Nemesis Games, by James S.A. Corey (Book Five in the Expanse Series)

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Book, Book Review, James S.A. Corey, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, The Expanse

Onward I press with book five in the Expanse series.  I had my issues with the last book, but I am invested at this point and have gone too far to stop now.

Three years have passed since James Holden and crew embarked on their diplomatic mission beyond the Ring and the battered Rocinante has finally limped home to Tycho Station.  While the ship undergoes major repairs the idle crew finds that their previous lives are beginning to catch up with them.  One by one they split off to face their checkered pasts; Alex to Mars to apologize to his ex-wife, Amos to Earth to mourn (and possibly avenge) the death of his surrogate mother, and Naomi to Ceres after learning someone from her estranged family is in danger.  Separated from his crew for the first time in many years, Holden busies himself overseeing repairs until he is approached by the reporter he transported during the events of Abaddon’s Gate.  She presents him with evidence of Ring-bound ships disappearing under mysterious circumstances and asks for help gathering information, much the dismay of his OPA host.  As the investigation suggests rogue elements within the now respectable OPA government, a series of major coordinated terrorist attacks cripple Earth, topple the Martian government, and jeopardize the future of settlements beyond the solar system.  As the destruction unfolds through the eyes of the scattered Rocinante crew, a new power emerges to challenge the existing political order.

This series confuses me.  After having mixed feelings about two or three of the previous books, I really liked this one.  The story was fast paced, gripping, and brought on another intriguing shakeup to the existing order in this universe.  That said, I am a bit worried that this book veered too far from the protomolecule story arc, but hopefully the next one can start tying some of these plot lines together.  Character-wise this book was solid, perhaps for the first time in the series thus far.  With each crew member getting their own POV chapters, it was nice to finally have a more personal view of them and learn about their lives before they ended up as a group.  I even liked Holden this time around, though apart from his detective duties (a role the authors have written well in this series), he wasn’t a major focus.  What excited me most about this book was the possibility of the Rocinante taking on two familiar faces as new crew members and one character’s realization that the fate of humanity now rests largely on Avarasala’s diplomatic skills.  These two developments give me cautious optimism for the next installment, though I do hope more time is spent on bringing the story together than drastically changing it again.

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Night Shift and The North – North by Northeast

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Beer, Beer Review, Everett, Massachusetts, New England, New York, Night Shift Brewing, The North Brewery

Even though the weather suggests my unofficial stout season is at end, I won’t let that stop me from seeking out one of my favorite styles.  I caught this on draft while visiting Night Shift last week and had to give it a try.

Beer Name: North by Northeast

Brewery: Night Shift Brewing Company (Everett, MA) and The North Brewery (Endicott, NY)

Style: Stout

ABV: 5.5%

Description: Since the brewery was kind enough to offer a description I will share that.  They have it listed as a stout brewed with chocolate, salt, and raspberries.  Brewed in collaboration with New York state’s The North Brewery, whom I have admittedly not heard of before.  My 16 oz. pour cost me $6 at the brewery.

Appearance: Deep, dark brown body with a foamy light tan head.

Smell: Notes of light, roasty cocoa.

Taste: Slightly sweet bitter chocolate upfront, followed by roasted malt and a touch of caramel sweetness and salt.  There was also a mildly sweet and tart raspberry presence that drifted on the periphery of the beer when first poured.  After sitting for a bit, the beer settled into a combination of raspberries and roast, with the other elements occasionally sneaking in on the finish.

Mouthfeel: Medium bodied with a light carbonation level.

Hype: I’m always partial to trying out new stouts, but I think that’s about the extent of the hype on this one.

Overall: I’m generally not a huge fan of roastiness in my beers, but something about this one was really enjoyable.  The addition of raspberry and salt really worked out well here, cutting into the roast a bit and giving the beer an intriguing flavor profile.  Nice brew and a successful collaboration.

