GregHowley.com

Books

June 10, 2014 -

After having completed Skin Game, the 15th book in Jim Butcher's excellent Dresden Files series, I picked up Paranormals, a light comic-booky novel that had been sitting on my to-read shelf for a while. After that, I'd planned on buying Cursor's Fury, the third book in Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. But lately, I've been hearing about so many other fantastic-sounding books that I'm not sure which to go after first. And I've also forgotten about Hugh Howey's sequels to Wool, which I absolutely have to get to soon.

First off, The Martian, which I first heard about when I saw Jeff Cannata's review on YouTube. That video will explain the book better than I can in this post, but I'll continue for those of you who are generally video-avoidant like myself.

The story takes place in the near future, and begins like Apollo 13. The first manned mission to Mars, and something goes wrong. I haven't yet read the book, so I don't know what. But our main character ends up stranded on the hostile world and has to survive. That's the crux of the book, but from what I gather, his creative and MacGyver-like solutions are the meat of the story. And I gather that it's all based on hard science. I've seen multiple glowing recommendations for the book, so I'm very much looking forward to reading it.

I absolutely loved Robopocalypse, despite the terrible title. It was the tale of how a single malevolent AI was born, grew, positioned itself, and became a huge threat to the entire global population. It was all handled realistically and written very well. Now, there's a sequel: RoboGenesis. The book was just released today, and I've read the first chapter online. Given how much I enjoyed the first book, I'm all over this one.

Lastly, a Japanese novel entitled All You Need is Kill. Yeah - it doesn't sound like it translated well. But it's the story from which the Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow was adapted. I saw that movie over the weekend and liked it. I read the synopsis of the book on Wikipedia, and unsurprisingly, it sounds like the book is better than the movie. I may have to locate a copy at some point.