I loved Andy Weir’s The Martian, and happily dug into Project: Hail Mary (I still need to read Artemis), and was completely wowed by it. I haven’t had this sense of wonder and sense of discovery and exploration since I read Clarke’s Odyssey and Rama series. Ryland Grace, former biologist turned teacher wakes up and…
Category: The Book Shelf
Rivers of London (2011) – Ben Aaronovitch
Rivers of London, originally released as Midnight Riot before it was retitled to launch the continuing series of novels it spawned, was a wonderful surprise and a complete joy to read, and a fantastic introduction into the genre of urban fantasy. PC Peter Grant is afraid he’s going to end up doing administrative duty once…
Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953) – James Baldwin
This week sees me reading something a little different from my usual escapist fare. Recently LeVar Burton began a reading club on Fable, and while I can’t access it in Canada, they did list the first three books he was recommending, and Go Tell It on the Mountain was at the top of his list….
The Diamond Queen of Singapore (2020) – Ian Hamilton
Somehow, with all the wackiness that was happening last year, I missed the House of Anansi Press’ release of the next Ava Lee novel by Ian Hamilton. Of course, that just meant I could catch up on it now, and I won’t have quite as long a wait (theoretically) for the next one. This time…
Blast From the Past (1997) – Raymond Benson
Benson takes over 007’s adventures from John Gardner, and delivered this short story that first appeared in Playboy in 1997. Benson shows that he can tell a Bond story in true Ian Fleming style, though the ending definitely is a little more adult, but hardly surprising given the context of where it was published. James…
Panic (2014) – Lauren Oliver
Lauren Oliver’s Panic is a page-turner on a monumental scale. I can’t remember the last time I was so swept up in the narrative of a story. I had to find out what happened next. As much as I have been enjoying my foray into the tales of Ian Fleming’s 007, and the writings of…
Star Trek: The Ashes of Eden (1995) – William Shatner, with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
This week, I take my first step into what became known as the Shatner-verse, a series of Star Trek novels written by Captain Kirk himself, with the aid of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Set some months after the events of The Undiscovered Country but before the opening of Generations, Kirk isn’t doing to well with…
Cold (1996) – John Gardner
John Gardner’s final 007 novel, Cold aka Cold Fall, his sixteenth, feels a little bit more like the James Bond we know, a balance between Ian Fleming’s literary creation, and his cinematic iteration. Far more enjoyable than his adaptation of GoldenEye, the novel is split into two parts, taking place before, and then after, his…
Battlestar Galactica 5: Galactica Discovers Earth (1980) – Micheal Resnick and Glen A. Larson
The Battlestar Galactica jumps forward a ways, passing over a number of episodes (that will be visited in later books) to give us an adaptation of the three hour series opener for the ill-fated, Galactica 1980, which just didn’t have the oomph, mythos, production value or stories of the original, equally ill-fated, series, though it…
The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930) – Agatha Christie
Long before DC introduced us to Harley Quinn, a variation of the traditional harlequin character, Agatha Christie created her own Harley Quin, and introduced him to the world in a collection of short stories first published in 1930. This Harley Quinn is a tall mysterious man who appears at prime opportunities in the story, and…
