That's a great book.

*** I Love You Kirk *** by Asia Argento

Written in 1999, this book by the Italian movie star Asia Argento is a collection of texts she wrote over the years since the mid 80's. If you've seen her movie "Scarlet Diva", it's a good companion as a good bunch of the texts are auto-biographical and she speaks about her family, her lovers, life, despair, etc. The texts are short (between 1-3 pages), are written in various styles, sometimes accompanied by some drawings and most of all, they're put in a total random order. This inherent sense of chaos emerging from this collection fits Argento perfectly as it reflects her personality at that time of her career and more generally, it increases the impression of going through her scattered memories and feelings just like you would find ripped-off pages of the personal diary of a girl/woman. Naturally, if you're not a fan of Asia Argento, you probably won't find any interest in it. Contrary to what the title would make you believe, it was only published in Italian and French (both editions are out of print).



*** Like I Speak *** by Aldo Sterone
(original title: "Comme je parle")

Aldo Sterone is a famous Algerian youtuber currently living in UK who's been making videos about politics and religion for years. This first book (out of 3) is his auto-biography. Naturally, his story is at the total opposite of most youtuber's cosy lives as it's rooted in the history of his country.

The beginning of the book tells about his teenage years in the 80's where he has to deal with the local young thugs. Afterwards, he describes the rise of islamism in Algeria and the social turmoils in the society. Then the real troubles begin with the 1991 elections and he flies to Switzerland for studies but he's not allowed to stay after some time so he has to come back in the middle of the Algerian civil war. There he witness the atrocities of the conflict and the civilians being caught between the islamists and the military government. He then definitely leaves his country for Europe where his desires for a better and honest life are crushed.

Even if it's written with an obvious personal point of view, it's a quite interesting read for seeing the 80-90's history of Algeria through the eyes of a casual citizen. The only drawback is as it's self-published on Amazon, there are some spelling errors and missing words but it's a minor default as the content is more important.

<span class="bold">The Final Empire</span>

Was a bit worried when I started reading this, but I shouldn’t have been, as it really is good epic fantasy. Though this rather tends to keep away that, well, “magical” atmosphere that some other works in this genre have, having such a clear and clearly explained magic system is interesting as well, and this system is rather different from what you may expect, which also goes for certain particular plot twists. But that atmosphere probably wouldn’t have fit anyway, as overall The Final Empire is gritty and somewhat grim despite the occasional humor. Wouldn’t call it dark though.
There are some too fortunate events here and there and the characters may occasionally get away with more than they should, but until part five this is all quite fine. However, said part five does rather push it, seeming somewhat rushed and chaining together such a series of fortunate events and shockingly positive developments that tends to go too far. One crucial shockingly positive development in particular sure made me roll my eyes and shake my head…

Rating: 4/5

I had a nasty head cold recently and wanted something I could read without having to think or concentrate too deeply, so I grabbed this book called Kyrik: Warlock Warrior by Gardner Fox. It's a short book from the 1970s that Fox presumably wrote to cash in on the era's high demand for sword-and-sorcery fiction. It's a got a nice Ken Barr cover with a guy riding a giant vulture/dragon thing while a naked woman clings to him.

Kyrik is a great warrior-king who was "frozen in carbonite" 1000 years ago by an evil sorcerer who usurped his throne, but he's awakened by a witch who wants Kyrik to get revenge on the sorcerer's descendant on her behalf.

Despite the title, Kyrik isn't much of a warlock. He's like 90 percent warrior, maybe 10 percent warlock. He has a special sword (it's not really clear if it's magical) called Blue Fang, and he can call on the aid of a literal sex goddess, which is a nice arrangement because she likes to show her appreciation for her worshipers through casual sex (rather a better deal than Elric has with Arioch). That's pretty much it - if Kyrik needs some serious magic done, he needs to ask someone else to do it for him.

