Advent Review #8: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (Book Review)

Ever since I started reading SFF for good back in high school, what I like to call my formative years of reading genre fiction, I’ve read some quite thick books. That was around the time when the Harry Potter novels were extremely popular as well and were following the trend of each new book being thicker and bulkier than the one before, so it was truly an interesting time. In more recent years, I’ve stopped reading big fat SFF novels all that much because I don’t really want to spend all that much time reading a book now. When I was reading like 3-4 novels a year, it was fine to spend a couple weeks on these books, but these days my daily life is far too fast-paced for me to be that slow.

While Scott Lynch’s debut novel The Lies of Locke Lamora isn’t quite the thicket fantasy novel I’ve read to date, its certainly one that’s taken me the longest, almost an entire week during which I barely kept up with my comics reading and blogging. The novel was that much of a slog throughout. I started reading it since I’d gotten caught in all the excitement of the release of the third book in the series, and I kind of wanted to see what all the buzz was about. So I had some high expectations going in, but few of them ended up being met and the novel generally proved to be a poor one with a lackadaisical plot, some uninteresting and bland characters, and limited world-building.

The Cover Art Mega-Post Part 3

So this is the third such post I have done for the blog. I took a 2-month break in between posts so that I could have some more material to showcase here, and it certainly has helped. There were a lot more books I wanted to cover, but I chose to stick withe magic number 17, the number of books I’ve covered previously.

A lot of the books on this list are next year’s releases, and just as before, they all sound great, even some of the ones that are second or third (or else) in their respective series. I’m not sure if I can put aside the time to catch up to them any time soon but I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to get around to some of them at least. We’ll see how that works out.

In the meantime, enjoy all these great covers and these books! Hope you liked the previous posts and that you’ll like this one as well.

NANP: A Name To Conjure

Guesting on the blog today for Names: A New Perspective is Scott Lynch, author of the smash hit Gentlemen Bastard series, the third novel in which, The Republic of Thieves, will be published later this year. Gentlemen Bastard has been on my reading radar for a while now, given the praise I’ve heard about the series from several friends, but haven’t been able to get to it given the staggering levels of Mount Toberead. However, this guest post series is a way for me to motivate myself to read books like Gentlemen Bastard ones, and I’m looking forward to getting into them later this year. In the meantime, here’s Scott on the topic of names.

NANP: A Rose By Any Other Name

As we move into the final stretch of the first wave of guest posts for Names: A New Perspective, today’s guest is Elspeth Cooper, author of the two Wild Hunt books Songs of The Earth and Trinity Rising, all of them published by Gollancz. I’d been meaning to read the first book (my review) for quite a while, as part of my sort of unofficial 2012 Morningstar reading challenge, and I got the chance to read the book in August. It was a fantastic read, with some decidedly new takes on some of the old tropes of epic fantasy, very much in line with a lot of the “modern” epic fantasy I’ve been reading of late. Elspeth is definitely in my top tier of modern authors and I have a firm hope that Trinity Rising will be just as great a novel as Songs of The Earth. Here’s what Elspeth had to say about how she uses names in her novels.