Steven Wu's Book Reviews

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I read at least several dozen books a year, focusing on speculative fiction but (especially in more recent years) with a healthy smattering of other genres. I began writing reviews in 2001 to record my thoughts, and also to keep track of what I've read.

Best Books I Read (By Year)
2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006-2008

Still here!
June 14, 2009 (10:30 PM) ( link )

Despite my lengthy silence, I haven't forgotten about this site. I've just been crushed at work recently, which has eaten into not only my (casual) reading time but also my reviewing time.

I have a couple of reviews queued up that I'll post as soon as I've gone over them again. (That's right -- no more of the shoddy reporting I did in my youth.) In terms of books I'm reading now, I recently started Peter F. Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction, which is insane, but in a good way.

SF in the New Yorker
May 13, 2009 (10:40 PM) ( link )

I don't know if this is a trend, but there have been a surprising number of short stories in recent New Yorkers that are of the speculative variety: Gail Hareven's "The Slows," Chris Adrian's "A Tiny Feast," Italo Calvino's "The Daughters of the Moon," and Steven Millhauser's "The Invasion from Outer Space."

None of the stories have been particularly good, either as speculative fiction or as fiction generally. (It turns out that a "quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story" is just as uninteresting with aliens or fairies.) But their publication represents, I think, yet another sign of the growing respect being afforded to my favorite genre.

Blog Roll
May 6, 2009 (11:18 PM) ( link )

I've removed my outdated links page and instead inserted a blog roll underneath the unsightly "Recent Reviews" box to the right. The blog roll now lists the book-related sites I actually read on a regular basis. The book review blogs on the list reflect my reading tastes; if you like what I talk about here, you'll probably like these other sites as well.

A word on the three author blogs. I'm a fan of the works of John Scalzi, Brandon Sanderson, and George R.R. Martin, but that's not why I subscribe to their RSS feeds. I read Sanderson for Wheel of Time news. I read Scalzi because he seems like such a loon (at least online). And I read Martin when I want to rage over why he's watching football and attending conventions instead of finishing A Song of Ice and Fire, which as far as I'm concerned will be his only lasting legacy.

New Review: The White Rose
May 3, 2009 (12:46 AM) ( link )

Added a review of Glen Cook's The White Rose (not recommended).

I really enjoyed the Black Company trilogy, but The White Rose was not good, primarily because of its ending. From what I've read online, the ending sets up a fourth book (appropriately known as The Silver Spike), but I have little interest in continuing. I'm still fascinated by Cook's world, but I know longer trust his plotting.

Another sequel that I've recently begun reading, Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan, has also been disappointing so far.

New Review: The Hero of Ages
May 1, 2009 (9:34 PM) ( link )

Added a review of Brandon Sanderson's The Hero of Ages (recommended).

Sanderson has a poorly designed but very informative website that features his candid thoughts about the writing process. Of most interest to me are his "annotations" for each chapter of the first two Mistborn books: see here and here.

As Sanderson notes in this introduction, he writes these annotations while he copy-edits his books. "I pause after each chapter and write out my thoughts, ideas, and impressions of that chapter. I try to talk about where the ideas came from, what my reaction is to the chapters after the fact, and what I was trying to do with some of the themes."

Some of the annotations are hard to understand without remembering exactly what happens in the chapter, but most of them are quite revealing -- a "behind the scenes," so to speak. Other authors have done "special features" for their books -- Jasper Fforde comes to mind -- but few are as introspective about their writing as Sanderson.