Tag: Books

Book Review | The Nightmare Collective, edited by PlayWithDeath.com

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Summary

The Nightmare Collective is a curated anthology of horror short stories that’s guaranteed to keep you up at night. With 12 terrifically spine chilling short stories, this anthology contains contributions from some of the best young horror writing talent out there, and was curated by the editors of the PlayWithDeath.com, the premier destination for online horror entertainment. If you’re searching for stories that will frighten you to your very core, look no further.

TheNightmareCollective

The Nightmare Collective is a horror anthology edited by PlayWithDeath.Com and published in April 2015. Admittedly, I first picked up this eBook on a whim. I’d been wanting to start reading more horror and had discovered that I could get some inexpensively on my tablet. I bought this book last October, but have been saving it to have at the ready for this year’s Halloween season. Anthology’s are often a gamble, but I wanted something I’d go into with no expectations or prior knowledge. The source itself is rather unassuming too. PlayWithDeath.Com as a site is rather modest in appearance and quantity of content, and hasn’t had any apparent activity in over two years.Read More »

WWW Wednesday – 2017/10/11

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WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

TheNightmareCollectiveI’m in the middle of a number of books now, The Nightmare Collective, a horror anthology edited by PlayWithDeath.com, being the one I’m giving the most attention to. As a $0.99 horror book on Kindle I honestly wasn’t expecting much, but I’m happy to report there have been some really good stories in here. A lot of them have great pacing and they’ve been good at avoiding predictability for the most part. The story “The Feral One” by Kyle Yodlosky struck a particular cord with me for how wonderfully bizarre it was.

StarWarsFromACertainPointofViewI also couldn’t resist starting Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, a new anthology from Del Rey featuring more than 40 authors for a collection of 40 stories to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars. Each story is told from the perspective of a background character in A New Hope. So far I’m really enjoying how they tie into moments and sequences in the film, which the book goes through chronologically. I’ve read three stories so far and I haven’t even gotten onto Tatooine yet.

TheNewPrinceOfPowerLastly I’m reading The Incredible Hercules: The New Prince of Power by Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, et al, the follow-up book to the Hercules series I’ve been reading over the last year and a bit. There have been some nice chapters dealing with the aftermath of the finale book, though it all seems a little silly considering what I know gets restored in future stories. Nevertheless, a fun read thus far, seeing all the characters from across the last several volumes coming back, as well as continuing the story of Amadeus Cho.

Recently Finished

Guards!Guards!I finally finished Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett over the weekend — check out my review here — which took me disappointingly long compared to how quickly I was able to get through Neverwhere. Alas, I am a little behind schedule. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this book. The Discworld is a great fantasy world as a whole, but there is something about Ankh-Morpork itself as a city that is a lot of fun to dive in to. I love the ridiculous yet functional way everything is run through guilds, including legal thievery. I love the cast, who were the first I ever came to know of in this series, and it feels weird that I won’t be encountering them again for another eight books.

Reading Next

HellboyAnAssortmentOfHorrorsI’ve got a pretty set schedule for October still, so next on my list is Hellboy: An Assortment of Horrors, the new short story collection edited by Christopher Golden. I’m planning to start it shortly after I finish The Nightmare Collective, which should be any day now.

Book Review | Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Ryan1 Comment

Summary

Insurrection is in the air in Ankh-Morpork. The Haves and Have-Nots are about to fall out all over again. Captain Sam Vimes of the city’s ramshackle Night Watch is used to this. It’s enough to drive a man to drink. Well, to drink more. But this time, something is different – the Have-Nots have found the key to a dormant, lethal weapon that even they don’t fully understand, and they’re about to unleash a campaign of terror on the city. Time for Captain Vimes to sober up.

Guards!Guards!

