The Wizard of Dark Street, by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

Cute book. A young wizard’s apprentice is a natural magician but would rather follow in her father’s footsteps and become a detective. She gets mixed up with a somewhat silly mystery about missing party gowns and a much more serious one involving attempted murder. Light, funny, and friendly, this serves as a much better introduction to the world of fantasy than Harry Potter.

My mom gave my son an uncorrected proof; he liked it and passed it on to me. Clearly The Wizard of Dark Street is the first book of a series; it reminded me of a cross between Encyclopedia Brown and The Chronicles of Prydain. Being aimed at children, the main cases are wrapped up neatly at the end, but contains obvious villains and dangling plot lines aplenty for future volumes. An upbeat tone and positive messaging (“Neither man nor faerie can live long without hope.”) coupled with comfortable characters and easy friendships, this is a great book for any kid.

First Sentence:

“Magic is a fickle thing,” said twelve-year-old Oona Crate.

Life's Little Annoyances, by Ian Urbina

From the jerk who steals the parking spot for which you’ve been patiently waiting to the guy reclining his airline seat into your lap, from Starbuck’s insistence on calling a 24oz drink a Venti (which means 20, not 24) to shrink-wrapped CD’s that refuse to open, Urbina presents a collection of funny stories that express the exasperation we all feel at, well, life’s little annoyances. Most tales recount a bit of petty revenge, many of them quite clever. My favorite was the fellow that gets so irritated at the blow-in subscription cards in magazines that he drops them back in the mailbox—blank—so the offending company has to pay the postage. Another good one was the man who booked a room at a hotel hosting a telemarketing convention, and then starting calling every other room at 3am. This is a really quick read, fun but no real substance.

First Sentence (from the Introduction):

Most days the job ended late.

Extraordinary Engines, edited by Nick Gevers

Steampunk, the culture of modern inventions powered by steam in the 19th century, isn’t my favorite genre; I find it very hit-or-miss. This anthology was similar, a mix of good and not so good. Machine Maid by Margo Lanagan was easily my favorite, both entertaining and creepy. A young naive bride discovers she dislikes sex as much as her husband revels in it; finding that a nubile robotic maid has... other uses pushes her to commit mariticide in a most fitting fashion. Adam Robert’s Petrolpunk was a fascinating look at multiple dimensions, but as it went on got increasingly crazier until it spun entirely off its axis at the conclusion. I did like his term “steamternet” to describe the Victorian network, though. Jeffrey Ford’s The Dream of Reason was another odd one, telling of an experiment that trapped the rays of a star in a young woman’s mind using a fog that slowed light. Like I said, odd!

If you already like steampunk this is can be an interesting read; if you are looking for an introduction to the category, though, try The Difference Engine or The Peshawar Lancers.

First Sentence (from the Introduction):

Steampunk is a particularly engaging, entertaining, as well as thematically resonant, subgenre of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

The Snow Queen’s Shadow, by Jim C. Hines

Hines’ final book in the Princess series is a bit like what I imagine Disney might make of Crossed. A demon is freed and begins to infect the world (starting with Snow White) with a curse that causes everyone to see only ugliness and hate. Damaged relationships, petty revenges, and crumbling governments quickly follow, and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are forced to hunt their closest friend. Unlike a traditional fairy tale everyone doesn’t live happily ever after, but the ending is still satisfying. This book is the series finale as well, and Hines tacks on a coda that harkens back to the first book, wrapping up the novels nicely. Each book builds on the previous one so you’ll want to read them in order, but reading them is recommended!

First Sentence:

The plan had been so simple.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, by Peter Lunenfeld

This is a frighteningly bad and terribly inconsistent book. Lunenfeld’s point that the computer is dangerously close to replacing television as society’s idiot box is well taken, but his belief that a solution entails people creating as much content as they consume is ludicrous. “...the goal must be to establish a balance between consumption and production, and using the networked computer as a patio-potato enabler, download-only device, or even download-mainly device is a wasted opportunity of historic proportions.” Either he hasn’t seen what passes for content on YouTube these days or his wish is coming true in a wickedly ironic manner. Later he compares the Great Wall of China and the Greek myths to Wikipedia and Linux because they were all built with a communal effort. I wonder if the prisoners and soldiers that built the Wall often got into arguments over which brick went where?

While one one hand he demands people create and upload content, Lunenfeld is on the other offended at copyright laws and authors rights: “By holding on to Mickey [Mouse] ... [Disney] keeps the rest of us out of the storehouse of mutable materials for the creation of new, noncorporate culture.” He certainly didn’t give his book away for free without license. I imagine that M.I.T. (the book’s copyright holder) would frown on that as much as Disney would at someone posting Mickey porn on the Internet.

The author also bemoans the vanishing art of pen-on-paper illustration, calling it the “font of imagination.” He does go on to express hope that photo-realistic computer graphic special effects can be the new source of creative fantasy for the next generation. Sadly, the cover he chose for this book looks like a bad wipe from a 70’s TV show; a lost opportunity to encourage his dream. (While grumbling about the cover I might as well lodge another complaint about the dress: the book is printed almost entirely in boldface; only the sidebars are in a normal weight which makes them very welcome.)

I believe this statement summarizes everything I disliked about this book: “The computer allows the human creative spirit even more flexibility and greater potential than the printing press because it synthesizes so many other media forms.” On the surface this is a thoughtful sentence that draws an astute comparison. A deeper look causes you to realize the printing press didn’t nurture the human creative spirit at all, though, it simply made sharing and preserving content easier. The quiet pride we feel when viewing Rockwell’s Four Freedoms and the tears we shed hearing Elgar’s Nimrod movement in Enigma Variations, the wonder we find in Verne’s words and the rapture spawned by Astaire’s dance, the ingenuity of those that invented the printing press and computer, the love of our family and our quest for wisdom; these things feed our human spirit, not the machines themselves.

First Sentence:

First, we must define the terms of the struggle.