Frank Miller's Ronin

This isn’t bad, but it feels like Miller is just clearing his throat in retrospect. The art is less developed, and the central conceit is laughable, just existing to get the action going (there is an ancient warrior’s spirit attached to a blade that is found in the near future of new York, and a biomechanical Artificial Intelligence brings him back to live where he fights a demon that was also attached to the blade). It’s worth a read for fans but it feels dated by the author’s own subsequent works.

Science For Her by Megan Amram: Really for Nobody

So......

Amram is funny on twitter. I've bought some books by people that I liked on twitter. They have been hit or miss.

Maybe it is the conceit here or something else, but this just missed for me.

The introduction starts with a joke, where it is dedicated to all these people, who are her "Best friend when...".

It's a little clever at first.

Then it goes on for ten pages. It was one of those things where I was hoping that it was funny then it stops being funny but then it gets really funny. Well, that, but it never got funny again. It was actually kryptonite for me. I tried reading a bit more, but that beginning was such a bad experience that I became very defensive as a reader and was looking for reasons to set the book aside. I did, and moved on.

Lacking Magic: Terry Pratchett's "Dodger"

First off, I am a huge Terry Pratchett fan. Or at least I have read and loved all the Discworld books. I liked Good Omens too, but when I read that I thought of it more as a Neil Gaiman book.

That said, I did not like this book. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

I kept reading hoping something would happen that caught me into the world, but it never did.

I couldn’t believe either of the central characters, their relationship, or the antagonism. The world is interesting, but Terry is an old hand at Victorian London. The difference is just that in all the other books it is called Ankh-Morpork. The difference is that on the Disc there is magic, both the kind the Wizards practice, but also between the author and the reader. There is none of that in Dodger.