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett is the eighth novel in the comic fantasy Discworld series, and the first to feature the character Sam Vimes and the guards of the Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork. I have a particular relationship with this cast of characters, having first been introduced to the entire series through them in Men at Arms years ago, the 16th Discworld novel and second book to feature Captain Vimes and the Watch. This had an unfortunate effect on me coming into this one, however, because while I was excited to read about the characters again, I was also a little dismayed that because I’d read the sequel, which refers to the events of this book, any suspense or tension might be diffused. Fortunately, the book had more in store for me than I expected.Read More »

WWW Wednesday – 2017/10/04

Ryan5 Comments

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WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

Guards!Guards!Due to some current travel and misuse of reading time over the weekend I’m still about 100 pages shy of finishing Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. Regardless, it is quickly becoming one of my favourite of the Discworld novels I’ve read thus far. I had already expected to really like it, but it has taken some unexpected turns that have made it even better. A figure I thought was only going to be a plot device became a key player in the plot and I love where it has gone thus far. I should have it finished soon, with a review up within the next week.

ThroughTheLookingGlassI started reading the final volume of the Guardians of the Galaxy run I’ve been going through, Through the Looking Glass, but was disappointed to find that once again half of the issues in the book tied into an event. I’ll be damned if I read chapter 2 and 7 of a story without filling in the holes, so I put the book down to pick up the event comic and read it at a later date. It’s a shame Marvel never let this series stand on its own much at all.

Recently Finished

It’s been a slow week, unfortunately, so nothing finished for this week. I’m hopeful this will be a lull in an otherwise busy month.

Reading Next

ItDevours!Since I haven’t dug into any horror just yet, here’s the third book I have planned for reading this month: It Devours! by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor, which will be released on October 17. I’m a big fan of Welcome to Night Vale and loved the first novel, so I’m really excited to see what strange and intriguing places this book goes to.

Book Review | Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Ryan1 Comment

Summary

Under the streets of London there’s a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: neverwhere.

Neverwhere

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman is a 1996 urban fantasy novel, and the companion novelization of a BBC television series of the same name, also written by Gaiman. This was a book I purchased amongst a stack of others by the author, already being a big fan of his work. As a result, however, I actually knew very little about it. I didn’t even know it was a TV series until I started this review, though clearly the book has overshadowed it. It was a rather unique experience for me to go into a popular book by a beloved author while having virtually no idea what to expect.Read More »

WWW Wednesday – 2017/09/20

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WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

NeverwhereOver the weekend I started reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, about a hapless hero named Richard Mayhew who helps an injured girl on the street named Door, which gets him wrapped up in a previously unseen world of strange and magical beings that exist under and around London. I’ve yet to experience the full breadth and depth of this world, but Richard has started to learn that his good deed has not gone unpunished, forcing him to dive headfirst into this world to turn his life back around. I love Gaiman’s writing as per usual, but at 75 pages in I feel I should be more drawn in than I am so far. I plan to finish it this week, at any rate, so I’ll be spending a lot of time with it regardless.

Recently Finished

TheAeneidI finally capped off reading the Aeneid by Virgil, which you can read a full review of here. I still love and appreciate this sort of literature, but I have been reminded that reading stuff like this is a more laborious love than other literature for me. It perhaps didn’t help that this was my least favourite after the Odyssey and the Iliad. There were many great moments, but I never really felt a strong connection to Aeneas himself in the same way that I did with Achilles or Odysseus. Though it will be a while before I move on to this, the next epic poem I want to read is, fittingly, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

Reading Next

TheNightmareCollectiveAs I said last week, I’ve outlined some books I want to get through during the remainder of September and throughout October. I still plan to read Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett before the month is out. Hopefully I can actually accomplish that. As for October, one book looming on the horizon is an anthology of horror short stories called The Nightmare Collective, curated by the editors of PlayWithDeath.com. It’s a Kindle book I’ve had for a while that I’ve been saving for this upcoming season.

