relevant or just the typical three book publishing deal forced the author's hand? There are some questions that remain unanswered and I would be glad to see a clarification in this upcoming book, but will they be enough to flesh a great story?

Neal Stephenson is known for writing speculative science fiction with focus on technological advancements and Seveneves is all about space. He thought about the idea in 2006, while he was an adviser with Blue Origin and he let the idea fester for years, while getting feedback from all kinds of people knowledgeable about and invested in space technology, like Planetary Resources, so at least the science is good. Personally, I believe that he gathered so much material that he just had to write the book, regardless if he had a story to tell or not. Never have I read a book that is so obviously written by an engineer, with long descriptions about how space stuff works and how a culture is like or how people solve problems. It's all about the how, never about the why or the who. As such, I consider it a failed book, because it could have been so much better as a well thought, well edited trilogy of books, with compelling characters, rather than a humongous enumeration of space technologies.

The story is split into three parts, mostly unconnected: the cataclysm that dooms Earth in two years and the solution found by the people of the planet, the cataclysm and what people do afterwards and the aftermath, 5000 years into the future.

What happens is that the Moon suddenly gets splintered apart by some unknown agent, possibly a miniature black hole, which just breaks it into seven pieces (it already starts with the number 7), that are destined to further break in collisions with each other and cause a catastrophic meteor bombardment of Earth, heating its atmosphere and boiling and smashing away all life. People decide to invest everything into expanding the International Space Station, having a few thousand people escape certain death by going into space. Everything is done very orderly and the book focuses exclusively at what people do to reach the stars, with today's technology. Nothing about what 7 billion people (see? I can use seven all over the place, too) feel or do when faced with certain doom. The book continues quickly over the inevitable deaths and accidents caused by rushing into something that is not really researched, proceeding towards a part of the story where almost everything just works, as by magic. The devastating problems that people would face in space are solved quickly by engineering solutions, ignoring the unsolvable ones.

So far the book does have a sort of a main character, a woman working with robots, sent to the ISS as part of a partnership with an asteroid mining company. Before we know enough about her, the story shifts into its second part, which splits attention between several important characters. At this point it is almost impossible to empathize with anyone, a problem compounded by using personalities "slightly towards the Asperger side of the spectrum", as the author points out several times.

To continue explaining the story is pointless and would spoil it, enough said that even as I am an engineer and always complaining that there is not enough science in science fiction, I got really bored with reading this book. Long long (mobile) pages of two of three paragraphs each, containing no dialog, explaining things that had nothing to do with the story, puny and underfed as it was. The only thing that made me react emotionally was the villain of the second part, who was written well enough to make me hate. To add insult to injury, after fighting through the 880 (normal) pages, the third part just abruptly ends, like he was just tired of writing, now that the tech was all explained away and there was some human story there.

Bottom line: As someone interested in the technology necessary to colonize the Solar System, this book should have been gold. Instead, I caught myself skimming over the long descriptions, just wanting the book to end. Too bad, since the subject could have easily been split into three or even several books, each with their own story to tell in a well structured fictional universe. Also, while the author swears he was "peer reviewed" on the concepts, he also admits making huge leaps of faith over what would work or not.

The focus of Writing Tools is more on the journalist than on the novel writer. Of course there is a lot of overlap, but some of the tools there may feel either not relevant or truly gold, since book writers would not write about them so easily.

Roy Peter Clark lists the 50 tools (55 if you have the revised edition) in four categories:

• Nuts and Bolts - about the use of language: verbs, adverbs, phrase length, punctuation and so forth
• Special Effects - various creative ideas that give inspiration and direction to writing
• Blueprints - overall planning
• Useful Habits - various solutions for common problems or for improvement

I will list the entire 50 entries at the end of the review.

What I liked about the book is that it is direct, to the point, listing the tools so that you can always pick up the book and refresh your memory on how to use them. Being so many, it is impossible to just skim through the book, unless you already know and employ most of the ideas there. I feel like I have to practice, practice, practice in order to absorb everything there is inside the material. It's not a huge thing, though, like something Kendall Haven might have written, but still it is packed with information.

I am unable to understand if the source material is still under copyright or maybe Clark made it available for free. The book is sold on Amazon, but you can also read it as PDF online or listen to it freely on iTunes.

