Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Posts about books (old posts, page 49)

RSS feed (books, en)

Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim, #4)

2013-01-30 00:00

Cover for Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim, #4)

Review:

There is hard­ly a part of poor James Stark that has not been shot, cut, set on fire, hacked of­f, or sent to live in Bur­bank.

There is no weird wom­an in Los An­ge­les he has no his­to­ry with, no kind of su­per­nat­u­ral life he has not kicked the ass of, no lame bar where he has not had a drink, no clever but tough yet deep in­side nice bar­tender he has not hit for a smoke, no re­pul­sive act he has not com­mit­ed.

You get the same thing as in the oth­er three book­s. Ex­tra noir di­a­logue, smar­tass­ness, a clever phrase here and there, blood and gut­s.

The schtick is grow­ing stale.

A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)

2013-01-25 00:00

Cover for A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)

Review:

In an un­even se­ries, this is a good one, bet­ter than the 4th book, which was a not-­so-­good one.

Read­ing the se­ries en­tire­ly in se­quence in a few week­s, I no­ticed a few things.

1) The char­ac­ter sprawl is to­tal­ly out of con­trol, so much that the au­thor had to use two books to tell the sto­ry of a few weeks or month­s. That's nut­s, and hurts the book­s, be­cause there are a lot of char­ac­ters that are, sim­ply, not very in­ter­est­ing.

2) This sto­ry seems to be about 40% done, which means an­oth­er gazil­lion years wait­ing for it to end.

3) Un­like in star trek, here even is bad, odd is good.

4) If I had the time, I am sure I could find trends in word and ex­pres­sion us­age. Neep and nun­cle, leal and "The bas­tard of" are on the rise.

5) I don't re­gret read­ing it but ...

6) The sit­u­a­tion, af­ter thou­sands of pages, is com­plete­ly un­re­solved, and it's be­com­ing a bit grat­ing to move the ac­tu­al plot so slow­ly, even with all the things that are hap­pen­ing. It feels like noise.

A Game of Thrones

2012-12-15 00:00

Cover for A Game of Thrones

Review:

I had read this and the sec­ond book at some point in the 90s in a (now I re­al­ize) dread­ful span­ish trans­la­tion.

The HBO se­ries made me want to reread it, be­cause I could not be­lieve the piece of crap I re­mem­bered was the ba­sis for such a great show.

Well, read­ing the orig­i­nal (cheap 4-­book kin­dle bundle, yay!), it's very good, four stars.
Contents © 2000-2024 Roberto Alsina