★★☆ Stardust / Neil Gaiman

Well, I'm not a great fan of Gaiman. There are people, who love him and who hate him. And I'm still somewhere between. In this specific case I remembered really nice movie based on the novel. After a few years time wiped the story from my memory and I've decided to have some fun - this time with the book. Unfortunately, there is nothing amazing here. Nice, simple story based on humour and grotesque, pastiche of adventure literature and fairy tales.

★★★ Watership Down / Richard Adams

Fascinating. I'm always amazed how much about people you can discover reading animal classics written by Anglosaxon authors. If you finished with Orwell, London and Curwood, this one is good choice for the next reading.

★★☆ Abchazja / Wojciech Górecki
★☆☆ Morfina / Szczepan Twardoch
★☆☆ A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science / Barbara Oakley

List of all 2017 books.

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

The first rule about Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club, sorry.

Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Takes place 160 years after Robots of Dawn. Gladia decides to help her former lover's descendant at Aurora's request.
Her robots, Daneel and Giskard knows there's a imminent crisis and struggles with the constraints of the Three Laws of Robotics.

<span class="bold">The Blind Dragon</span>

I'll start by pointing out that seeing "A Tale from the Canon of Tarn" leads one to believe it's a novel that takes place in the setting of an existing series, yet there is no series and this actually seems to be the author's first and, so far, only book. And then there's the fact that it's listed as having 456 pages, but only has the equivalent of about 150. So it's a good thing I picked it up when it was free, or I'd be feeling quite cheated.
Can't complain about the writing though, and it's also quite visual despite being so short, being filled with detailed descriptions that let the reader get a good idea about the part of the world that is presented. That's a tiny part, however, and most of the action takes place within a matter of hours, the rest being concentrated in a few brief but crucial moments that follow. So what is there is quite good, but there's far too little of it, and this also fails to provide enough of a chance to actually connect with the characters, or for them to develop in any meaningful way for that matter.
On that note, Dagger's powers and Anna's skills are a bit too much considering their age and lack of proper training, and the part that details fitting them with gear is quite odd, considering the circumstances. Also, quite a number of Dagger's actions and movements don't seem right, considering how he sees and knows things. Maybe not major issues in themselves, and maybe that also goes for the fact that the author seems to have been inspired to a fair extent by Temeraire, some themes from A Song of Ice and Fire, and probably also some other series I couldn't identify, or for the odd choice to include a sketch along with the description of the Dallanar Sun when it just has placeholders instead of the portraits and the tear at the center is not inverted, but, again, there just isn't enough content for the problems not to stand out.

Rating: 3/5

The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King. I read The Gunslinger a few years ago and thought it was interesting, but I figured I'd stop there and not get into the Dark Tower series since the reaction to the ending seems so divided. But I got an itch to at least check out the next book. Maybe I'll just go one book at a time and quit when it stops being fun.

Anyway, this was okay. The plot isn't very interesting as it's basically a padded out "get the cast together" thing, what most books would do over a few chapters before getting to the meat of the story. The setting consists entirely of a beach with giant lobster-things that come out to feed at night, and New York in different time periods. I just wish a little more had happened. At least make something come out of the ocean besides the "lobstrosities", I dunno.

What I really like about it, though, is that there's a metaphysical aspect that you don't often see in fantasy stories anymore. Most modern fantasy writers would probably say King is doing it all wrong, that there's no world-building and the magic system isn't explained or something like that, but I like that the story has this dreamlike fogginess to it. Roland is obsessed with finding a dark tower because he just is. He needs to find these people in other dimensions because he needs to. He gets them by entering these doors that appear before him in random places. Why do the doors appear? They just do. Why is it all about Roland? It just is. It reminds of stuff like that movie Circle of Iron.

The Rest of the Robots by Isaac Asimov
A collection of pre-space travel robot stories.

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans
A scout, running away from an enemy patrol, led them to an old wizard's hut. In appreciation of his hut being destroyed, the old wizard enchanted the scout's sword.
Some details are hard to fathom for me and needs a bit of suspension of belief.
IE. Ethshar wields a 3 million men conscript army [with medieval tech?]. The Holy Kingdom of Ethshar and the landlocked Northern Empire have been at war for centuries. There are many kinds of magic apparently.

Camelot 30K by Robert L. Forward
Earth finds and makes contact with intelligent life on a frozen planetoid somewhere on the Kuiper Belt. Earth sends a small manned mission there to communicate with a kerack wizard named Merlene there. Civilization on Ice is composed of city states ruled by hive queens. The techs and culture is reminiscent of King Arthur. The differences between hot humans and tiny ice cold keracks is too great for direct contact. So the humans use kerack model (drones) telebots.
Keracks and other lifeforms on Ice are composed of so so and atom counts and isotopes. I know names of elements but I'm not a technical minded person, so I don't understand the significance of it.
There's a surprising plot twist that is literally explosive.

I was very lazy reading books the last years. But i finished two recently. The last months i managed to finish two books.
Both from a trilogy called Chronicles of Siala. Book 1 is called Shadow Prowler and Book 2 was called Shadow Chaser.

Right now i am reading the last book of the trilogy called Shadow Blizzard. The author is Alexey Pehov.

It’s fantasy with some humour about a thief that signs a contract that leads into a big adventure. I did describe it that vague on purpose, since i don’t want to spoler anyone, because the books are that good.

Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams

It turns out you can't simultaneously know the question and the answer to life, the universe and everything without them cancelling each other out and taking the universe with them, and then being replaced with something even more bizarrely inexplicable.

I only understood and could visualize about half of it, I think the movies help. But I enjoyed it and it's odd sense of humor.

