Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket...

In case you hadn't noticed from the content of this blog, I consume a great quantity of media. Videogames, movies, TV shows, anime, comics, novels. I'll take it all, and there's so much good stuff out there . It's a pretty hard thing to manage not to get inundated with it all, so hard, that I just don't even try. I have wish lists that are pages long for all of these things. So, kind of a rambling lead-in, but I finally made it to one of those items, which is the Felix Castor series by Mike Carey. I was on a message board for comics, and people got to talking about books, and the statement was made "If you like the Dresden Files series, you really need to check out the Felix Castor series, it's even better." So, I dove in. I always have a problem with these urban fantasy novels, and a lot of writing in general, but there's always the first chapter that you have to get through, where they explain just how "cool" their character is. ...

I'm probably going to sound pretty harsh in my opinion about this book, but really, it was a very entertaining read, and I've not had a book for a long time that sucked me in like this one did, I literally spent every free moment turning it's pages until I was done, rather than watch TV, play video games, or read comics. So, there you are, the one paragraph review. Here's a bit of a synopsis though, the story revolves around a female werewolf who has been captured by a sect of knights of the teutonic order during the time of the crusades, and been raised into their service as a weapon to defeat the pagan tribes of Prussia in order to bring them to the light Christianity (part of what makes this story so compelling is that I can readily believe that that would happen). The story kicks off with the werewolf, Lilly, escaping from the order when their leader is called away, and she's left in the care of a relatively inexperienced/uninformed group of knights. She brea...

First Lord's Fury, the last entry in the Codex Alera series was recently released. I've completed it now, and here are my thoughts on the series. My first exposure to Jim Butcher's work was with the Dresden Files, a series of urban fantasy novels starring the titular Harry Dresden, Chicago's only wizard listed in the Yellow Pages. In contrast, the Codex Alera series is a much more traditional fantasy world. The country of Alera exists on a fictional continent where humans are able to control the elements through what they call furycraft. Every human is able furycraft at at least some level, and it has shaped society, all lamps are fury lamps, and need to be lit through the use of a small amount of fire crafting, healing is all performed in tubs of water by watercrafters, messengers are all windcrafters, who fly through the skies. Blacksmith's are all metalcrafters who are able to sense just the right conditions for forging the metal. Not all furycrafters are cr...

My very first book review, and it's for one of my favorite authors. C.S. Friedman hasn't written a whole lot of books, but what she has done has just about all been top shelf science fiction. A few notable favorites would be Madness Season, where an immortal creature that can assume the shape of any animal, but is allergic to sunlight and must survive on the nutrients in the blood of other creatures (a vampire basically) must learn how to survive in a universe where the human race has been enslaved by a reptillian hive-mind race. And the Coldfire Trilogy, which features a planet that was started as a human seed colony, except the colonists found upon landing that there were forces that would act on conscious and unconscious thoughts and effect the physical world. Thus if you had a doubt that something might not work, it would be amplified, and definitely not work. Hundreds of years later, it's become a fantasy world, where people use guns in favor of swords, since they are ...