WWW Wednesday – 2017/09/06

Ryan5 Comments

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WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

TheAeneidI started reading The Aeneid by Virgil (translation by Robert Fagles), though really I’ve only read the fairly lengthy introduction by Bernard Knox thus far. As with copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey I read, Knox’s introduction does a great job of giving historical context and background information on the poem and its author. A lot of the information I recall having been taught before, but it was great to get a refresher. It feels a lot better to have this primer than simply jumping into the poem.

GuardiansOfTheGalaxyGuardiansDisassembledI’m also in the middle of Guardians of the Galaxy: Guardians Disassembled. Not only am I excited I’m finally reading about Agent Venom’s time on the team (the main reason I even picked these up) but it finally feels like an honest-to-god story about this team without loose ties to other story lines or playing a more supporting role. They’ve already started to plant the seeds that they’ll explore where the symbiote (Venom’s alien suit) comes from, and though some of that has been spoiled for me I’m excited to read it firsthand.

Recently Finished

DarkDiscipleI finished reading Star Wars: Dark Disciple by Christie Golden just before the weekend last week. Had a good train ride into Toronto from my parents’ to finish it off before Fan Expo. I post a review on Monday, which you can read here. I enjoyed this novel quite a bit, especially having just concluded the series it was originally written for. What I imagined as I read as routinely in the style of the show. It even felt episodic at times, where the endings of certain chapters could easily have been the closing to credits in an episode. It is very much a novel for fans, however. If by chance someone tried getting into Star Wars with this book, I imagine they would find it more confusing than anything else.

Reading Next

NeverwhereThough I still have two Guardians of the Galaxy volumes left after the current one I’m on, I find myself looking toward other comic books series I need to complete. At Fan Expo I managed to hunt down the last two volumes of The Dark Tower prequel comic books series, so now I will definitely start reading those soon.

Otherwise, I want to get myself reading some Neil Gaiman again finally. I have two of his books on my 2017 to-read list, yet haven’t touched either yet. I will probably start Neverwhere once I’m finished with The Aeneid. Hopefully that will be within September, as I want to read some horror for October.

WWW Wednesday – 2017/07/26

RyanLeave a comment

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WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

Regrettably, I have not made any progress on Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones. I just didn’t really make time for it over the last week, so I’m resolving to finish with it by next week. I like having supplemental readings, but it does reach a point where I feel I’ve been on them for too long and I must push through.

TheMightyThorculesOtherwise, I just started reading The Incredible Hercules: The Mighty Thorcules by Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, et al. I’m only a couple of issues into the volume, which have only introduced the different stories going on. Hercules, along with Zeus who is now a child with no memory, is tricked into pretending to be Thor to help fight dark elves (it has yet to be revealed why) and Amadeus Cho is in a strange small town taken over by what appear to be glowing space brains. The series has been a lot of fun thus far and this volume doesn’t look like it’ll disappoint. I especially like how petty Herc is when comparing himself to Thor.

Recently Finished

SistersBrothersCoverI finished reading The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt over the weekend and posted a review yesterday. I think I still like Undermajordomo Minor best of his novels, though this one is definitely close behind it. It ended up being much more of an odyssey than I expected, with the duo’s story being a lot more about the strange people, turns of fortune, and encounters they have on their way from Oregon City to Sacramento. Going in I expected it to be more about the developments that take place after they find their mark, but that’s really more of a chapter in the journey.

Reading Next

DarkDiscipleI still intend to read The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway over the next week, and I will probably read the final Incredible Hercules volume I own as well so I can shelve that series finally. I’ve also realized it would be a good idea for me to read Star Wars: Dark Disciple by Christie Golden relatively soon. I bought it a while ago just to have it, but I’ve actually restarted watching the series The Clone Wars (after I got frustrated with its donkus chronology last year). As it turns out this novel was meant to be an eight episode story arc before the series was cancelled, so once I finish the series I’m going to dig right into this book, which I’m much more enthusiastic about now.