★☆☆ The Guns of Avalon / Roger Zelazny
★☆☆ Sign of the Unicorn / Roger Zelazny
★☆☆ The Hand of Oberon / Roger Zelazny
★☆☆ The Courts of Chaos / Roger Zelazny

No way I'm continuing with The Merlin Cycle. Thanks a lot, people, who recommended me these :|

★☆☆ Ziarno i krew / Dariusz Rosiak

It explains nothing. Chaotic sequence of meetings, situations and images. Disappointing.

★★☆ Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours / Robert C. Pozen

Just fine. Nothing new, if you already know some basic methods and ideas or read a few books about being productive, orginizing priorities, time management etc.

List of all 2017 books.

Oh, I forgot to post the first here a week ago, so posting both now.

Magician: Apprentice

If I’d try to describe this book in one word, it’d be “immature”. In case of some of the characters, at least before certain points, that makes sense, but the term applies to pretty much everything: Writing style, presentation, dialogues, some behaviors of characters which definitely shouldn’t behave in such a manner, a fair number of events and, in a way, the manner in which everything develops. In addition, it reads more like a series of moments, almost a collection of connected short stories in a way, due to how much time passes between the events that are presented and how locations change and apparently important elements seem to simply get dropped in order to move on to something else.
Still, it’s not a bad book if you take it for what it is, and it does openly present itself as heroic fantasy, therefore not aiming to match the more notable fantasy works released since, as those tend to fall under epic fantasy. You won’t find deep immersion, particularly detailed worldbuilding, notable bits of wisdom, characters to truly care for or other reasons to get emotionally involved, but it does its job to provide another fix of adventure for someone looking for it, and set it in a world that’s not our own. As such, teenage guys seem to be the target audience, but maybe that’s just what fantasy was back then.

Rating: 7/10

Magician: Master

Oddly, seeing as the two are actually a single book which was split for this extended edition, Magician: Master is noticeably better than Magician: Apprentice. The first few chapters are more or less the same, “immature” remaining perhaps the most accurate way to describe pretty much every aspect, but chapter four suddenly takes everything to a different, higher level. While reading it, it struck me as something which must have been written by an entirely different person, and a much more skilled one at that.
After that it goes up and down and dedicating more than two chapters to the aftermath makes for a rather anticlimactic finale, but there are a fair number of good sections in between and, on average, it remains a clear improvement. The genre even switches from heroic to epic fantasy, though the story remains focused on a few characters and some small areas, a short scene towards the end underlining just how small. The action is still terribly rushed, a whole lot is still skipped and details are still lacking, harming depth, immersion and character development, but somewhat more attention seems to be paid to the parts taking place in Kelewan and the overall impression is of one book that had everything not essential to the story itself cut out of it, while I was saying that Magician: Apprentice at times seemed more like a collection of connected short stories. A few bits of wisdom may even be said to have been thrown in as well.

Kept thinking of Betrayal at Krondor while reading this. In spite of technical limitations, made more notable by the fact that I played it several years after release, I definitely remember how well it managed to generate the feeling of immersion, and that I described it as “playing a book” when mentioning it to someone a decade or more later. Now I wonder how my impression of that outstanding game would have changed if I’d have played it after reading some of the relevant books… And if it’s not a case of a game being better than the books…

Rating: 8/10

Silverthorn

After the improvement and the greater scope of Magician: Master, Silverthorn marks a rather brutal return to immaturity in pretty much every aspect and, for the most part, a simple heroic fantasy adventure. It’s quite forced as a sequel at first, but eventually it finds its way and elements start to connect, albeit not necessarily in a smooth or, at times, even reasonable fashion, so it eventually grows and opens the way to another bigger story, but it does not contain it.
Expectations are very different today, or at least mine are, but, keeping them in check, I wasn’t exactly bothered by anything while reading it and it actually went faster and smoother than I expected. Taken for what it is, assuming teenage boys as the target audience once again, recognizing the fact that the fantasy genre has improved massively in the decades since it was written, and not expecting details that aren’t absolutely necessary to the action, carefully developed and developing characters, or significant depth or wisdom, there’s not much that can be said to be particularly wrong with it. That’s just far from being enough, however.

Rating: 3/5

The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein
A volume of "Future History" stories and novellas in one big novel.

The Imperial Stars by Poul Anderson
3 novels in 1 book; Ensign Flandry, A Circus of Hells, The Rebel Worlds.

★☆☆ A Little Life / Hanya Yanagihara

It was a torture. You have been warned.

★★☆ His Master's Voice / Stanisław Lem

A bit disappointing, but the whole idea is great, unique and inspiring, as always for this author.

★☆☆ Hunger / Martín Caparrós

Explains nothing. There are a few interesting thoughts, but, come on, there is 800 pages of repeating scenes and socialist cliches. It could be interesting 200-pages-book containg some smart observations.

★★★ The Time Machine / H.G. Wells

A true classic - a bit rusty, but still charming!

★★☆ The Nonexistent Knight / Italo Calvino

It reminds me "Źródło Mamerkusa" and I think that sense of humour, ironic character creation and story was even better there. Still interesting reading.

List of all 2017 books.

The Third Garfield fat cat 3-Pack by Jim Davis
I haven't read Garfield in 20 plus years. So it was a pleasant find in a thrift store.
3 book volume of previous works in one bundle. Garfield loses his feet, Garfield tips the scales; Garfield sits around the house

1491 by Charles C. Mann
People may agree or disagree on the findings of this book.
Very educational reading on the recent research on the archeological findings of the Americas before European contact and post contact. It seems like we always underestimate American Indians.

You are my new best friend. :D