Now, for a list of the tools, something that I have shamelessly stolen from another review, because I am lazy:

• Part One: Nuts and Bolts
  • Begin sentences with subjects and verbs.
  • Order words for emphasis.
  • Activate your verbs.
  • Be passive-aggressive.
  • Watch those adverbs.
  • Take it easy on the -ings.
  • Fear not the long sentence.
  • Establish a pattern, then give it a twist.
  • Let punctuation control pace and space.
  • Cut big, then small.
• Part Two: Special Effects
  • Prefer the simple over the technical.
  • Give key words their space.
  • Play with words, even in serious stories.
  • Get the name of the dog.
  • Pay attention to names.
  • Seek original images.
  • Riff on the creative language of others.
  • Set the pace with sentence length.
  • Vary the lengths of paragraphs.
  • Choose the number of elements with a purpose in mind.
  • Know when to back off and when to show off.
  • Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction.
  • Tune your voice.
• Part Three: Blueprints
  • Work from a plan.
  • Learn the difference between reports and stories.
  • Use dialogue as a form of action.
  • Reveal traits of character.
  • Put odd and interesting things next to each other.
  • Foreshadow dramatic events and powerful conclusions.
  • To generate suspense, use internal cliffhangers.
  • Build your work around a key question.
  • Place gold coins along the path.
  • Repeat, repeat, and repeat.
  • Write from different cinematic angles.
  • Report and write for scenes.
  • Mix narrative modes.
  • In short works, don’t waste a syllable.
  • Prefer archetypes to stereotypes.
  • Write toward an ending.
• Part Four: Useful Habits
  • Draft a mission statement for your work.
  • Turn procrastination into rehearsal.
  • Do your homework well in advance.
  • Read for both form and content.
  • Save string.
  • Break long projects into parts.
  • Take an interest in all crafts that support your work.
  • Recruit your own support group.
  • Limit self-criticism in early drafts.
  • Learn from your critics.
  • Own the tools of your craft.

The book was nothing if not captivating, its pace much better than for the Magicians trilogy, but as in those books, it was really really difficult to empathize with any of the characters.

The story in Codex is about this investment banker who is having the first vacation in years, actually a small transition time between switching from his US job to a London based one. This makes him feel disconnected and somehow gets tangled in a project to arrange the library of a very wealthy family. The problem with this character is that he doesn't seem to chose anything. Things just happen to him, kind of like with Quentin in the Magicians, and he goes with them, only to get disappointed or surprised at the end. His friends, the people he randomly meets, even his adversaries appear at the exact time when the story requires them, making the book feel like a string of unlikely happenstances a rather aimless character just stumbles through.

There are some interesting parallels in the book, analogies between the beginning of romantic literature and the emergence of computer game fantasy, and probably the literary and historical details in the book hide some deeper meaning as well, but it's Lev Grossman's infuriatingly detached, almost dreamlike perspective that made me not care about it at all. Strangely, all the literary research going on in the book and the altered mood made me think of House of Leaves, only that was orders of magnitude weirder and better written.

As for the ending, I think I can safely say now that it's typical Grossman: the main character becomes aware of the delusions he was living under, both relating to his goals and the people around him. The veil gets lifted and the world goes back to the usual confusing pointless drag that it is for most of us. The author doesn't seem to care about the need of the reader for a happy ending, and I would normally applaud that, yet to use a depressingly realistic ending to a story that felt torn out of a night's dream seems a bit pointless to me.

Bottom line: I actually enjoyed it better than The Magicians, perhaps because it was shorter, better paced and I could relate to the main character a bit more. However, it is not something I would recommend to people. It felt too much like describing a man during a heatstroke, always dazed and confused, spinning wildly out of control of the things happening around him, a hapless victim of his immature feelings and a situation he is out of his depth in.

I will be reviewing all three books in The Magicians trilogy, by Lev Grossman, as they are one complete story with a beginning and an end, as well as an overarching moral. My review of the first book only, from the perspective of someone who enjoys the (very different!!) TV show, stands.

To understand The Magicians you need to understand who Lev Grossman is: a book critic for Time magazine. As such, he must have had a very strange experience trying to write after probably demolishing a lot of other writers for their lack of skill or overuse of tropes. Therefore some sort of alarm bells must sound when he undertakes to writing a "trilogy of fantasy books", a concept that is a meta-trope in itself. I believe he attempted to break the mould of the genre by using flawed every day characters on a journey that is less heroic as closer to real life: random things happening to you, bad things which you can't avoid, defeat or change, even if you try, which sometimes you don't, because you are scared or bored or selfish. At the end of said journey you are altered, but is it a better you, or just an old damaged version of the dreamer kid you started out as?

