Review: Full Fathom Five

posted in: Blog, Reviews | 0

Full Fathom Five (Craft Sequence, #3)Full Fathom Five by Max Gladstone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m reading this series slightly out of order, though luckily the stories are mostly self-contained. Having just finished it, my feeling is that FFF is a better story than Three Parts Dead, though of course the first volume has the added weight of having to introduce world and characters from scratch, while FFF doesn’t bother too much explaining gods, Craft, and walking skeletons to first time readers. Only … (Read more)

Review: The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home

posted in: Blog | 0

The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (Fairyland, #5)The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Endings are tricky things. They don’t really exist, as the narrator helpfully reminds us, and yet, at the same time, the point where you do stop talking does create a rift between before and after, said and unsaid, known and imagined. September and her friends will have many adventures after this book is closed, but a cycle has been ended, a … (Read more)

Review: Forest of Memory

posted in: Blog, Reviews | 0

Forest of MemoryForest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story plays with the themes of memory, recollection, and authenticity. Did something really happen if no one was there to record it? Is an account true if filtered by our fallible memories? If someone tells a story, can we ever be sure they’re not lying?

Some people found an anti-technology message in this story. I really don’t. It just asks some important questions about a technological … (Read more)

Review: Word Puppets

posted in: Blog, Reviews | 0

Word PuppetsWord Puppets by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good collection, with many strong (and some less, but still enjoyable) pieces that showcase Kowal’s evolution as a short fiction writer. Most of these I had read before, either on the author’s website or on different magazines, but they didn’t lose anything on a second read.

The last three stories of the volume, including Rockets Red, original to this book, share the same universe as the extremely … (Read more)

Review: Speak Easy

posted in: Blog, Reviews | 0

Speak EasySpeak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this on a first read. While Cat Valente’s writing style is always luscious and overflowing like a fountain, perfectly capturing the slang, essence, and style of the 1920s, I don’t think it helped favourably the pacing and narrative of the story. Barely over 140 pages, it felt enormously longer to read. What seemed to be the story of Zelda turned out to be … (Read more)

Review: Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon

posted in: Blog, Reviews | 0

Castle HangnailCastle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Haunted castles! Stitched-up minions! Walking suits of armour! Bats! donkeys! Several kinds of not-quite-dragons! And a 12-year old Wicked Witch who isn’t exactly who she says she is. These are the ingredients of Ursula Vernon’s latest novel and all I can say is I need a sequel now.

If you read my other reviews you already know what I love about Ursula’s books: the humour, the clever resolutions, … (Read more)

Review: Ready Player One

posted in: Blog, Reviews | 0

Player one Player one by Ernest Cline

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 stars, really.
Before elaborating, I’m going to quote from two other reviews here on Goodreads because I think they summarize my opinion quite well.
Flannery: “This book is nostalgia porn.”
William Cline: “Ready Player One doesn’t draw from 1980s popular culture; it just name-drops it all over the place.”

First things first: I liked Ready Player One, it’s a solid first book, and I’m curious of what else … (Read more)

The road to

posted in: Blog | 0

The following post stems from matters of feminism / gender studies, but doesn’t really offer much insight into either of those apart from the personal ramblings of a white cis dude. So, feel free to skip it, unless you want a brief insight into how my mind works.

*

When you’re walking with a discrete amount of people for a certain time, eventually you’ll see them split up into three main groups: some rushing up ahead, others lagging towards the … (Read more)

Review: The Seventh Bride, by T. Kingfisher

posted in: Reviews | 0

The Seventh BrideThe Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“When your future husband is a mad sorcerer, following hedgehogs sometimes seems like the only option.”

Initially born as a retelling of Bluebeard, this story stands on its own and becomes something else entirely. For one, most of the wives are still alive in this version, and for some of them that’s definitely not an improvement.

Kingfisher/Vernon has a rare skill, in that she can imbue a book … (Read more)

Birdman and the Hugos

posted in: Blog, Reviews | 0

Since the snow had finally decided to give us a cease fire, and since all my American friends had been raving about it, yesterday we decided to go see what Birdman was all about.

Birdman really is a fantastic movie, both for the story, the acting, and the direction. Every single choice points to its focus on duality, real and imagined, stage and backstage. It’s made to look like it was shot all in one take, and there are very … (Read more)

1 2 3 4 5 43
http://iangazzotti.com/author/ian-gazzotti/page/2/
iangazzotti.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-39
57274
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:SFV566UX2JQ2NKOUKROUINUDACLZVSMS
<urn:uuid:a7202133-8c9a-4bc3-bab7-82aba13a83f9>
2017-09-22T15:24:26Z
94.23.64.24
text/html
sha1:X2BKE55LELF6WQOMUSPCW45CESGPDPUG
<urn:uuid:1a84b32a-2fc4-4ad2-bba5-2ab437664fb0>
http://iangazzotti.com/author/ian-gazzotti/page/2/
length
response
<urn:uuid:753d653d-2f0b-44a6-9b7f-1466e0624378>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-178-166-219.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-39
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf