I quite liked this book. I haven’t read any of Jasper Fforde’s other novels (best known for his Thursday Next series), but that may change in the near future. The Last Dragonslayer is, by all means, a Young Adult novel and stays safely in that demographic.

Like I said, it’s been two months. All I can really say is that I liked the book, you should read, and I look forward to the second book in this trilogy. If you want a more detailed review, check out Molly’s review. She read it more recently than I. :-)

 The Last Dragonslayer

By Jasper Fforde

Release Date:

2012 (USA)

Two Things I Like:

1) Fun take on fantasy and wizardry

2) Set in a modern setting

Two Things I Hated: 

1) Safe

2) Great, another story about an orphan. 

Why I Read It:

Trying to fill the Harry Potter shaped hole in my soul.

Gun to my head, would I recommend this book?

I have been craving a good mystery novel lately. Something about fall and the change in temperature and it getting darker early makes this time of year the perfect time to curl up under a blanket and read about murder. I was thrilled when, upon visiting Powells not to long ago, I learned that Cornell Woolrich’s Night has a Thousand Eyeswas republished. Woolrich is notoriously out-of-print, so I end up picking up his novels used whenever they get stocked at Powells.

Night has a Thousand Eyes is a unique take on the murder mystery genre. It is a murder mystery without a murder. You see, the plot revolves around Detective Tom Shawn who, while walking home one night, prevents a wealthy young woman, Jean, from killing herself. She then tells Shawn the events leading up to that point. Basically, there’s this man who has been able to predict the future and is never wrong. The girl’s father used this man’s knowledge for his own personal gain, but the man has predicted that a lion will kill the girl’s father. Both Jean and her father become depressed believing this to be true. After all, the man is never wrong. Shawn enlists the help of his fellow detectives to prove the man is a fraud and to keep the father alive past his fated death on a particular day.

Woolrich is a master of suspense. There are scenes in this book that were just so compelling that I couldn’t put them down (i”m thinking in particular of the roulette scene). These scenes may seem to drag out, but they prolong the suspense. It’s kind of like a balloon that is slowly inflating until it pops. The whole novel lives up to this method and never resolves the question of whether the fortuneteller is a fraud or the real thing until the very end. There is much that could probably be said about the ending, but this is not the place. Go read the book, then we can talk.

There are some slow parts however. Jean recounting the events leading up to her attempted suicide, which including meeting the man and his predictions, take up about a third of the novel. It’s only after Shawn commits to saving her father from being killed by a lion does the pace quicken and things start happening.

Overall, Night has a Thousand Eyes is a fantastic mystery that I can’t recommend enough.

 Night has a Thousand Eyes

By Cornell Woolrich

Release Date:

1945

Two Things I Like:

1) Fan of the author

2) Suspense!

Two Things I Hated: 

1) Starts slow

2) The father’s lack of common sense

Why I Read It:

Read other stories from this author and loved them all.

Gun to my head, would I recommend this book?

You are about to read the review of If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino. As you read this on your digital screen, you begin to feel uneasy right from the get go. You wonder if you read the introduction sentence correctly Was it really written the the second person tense? You re-read it again, going over every word carefully to avoid confusion. You were correct. No surprise there. You are, after all, a rather smart person. You read books, have excellent taste is music and have been described as ‘the life of the party’ on more than one occasion. It is the enjoyment you get from reading books that has led you to this review. You want to know whether or not If on a winter’s night a travel by Italo Calvino is worth your time but you’re too distracted by the way the review is written and is failing to mention anything at all about the book other than it’s title, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and the author’s name, Italo Calvino.

By now you’ve given up on the review and have turned to Amazon to read the customer reviews. You know in your heart that these reviews, while numerous, will never actually be useful. Your eyes skim the first review that catches your eye, and it does so because this review is written in caps. “This book blows. If I could give it one star I would. DON’T EVER READ THIS BOOK! EVER. EVER. EVER!!” You notice that the reviewer, Bill Fred, was able to achieve his goal of giving the book one star. As you scroll down, you notice other reviews from other reviewers who have rated the book various numbers of stars. They seem to be all over the place ranging from one star to five stars. You skim a couple more reviews, but they are too erratic and never give a good picture of how you would enjoy the book if you were to read it.

