-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Dark, soulful tales that haunt long after the last page.
I had to downgrade my old rating of 5 stars on this one. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that. While I still found The Riddle-Master of Hed to be worthy of 5 stars, re-reading the second book in the series some 20 years after my last previous read, I just didn’t enjoy Heir of…
What the heck did I just read? It’s been a long, long time since I finished a book with such thoroughly unlikable characters. There was absolutely nobody in this story that was likable. Not even a little. The writing itself is beautiful, and was the only thing that kept me slogging through the train wreck…
The following is a story I wrote for my AP Literature class’s 4th quarter benchmark test this year. It makes allusions to every novel and play we read in class during the school year (except Fahrenheit 451, which I forgot to work in) and they had to answer questions to identify the source. How many…
For their fourth quarter benchmark I required my Leadership students to write and present an essay about what they hope to leave behind as their legacy. Some asked me about my own. This is what I would have liked to have written/said to them. For many decades now I have hoped to leave a literary…
After having watched a good film adaptation of this novel several weeks ago, I had high hopes for the actual book. In places it lived up to those, but overall, just not so much. Knowing where Greene was going with the story made me impatient with the long buildup and non-linear format of the first…
One of the more interesting zombie novels I’ve read. This one is set about 20 years after the zombie apocalypse and focuses on a 10-year-old girl who is very smart, but must come to terms with the fact she is a Hungry, which is the name given to zombies in this story (the word zombie…
A long-time favorite, it had been at least 20 years since I’d traveled with Morgan from the farming island of Hed to see the High One in Erlenstar Mountain. This was one of those transformative books for me, a fantasy that made me think, made me want to look beyond the boundaries of what we…
Tell a little truth with many lies It’s the only way I’ve found — Dio, “Straight Through the Heart” No matter how far out in space your story is set, or how alien your fantasy world, your reader needs a touchstone of reality to identify with. The question, though, especially for those not creating completely…
My goal for 2014 was to read 30 books. I did that, plus three. Of those, I only gave a 1-star review to one title, with everything else getting at least three stars. That’s a pretty good year of reading. I thought I’d recap the highlights here, as I tend to do at the start…
Steven E. Wedel 