Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, by J. K. Rowling

A barrel of fun. Although I found the first three books a bit formulaic, Rowling's style evolved in as the series went on, as the subject matter and the characters got more mature. I find it fascinating that if a young reader starts the series at Harry's age in the first book and reads one volume per year, he or she will find that each successive book will grow alongside the reader's level of maturity. The end is chaotic, fast, breath-taking and, heart-rending. I'm nervously and anxiously waiting for The Deathly Hallows, which I pre-ordered as soon as Amazon allowed me to.

Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown

Ah... why do I do this to myself? Oh, wait, I wanted something to read in the hustle and bustle of airplanes and airports during a long trip. Something that wouldn't require more than an infinitesimal amount of neurons to get through. It served that purpose, but not without considerable amount of pain. I had already had a taste of Brown in The Da Vinci Code, that nonsensical, plainly stupid fast action page-turner that hopes to incite "oohs" and "aahs" with every sentence. This is similar drivel. It's not fantasy, it's not sci-fi, it's not a thriller, it's not a mystery, it's not a feel-good love story, and it's aeons away from being literature. It's not even a book. It's more like a collection of used sheets of toilet paper tainted with half-lies, misconceptions, half-baked, and nonsensical and ideas. It is real garbage and assumes that the reader cannot reason enough to see its deep flaws.

The only ability that Brown has is the talent to confuse fact and fiction for the minds of the less knowledgeable or the incurious reader. Mr. Controversy scores big in this abysmally nonsensical extrapolation of a few facts fished out from other novels (perhaps The Illuminati Trilogy) and third-rate science fiction movies. Read it and weep; you've been warned. Mr. Langdon is more bullet proof than Indiana Jones, but without any charm and much less credibility. The "anti-matter" stuff is silly in a childlike way. Brown is like Marylin Manson in the intent to shock and to horrify. Manson at least scored one with me when he recorded Mechanical Animals (not to mention a few select songs from other albums). Brown, on the other hand... well, never again.

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge

This was a fun space-opera. The beginning was a bit unsettling and hard to read for me. The author leaves plenty of room for the reader to figure things out instead of explaining everything. As a consequence, you go through many,many pages not quite understanding things, but in the end the prize for your persistence and effort is worth it. There are some really great ideas such as the galaxy being divided into "zones of thought" each one with different laws of physics. The "lupine" race of aliens mentioned in the back cover of the paperback edition is brilliant. The ideas on the evolution of sentient species is also very interesting. I nearly put this down after about 30 pages or so, but as I went on reading, more and more of Vinge's universe made sense and I could appreciate it better. In scope, this is comparable to the great works of science fiction, even though it doesn't even qualify as soft sci-fi.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Cool story told in the first person perspective of an autistic 15 year old boy who discovers that a neighbor's dog has been killed with a garden fork. It's a fast and light read that amuses and entertains, while at the same time giving an insight into how an autistic person thinks. The style reminded me a little of Nick Hornby's, but I mean that as a big compliment. Both authors are British, so perhaps this is not a fact and just my perception.

While the story starts out with the boy trying to investigate the dog's murder, it later on becomes an investigation of the shortcomings and screw ups of the human race. I enjoyed this read quite a bit, but thought that it didn't live up to the hype that was created around it. I particularly enjoyed the boy's penchant for mathematics, which comes through in the story in a number of fun way (for a geek, that is). For instance, the chapters are numbered as a sequence of primes and the text contains the solutions to more than one interesting discrete math problem. I think, though, that this would appeal very much to those not mathematically inclined and feel safe to recommend it.

Pursuit, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

The comments in this review relate more directly to the original in Portuguese, which is entitled "Perseguido". It could have been a great book, but it's a major flop. The book is divided into three "stories", which really are subdivisions of one same plot. The first one is fantastic. It sets up the story of Jonas, or Isidoro, a man who shows up at a psychiatric clinic in Rio de Janeiro. There is seen by Dr. Artur Nesse, who seems much more troubled than his patient. In their first meeting, a "preliminary" session, the doctor builds the patient's case around the fact that while his legal name is Isidoro, he wants to be called Jonas. In the two following sessions, rather than trying to allow the patient to state the reason that drove him to seek medical help, the doctor insists on the identity issue. Little by little this strange pattern develops into something scary. The doctor starts feeling that the patient is trying to invade his life for some dark motive. Jonas/Isidoro starts out as a very mysterious character, the one who sparks the reader's excitement for the whole story.

In the second "story", Espinosa, the police chief investigator who headlines a series of Garcia-Roza's books, is brought by Dr. Nesse into the plot. The plot develops well enough along this story, but it is brought to an aggravating and disappointing sort of conclusion in the third story. It looks as if the author simply couldn't conceive of a good way to wrap up the book and just allowed it to come to an end where nothing is explained and where nothing seems to make much sense. The conclusion is heavy handed and is bound to anger the most generous reader. I recommend you avoid this book at all costs.

Exile's Return, by Raymond Feist

Awesome turn of the tide. This was by far the best book in the Conclave of Shadows trilogy and signals the reader that good old Feist can still deliver stories with the flair and the excitement of the original Riftwar Saga. What threw me off in the beginning was to discover that the point of view in this book belongs not to Tal, the protagonist of the first two volumes, but to Kaspar of Olasko. I really wasn't ready for that and in spite of a small feeling of disorientation in the beginning, this turned out to be an incredible read which further developed the storyline in a very clever and interesting way.

Kaspar starts out somewhere in the desert, in the continent of Novindus. After being abandoned there for his crimes, he undergoes some change of spirits as he lives for the day among ordinary, struggling peasants. He soon becomes a survivor, fighting for his subsistence. Until he comes in contact with a small bunch of brigands carrying a magical artifact. In the course of dealing with this finding, he crosses the continent visiting temples and seeking help from divinities. Eventually, the plot spreads out and puts him in the context of earlier, loved characters from Feist's universe. The artifact is the precursor of a greater evil to come to Midkemia and warrior and magic-users must team up to understand this threat and fight it.

The book ends without really ending and links directly into Feist's new Darkwar Saga. If there was any flaw with the Conclave of Shadows, I would say that it was its organization for the obvious sake of marketing. It seems that fantasy readers are used to trilogies and expect books to be packaged as such. The Conclave of Shadows appears to have been written in this volume for this reason alone. In all honesty, this is not a self-contained story and I understand that not every author aspires to be a Robert Jordan writing a story that spans a dozen volumes. As much as I enjoyed reading it, I would have enjoyed finding some kind of resolution when I turned the last page of Exile's Return. What I discovered was that the beat goes on and if I want to see what happens, I must go on reading. Fine by me, I enjoy Feist anyway, but a trilogy, this Conclave of Shadows really was not.

The King of Foxes, by Raymond Feist

Another really fun volume in the Conclave of Shadows trilogy. The narrative continues exactly where Talon of the Silver Hawk ends and the plot is a natural extension of what was started in the first volume. Court politics, swashbuckling, spying and sneaking, and a tiny bit of magic. Talon becomes Talwin Hawkins, agent of the Conclave within the court of the Duke of Olasko. His task, as much as his personal mission to seek revenge for the obliteration of the Orosini, his people, is to keep an eye on the Duke and on his ally Leso Varen, the necromancer. In the course of this mission, Tal confronts deep personal, ethical dilemmas of his own when following orders given by a scrupulous master. Quite a lot happens in this book which is impossible to mention without spoiling the reading, but this is a tale of one overcoming numerous hardships, of reaching the sky and then sinking to the depths of hell. It ends with a certain feeling of resolution, but also with the promise of much more excitement to come.