last reads

The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams Publishing information: Paperback; 783pgs Publisher: Daw; 30 Nov 1989 ISBN: 9780886773847 Series: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn #1 Copy: Out of pocket Reviewer: Tyson Amazon Synopsis: "A war fueled by the dark powers of sorcery is about to engulf the peaceful land of Osten Ard - for Prester John, the High King, slayer of the dread dragon Shurakai, lies dying. And with his death, an ancient evil will at last be unleashed, as the Storm King, undead ruler of the elvish-like Sithi, seeks to regain his lost realms through a pact with one of human royal blood. Then, driven by spell-inspired jealousy and hate, prince will fight prince, while around them the very land begins to die. Only a small, scattered group, the League of the Scroll, recognizes the true danger awaiting Osten Ard. And to Simon - a castle scullion unknowingly apprenticed to a member of this League - will get the task of spearheading the quest for the solution to a riddle that offers the...

From the Tundra to the Trenches By Eddy Weetaltuk Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016 $24.95 Canadian/ $27.95 US Reviewed by Kenn Harper To say that Eddy Weetaltuk lived an eventful life, unlike the lives of his fellow Inuit, is an understatement. He was born in 1932 on Strutton Island in James Bay, one of twelve children. His surname, he points out, means “innocent eyes” (and should really be spelled Uitaaluttuq). His grandfather, George Weetaltuk, was a guide for the film-maker Robert Flaherty in the making of his ground-breaking documentary, Nanook of the North . Eddy’s childhood was what one would expect for an Inuk boy growing up in the 1930s and 40s at the southern limit of traditional Inuit land, in James Bay and on the Quebec coast – periods of joy and hunger in the comfort of a large family.  He went to school in Fort George, and finished the eighth grade at boarding school. By the time he reached adulthood, he was multi-lingual, speaking English, Inuktitut, Frenc...

Year Zero by Rob Reid Narrated by John Hodgman Publishing information: Audible ISBN: 9780345534415 Standalone Copy: Out of pocket Reviewer: Tyson Audible Amazon Synopsis: "An alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet. Worse, they were lawyering up. . . . In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe—and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry. Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. And boy, do they have news. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on humanity’s music ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest ...

Cam Baity and Benny Zelkowicz are pleased to share an excerpt from  Blaze of Embers,  the conclusion to their Books Of Ore series. Micah realized that work in the camp had stopped. Feeling warm all of a sudden, he shed the thermal blanket and found that his skin tingled in the night air. The hair rose on his exposed arms. There was a strange scent too. Not harsh and metallic like most of Mehk, but sweet and rich, almost like roses. Watchmen stood alert. Workers clustered together, all of them staring off to the left at something on the horizon. The Shroud was churning. Clouds formed. Not the scrap-metal clouds of bullet rain, but soft white ones, like cumulus clouds back home. They bubbled out from the wall of fog, growing and rising. And . . . glowing? And coming at them. The air was hot now, and Micah felt sweat beading on his forehead. There was pressure in his ears, a squeezing sensation that swallowed up the sound around him.  “Get those jets up and running!” Goodwin...

The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Salesman by Larry Correia Narrator Adam Baldwin Publishing information: Audible Publisher: Audible Studios; 24 May 2016 ASIN: B01D0E075A Standalone Copy: Free at Audible Reviewer: Tyson Amazon Synopsis: "Have you ever seen a planet invaded by rampaging space mutants from another dimension or Nazi dinosaurs from the future? Don't let this happen to you! Rifts happen, so you should be ready when universes collide. A policy with Stranger & Stranger can cover all of your interdimensional insurance needs. Rated "Number One in Customer Satisfaction" for three years running, no claim is too big or too weird for Tom Stranger to handle. But now Tom faces his greatest challenge yet. Despite being assigned the wrong - and woefully inadequate - intern, Tom must still provide quality customer service to multiple alternate Earths, all while battling tentacle monsters, legions of the damned, an evil call center in Nebra...

Red Sister by Mark Lawrence Publishing information: Kindle Publisher: Ace; 4 April 2017 ISBN: 9781101988855 Series: Book of the Ancestors #1 Copy: Provided by publisher Reviewer: Tyson Amazon Synopsis: "I was born for killing – the gods made me to ruin. At the Convent of Sweet Mercy young girls are raised to be killers. In a few the old bloods show, gifting talents rarely seen since the tribes beached their ships on Abeth. Sweet Mercy hones its novices’ skills to deadly effect: it takes ten years to educate a Red Sister in the ways of blade and fist. But even the mistresses of sword and shadow don’t truly understand what they have purchased when Nona Grey is brought to their halls as a bloodstained child of eight, falsely accused of murder: guilty of worse. Stolen from the shadow of the noose, Nona is sought by powerful enemies, and for good reason. Despite the security and isolation of the convent her secret and violent past will find her out. Beneath a dying sun that shines upon...

Relics of the Franklin Expedition: Discovering Artifacts from the Doomed Arctic Voyage of 1845 By Garth Walpole Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017, $39.95 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore Garth Walpole was an Australian archaeologist who early on became fascinated with Franklin’s final expedition, and who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the relics recovered from it by various searchers and held in the National Maritime Museum, London.  In later life he decided to expand this research and publish the results as a book, and had completed most of this work before he sadly succumbed to cancer in 2015. Before his death he had asked Russell Potter to edit the work for publication, and it has now been published by McFarland (who also brought out Glenn Stein’s Discovering the North West Passage ). With the first major exhibition of the relics in more than a century due to open this summer, publication could not have been better timed, despite the poignant reminder that the author did not live to se...