Tag: Pets

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The Bookish Owl – Hard in Hightown by Varric Tethras

Hard in Hightown Varric Tethras

Time for some nerdy noir with Hard in Hightown by Varric Tethras!

(Also known as Mary Kirby… considering that Varric is a video game character.)

For those of you not familiar with the Dragon Age games, Varric Tethras is a crossbow-wielding dwarf as well as a successful writer of multiple genres.

Basically everything I aspire to be. Except maybe for the dwarf part… but if it’s a requirement for getting the crossbow, I’m willing to invest in a stepladder.

Hard in Hightown, a noir detective story and Varric’s most popular book, is mentioned in Dragon Age II, and you can find all the individual chapters around the world in Dragon Age: Inquisition. So it’s really just my nerdness that made me buy a physical copy. But this one has illustrations!

I do, however, think they could have made the story a bit longer when they decided to release it as its own book. But I enjoyed it, even though it’s short and rather predictable. Sometimes it’s nice to just read something like that.

Hard in Hightown
by Varric Tethras

Prolific dwarven author and heroic companion of the Dragon Age games, Varric Tethras brings us the collected edition of his breakthrough crime-noir drama, Hard in Hightown (with help from his trusted human confidante, Mary Kirby)! This volume is beautifully illustrated by Stefano Martino, Alvaro Sarraseca, Andres Ponce, and Ricardo German Ponce Torres, with a painted cover by E.M. Gist!

Twenty years of patrols have chiseled each and every stone of the Kirkwall streets into city guardsmen Donnen Brennokovic. Weary and weathered, Donnen is paired with a recruit so green he might as well have leaves growing out of his armor. When the mismatched pair discover a dead magistrate bleeding out on the flagstones, they’re caught up in a clash between a shadowy organization known only as the Executors and a secretive group of Chantry agents–all over some ancient artifact.

Hard in Hightown Varric Tethras

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The Bookish Owl – Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

I’m still alive. And to prove it, I give you Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett!

I swear that I’m really back this time. It’s been a couple of weeks since things calmed down around here, and now I’m finally done hiding under a blanket because I’m scared of checking my emails. My brain still sounds like the engine of an old car on a cold morning when I try to work on blog posts, but after a few false starts, I do get it rolling.

This also means that you are now allowed to hunt me down and kick me in the ass if I don’t reply to comments on here. There are no more excuses.

(Though I might try to come up with a few…)

About the book: Johnny and the Dead is the second book in the Johnny Maxwell series and I liked it more than Only You Can Save Mankind. However, I could not tell you the morale of the story, even if my life depended on it. I get the strong feeling that there is a morale in there somewhere, but in that case it flew right over my head. But hey, who needs a point to the story when it’s funny?

Johnny and the Dead
by Terry Pratchett

Over their dead bodies . . .

Not many people can see the dead (not many would want to). Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell can. And he’s got bad news for them: the council want to sell the cemetery as a building site. But the dead have learnt a thing or two from Johnny. They’re not going to take it lying down . . . especially since it’s Halloween tomorrow.

Besides, they’re beginning to find that life is a lot more fun than it was when they were . . . well . . . alive. Particularly if they break a few rules . . .

Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

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The Bookish Owl – The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins

I know it’s been a while, but I’m back with new Bookish Owl posts, and today’s book is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins!

I’m so sorry for being absent lately and not keeping up with replying to comments or staying in touch with my blogger friends. It’s just been crazy lately (you might have noticed I recently published a new book), and it’s been all I could do just to remember to do basic things such as eating…

I hope you haven’t all given up on me!

But seeing as I’m 18 books behind, I better get on with the book stuff. As mentioned above, the featured book in this post is ‘The Hunger Games’. I first read this many years ago and while I remember liking it well enough, it didn’t really drive me to rush out to get the next book in the series, and in the end I never got around to it at all. However, after rereading it, I absolutely loved it!

I think the reason I didn’t really love it the first time around was because I found it a bit far-fetched. But now, after America got a reality star who have dick competitions with dictators as President, somehow I can TOTALLY imagine a government turning kids into celebrities before throwing them into an arena to kill each other.

