Tag: Fantasy

Rivers of London

I have some fantastic friends who know just what I want in my life, and this year for my birthday they treated me to a book subscription with ‘Blind Date With a Book’. For those who haven’t heard of this, the concept is that a book is wrapped in brown paper and on the outside is a few choice words that would describe that book. The idea is that you buy a book based on how it is described in a few words, rather than knowing about it. What my friends got me is just a book subscription version of that, so for the next 6 months I will be receiving a new suprise book every month. The great thing about a service like this as well is that you can choose the genres that you can receive. You can choose up to 5 genres from the list, or just choose ‘Suprise Me’ where you could end up with anything.

When making my choice, i decided to go with the ‘Suprise Me’ option because I figured if the books were going to be a suprise anyway, it might be a good opportunity to expand my reading repertoire and explore some new things.

I received my first book this week, and it was Rivers of London, the first in the series by Ben Aaronovitch. I had seen this book before and had nearly bought it but something about it just didn’t catch me so I decided to leave it so I thought it was great that I would get the opportunity to read it now.

The premise of this series (without giving anything away) is that a young cop gets brought into a world of fantasy and magic living in modern day London. He joins a team that investigates mystical crimes including for ghosts, river spirits, vampires and anything also fantastical that you can think of. It is basically Sherlock Holmes crossed with Line of Duty crossed with Harry Potter.

I think the premise of this book has some merit, however I didn’t love the execution. I think the author was trying to string the author along and allude to things that might resurface later in the book or series without explaining them, but all it felt like to me was that they were trying to drop hints on ideas that the author wasn’t able to explain or properly weave into the story, and it just leaves you feeling unsatisfied and confused about what the purpose of including it was. Having finished the book now, I am sure that a lot of the references were not important, so I think Aaronovitch would have benefited from just not including these hints at all.

Even the things that he did properly include and elaborated on more didn’t make sense. He talks about river spirits and I still can’t figure out how they work or how they are different to normal people or how their family structures work.

At the same time, there was so many storylines going on at once and I had hoped that they would all intertwine in the end and make sense, and Aaronovitch did try and do that in a sense, but in the end, it just felt rushed and forced. I would compare it to when you read Harry Potter and you get to points where you just go ‘A-ha’ and have to acknowledge Rowling’s mastery in that she had that whole thing planned out in her head from the start. This story really lacked that, and just seemed to be lots of things thrown together at the last minute.

I think the premise of the story is good and I obviously enjoyed it enough to finish it in 3 days, but I don’t think I would return for any more of his stories. Maybe this story could become an interesting movie?

I give Rivers of London 2.5 out of 5 stars.

The Final Empire (Mistborn Book One)

I used to have this old roommate a couple of years ago, and whilst I love him, he is in the best way a big nerd. He used to read these huge fantasy books that were 600 pages long and part of this intricate and complicated world, and I used to pick on him almost daily about this. I have always loved reading but these books just seemed like the epitome of nerdy books and I always thought they weren’t for me. Then all of my friends started reading these books, and swore by how fantastic they were, so eventually I got to the point where I decided I had to see what all the hype was about.

Enter The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. The sheer idea of this book intimidates me, more than 600 pages long and the first in a much longer series. I was sceptical but I started to dig in. By about page 100 I was absolutely hooked and couldn’t put it down. It got to the point where I had a sick day from work (I was actually sick, I swear), and I read about 400 pages and finished the book this day. I did nothing else.

I don’t know what it is about Brandon Sanderson’s writing, but he has a way of building this extremely complex world with so many sub plots and characters, and yet it is easy to read and follow. You find yourself enraptured by the mystery of what’s to come, and whilst some storylines (I won’t be giving away any spoilers) are slightly predictable, the overall story and ending was not at all. It also had a way of exploring real world issues, like class systems, slavery, discrimination and political systems, in a really though provoking way.

I have a pile of books I need to keep on reading, but I must admit I was close to just buying the second book of this series and keep on going right away, because I am now addicted to this storyline. I haven’t been this sucked in by a book series since Harry Potter, and I can assure you, Brandon Sanderson’s world that he is building seems much more complicated than that world.

So I want to thank my friends for introducing me to these books, but at the same time be mad. I can foresee that I am not going to have much of a life for the next few years trying to catch up on all these books. And the other amazing thing about Brandon Sanderson is how quickly he pumps these books out, I am talking multiple 600 page books a year, it’s really impressive.

 

I give The Final Empire 5 out of 5 stars. If you haven’t read it yet, then what are you waiting for? Start now, you won’t regret it (unless you have a very busy life and like sleep, then you might).