25 More Book Reviews!

In this podcast below, I give you not one, not two, but a whopping 25 book reviews! These are all books I read before starting this blog 15 years ago that I never got a chance to share. Reading (and reading a lot) is a crucial part of being an author. It’s truly the only way to learn the craft. Every author here—even the bad ones—helped me learn something about the art of storytelling, paving the way for the future of the Aenya series and whatever other novels I’ll be writing in the future.

The books featured today include:

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot ***
Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac ** 1/2
Mars by Ben Bova ***
Jupiter by Ben Bova ** 1/2
Venus by Ben Bova ** 1/2
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck *** 1/2
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald *** 1/2
Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly **
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne ****
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert ** 1/2
God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert ** 1/2
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo ****
A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ****
The Stand by Stephen King ** 1/2
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson ***
Sayonara by James A. Michener ** 1/2
A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park ***
The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore **
Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore **
Winter of Magic’s Return by Pamela F. Service ***
Ilium by Dan Simmons ***
Dracula by Bram Stoker ** 1/2
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ** 1/2
Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis **
Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn **

For your viewing pleasure, I have included a condensed transcript of the podcast below. I should warn you, however: the transcript was condensed by AI and is hilariously bad, even after I stepped in to correct quite a bit of it. So if you’ve ever worried that AI will take over your job as a writer, don’t be! Because if the transcript below is any indication, AI has a long… long way to go!

While 1984 is more frightening, A Brave New World is more prescient. It depicts the world we live in today, a world of excessive information and appeasement through television, drugs, sex, and music. Aldous Huxley’s warnings about casual drug use and its impact on thought and protest seem to have come true, as people are taking over-the-counter psychological drugs to regulate their minds.

Next, we have A Long Walk to Water by Sue Linda Park. It’s semi-autobiographical and follows a boy living in a small African village who dreams of installing plumbing to eliminate the long walk for water. This was one of many books that inspired me to write The Feral Girl, as it shares similar themes of primitive societies struggling to survive.

Here’s an old book: A Winter of Magic’s Return by Pamela Service. I enjoyed reading it in ninth grade. What’s interesting is its similarity to Harry Potter. If I were Pamela Service, I’d be upset about Harry Potter’s success, as her book is very similar.

It’s about a boy who wears glasses and learns magic. Unlike Harry Potter, this book takes place in a distant future after a nuclear apocalypse. The apocalypse destroys the world and civilization, but it also brings back magic and transforms Earth into a fantasy setting.

If you enjoyed Andy Weir, you’ll likely enjoy Ben Boba. Interestingly, Ben Boba wrote books named after the planets of the solar system. For example, he wrote a book about Mars and another about Jupiter.

Even though Venus is extremely hot, extremophiles live there.

Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore is a blatant ripoff of The Hobbit. In this book, a dwarf wants to return to his ancestral home after being kicked out by a dragon. A dark elf joins the dwarf to kill the dragon and allow the dwarves to return home. There’s even a hobbit-like character, though he’s called a halfling. He has an evil magic pendant around his neck that’s slowly corrupting him.

Then there’s Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. It’s the first official storyline after Return of the Jedi.

After Return of the Jedi, there was a huge demand for more Star Wars. George Lucas didn’t want to make any more movies, but LucasArts reached out to authors to write novels set in the Star Wars universe.

These books were written before Disney canonized the Star Wars novels. Many fans, especially those who loved Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, hated Disney’s decision.

It’s unfortunate that Disney didn’t attempt to create a version of Heir to the Empire. It could have been more popular. However, I don’t particularly like these books. They are often poorly written and lack substance. I don’t blame the author. When a company demands a book within a year with specific parameters, it limits the author’s creativity. If you’re not a Star Wars fan, I wouldn’t recommend these books.

I read Stephen King’s The Stand in college. There was a commercial for a Stephen King subscription service that sent a new book every month. The first book they sent was The Stand. This led me to believe that it must be one of his best books.

I wish I’d read another of Stephen King’s books first, like Carrie or something else. The Stand has the worst ending of all his books. Stephen King himself said he got stuck writing it and couldn’t find a good conclusion. The book starts off amazing. It’s about a superflu that kills almost everyone on Earth.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a much better book. I was so upset by the ending that I threw it across the classroom. Hester Prynn’s husband was lost at sea, and she got pregnant. Everyone figured out she must have slept with someone else in the village, and they punished her by making her wear a red letter A for the rest of her life. (The AI summarization here is laughable — It forgot to mention that by wearing the letter A, Hester Prynn is never spoken to again.)

Sayonara is a book about a World War II vet stationed in Japan after Japan’s defeat. He falls in love with a geisha, whom he finds beautiful. However, many Americans perceive her as ugly due to her dark skin, short stature, and squinty eyes, contrasting with their typical American features. The story explores beauty and how people perceive it. The vet defies societal norms and marries the geisha, proving his love for her.

Another book, Père Goriot by Balzac, is a classic novel written in the 1830s. My wife, who is a fan of Balzac, recommended it to me. While it’s not a terrible book, it’s extremely slow-paced and takes a long time to reach the point. The story begins by describing an apartment building where French people live. A wealthy man who lost his money sells his treasures from his apartment to provide for his spoiled daughters.

Mars by Ben Boba is my favorite in the Planet Series. The book sparked my interest in building a human colony on Mars. The main character is an American Indian from the Navajo tribe, who originally came from New Mexico, which shares similarities with the Martian landscape.

Despite Mars lacking evidence of life, Ben Boba describes a massive trench that spans almost the entire planet. He hints at the possibility of small houses with doors and windows, suggesting that there might be life beneath the Martian surface.

Moving on, we have Jupiter by Ben Boba. Here I learned about Jupiter’s cloud layers and how pressure increases as you descend through them. To explore Jupiter, a ship must withstand this pressure. Ben Boba designs a liquid-filled ship with a fluid that can withstand the pressure. Humans are fed liquid oxygen, which fills their lungs and allows them to breathe it. All of their senses are hooked to the machine’s controls, making them feel like they are the spacecraft descending into Jupiter. As with his books, an alien creature lives on Jupiter.

This giant blue whale-like creature floats through Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, never descending due to the high pressure. Its neurons can’t communicate quickly with its body, so it must think ahead to give its brain enough time to send signals.

Moving on, we have Ilium by Dan Simmons. This book takes place on Mars, but it’s not hard sci-fi. It’s fantastical sci-fi. The author took advantage of a silly little thing. According to Greek mythology, the Greek gods reside on Mount Olympus in Greece. However, on Mars, there’s a mountain called Olympus Mons, which is taller than Mount Everest and the tallest mountain in the solar system. Dan Simmons thought it would be interesting if the Greek gods lived on Mars rather than on Mount Olympus. This concept is unusual, placing Greek gods on Mars.

The story follows a man who wakes up a thousand years in the future, only to find himself on Mars. He discovers that the Greek gods are real. While I enjoyed the book, its outlandishness initially turned me off. However, I might appreciate it more now, given the lack of creativity in modern fantasy and sci-fi.

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, was adapted into a movie starring Will Smith. I believe this is the worst movie adaptation of all time because it completely misses the point of the title. The premise of the book is that vampires have taken over the world, except for one human survivor. The vampires are active during the day and sleep at night because sunlight kills them. The lone survivor takes it upon himself to kill the vampires while they sleep.

The surprise ending in I Am Legend is that the main character realizes he’s the monster, because he’s been murdering people in their sleep. There are vampire kids who are scared of him. He realizes that after his death, he’ll become a legend in the vampire society. The movie threw all of this away and made it another generic zombie movie.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an excellent book. It’s a tragic love story about a severely deformed orphan who lives in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He falls in love with a gypsy girl, but she doesn’t return his love. When she seeks sanctuary from a priest who wants to kill her, the hunchback saves her, even though he knows she can never return his love. It’s a one-sided love story, but it shows the power of love, even when it’s unrequited. This is a masterpiece by Victor Hugo, my favorite French author. I can’t recommend it enough.

Moving on is The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. It gives you a glimpse into early 20th-century China and teaches you about Chinese society and culture, which is very sexist. It might have been better to be a Muslim woman in medieval times than to be a Chinese woman in medieval times because women in medieval China were basically like livestock.

This man buys a cheap, ugly wife because he can’t afford a better one. Later, when he becomes successful, he returns to the whorehouse. Chinese culture didn’t care about women’s prior sexual experience, unlike Muslim societies, where non-virgins are considered spoiled goods. So this man buys more attractive wives, but the more attractive ones are treated better. The ugly wives work hard, cooking and mending his clothes, but he never gives them the love they deserve because they’re not attractive. At the end of his life, he buys a young girl as a third wife. This book doesn’t explicitly advocate for or condemn such behavior. It simply presents it as the way the world is.

Moving on, we have God Emperor of Dune, one of the later Dune books. One of Paul’s children is transformed into a worm, making him immortal. I felt this book veered too far from the original Dune, which I loved. After God Emperor of Dune, I stopped reading the series.

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut is a unique and weird book set a million years in the future, where humans have evolved into an aquatic species living on the Galapagos Islands. It’s hard to describe, but Vonnegut is a surrealist author known for his outlandish works.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott is another unique book. The story is about shapes, specifically a circle living in a society of squares and straight lines. It’s not a stupid kids’ book, but a book about math that teaches imagination and conceptualizing dimensions. The circle meets a sphere that descends through his reality, highlighting the impossibility of a two-dimensional being fully comprehending a three-dimensional one. It suggests the existence of other dimensions beyond our imagination.

Dune Messiah, the sequel to Dune, is a letdown. Frank Herbert wrote it because he felt many missed the original’s point. Many saw Paul Atreides as a great hero, but he slowly becomes more villainous, like Walter White in Breaking Bad. He realizes he can only escape his future misdeeds by abandoning everything and walking into the desert, which he does at the book’s end. He disappears, leaving no trace. The message is powerful but a downer: Paul, whom we loved in the first book, turns out to be a terrible person and dies.

Dragon’s Bane inspired Brandon Sanderson in ninth grade to become a fantasy author.

I read Dragon’s Bane in ninth grade, the same year Brandon Sanderson did. I found it boring because I craved action and adventure, not a deep dive into dragon society and culture. Instead, I turned to Norse and Greek mythology, old books from a thousand years ago, which hurt me.

If I had enjoyed Dragon’s Bane as much as Sanderson, maybe I’d be as famous as Sanderson—who knows?—making $10 million a year. Publishers don’t want you to write like the Norse myths; they want you to write like Barbara Hambly.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weiss is a Dragonlance book, and I read it because I’m a Dungeons and Dragons fan. I don’t remember it well, but I felt the writing was poor. Maybe it’s because they were writing for TSR, the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons.

Finally, I have to apologize to my friend Heather. I believe Dracula is her favorite book, but I thought it was a bore. I love the premise and concept, but the writing was awful. Still, I prefer it to modern vampire novels because, initially, vampires were fantastical creatures, but later they were described in scientific terms, having allergies to garlic and sensitivity to sunlight. This shift from a fantasy to a scientific explanation makes Dracula less captivating.

The story is set in a dull world where the main characters, British aristocrats, spend most of their time making notes and discussing their quest to find and kill Dracula. This contrasts with Frankenstein, another of my favorite books, which is more engaging.

While Dracula may have been terrifying in its time because of its cannibalistic depictions (he eats babies!), it lacks the modern appeal of more action-oriented books.

R.A. Salvatore’s The Crystal Shard is reminiscent of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, offering basic action scenes that are lacking in depth.

Lastly, there’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Fitzgerald is known for The Great Gatsby, which is considered a great American classic. But to me, The Great Gatsby is a pointless story with an incidental conclusion unrelated to the preceding events. Surprisingly, I enjoyed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a lot more. It’s a surreal story about a man born old who ages backward, eventually dying as a baby. While the logistics of his birth raise questions, the story conveys a powerful message. We often lack sympathy for old people, shoving them into nursing homes and avoiding them. Our sympathy declines with age, but we show much more compassion for younger life. This book reminds us that all old people were once children, urging us to be more compassionate towards them.