It’s a slightly depressing reason for changing your mind about a book, isn’t it…?

The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins

WINNING MEANS FAME AND FORTUNE.
LOSING MEANS CERTAIN DEATH.
THE HUNGER GAMES HAVE BEGUN. . . .

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and once girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister’s place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before—and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weight survival against humanity and life against love.

The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins

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The Bookish Owl – War of the Spark: Ravnica by Greg Weisman

War of the Spark: Ravnica by Greg Weisman

Next up is War of the Spark: Ravnica by Greg Weisman.

As the name might suggest, this is a Magic: The Gathering tie-in novel. I have not played the trading card game, but lots of my friends are obsessed with it and some of them invited me to join a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the MTG world Ravnica.

Do you know how hard it is to make a good character backstory when you know nothing about the world said character lives in?

It’s pretty damn hard.

So I went into research mode after the first session. But the info dumps I got from watching YouTubers talk lore were a bit hard to keep straight in my head. But luckily for a bookworm like me, there’s also Magic: The Gathering novels! And it turns out that they (or at least the one I have read at the moment of writing this) are even quite good.

It was a bit hard to keep track of the large cast of characters in War of the Spark: Ravnica, but it’s written in such a way that even Magic noobs like myself can easily follow the story. And when I played D&D last Saturday, I recognized a name mentioned in passing by an NPC (Kaya, who had failed the mission we were about to be given) and immediately knew what that meant. Even better,  I got to explain character lore to one of my fellow players who plays a lot of MTG.

Yes, I’m a smug bastard when I suddenly know things.

Long story short: This is a good book, and I now know who all the people trying to kill me in my D&D campaign are.

War of the Spark: Ravnica
by Greg Weisman

Teyo Verada wants nothing more than to be a shieldmage, wielding arcane energies to protect his people from his world’s vicious diamondstorms. When he’s buried alive in the aftermath of his first real tempest, the young mage’s life is about to end before it can truly begin—until it doesn’t. In a flash, a power he didn’t know he had whisks him away from his home, to a world of stone, glass, and wonder: Ravnica. Teyo is a Planeswalker, one of many to be called to the world-spanning city—all lured by Nicol Bolas, the Elder Dragon. Bolas lays siege to the city of Ravnica, hungry for the ultimate prize: godhood itself. His unparalleled magic and unstoppable army appear poised to bring the city to utter ruin.

Among those who stand in the way of Bolas’s terrifying machinations are the Gatewatch, Planeswalkers sworn to defeat evil, no matter where it’s found. But as they work to unite the other mages and mount a defense of the city and its people, the terrifying truth of Bolas’s plan becomes clear. The Elder Dragon has prepared a trap to ensnare the most powerful mages from across the Multiverse—and it’s too late to escape.

As forces great and small converge on the city and the battle rages, the stakes could not be higher. If the Gatewatch falters and the Planeswalkers fail, the curtain will fall on the age of heroes—and rise on the infinite reign of Nicol Bolas.

War of the Spark: Ravnica by Greg Weisman

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The Bookish Owl – Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett

Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett

Time to shoot some aliens, with Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett.

This is the first book in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy.

It might not have aged as well as Pratchett’s other books, but the overall message about how we’re numb to the horrors of war fits as well today as it must have done in the 90s. In the book it’s the Gulf War they’re referring to, but it might as well have been any of the wars over the last thirty years.

But despite the timeless morale, I think kids today would have a really hard time relating to this book, considering they have never known a time where space invader games were ‘cutting edge’…

Only You Can Save Mankind
by Terry Pratchett

It’s just a game . . . isn’t it?

The alien spaceship is in his sights. His finger is on the Fire button. Johnny Maxwell is about to set the new high score on the computer game Only You Can Save Mankind.

Suddenly, a message appears:
We wish to talk. We surrender.

But the aliens aren’t supposed to surrender—they’re supposed to die!

Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett