Rants & Raves

My kids are off from school this week, and I just wasn’t ready to have another review up, so instead you get a new Rants & Raves. Which is fine actually, as there’s been a few things I’ve been thinking about and wanted to put down on paper.



Rant – ah the scifi/fantasy book blogging (reviewing) community. In the span of one day, among the same group of twitter feeds from our community I see bloggers complaining about how scifi/fantasy books get no respect in book awards – and then go on to talk about how they’d never lower themselves to read a tie-in book. You know, harboring the same attitude that those same book awards are showing towards science fiction and fantasy literature. It actually makes me want to actively go out an only read and review tie-in fiction for an entire year – which I’ll consider doing just as soon as some of my favorite authors stop making new original fiction that I really want to read.



Rant – So Gabe at Penny Arcade decided to have a little rant about Star Wars literature a few days ago. I’ve got my own problems at times with Star Wars lit (and I don’t completely disagree with his point about a recent series being somewhat lackluster – that being Fate of the Jedi)… BUT, his big gripe, the one that made him turn away in disgust, is the name Darth Andeddu (because it’s pronounced Undead U or something). This was a name so out of left-field when we’ve had the likes of Darth Maul, Tyranus, Sidious and Bane – such unobtrusive Sith names giving no obvious sign of the meaning behind them. That’s sarcasm folks, when you’re a fan of Star Wars you’ve got to go with the flow on the names thing – George Lucas started that whole trend way back when with names like Luke Skywalker and Solo.



Rave – It can be difficult to find books for my second grader that I feel are both of interest to him as well as actually being worth reading. He’s a big fan of the Thor movie, but we’ve been disappointed to find not too many novels featuring him (and most of the ones that do are just movie adaptations). However, Marvel recently announced a series of Young Readers novels which gives me hope. The series is starting with Spider-Man, but I have hope that if it winds up being a success (as well as the expected success of the Avengers movie) that it will expand into books featuring other characters shortly.

Rave – I was thrilled when a review copy of Uglies: Shay’s Story showed up at my door. Despite having heard great things about this scifi book series, I haven’t had the chance to check it out. But Shay’s Story, as a graphic novel, just jumped up to the top of my reading pile. It made me realize that I wish more books would make the jump to comic adaptations – and if comic companies themselves won’t do it (and they are), then I’m glad the book publishers have started to try it out for themselves. Speaking of which, it may be time for me to start checking out the graphic novels of The Wheel of Time, Elric, and Drizzt – all stories I’m otherwise unlikely to ever read in prose form. Got any other novel-to-graphic novel adaptations to recommend to me?