30. Goliath, Scott Westerfeld
These books are excellent and I'm sad that I've finished them. This third volume especially gets points for not overwhelming me with the romance story, for introducing Nikola Tesla in all his batshit glory, and for the best illustration of a loris wearing a fake mustache I've ever seen. If you like steampunk, or alternate history, or war stories, or fun things, you should probably read these books posthaste.
I'm still kind of shocked that Westerfeld wrote both these and the Uglies books. The level of quality of the writing, the characters, the world building, is so vastly different - Uglies not only isn't on the same level as Leviathan, they don't even occupy the same hemisphere of literature.
31. Know No Fear, Dan Abnett
The reason to plow through Deliverance Lost is pretty much so you can read Know No Fear. I was looking at the most current list of Horus Heresy books and their authors, and it's pretty clear that Games Workshop knows where to get the best quality work - of seventeen novel titles (not including short story compilations), four of them are by Abnett and five are by Graham McNeill (I recently finished The Outcast Dead by McNeill). There are a few others who are definitely quality authors, and I look forward to seeing more of their work (Aaron Dembski-Bowden and James Swallow, particularly), but Abnett and McNeill pretty much have a monopoly on the best titles in this series. That said, I wasn't fond of the pacing of about the first third of Know No Fear - Abnett writes the book it present tense, and the beginning is SO heavy with foreshadowing that it feels weighty and plodding, rather than tense. But once the main battle started I was on the edge of my seat - it definitely packs the gut-punching emotional weight and heartbreak that I've come to expect from Abnett.
These books are excellent and I'm sad that I've finished them. This third volume especially gets points for not overwhelming me with the romance story, for introducing Nikola Tesla in all his batshit glory, and for the best illustration of a loris wearing a fake mustache I've ever seen. If you like steampunk, or alternate history, or war stories, or fun things, you should probably read these books posthaste.
I'm still kind of shocked that Westerfeld wrote both these and the Uglies books. The level of quality of the writing, the characters, the world building, is so vastly different - Uglies not only isn't on the same level as Leviathan, they don't even occupy the same hemisphere of literature.
31. Know No Fear, Dan Abnett
The reason to plow through Deliverance Lost is pretty much so you can read Know No Fear. I was looking at the most current list of Horus Heresy books and their authors, and it's pretty clear that Games Workshop knows where to get the best quality work - of seventeen novel titles (not including short story compilations), four of them are by Abnett and five are by Graham McNeill (I recently finished The Outcast Dead by McNeill). There are a few others who are definitely quality authors, and I look forward to seeing more of their work (Aaron Dembski-Bowden and James Swallow, particularly), but Abnett and McNeill pretty much have a monopoly on the best titles in this series. That said, I wasn't fond of the pacing of about the first third of Know No Fear - Abnett writes the book it present tense, and the beginning is SO heavy with foreshadowing that it feels weighty and plodding, rather than tense. But once the main battle started I was on the edge of my seat - it definitely packs the gut-punching emotional weight and heartbreak that I've come to expect from Abnett.
2 comments:
Bill has my copy of Age of Darkness still. That has a huge number of the autthors. Rob Sanders wrote one of my favorites in the book, The Iron Within.
You've seen OTHER illustrations of a loris in a false mustache?
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