Category:

Byron

The Song of Achilles: Fans of Circe won’t be disappointed (A Review)

written by Byron

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

I really liked Circe, so I bought another, older book by its author (Madeline Miller): The Song of Achilles. I’m glad I did because it’s terrific.

The simplest way to describe it is that it’s The Iliad from Patroclus’ point of view. I haven’t read The Iliad, so I cannot really personally vouch for The Song of Achilles‘ faithfulness to the source material. However, based upon some wiki research and google-fu, I THINK all the important high points from The Illiad are preserved.

July 1, 2018 1 comment

Byron Fantasy Literary Fiction Reviews

Circe: I loved it (A spoiler free review)

written by Byron

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

Along with a few Sunday school stories and fairy tales, Greek myths were some of the first stories that I was exposed to. Before I knew anything at all about hobbits or Jesus lions, I could recite the names of all the Olympians and a few of the Titans. Jason and Theseus and Hercules and Perseus were way more familiar to little-Me than Robin Hood or Wyatt Earp or Frodo. As I got older and read more of the myths, plays, and poems of ancient Greece, unedited, I became a bit uncomfortable with the casual sexism and idiotic violence of it all. Other, later works, like the Aeneid, proved deeper, prettier, and more intellectually stimulating than the Bronze Age Greek stuff. Nevertheless, I have always had a special place in my heart for the old tales.

Circe, by Madeline Miller, therefore, proved to be the perfect book to get me out of my fiction-funk. It tells the “life” story of Circe, the premier witch of ancient Greek myth, from Circe’s point of view.

June 24, 2018 1 comment

Byron Nonfiction Reviews

Word by Word: In which a dictionary editor demonstrates that she has a way with words (A Review)

written by Byron

She thinks for a moment. “I worked really, really hard on the definition of ‘build-out,’ but I’m sure no one has ever really looked at it.”

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper is freaking terrific. I’m sure that the brilliant, clever, funny, insightful Ms. Stamper could come up with a better superlative descriptor than “freaking terrific,” but I can’t.

It’s partly a workplace memoir (“What’s it like to work for a dictionary publisher?”), but it’s also about the history and role of dictionaries in society (“prescriptive vs. descriptive”), and partly about the way that language works (however people want it to, apparently). I know, I know, that might sound pretty dry. But Stamper’s fantastic writing makes reading this book an absolute delight. I literally laughed out loud several times while reading it (although it’s not really a comedic book, per se, I am just especially charmed by a quick wit), and I learned a lot. For anyone that appreciates good writing, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Before I read this book, I tended to think of the dictionary as somehow divinely provided. It did not occur to me that actual human beings wrote the definitions, and, if I had some vague idea that they were made by a human, I had no idea how they went about it. This book made me realize the tremendous amount of work that goes into each entry. I have a newfound respect for dictionaries after reading the book. In fact, I was so enamored with dictionaries after reading Word by Word that I bought a damn print dictionary.

My Rating: 5 stars

June 16, 2018 0 comment

Byron Nonfiction Reviews

Barracoon: It’s important. (A Review)

written by Byron

“Cudjo meetee de people at de gate and tells dem, “You see de rattlesnake in de woods?” Dey say, “Yeah.” I say “If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you, why you bother wid him? Same way wid my boys, you unnerstand me. If you leave my boys alone, dey not bother nobody!”

Zora Neale Hurston interviewed “Cudjo Lewis” in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mr. Lewis was the last known person still alive that had been born in Africa, sold to Americans, and transported across the Atlantic to work as a slave. Hurston wrote his story, capturing his vernacular, but her publisher refused to print it. It’s finally been published, as Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”.

June 10, 2018 0 comment

Byron Nonfiction Reviews

Bloodlines: It’s not bad…it’s not really good…but it’s not bad (A Review)

written by Byron

Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty by Melissa del Bosque is about a FBI money-laundering case involving a Mexican drug cartel and quarter horses.