The book is basically adequate but nothing special, which is about what I expected. The plot isn't particularly interesting and Kyrik is a bog-standard barbarian hero. The worst thing about the book is that Kyrik often draws on his life from 1000 years ago to get the upper hand in situations, such as digging through the floor boards of an inn to recover a magic artifact he hid there back in the day. That's a whole millennium we're talking about and apparently the place is still in business and nothing ever rotted or needed replacing. I know fantasy settings often feel frozen in time but it's a bit much.

Basically this is the kind of book that's totally nonessential, but it can briefly scratch an itch if you've read the better examples of the genre.

<span class="bold">The Well of Ascension</span>

Sanderson's mind seems to work like that of a crime writer, but on a much bigger scale. He'll take you every which way, whether intentionally or not he'll leave some things that are easy to figure out so you'll perhaps miss other clues while waiting for him to finally admit what you knew all along... And then everything will suddenly get turned on its head when it comes to the biggest matters, apparently out of nowhere until you'll think it over again and realize all signs were there all along, only you didn't pay attention.
That level of care and that attention to detail make it stranger to see mistakes slip through, yet there are some. Not talking of typos, though I actually spotted a couple, nor about the summary of the first book being placed at the end, nor even about the Ars Arcanum, also at the end, including the new characters but missing new metals. Rather, talking of things like an obviously wrong vote count or more than one instance of Vin burning a metal she should have very clearly and specifically been out of, taking more after that additional impossible burn instead of before. But, while jarring, these are little things, the main frustrating issue for me being how Vin and, to a lesser extent, Elend behaved when it came to their relationship, though that fits their characters and was fortunately stopped just before becoming truly awful.
With that out of the way, must return to the depth and detail, to how pieces keep clicking together as more is revealed, yet this time I'm referring to the world and its history instead of mere action and current events. If I pretty much took The Final Empire as just a book, albeit a good one, after The Well of Ascension I'm wondering how much am I willing to get into the extended lore, starting to dig through things not included in the main books. Not sure whether I can afford to fall into that rabbit hole, but it's enticing enough that avoiding it may require effort.

Rating: 4/5

The Hunter From the Woods, by Robert McCammon. This is a belated follow-up to McCammon's 80s novel, The Wolf's Hour, which was about a Russian-born British secret agent during WWII, Michael Gallatin, who also happened to be a werewolf. If that sounds complicated, just think of it as "James Bond is a Nazi-fighting werewolf." I'm not sure why it took McCammon so long to do a sequel because the first book is fantastic; maybe the sales just weren't there at the time and it ended up being more of a cult thing, and then he quit being a horror writer altogether for a good while.

This is more like a short story collection that covers different times in Michael's life. First with him in Russia as young man, his recruitment to the secret service, and then three novellas during the war. The first one is a nautical adventure, the second has Michael reluctantly teaming up with a German flying ace to safely cross the Sahara, and the third has him going undercover in Berlin to seduce and kill a woman who's been reporting underground members to the Nazis. McCammon actually keeps the werewolf aspect in the background for the most of the book, which would be suicide for most writers, but he's a good enough storyteller that it doesn't matter. If he had just published a collection of WWII adventures, it would have still been very entertaining.

What I like about the guy's writing is that he always plays his stories straight and sincerely. Most modern, younger writers would take a concept like this and get way too jokey and self-reflexive with it. It wouldn't be pulp, it would be "pulp". McCammon is clearly aware of what he's writing, but he never sells out the integrity of his story and his characters all come across as believable and vulnerable.

There are multiple hooks for sequels included, so hopefully another book in the series won't take another 20-30 years to be written.

★★☆ One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way / Robert Maurer
★☆☆ Wings of Wrath / C.S. Friedman
★☆☆ Adept / Adam Przechrzta
★☆☆ The Robe / Lloyd C. Douglas
★★☆ Akademia Pana Kleksa / Jan Brzechwa
★☆☆ Osama / Lavie Tidhar
★☆☆ Czarna kolonia / Arkady Saulski
★☆☆ Grimm City. Wilk! / Jakub Ćwiek
★☆☆ Krfotok / Edward Redliński
★☆☆ Channel SK1N / Jeff Noon
★★☆ The Call of the Wild / Jack London
★★☆ Gardening / William Walsworth
★☆☆ Moby-Dick or, The Whale / Herman Melville

List of all 2017 books.

Brain Wave, by Poul Anderson. This is generally considered the book that put Anderson on the map as a sci-fi writer in the 50s. The premise is that the Earth emerges from an energy field that rotates around the galaxy every few million years that has the effect of suppressing intelligence in creatures with brains, so suddenly every human and animal on earth instantly leaps forward in intelligence. Animals become as smart as people, the mentally retarded become normally intelligent, and geniuses become super-geniuses. It's a big concept that could be explored from many angles and Anderson touches on a number of them. He's an excellent writer - there are many acclaimed sci-fi writers I've read that I've found too boring to stay engaged with their ideas, but I have yet to read an Anderson book that doesn't at least have an enjoyable style to it.

I do think this book has some shortcomings, though. Some threads interested me more than others; I would have liked more focus on the animal kingdom, but that's more in the background of the story. There's a section on a small number of people in Russia becoming psychic that looked like it was going to be interesting but it never comes back after a single chapter. It's kind of scattershot like that. I also think Anderson, despite generally being very good at understanding the nuances in how different types of people think, makes some generalizations that didn't strike me as consistent with his premise. For instance, the idea that super-smart people would all stubbornly refuse to do manual labor, with the implication that people only accept jobs like that if they're stupid to begin with. I've known many smart people who work such jobs but get their intellectual stimulation elsewhere. And if the people truly are super-smart, wouldn't they have a greater understanding of the importance of such work, especially if their egos vanished as Anderson depicts?

<span class="bold">The Hero of Ages</span>

If I was saying that I wouldn't call The Final Empire dark, The Hero of Ages definitely is, despite an ending that doesn't quite fit. On the other hand, if The Well of Ascension at times seemed to me to read as I expect a good crime novel would, only on a much bigger scale, The Hero of Ages didn't leave the same impression. There is a solid direction, there are revelations that build upon each other, the scale is even grander, and the stakes, the importance and impact of actions and events, as high as possible while confined to a single planet, but perhaps it moves too quickly and goes too far, leaving behind a feeling that details, even important ones, are overlooked in the process, that it occasionally falls apart at the seams.
It definitely is written well, and it also touches upon quite a number of issues and occasionally offers arguments which may or may not be considered bits of wisdom, likely depending on whether or not the reader agrees, so I have no reservations in stating that it's a good book. At the same time... I expected more. Or, more exactly, I expected better, though I do now realize that The Well of Ascension may have set the bar too high in certain aspects and made me carefully search for certain elements, looking for flaws and dismissing potential positive aspects if they didn't mark a significant improvement, which may have been too much to ask. For example, after having correctly figured out the identity of the spy in The Well of Ascension pretty much right away, I felt that the author may have allowed me to do so in order to lull me into complacency and then surprise me with even greater revelations, while now there was no similar feeling after also immediately figuring out the identity of the Hero of Ages. Yet is that because there really was nothing greater hidden beneath, or is it because I was somewhat inoculated against that feeling, searching too carefully and expecting too much? I couldn't really say...

Rating: 4/5

<span class="bold">Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking</span>

