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Author Archives: King Rat
A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Madeleine L’Engle
18 November 2008 – 7:48 am
I re-read A Wrinkle in Time and didn’t think it was as good as I remembered. And I re-read A Wind in the Door and thought it was completely awful. Now I am on to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I was predisposed to hate after the previous two. I write that to warn you that, while I often nit-pick my reading to death, I probably noticed far more things that irritated me than even my normal. That being written, the third installment of the Time Quintet is not as bad as the second. (…)
Swordspoint / Ellen Kushner
15 November 2008 – 12:10 am
Another slow read for me. It’s the first fantasy novel I’ve read that doesn’t have any fantastical elements in it. No magic. No alchemy. Nothing of the sort. It’s just a city called Riverside, old Riverside proper where the commoners live and nobles rarely tread, and the Hill where the aristocracy resides. The nobles rarely settle their duels themselves any more. They hire swordsmen to stand in for them. Richard St. (…)
Hero / Perry Moore
7 November 2008 – 1:49 am
My friend Kim attended WisCon this year. WisCon is a feminist S.F. convention. As steady followers of this blog may have picked up, feminism has been a minor theme of mine this year. Kim returned from the conference with a recommendation to read Perry Moore’s Hero. Kim read it, then lent her copy to me so that she could get my opinion. At no point has Kim told me what she thought of it, I presume so that my impressions would not be tainted.
So here’s the summary. (…)
Administrivia: Closing the book
5 November 2008 – 3:24 pm
In August, I offered a giveaway for Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity. To win, entrants needed to guess the largest country in terms of population from which Rat’s Reading had not seen any visitors. There were guesses of China and Russia and a couple others. However, those countries have fairly large populations of Internet users. Instead, folks needed to be looking toward Africa.
I never set a closing date for the contest. (…)
The Green Mile: Part 2: The Mouse on the Mile / Stephen King
5 November 2008 – 12:01 pm
I originally intended to read this series of books each about a month apart, as if I were reading when they first came out. However, the events of the last month in my personal life prevent that this time. Hopefully I’ll get back to that for the remaining books.
I hope to be proved wrong by reading later books on this, but this one really felt like filler to me. The focus is on a mouse that found it’s way to the Green Mile (death row). (…)
Free Books - 5 November 2008
5 November 2008 – 10:20 am
Category
Item/Prize(s)
Web Site (click here to enter)
Geographic Restrictions
Deadline
Hell Bent by William G. (…)
Midnight Robber / Nalo Hopkinson
1 November 2008 – 6:44 pm
Fourth of five books from the Feminist SF The Blog list of obscure speculative fiction works that shouldn’t be so obscure.
I thought the book was tough to get in to. A somewhat interesting world called Toussaint where nano-technology underlies everything. But the story of Tan-Tan as a child kind of dragged. And while the Caribbean dialect used both for the characters and narration made things interesting, it slowed down my reading. (…)
Free Books - 29 October 2008
28 October 2008 – 11:58 pm
Category
Item/Prize(s)
Web Site (click here to enter)
Geographic Restrictions
Deadline
Cooking
I Like You: Cooking Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris (3 copies)
Slashfood
none stated
Thu, 30 October
Cooking
The Sweeter Side of Amy’s Bread by Amy Scherber and Toy Kim Dupree (5 copies)
Serious Eats
none stated
Mon, 3 November
Cooking
Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by Ina Garten
Leite’s Culinaria
none stated
Sun, 30 November
Crime Fiction
Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston (250 copies)
Monsters and Critics.com
U.S. (…)
Free Books - 28 October 2008
28 October 2008 – 12:31 am
Category
Item/Prize(s)
Web Site (click here to enter)
Geographic Restrictions
Deadline
Cooking
Live, Love, Eat: The Best of Wolfgang Puck
Big Blueberry Eyes
U.S.
none stated
Fantasy
The Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson
Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review
U.S./U.K. (…)
Triviata / Timothy T. Fullerton
24 October 2008 – 3:34 pm
The back cover promises that Each item is certain to produce a chuckle and that the information is intriguing and entertaining. The sub-title for this tome reads A Compendium of Useless Information. It did not include uninteresting or incorrect though it should have. For years newspapers around the country ran a column either under the byline L. M. Boyd or Mike Mailway. The daily listing of anecdotal trivia was targeted at the Paul Harvey listening crowd. (…)
