Alexander Pyles's Blog, page 14

Review: Descender #1-6

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This series was an unexpected surprise. I’ve been chugging through a lot of graphic novels/comics of late and this is one that I just have to take a moment and gush about.

The Descender series by Jeff Lemire with art by Dustin Nguyen, is a fantastic space opera. While some of the thematic elements and tropes are not too far removed from what we have come to expect. The world still has a fresh, but lived in feel that feels authentic. And I can’t go any further without affirming Nguyen’s artwo...

Review: Borne

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What a strange and wild ride. This was a really great read and anyone looking for a more “biotech” sort of dystopia, this has to be your first pick. Anyone willing to tolerate a bit of weird in the mix of their fiction, then you will be in good hands here, then again has Vandermeer ever left any room for doubt?

Borne takes place in a city, both an ancient and new place that seems to writhe with conflict and change. We follow Rachel a scavenger, who with her partner Wick, attempt to survive i...

Review: Little Fires Everywhere

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Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng has to go in as my favorite book of 2019 so far.

Wow.

This was also my first audiobook of the year and by the end, I was so pleased to have made this the first one, although I wince at following this one up. Jennifer Lim narrated this one and did an excellent job. Every syllable was carried with immense care and for great impact.

The book itself is a little disconcerting with the omniscient POV, but even as I listened to the prose by Ng goes a long way i...

2018 in Books

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Sorry for the delay, but January proved to be a very busy month. I have my recap and some favorites below, so please take a moment a peek at those. Otherwise, I read a total of 137 stories(novels, graphic novels, short stories & novellas), so don’t be too amazed by that count.

Without putting this off anymore, I present my stats for 2018 below:

Science Fiction 47 Fantasy 27 Horror 7 Romance 1 Mystery 2 Historical Fiction 4 Thriller 8 Non-Fiction 10 Graphic Novel/Comics...

Review: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

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This was a very different anthology, but a good one. Edited by by Phoebe Wagner & Brontë Christopher Wieland, we have a collection of upcoming writers who were asked to write science fiction in a new way, that imagines humanities’ future in a context of climate change, far future realities, and new understandings of culture and bodies. This is all from an outlook that is relatively more positive and uplifting then what most would find in most mainstream science fiction.

Solarpunk as a new ge...

Review: The Wanderers

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I really wanted to like The Wanderers by Meg Howrey, especially with how it was initially sold to me via the blurb: “Howery’s exquisite novel demonstrates that the final frontier may not be space after all.”(J. Ryan Stradal). At the end of the day I could only really give it two stars and wondered why I had witnessed all of this.

There’s plenty of existential navel-gazing and despite Howrey’s beautiful prose that frames these scenes, she gets trapped in narrative loops and I’m not sure I’ve...

Review: The Collapsing Empire

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I might have had my expectations too high for the writer of Old Man’s War, but John Scalzi did not exactly dazzle me with this first installment of his Interdependency Series. This was also a Hugo nomination from last year that I’m still wrapping up(got caught up on my own TBR list).

The Collapsing Empire is really about the end of a civilization, one who has built their entire way of life around “the Flow”, which is essentially a wormhole highway that connects solar systems throughout the g...

Review: Flowers for Algernon

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Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes was one of the last books I finished in 2018 and I loved it so much that I decided I needed to make it my first review of 2019. I realize this is more of a classic and many people have either already read the story(it won the Hugo for Short Story in 1960), but I need to discuss it for a second.

It wrecked me.

I listened to this as an audiobook, narrated by Jeff Woodman, who did a fantastic job. This book was by far one of the hardest things I have read/li...

2018: A Review

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So, this is much overdue and I won’t even be able to cover everything that I want to cover here, like reading/writing stats and everything else. (I’ll cover this in January.) What I do want to take a moment to reflect on is everything that happened in 2018 and what I am looking forward to in this coming year.

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Looking back

2018 had a lot of milestones for me. I finished my MFA at Seton Hill in January after spending two and a half years immersed in genre fiction. I’ve since taken months off...

Review: At The End of the Day I Burst Into Flames

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First, I want to say this book may cause you to burst into flames. At the End of the Day I Burst Into Flames by Nicholas Day is a dark, intimate, but sincere dip into the darkness of love, life, and growing up.

*Disclaimer* I did receive an ARC prior to it’s release on December 21st.

We follow Martin “Firecracker” on the day that he will go up in flames and we watch and listen to him as he goes through various thoughts and replays memories as he attempts to understand his life, love, and dea...