Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: book reviews
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Primo Levi’s The Truce is a beautiful book that contains many insights into the human condition. For those who have not had the good fortune to read this masterpiece, it describes the year or so period over which Primo Levi recovered from his experience of Auschwitz and his return to Italy. Having been rescued by…
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In part 2 of this manga series, Yakumo and Haruka have to investigate the strange possession of a young woman by the ghost of a man, against the backdrop of a serial murderer in their town. The serial murder has been abducting schoolgirls, holding them for a few days and then killing them, but this…
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All this talk of human rivers and grim waves of destruction reminds me that I haven’t got around to posting up a review of my most recent reading material, Twelve by Jasper Kent. Maintaining the recent trend towards undead-themed novels, Twelve is a tale about vampires set in Russia in 1812, during Napoleon’s invasion. Napoleon…
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Flood is a disaster story of epic proportions, written by Stephen Baxter. The story follows a group of 4 friends over a 30 year period from the moment in 2012 when they make a pledge under strange circumstances to always look out for one another, as a disaster of incredible size overtakes the earth. This…
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I think everyone is probably familiar with the idea of this novel, which is the original tale of Pride and Prejudice set in an England beset by a plague of zombies (or “unmentionables”). I’d been meaning to see how this story worked for some time now but, sadly, it was a little disappointing. The basic…
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I devoured this novel in 4 hours on the Beppu-Fukuoka return train, and I thought it was awesome. The book is an Oral History of an international zombie conflict, which starts in China and brings humanity to the edge of extinction. It is written as a series of interviews, which were intended to be incorporated…
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I started reading World War Z this morning, and so far it’s excellent but the central conceit – that it’s a factual account written in the aftermath of a zombie plague – just doesn’t hold up, because the introduction presents information so implausible that you can’t trust the credibility of the author. I mean, sure,…
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This is the third book I have read in the Takeshi Kovacs series, by Richard Morgan. It’s set maybe 100 years after the last one I read, Broken Angels (which I seem strangely to have neglected to review) and features an older, much angrier Kovacs returning to his homeworld, Harlan’s World, for personal reasons. The…
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I received The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, as a christmas present, and the lazy season being as it is started reading immediately. I was initially interested and a little disappointed, but the book soon turned a corner and became an excellent and impressive read. The book is set in a medium-future post-collapse Bangkok, after…
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As part of my new year plan to improve my Japanese, I am on a manga collecting binge, starting with Psychic Detective Yakumo (Shinrei Tantei Yakumo,心霊探偵八雲) by Manabu Kaminaga. This is a series of case files about a cynical and slightly misanthropic college student called Yakumo, seen mostly through the perspective of the slightly eccentric…
Compromise and Conceit 