Unusually for me, read it in Romanian, so things may have gotten lost in translation and I may have failed to make some connections or even pay enough attention at times. Still, sure seems well written and properly researched, though the notes that weren’t just references should have been footnotes, as I had to keep looking at the notes section every few pages to see whether there were any of that kind connected to what I had just read. It does a great job of presenting how introverts function and why, including details that may be somewhat surprising, stresses their strengths and advantages, and definitely properly presents the problems with the Extrovert Ideal and shaping society according to it. If it’d have stopped at that, it’d have been a truly outstanding work.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. I may even mention how the author rather discards what may perhaps be at the outer edge of introversion and gears the book toward a need for balance, but I’m mainly referring to all those parts focusing on how to go against who you really are if you’re an introvert, even more so if it’s for a career or organized education, focusing on those as a person being a huge problem in itself in my view. There was also the comparison between the Western Extrovert Ideal and typical Asian behavior, which to me was a comparison between two deeply flawed views and behavior patterns. Or the compromise between “Greg” and “Emily”, which seems in no way fair or even tolerable for “Emily” to me. But most infuriating of all were all the parts of the chapter about children telling parents how to make their children behave less like what comes natural for them, stressing the need for methods that are much more considerate than the norm in no way excusing supporting the view that people must change themselves to fit society’s ideals at least to a significant degree instead of the other way around. Yet somehow, despite gritting my teeth because of that, I can’t quite take away that fourth star.

Rating: 4/5

★☆☆ The Map and the Territory / Michel Houellebecq

After being intrigued by The Elementary Particles and quite satisfied with Submission I've decided to read another book written by Houellebecq. It was chosen by random, I think I bought the book for some ridiculous price and thrown on my bookshelf to read someday.

Well, the day has come. And I'm afraid it's the last book by Houellebecq read by me. It's not better or worse then the previous ones. It's just still the same story - sad people in dying French society, living without hope, values and purpose. In this particular case we've got a picture of French cultural elite. I'm not smart enough to write it clearly in English, but I believe I can understand what author is trying to tell me and I'm not sure if I need another book to understand it better.

List of all 2017 books.

'Salem's Lot, by Stephen King. I liked it. One of my pet peeves about so many vampire stories today is that everyone has a "fresh take" on the concept that seems to pull away too much from the classical vampire story, but King's take is that he doesn't really have one. Instead of screwing with the folklore or doing sci-fi vampires or "they're like superheroes that just have to sleep during the day" or whatever, his angle in this book is to emphasize the sensory and psychological impact of the vampire on ordinary people. How they stink, the deadness of their eyes, how they impose their will on victims, etc. The master vampire is really just an old-fashioned continental type that could have been played by Lugosi, but the way King writes him he comes off like a force of nature.

The atmosphere is also nicely done. Even in the early chapters, it always feels like there's something just out of glance watching the characters. It takes a while for the book to get going, but when it does it gets quite fun.

On the other side, the characters aren't really all that interesting. I didn't mind them in the sense that they're supposed to be regular folks you can relate to, but they never quite came alive for me despite the first half of the book being all about getting the reader to know them (already in this, his second credited novel, King was overwriting). King's dialogue is pretty lame. He tends to write better when he's restrained - when he tries to go big it just comes off wrong, such as the funeral scene in which the victim's dad starts cussing and then dives into the grave, screaming "You're not burying my boy!" That was one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've read in a while.

★☆☆ Pokonaj stres z Kaizen / Jarosław Gibas
★☆☆ Hel³ / Jarosław Grzędowicz
★☆☆ Dolina Issy / Czesław Miłosz
★☆☆ Not Peace But a Sword / John Henry Newman
★☆☆ Lexikon des Unwissens. Worauf es bisher keine Antwort gibt / Kathrin Passig
★★☆ The October Faction, Vol. 1 / Steve Niles
★★☆ The Sermons of the Parish Priest of Ars / Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney
★☆☆ How to Be Happy and Live Life to the Fullest / Kevin Kerr
★☆☆ The Monk / Matthew Gregory Lewis

List of all 2017 books.

Ohh, so bad year for me :( No time for books at all..

But, i've read One Hundred Years of Solitude from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and it's stunning :)
I can recommend it to everyone :)

★★☆ Nine Princes of Amber / Roger Zelazny

I knew it will be concise or even laconic, but I didn't expect that it is also so shallow. "Suspension of disbelief" does not work in this case. Poor psychology and story based on shortcuts and bad solutions (deus ex machina). Disappointing.

List of all 2017 books.