Cowl (6/10)

Neal Asher
Science Fiction

This books contains time travel. It should also be placed on the book on a sticker as a warning. Time travel if not handled with care can lead to extremely confusing plots and this book certainly has this issue. Cowl begins strongly with some interesting characters, but then become less intelligible as the book begins to lose control. There are ideas and concepts here there that I was not able to follow and the ending seemed to leave a large number of questions unanswered. There were also minor characters in the book whose point of view we had the story told from for no particularly good reason. These characters were added (I suspect) to flesh out this novel from a novella.

Readibility (2.5/5)
Quality (3.5/5)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (8.5/10)

David Brin
Science Fiction

This book is written in a fake-historial style, with plenty of footnotes. The footnotes were often used to hold various stories of farie, the type of stories where the humans usually end up dead/permanently disfigured.

I liked it, it created a nice history of magic in Britan (mostly false, but still good). A critisim might be that the story has little in the way of a great central plot, but if you are the type of reader that can enjoy the journey (i.e. readers of Neal Stephenson) rather than the ending, then this is a good fantasy novel that is a great read. It is nice to see magic being brought into the historical novel, makes it far more interested from my point of view.

Readibility (4.5/5)
Quality (4/5)