WWW Wednesday – 2017/07/19

Ryan2 Comments

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WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

ReflectionsI’ve made a small amount of progress with Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones. I’m starting to notice information getting repeated, such as her being forbidden from reading “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” from The Wind in the Willows. It’s a collection of speeches and essays from over the course of her career, though, so I don’t fault it. The last three chapters I read actually delved deeper into writing advice and her approach to it. I’m happy to find yet another big-name author discouraging the creation of massive outlines for novels, in favour of a more flowing creativity, as the idea of crafting one myself sounds a bit agonizing.

SistersBrothersCoverI’ve been reading The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt as well, which I had actually hoped to finish by now, but life got a little in the way. Nevertheless, I’m enjoyed the book quite well. While very much a Western, it feels literary too. The story of these two brothers so far has been a strange odyssey of violence and quirky encounters. The one brother, Charlie, seems more deplorable, but at times Eli (the other brother and narrator) seems more unstable than he lets on. At just over halfway through, I’m excited to see where the story is heading.

Recently Finished

PrincessLeiaCoverOver the weekend I read Star Wars: Princess Leia, the Marvel Comics miniseries by Mark Waid and Terry Dodson. It takes place just after the destruction of the Death Star in A New Hope, telling the story of Leia rallying together surviving Alderaanians from around the Galaxy in an effort to preserve the legacy of her destroyed world. It was a fun little side-story that wasn’t really needed, but gave another opportunity to see the iconic princess in action. There’s also a nice little moment of Force-sensitivity on her part that nods to her true heritage.

DeathCoverI also read Death by Neil Gaiman et al, the spin-off from The Sandman series also by Gaiman. The book collects various one-shot issues about the character Death, as well as the two previously separate miniseries about her. They tell wonderfully poignant and sentimental stories about life and death, as well as continuing to show the lives of some of the characters that appeared in The Sandman: A Game of You, a surprise that made it all the better.

Reading Next

TheOldManAndTheSeaCoverI’ve definitely got a lot of comic books lined up for reading, such as some digital volumes of Guardians of the Galaxy, a couple more Star Wars volumes, Paper Girls, and Incredible Hercules. Can’t really say which I will read next, but I want to get through all of these and more this summer.

Otherwise, on a trip to the bookstore the other week I got some classic novels, 3 for $10, one of which was The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Since it’s rather short I might knock that out sometime soon, so at least one of these books doesn’t gather dust after being impulsively purchased.

WWW Wednesday – 2017/07/12

RyanLeave a comment

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WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading

ReflectionsI’m still in the middle of Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Dianna Wynne Jones. It fell to the wayside during most of my reading time since last week, so I didn’t get much further along in it, which I’m okay with for the moment since it’s meant to complement what I more strongly focus on. An essay of particular note was about her realization of responsibility to a reading audience of children, particularly in regards to opening up imagination; considering what you thought otherwise not possible. In doing so she derides other authors (unnamed) who reduce their characters’ journeys to mere flights of fancy, where in the end they escape into fantasy had no bearing on reality. It was a fascinating angle to consider.

Recently Finished

LovecraftCountryCoverI’m happy to say I finished reading Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. Though not perfect, it was a great novel that I’m sure I’ll be recommending to anybody who asks about a new book to read. I didn’t mention this in my review, so I want to take a moment to gush about the binding of the book. Not only is it’s artistic style made to look like a pulpy horror novel from the 1950s, but the texture feels gritty as well. Part of its design makes it look worn too, as if it’s been sitting in a used bookstore for a long time, having changed who knows how many hands.

Reading Next

PaperGirlsVol1Like I said last week, I plan to start reading The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt any day now. I really liked Undermajordomo Minor and the unorthodox style of Ablutions was certainly memorable, so I’m hopeful I will really like this novel as well.

Otherwise, I intend to get through some comic book trades that I’ve been stockpiling lately. Fortunately for the sake a space most of them are digital editions. It’s hard to say which I’ll start first, but I’ve got some Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy volumes on my tablet that should do just fine. I also picked up volumes one and two of Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn, which I also want to start to broaden by comic book horizons a little.