Night Shift Brewing Company – Rickey Weiss

Tags

Beer, Beer Review, Everett, Massachusetts, New England, Night Shift Brewing, Weiss

If you’ve never had a raspberry-lime rickey, you sure are missing out.  A mixture of club soda, lime, and raspberry (in varying degrees of fresh fruit and syrup), it is one of the most refreshing warm weather drinks out there.  It’s also an excellent candidate for becoming an adult beverage.  One of our summertime traditions at work is to get rickies to go from the diner downstairs and mix in vodka back at the office.  Knowing how tasty that is, I was curious to see how the drink would translate into a beer.

Beer Name: Rickey Weiss

Brewery: Night Shift Brewing Company (Everett, MA)

Style: Sour Ale

ABV: 4.7%

Description: Per the notes available at the brewery, this is a mixed fermentation sour ale aged with raspberries and limes.  Not available on draft, they were offering bottle pours at $6 for 12 oz.

Appearance: A bold reddish pink body with a fizzly white/pink layer of foam across the top.

Smell: Light hints of tart fruit and a little bit of funk.

Taste: Started out with a burst of tart lime before the raspberries came on and sweetened things up a little bit.  The finish was tangy and mixed in a subtle sweetness and just a little bit of funk.  Overall though, I would say that lime was the primary flavor in this one.  Very light and refreshing.

Mouthfeel: Light and bubbly, this felt very similar to the drink that inspired it.  A tingling of bubbles on the end mostly negated the syrupy feeling I tend to get from this style of beer.

Hype: I really wanted to try this out from the moment I saw it released last month.  Tons of potential here as the Night Shift weiss series tends to be very well done.

Overall: I liked this and think the brewers did an excellent job capturing the essence of a raspberry-lime rickey.  Since I got to try it on particularly warm day I really appreciated how light and refreshing it was.  That said I don’t think it really compares to our work concoction, though it is admittedly hard to compete with that on account of the fresh fruit and ice.  Definitely would recommend breaking this out on a warm day though.

Book Review: The Hero of Ages, by Brandon Sanderson (Book Three of the Mistborn Series)

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Book Review, Books, Brandon Sanderson, Cosmere, Fantasy, Mistborn

Here we are with the final entry in the original Mistborn trilogy.  It has been an excellent journey so far and I couldn’t wait to find out how the story ended.  As usual there are no spoilers for this particular book, but since this is the end of the series I highly recommend skipping this until you have read the first two books.

Another year has passed and all is not well on Scadrial.  Ruin, the malevolent force released at the end of the previous book, has been growing in power and is on the verge of fulfilling its desire to destroy the world.  Koloss led by Steel Inquisitors are marauding through the countryside, ashfall and earthquakes are occurring with alarming frequency, and the mists have begun appearing earlier and earlier and have begun to seemingly strike down people at random.  The only hope for our heroes appear to lay within the Lord Ruler’s hidden storage caches they discovered to exist at the end of the last book.  Desperate for the vital supplies and cryptic clues about fighting Ruin, Elend and Vin are struggling to secure the final two caches which lay in unfriendly hands.  With time running out Elend splits what remains of his forces between the two sites.  While Breeze, Sazed, and Spook travel to the city of Urteau to parlay with an erratic Skaa populist that has risen to power, Elend and Vin lead their army towards the heavily fortified city of Fadrex to secure the final store by any means necessary.

I liked this book a lot and definitely felt it provided a worthy end to the story.  Full of surprises and suspense, it also gave satisfying answers about the origins of the mists and what caused the drastic changes to the world.  I won’t give away the ending, but what I do want to say about it is: Wow, I did not see that coming!  For the book as a whole, the author did a great job in setting a tense, urgent mood, and I particularly liked the mysteries surrounding the storage caches.  I was often reminded of my favorite parts of Heretics of Dune, in particular the chapter in which Odrade uncovers the ruins of Sietch Tabr and the God Emperor’s message.

I also enjoyed that the story again explored a larger portion of this world.  It gave the book an even more epic scope than the others while allowing characters like Spook, TenSoon, and Sazed more page time as well.  There were again a few slow spots, this time on account of an unnecessary amount of time spent rehashing established information every few chapters or so.  My eagerness to read on gave me the momentum to speed through these parts, but what really bothered me was that this took away time I could have been getting more new story.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought this book was great.  I just wanted to get as much of it as possible in the pages provided!