You come back to this review, the one that you are reading right now, in hopes of it making more sense the second time around. You re-re-read the first sentence. Nope, still awkward the third time around. You wish that the author of this review would mention some of the bits you gleamed in the Amazon reviews such as the frustration some people had about large portions of the book be written in the second person. You think back upon all the books written in the second person and are fondly reminded of the Choose Your Own Adventure book series that would tell you to turn to different page numbers to make a choice. You can see how having a book written like that would be off putting. But the reviewers also spoke about the various short stories that are intertwined throughout the novel and move the plot forward. One reviewer called this “gimmicky”. You suddenly remember one of the tweets you read from the author of the review you are reading right now complain about an unspecified book with sentence that contained 190 words. That sure is a lot of words and you certainly don’t want to read a book that is full of sentences that contain a lot of works, many of which don’t add anything to whatever the sentence is trying to say, but that is okay, because, by the time you, the reader, would get to the end of the sentence, which seems to have stopped and started to many times already, you’ve already lost your train of thought and, thanks to an over abundance of commas, have forgotten what the author, or in the case of If on a winter’s night a traveler, a translator, was trying to say when they began the sentence two pages ago, which is a slight exaggeration you feel, but since it was made for comedic effect, with more-or-less success, you feel fine with letting the author’s inaccuracy slide, just this once.

By now you’re stopped reading the review and have decided that you are not the type of person who likes reviews based on If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino and therefore would probably not like the book.

 If on a winter’s night a traveler

By Italo Calvino

Release Date:

1979

Two Things I Like:

1) Some of the short storys were enjoyable to read.

2) The second person narration was fun at first…

Two Things I Hated: 

1) …but then it got old after 50 pages.

2) The story that tired the short stories together was dull and the main character seriously has book-ADHD.

Why I Read It:

Duel review!

Gun to my head, would I recommend this book?

The Long Earth is one of those books where, after I’ve finished the last page, I am unsure whether or not I would recommend it to somebody else. There are a lot of negative aspects to this novel, and I am unsure if the bad outweigh the good.

I’m getting ahead of myself. The Long Earth is about the sudden discovery of a device called a “Stepper.” It’s nothing more than a potato with some wires and circuits. But on top of it is a switch that can be flipped in two directions, EAST and WEST. Flipping the switch takes the user to a parallel earth. As it turns out, there is an infinite number of earths and people can continue stepping east and west for as long as their little hearts desire. This is called the Long Earth. The tricky part on these new earths is staying alive. Each of these new earths are without people but are, to some degree, a variation of the earth we know, called Datum Earth in the book. These earths are filled with dangerous, fantastical creatures and sometimes extreme weather conditions. But all that isn’t what the book is really about. The Long Earth is about the main character Joshua, who can step without need of a Stepper, traveling in an airship with an eccentric Human (possible Artificial Intelligence) named Lobsang. Together they go further than any other human in search for the end of the Long Earth. Along the way they discover something else that could put the whole Long Earth in danger.

To me, it’s a very interesting concept because I love stories about parallel worlds and time travel (there is no time travel in this book… but I still like it). With each new world they stepped to I was excited to see what would happen next and how this new earth would be different from the rest. I always senced that something eventful was right around the corner, maybe on the next earth. Much like Joshua and Lobsang, I wanted to know what lay at the end of the Long Earth. It’s about exploring the unknown.

Now the downsides I spoke about are worth mentioning. The book does drag in the middle. Joshua, by his nature, likes to be alone and it a relative recluse. For long periods of time, the story would just be about their travels from earth to earth with little or nothing happening. There was no real chemistry between the two characters. When a third character was introduced to the dynamic, I ended up not liking her as much as I disliked Joshua. Lobsang is perhaps the most enjoyable characters, but he often is there for comic relief or to explain to Joshua, our everyman, what the heck is happening and why. None of the characters were relatable.

The novel itself is nicely written, I felt. While some of the descriptions of the odd animals they encountered could sometimes feel a little vague, I was okay with that since it left more to the imagination. There were also chapters that would shift to a different person’s point of view. There was one family who decided to find a better life in the Long Earth, but their son was one of the few people who could not step. They left him at Datum Earth with family. The problem I had with these short side-segments is that they never felt fully developed. They were more like snapshots than an actually addition to the main story. I would have liked to see how these snapshots related to the novel as a whole, but this only started to come together near the end of the book. I suspect the The Long Earth 2: Electric Boogaloo will bring together all these stories the author’s started to create.

As it turns out, The Long Earth is a series and ends on a slight cliffhanger as Joshua returns to Datum Earth. Overall I’m inclined to say I enjoyed The Long Earth regardless of the drawbacks. I don’t, however, know if I’ll be picking up the eventual second book in the series. It reminds me of the time I read The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks, enjoyed it and completely ignored the following two books in the trilogy.

 The Long Earth

By Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Release Date:

June 19th, 2012

Two Things I Like:

1) The overall concept of the novel

2) The sense of exploration

Two Things I Hated: 

1) Story can drag at times

2) Didn’t care for the main characters

Why I Read It:

Terry Pratchett. His name drew me to the book. After reading the inside cover, I thought I’d give it a try.

Gun to my head, would I recommend this book?