June 2, 2018 0 comment

Byron Nonfiction Reviews

The Right Stuff: Tom Wolfe wrote the hell out of this book (A Review)

written by Byron

July 4 was not the time of year for anyone to be introduced to Houston, Texas, although just what the right time would be was hard to say. For eight months Houston was an unbelievably torrid effluvial sump with a mass of mushy asphalt, known as Downtown, set in the middle. Then for two months, starting in November, the most amazing winds came sweeping down from Canada, as if down a pipe, and the humid torpor turned into a wet chill. The remaining two months were the moderate ones, although not exactly what you would call spring.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe is about the Mercury Project, NASA’s first manned space missions, and the origins of the astronaut program.

May 27, 2018 3 comments

Award Winners Byron Fantasy Reviews

The Black Tides of Heaven: A Flawed Story in a Cool World (A Spoiler-Free Review)

written by Byron

The Nebula Awards will be announced May 19, 2018. The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This post is the fifth in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novella. The Nebula defines a work as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 40,000 words. These are short books.

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang is…shoot, I’m not sure how to describe it. Others have described it as silkpunk (it’s not), Asian fantasy (kind of but not really), or some sort of epic thingy (that’s not written in the style of an epic at all). I don’t usually like to provide details of an author’s created world in my reviews because authors work really hard to introduce readers to their worlds in their stories. Who am I to short circuit that introduction? At the same time, though, I want to give MY readers, friends, and followers kind of a heads up of what they’re getting into if they were to pick the book up. So, the highlights: it is an entirely fictional world, set in an entirely fictional country that has magic, and the magic fuels technology levels to more-or-less 19th century/early 20th century. There is an “Asian” flavor, but that’s confined to pretty much names and some creature/legend stuff.

Now that the description of the world is out of the way, we come to the real question…is it any good? I don’t know if it’s good or not – I’m not some gatekeeping arbiter of all that is Good and Worthy in the written world – but I do know that it is not a book that I particularly enjoyed reading. People that share my tastes would also probably not enjoy this book too much.

May 18, 2018 0 comment

Award Winners Byron Reviews Science Fiction

Barry’s Deal: It’s a good time. (A Spoiler-Free Review)

written by Byron

The Nebula Awards will be announced May 19, 2018. The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This post is the fourth in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novella. The Nebula defines a work as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 40,000 words. These are short books.

The Half Price Books store in my town used to be in a rundown house, with a few cats running around underfoot. I’d go to the science-fiction/fantasy section, blow dust off of the yellowed pages of the paperbacks, and try to find some hidden gem by an author I had never heard of before.

Past-me would have loved to have discovered Barry’s Deal by Lawrence M. Schoen in those stacks. It’s about a chaotic good stage hypnotist con man that travels around the universe with a pet dog/buffalo/alien/thing that eats anything (ANYTHING) going to an auction for a rare bottle of liquor on a shady casino outpost on Triton. Shenanigans ensue.

May 14, 2018 0 comment

Award Winners Byron Fantasy History Reviews

Passing Strange: Not one of my favorites by the author, but still pretty damn good (A spoiler-free review)

written by Byron

The Nebula Awards will be announced May 19, 2018. The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This post is the third in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novella. The Nebula defines a work as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 40,000 words. These are short books.

Passing Strange by Ellen Klages is basically historical literary fiction involving the LBGT scene of early 1940s San Francisco with a little magic thrown in here and there.

May 13, 2018 0 comment

Award Winners Byron Fantasy Reviews Westerns

River of Teeth: An uneven alternate history of hippo-riding cowboys (A Spoiler-Free Review)

written by Byron

The Nebula Awards will be announced May 19, 2018. The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This post is the second in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novella. The Nebula defines a work as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 40,000 words. These are short books.

It’s not a caper. It’s an operation.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey should be one of my favorite books of all time. It’s an alternative-history western heist story involving a gathering of diverse, eclectic, violent individuals to accomplish a risky task. With hippos. It is as if the book had been custom designed to check off All the Stuff Byron Likes.

And yet, I don’t love it.

May 5, 2018 2 comments

Newer Posts

Older Posts