City of Stairs

I needed something to read on my kindle, and sometimes I feel as though I've exhausted much of the fantasy genre. I am obviously mistaken. I was looking through goodreads and found this mentioned as a good or great book, depending on which review you looked at it. I decided to give it a try.

Title: City of Stairs
Author: Robert Bennett Jackson
Format: Kindle

The story takes place in Bukilov, the capital city of "the Continent." The Continent had conquered much of the world because they had Gods or "Divinities" aiding them. Then a man emerge from Saypur, a small conquered and oppressed island, and killed the gods, helping Saypur replace the Continent as the dominant world power. Our story takes place four generations later in modern Bukilov. A prominent Saypuri historian is murdered and a representative from the foreign ministry, Shara, arrives to investigate the crime. Within days she finds herself barely avoiding assault and potentially talking to gods. All is not as it seems in Bukilov and Shara's curiosity leaves her no choice but to unravel all the twisted threads.

I think the simplest, but most important thing I can say about this book is that the story is much better than the writing. There was a slow start, but the story became more and more engaging and the style less distracting as each page turned. When I say that story isn't particularly well written, I'm referring to a few specific things. Firstly, the story takes place in third person present, with us inside the head of whoever is the main focus of each section (mainly Shara). This is an odd and off putting choice, but the reader gets used to it after a hundred pages or so. The second problem is a pet peeve of mine. Jackson's method of writing dialogue is incredibly frustrating. He puts more than two separate lines of dialogue in one paragraph. This drives me crazy. It's cluttered, confusing, and amateurish and I hate when authors do this. Even worse, at points he has multiple people talking within the same paragraph. Could he not find the enter key while he was writing the manuscript?

The plot itself is enthralling. To potential readers, ignore the first chapter, it's by far the section of the entire book, and while it sets up the plot for the rest of the novel, it's a boring chapter about bored characters doing boring thing. Just get through it. On the plus side, in the rest of the book there are gods, demons, intrigue, death, sex, and good old fashion monster fighting. Jackson gets a little bit of everything into the story, and does so in a surprisingly coherent and entertaining way. I would recommend this book to most fantasy fans, but I'd warn them that parts of the book can be quite a struggle. I don't think I'll be exploring the rest of the series. Good luck.
6/10

Star Island

This is another book that I found at the used book sale in Maine. I had never read any Hiaasen before, but I'd seen other of works in stores and online and it had a bright cover. What could go wrong?

Title: Star Island
Author: Carl Hiaasen
Format: Paperback

This book was a struggle to get through.I sat down with it, and breezed through the first hundred pages in one sitting. I found myself thinking, "wow, this is so easy to read, it takes no thought at all." Yet after that initial session, I found myself very reluctant to pick the book back up. It wasn't the familiar hesitance about finishing a book I love and never want to end. After some reflection I realized this resistance was due to the fact that Star Island is just not a particularly good book. I had made the fatal mistake of coming up for air, giving me time to think about what I had read and would continue reading.
The major flaw with the book is that it is too self indulgent by Hiaasen. It appears that throughout the book he'd have an idea, and think "this is hilarious" and put it in. Then he would realize that he should have introduced it earlier on, and would half-heatedly edit a paragraph or two to justify the inclusion. It just made it seem it all seem like lazy writing aimed more at gags than at well developed characters or a thoughtful plot.
His characters received a similar treatment. It became clear that Hiaasen had radically altered aspects of the characters personalities to allow for some joke he thought of 200 pages into the story. All the main characters are caricatures will no depth or thought put into them. There is a weak attempt at juxtaposing nearly identical physical characters with mostly different characters, but this is poorly done as well. On top of the poor treatment of his main characters, Hiaasen would also randomly add characters as one offs for the sole purpose of moving the plot along. These were undeveloped and lazy tools that where anything to experience.
Finally, the book also lacked any form of subtlety. One can only read about a fat man being called gelatinous or jello-like and how air-headed a bimbo is so many times before it becomes painful and deleterious to the story. Hiaasen came off as a poor man's Christopher Moore. I'd recommend readers steer towards Moore instead because though his work is also flawed, it is much less self-indulgent and frustrating to read than Star Island.
2/10

Monster Hunter International

I listened to this book a few years ago, and noticed that the most recent book in the series had been getting some press. I was in between books, so I figured that I'd give it another listen.

Title: Monster Hunter International
Author: Larry Correia
Format: Audio
Time to Finish: 12 days

The book follows Owen Pitt, an accountant, whose boss transforms into a werewolf and attacks him. He barely survives the encounter and is recruited to join MHI, Monster Hunters International. They are a group of skilled monster hunters for hire. It turns out that monsters are not only real, there are a lot of them and there's good money to be made hunting them. The big enemies for this story is a powerful being known as the Cursed One, who has bent a number of master vampires to his will. It's up to a reluctant alliance between government monster hunters and MHI to stop him before he fulfills his prophecy to "breaks time" and ends the world.

Oof, this story does not hold up to a second reading. In all honesty, I only finished because I wanted an opportunity to write my first negative review.
That said, I actually gave some thought to why this book seemed terrible this time around and came to a few conclusions. The first is that this book is pure gun porn. Correia was a fire arms instructor before becoming an author, and I think it's safe to say he's a bit of a gun nut. This becomes apparent very early on with intimate, loving descriptions of every firearm imaginable. It's kind of cool at first, but for those who do not believe guns are man's greatest invention, the weapon worship becomes tiresome. The book would likely be forty pages shorter without that content.
The second thing I realized is that this the book equivalent of a B-movie. Not a good B-movie that borders on becoming a quality movie, just a story of simple characters doing very predictable things. As one would expect, it's chock full of corny lines and over the top action scenes, but there's very little substance or heart to the story. This didn't seem like a problem, especially as early on the book is a bit tongue in cheek about how ridiculous some of it is. Sadly, as the story progresses this self-effacing sense of humor disappears and all we're left with is a cheesy plot taking itself much too seriously.
Probably the worst aspect is the characters themselves. Rather than deep, meaningful individuals, none of them has any depth. Instead we are left with caricatures and mediocre ones at that. The women are beautiful the men are defined by one feature and the goodguy always gets the girl. We know all these things to be true, so there's no sense of risk or urgency at any point of the story.
Don't get me wrong, parts of the story were fun and enjoyable, those just didn't do close to enough to salvage the book.
4/10