Featured image is The Mistborn by Hunter Bonyun The Final Empire is the first of the Mistborn trilogy, whose premise is an intriguing one for anyone who has enjoyed fantasy fiction: What if the “dark lord” had won? Imagine if Voldemort, Sauron, or Darth Vader had not been defeated. What would have become of the…
Category: Books
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins – Book Review
Featured image is The Mockingjay and the Rebels by Samuel Teixeira. With the third movie in the Hunger Games series not far away, you just know I’ve got to prep myself by catching up on the books. Despite the dramatic cliffhanger at the end of Catching Fire, I was able to hold off reading the…
Movie #9: Divergent
Riding on the dystopian, young-adult coattails of The Hunger Games, Divergent was another series to make it to the ranks of blockbuster movie adaptation. Even before reading the book, I was skeptical of the premise. In a future-Chicago, society has split everyone into factions based on individual ideals (e.g. the selfless belong to the Abnegation…
Super-fiction: Brilliance, Amped, Ex-Heroes, and Steelheart – Book Reviews
In case you have not noticed, superhumans are all the rage. Whether it’s being bitten by a spider, receiving a shiny green ring, being struck by some special lightning or meteor, or just by being born this way, people on screen are getting supernatural powers in droves. Movies like Amazing Spider-man and X-Men are obvious…
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – Book Review
I consider it a miracle in itself that I finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. After all, the book is almost 800 pages long (and since I listened to the audiobook, it was also over 30 hours long)! While it deals with magic and is set in an England where magic…
Redshirts by John Scalzi – Capsule Book Review
Redshirts has got to be one of the most geek-friendly book titles I have encountered. The uninformed might guess that it’s about wearing a certain colour of clothing, and they might be wondering why it’s a single compound word. However, any sci-fi fan worth his salt knows that it actually refers to the laughable tendency…
Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl and Richard LaGravenese – Book and Movie Review
I’m not quite sure what brought me to another supernatural, teen romance (especially after giving up on the Twilight books after only halfway through the second) but I guess I wanted to see if they were truly as similar as they seem. One of the things I noticed right away (especially since I was listening…
The Magicians by Lev Grossman – Book Review
Did you always think that there needed to be more sex, drinking, or 4-letter words in the Harry Potter books? Or that the kids in the Chronicles of Narnia weren’t as snarky, cynical, or full of ennui as the ones you knew at that age? Perhaps that upending of a beloved series of fantasy books…
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – Book Review
I wasn’t very excited to read Catching Fire at first. The first book, The Hunger Games, was an original blend of sci-fi, action, and drama but I expected that the 2nd novel might be a revisiting of those same elements: the Katniss-Peeta-Gale love triangle, the inventive yet cruel Hunger Games, and the dystopian backdrop of…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 