For this belief alone, I say that the books were decent because they achieved their purpose. The topics approached are more adult, the characters different from the plethora of fantasy heroes, the elements that seem to randomly appear get resolved somewhere in the far future rather than in the confined timeframe of an "episode". I loved the concept and therefore I liked the books.

However, that doesn't mean everything is rosy in Fillory. The characters are barely built up, the reader starves for some understanding of why people do the things they do or even think or feel in a certain way. Important influences such as home, childhood, parents, siblings, good friends are being ignored and abandoned, while the action of the people in the books are more often described than explained. Satirical references to well known works in the fantasy and science fiction genres pepper the books, but those stories at least attempted some consistency, while The Magicians, especially the Fillory part, feels like an LSD trip of an autistic dork.

The worst sin the books commit, and that is in direct conflict with what I think their goal was, is to make the characters almost impossible to empathize with. All of them move through the story like pieces on a board, almost indifferent to their surroundings and the people that accompany them and mostly annoyed. Whatever deep feelings they do have come out as quirky and obsessive, rather than real. It was with great dissatisfaction that I realized that the character I most identified with and believed real was The Beast, which is a terrible villain for most of the first half of the story. People died, were hurt, tortured and violated, resurrected and I couldn't care less. Mythological monsters and weird random creations were epically battling at the end of the world, and I was just bored, waiting for something interesting to happen.

Bottom line: good idea, bad implementation. Interesting to read, but hardly something that I would recommend as good writing.

I'm seeing a pattern here already. After The Expanse, which surprised me with how good the TV show was compared to the books, now The Magicians does the same. There is something to be said about hindsight and when you are adapting a series of books for the small screen you get a lot of resources that the writer himself did not have when he began. I have a feeling that many things that happened in the first season of the TV series will not even happen in the second book. The plot has been changed as well, quite a lot, to the point that now I will be reviewing a book that has at most half of it to do with what you might have seen on TV and another half that you probably won't see even in the future.

In The Magicians, the first book in the series with the same name, Lev Grossman describes a pretty dorky character suddenly finding that magic is real and he is a magician. But while it starts like the typical fantasy story, it continues quite differently, with a school of magic that doesn't seem to care about its students much, a way of learning and doing magic that is never quite explained, but described as tedious and difficult, and an overall depressing view on the world. The main character isn't even very heroic, quite the opposite, he really does think and feel like a 'dork'. If anything, he is a coward and a person who's few feelings are confused and pretty much self involved. His friends are none the better and the entire thing soon started to take a toll on me, who failed to empathize with anything and anybody.

Another issue with the book is that it is rarely consistent. Things happen without much explanation and then they turn into others. Modern culture references mix with awe of magic and then seriously fucked up shit, only to slip into irony or even slapstick comedy. It gets the reader curious about what is going to happen next, but always on the brink of "why am I reading this?". Myself I am sometimes completely engrossed in a bit of the story only to see it end abruptly and leading to nowhere. Doors to other realms are opened and nobody really cares for it for any reason other than to become kings and party all the time. People die or characters do some really shitty things, but the others are all calm and going on with their lives.

So yeah, I don't know if I should recommend the books yet. The show is levels of magnitude better so far, in story, consistency and character development. Even if I could buy into the whole borderline autistic asshole of a main character, which I was ready to, the sudden and often context switch made me really difficult for me to enjoy the series so far. However it is original and I have not read a book that sees the world quite in the same way. If you are tired of the same old fantasy stuff, The Magicians is a bit more adult and hard to put in a clear box, touching real young people topics, like sexuality, alcohol, drugs, depression, uncertainty, the search for happiness.

Nemesis Games felt like a fixer-upper. The authors had already established a pattern in the books from The Expanse, mainly a psychopathic villain and the motley crew of the Rocinante saving the world through bouts of coincidence and luck that are impossible to believe, and so seeing the exact same formula used again in the fifth book was a disappointment. However, they had another issue: the characters of the story were not very clearly defined. Having hinted since forever that each of the people on the ship had a heavy past, James S.A. Corey decided to explain almost all of those pasts in this book. The fact that the disaster was epic made the book easy to read through, in that "what happens next" trance, but it felt the book version of an elevator show. It even ended badly, with conflicts unresolved and a cliffhanger "to be continued" scene at the end. The sixth book of the series, Babylon's Ashes, is supposed to be published in April this year and seriously I am asking myself if I want to continue reading it.

