First Impressions

So, this is my first blog entry in my shiny new blog, which will absolutely be updated more than my old blogs. Probably.
This blog is meant to be a place for me to review the books I’m currently reading and , hopefully, get some fun discussions started about them. I will have occasional giveaways and contests. Hopefully, I’ll get some author interviews here as well. If nothing else, I can link the interviews we do at the bookstore I work at – Little Professor. The current interview is with The Magicians author Lev Grossman.

So, on to what I’m currently reading… At the moment, I’m working my way through Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs series. If you have any interest in sci-fi I highly recommend them. I’m coming a bit late to the party (as usual) since Altered Carbon made a pretty big splash when it debuted in 2002. The setting is the far future and technology has changed everything. Consciousness can now be electronically stored and moved from body to body. Death is reversible for those with the money to pay for it. Humans have used the infrastructure of an alien civilization to spread across the galaxy. But the old problems are still around. Cue Takeshi Kovacs. He was trained to be one of the galaxy’s most elite and adaptable soldiers. Unfortunately, that position doesn’t come with much of a severance package so Takeshi has turned to more creative revenue sources.
When a job goes bad and Takeshi is taken into custody the last place he expects to wake up in is a processing facility on Earth. But a very rich has died (temporarily). The police are calling it a suicide, but the victim and his family aren’t satisfied. Takeshi has a time limit, a bottomless expense account, and a few too many dangerous women trying to help him. This is Raymond Chandler for the hard sci-fi fan and it’s beautifully executed. Kovacs is ruthless, but you can’t quite help liking him even if you probably wouldn’t want to meet him on your way home some night. He’s not a comfortable protagonist. He makes morally questionable decisions and sometimes he’s an asshole, but deep down, I think he’s probably a good guy.