Books I Didn't Finish: Devolution

July 04, 2020 by Ronan Wills in Books I Didn't Finish

Max Brooks is back, baby!

Following the success of The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and a book about how if you find yourself in a world of mines and crafting the most important thing you can craft is you, we now have Devolution, which is jumping on board the increasingly-hot bigfoot scene that’s inexplicably growing in America. Will it kick start a sasquatchenaissance in the same way that The Zombie Survival Guide helped to revive zombie mania in the early 2000s? Maybe, but it probably doesn’t deserve to.

Books I Didn't Finish: A Memory Called Empire

April 23, 2020 by Ronan Wills in Books I Didn't Finish

Going into Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, there were a few reasons I thought I wasn’t going to finish it.

Books I Didn't Finish: The Priory Of The Orange Tree

March 13, 2020 by Ronan Wills in Books, Books I Didn't Finish

But Ronan, I hear you ask, you don’t finish most of the books you review! Why make a seperate series for it now? Shut up, that’s why!

For today’s entry in my acclaimed and popular review column we’re looking at last year’s The Priory Of The Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, a book I got about 20% of the way through before giving up. Why did I give up? Because it wasn’t very good.

See you all next time.

Seriously though, Priory got a fair bit of attention when it came out, partially because it’s a single-volume fantasy novel--something that’s never been the norm for the genre and is increasingly unusual now--and partially because it was frequently and breathlessly compared to Game Of Thrones, to which it in fact has basically no resemblance whatsoever except that both of them involve dragons (Shannon herself has described the book as “a feminist retelling of the story of St. George and the dragon”).

Books I Didn't Finish: The Stephen King Detective Two-For-One Experience

March 05, 2020 by Ronan Wills in Books, Books I Didn't Finish

I was recently in the hospital for a week, heavily doped up on pain medication (it wasn’t anything serious) and I needed a breezy, light book to pass the time. And lo and behold, the Kindle daily deal happened to feature a selection from my spooky frenemy, Stephen King!

That book was Mr. Mercedes, the first entry in what would become a trilogy revolving around a detective named Bill Hodges. The books are kind of notable in King’s ouvre for moving all the way out of horror and into the mystery/thriller genre, a space that many of his previous novels strayed pretty far into without entirely making the leap away from horror or the supernatural. Today we’re looking at Mr. Mercedes as well as its sequel, Finders Keepers.

The fact that I didn’t bother to read the third one is a spoiler.