To be honest, the book was not bad. It was just so recklessly slapped together using book writing rules that it felt like a commercial TV show. And I don't mean one of the good ones like, ironically, the first season of The Expanse, I mean those long winded cop shows that lead to nothing. I wasn't the only one to notice that the characters in the series have not really evolved one bit since they were introduced, despite having passed through five separate world saving scenarios. Taking a page from their mentor, George R.R. Martin, the authors just let the alien presence linger in the shadows, having no role whatsoever besides the one of stage prop. Meanwhile, all the conflict, all the struggle is between ordinary humans. This appeals, but then it bores. And yes, I have to admit to myself, the feeling I am left with after reading Nemesis Games is boredom.

Perhaps if at least one of the books would have explained the actions and motivations and background of the villains, other than being sick in the head, I would have liked the series more. I know that there are short novellas that try to do that and I did try to read some, but after a few tens of pages I gave up. If the books feel like an endlessly rehashed formula, the novellas feel like those quotes from fictional people and books that some sci-fi writers adorn their chapters with. If I make efforts to feel anything for the people in the books, I feel absolutely nothing for the sketched out secondary characters in the novellas.

So there, after reading the five books one after the other like there was no tomorrow, my final verdict is 'meh'. Perhaps they should have hired Brandon Sanderson to finish up the series. That guy is good at that. Hey, Brandon, can you write three books in The Expanse, starting from the second book, Caliban's War, and ignoring the rest?

Cibola Burn is the book that worried me the most. James S.A. Corey had created a world in which the Solar System has been colonized and Abaddon's Gate, the third book in the Expanse series, had ended with humanity gaining access to one thousand new star systems. I liked the Solar System background and I really thought the fourth book was gonna suck. Well, while being some of the same old thing as the other books and maybe even better written - so a better book - it also sucked because I could easily imagine Picard and The Enterprise going on a mining colony to settle a territorial dispute and, beside being PG-13, having almost nothing changed.

The plot of the book is about Holden and the Rocinante being sent to mediate a situation between the representatives of an Earth corporation and the people who had landed on the planet before the corporation had even filed a claim. You have your familiar characters like the crew of the Rocinante and Miller and even Havelock (Miller's former partner, now a security employee of the Earth corporation), you have your psychotic leader types that mess everything up while the good guys hesitate to just shoot them, you have the very human characters with children that need to be saved, you have the overwhelming but dumb alien presence and the snowballing crisis that drives it all. I thought the story was a bit of a rehashing of the same ideas and therefore I enjoyed it less than I would have if I had read it standalone. I know that successful series are based on successful books and must present kind of the same so to not alienate its readers, but as the intergalactic situation changes dramatically, damn if I don' feel the plot should vary a little, too.

Given that science and technology have always played a big part in the Expanse, you get to see more attention to the details than from other authors, but so far Cibola Burn felt to me like the least scientifically accurate so far. And yet I liked it, because it is well written and it drives the reader through the story and makes most characters likable and one wonders what the hell would they do if they were in the character's shoes.

Cibola is the Spanish transliteration of a native name for a pueblo (Hawikuh Ruins) conquered by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, also one of the seven mythical gold cities that the conquistadors searched for in vain.

The authors known as James S.A. Corey have planned the series of books The Expanse to have three volumes. As such, Abaddon's Gate feels like a wraparound of the stories so far, while also remaining a good standalone feature. However, because of the overwhelmingly positive response for the series, it was continued for another three volumes, and now three more are announced. There are also various novellas in between books. That is a problem, since this book ends up undoing what the first two started. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, just be warned that this review may contain spoilers, without which I couldn't possibly comment on the plot of the book.

If you are only interested in my general opinion of the book, I believe it is consistent with the quality of the second. There are more characters, but also less compelling ones. There is a great mystery, but a rather bland one. There is a danger, well... several of them in succession, but they feel a bit artificial, just to keep the tension going. I am not complaining, but I am also not thrilled. As in Caliban's War, there are several characters that seem put there just to annoy me. There is this lesbian preacher that always needs to save the souls of everybody around, for example; she kind of felt like someone nagged the writers to put more progressive characters in, like writing about giant alien artifacts in space is not progressive! Fortunately, she is also important to the plot, so she is not just added there like condiment on food, yet the parts of her philosophizing about the meaning of God bored me to tears. Then there is a psychotic captain that doesn't seem to be a person at all. He just randomly appears and does stuff, and I am not the only one noticing this. And there are more, but I don't feel the need to complain that much. Here be spoilers!

The story revolves around a ring like structure that the alien "protomolecule" has constructed outside the orbit of Uranus. A random ship goes through revealing it is in fact a wormhole. An entire fleet of ships gets in, for various reasons, and again Holden and his crew are in the middle of it all. Yet their roles are quite limited up until very close to the end of the book, the main character here being the sister of Juliette Mao who seems to be seriously unhinged, moving from dangerous psycho killer to kind person who wants to fix things. Quite a lot of psychos in this book. The end opens up a wormhole hub, thus allowing access to the stars. And that is what I take offense with.

You see, the beauty of the series, as made clear by the TV show actually and less by the books, is that it presents a plausible solar human occupation, something close by, that we could achieve in about a century or so, given the magical fusion Epstein drive. It goes into the social, the economic, the political, less in the technical, but still quite a lot. It brings hope. Then there is this alien thing that we don't understand which throws a wrench in our understanding of our place in the Universe. So much to explore there (unintended pun, I assure you). Yet, the end of the third book in The Expanse opens up the stars, even more magically than the Epstein drive, ending the promise of a realistic hard science fiction universe and going towards the implausible and yet so overused "humanity among the stars" trope. I really hope they don't fuck this up for me!

Bottom line: I feel like this book had flaws in its characters, while the story was kept ablaze just by random dangers and conflicts that did not engage me as a reader. Yes, I wanted to see how it all unfurls, but I couldn't care less about the people involved. While it certainly has kept me entertained and it is a good book, I couldn't help begrudging this as well as the ending, which for me ended the promise of exploration and colonization of the Solar system, while going into that all too trodded interstellar medium (hearing me about it it seems like it is seething with stuff, but I mean the literary medium).

P.S. Abaddon was a gate associated to the realm of the dead from the Hebrew Bible.

The second book of The Expanse is much better written than the first, however the story is a little weaker. There are more of the details one would already be familiar with from the TV show, the character of Chrisjen Avasarala is introduced and chapters are written from the perspective of many more characters than just Miller and Holden. That means there are many more chances to completely dislike a chapter if you hate the character. For me, that character was Prax, someone who would endanger everybody and himself with random emotional outbursts. Perhaps he was put there just to offset the slightly similar behavior of Holden, who now looks like the paragon of professionalism in comparison.

The plot revolves around yet another alien infestation, this time on Ganymede, only it is not clear who or what is actually responsible. The already angered Mars and Earth navies use this as a pretext to attack each other, while the Rocinante crew find themselves agents of the OPA, sent to find out what happened. As opposed to Leviathan Wakes, the book adds two major female characters, Avasarala and Bobbie, a Martian marine, and a lot of the story is about their interaction. In truth, what the Rocinante does on Ganymede is almost inconsequential until they make contact with the two women, which felt like the main characters of the book, if I had to choose. This is also a sign of a better built world, in which one has to struggle to identify the lead characters.

While the book was clearly better (some even suggest it is the best in the series), I didn't find myself attracted so much by the story. Instead of a mystery, like in the first, we pretty much discover from the beginning what is going on and only halfheartedly root for the characters to get in the same position the reader has been all along. I like Avasarala's character, but in order to show how badass she is, we have to go through all the political machinations in the UN which I couldn't care less about. Bobbie was slightly more interesting, but she starts off with such low confidence that until she gets to embrace her role there is so much filler. And Prax... don't get me started on that asshole! He is central to the Rocinante crew quickly finding out what has happened, but for the rest of the book he just drags along. He would have been a perfect character to be killed off, adding to the darkness of the tale.

And I think this is where the books and the TV series diverge the most. While the show is perfectly content to show a dark, hopeless world, the books fight to maintain some sort of feeling of normalcy, of hope, leading to reasonably happy endings. The show recognizes that in a Solar System built on exploitation, armed spaceships and politics there is no hope for the little man, there is no silver lining, there are just people trying to survive while colossal forces push them around like leaves in the wind: another reason to watch the series, at least the first season, before starting reading the book.

Bottom line: Caliban's War, by James S.A. Corey, contains no reference to a character called Caliban, which is a Shakespeare character. In the play The Tempest, Caliban is a part-human monster and slave who rebels against his masters. Even starting from the title, the authors spill the beans on what the story is all about. While I enjoyed the book and now I am reading the third one in the series, I can't help wishing they would have maintained the tension and mystery of Leviathan Wakes.