Luckily for me there is indeed plenty of more story out there.  There are a couple of novellas associated with this trilogy and a follow-up series set a few hundred years after these events.  Further, as if all that wasn’t enough, I found out all of those works are part of an even larger collection of the author’s works known as the Cosmere, a shared universe in which some of his various other series take place (and eventually overlap).  Pretty safe to say my reading list is now well stocked for the immediate future.

Brewery Ommegang – Gnomegeddon Blonde Ale

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Beer, Beer Review, Brewery Ommegang, Craft Beer, New York

This beer came to me via my wife, who surprised me with it after work one day because she’s just that awesome.

Beer Name: Gnomegeddon Blonde Ale

Brewery: Brewery Ommegang (Cooperstown, NY)

Style: Blonde Ale

ABV: 9.5%

Description: I couldn’t find anything on the official brewery website, but a careful reading of the label revealed this to be a blonde ale that underwent secondary fermentation with Brett yeast and got a few months extra conditioning in the bottle before hitting shelves.

Appearance: Poured a dark golden-yellow/almost amber body.  There was fluffy head of slight off-white foam that formed with the pour and lazily bubbled away.

Smell: Sweet upfront, with some linger herbal/floral spices in the back.

Taste: Sweet malts and bubblegum sweetness to start.  From there the beer took on a subtle barnyard funk in the background as banana esters, herbs, and a light peppery yeast came on for the finish.  Very mellow and smooth drinking.

Mouthfeel: Medium-plus bodied and creamy to start.  Ended in a flurry of tiny bubbles.

Hype: Always happy to drink a beer from this brewery.  I don’t seek them out as often as I probably should.

Overall: I really like this, though it did creep up on me a bit.  I started drinking without paying much attention to the label and was well into my second glass before realizing it was 9.5%.  This was a tasty, quality that brew that made for some great drinking on a warm spring evening.

Book Review: The Well of Ascention, by Brandon Sanderson (Book Two of the Mistborn Series)

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Book, Book Review, Brandon Sanderson, Fantasy, Mistborn, Reading

As I mentioned in my previous review, I jumped into this second entry in the Mistborn series immediately upon finishing the first.  I won’t bring up any spoilers for this novel below, but please be warned: major, though perhaps expected, elements of the previous novel will unavoidably be brought up.

This story reunites the reader with the surviving members of Kelsier’s crew.  A year has passed since the end of the last book and our heroes have had limited success consolidating their victory under the benevolent kingship of Elend Venture. Challenging his legitimacy, however, are three aspiring kings who have lain siege to Luthadel in the hopes of seizing both political power and the Lord Ruler’s rumored store of riches.  Included among them are Elend’s estranged father, a desperate warlord, and a former friend who has somehow managed to control the monstrous Koloss, the feared elite forces of the Lord Ruler.  Despite these threats, Vin’s thoughts lay elsewhere.  Haunted by the Lord Ruler’s dying words, she feels ominous forces gathering in the world, manifested by a phantom creature stalking her in the mists and the calling of an ancient power running through her mind.  And if that wasn’t enough, a rival Mistborn arrived with the enemy forces and has taken a keen interest in Vin, leading her to doubt both her relationship with Elend and role within his government.

I found this an excellent followup to the first book and enjoyed it every bit as much.  I particularly liked having more of the world and its inhabitants revealed.  Whereas the first novel was mainly focused on the inner working of the crew and events in and around Luthadel, this time we’re given a glimpse of what is going on elsewhere as well.  We also get more formal introductions to other the other magical beings in this world groups like the formidable koloss warriors, shape-shifting kandra spies, as well as the more well-meaning and scholarly Terris people who their own unique abilities involving metallic alloys called Feruchemy.  As for the characters, I liked both Vin and Elend (which is fortunate since they are the main ones), though I did feel that the story occasionally slowed down around them in a few places on account of repetitive dwelling on their unchanging mental states that came up more frequently than necessary.  I also really liked that Sazed had a bigger role in this story since I feel like there is a lot of potential with his character.

Although answers to my biggest questions about this world understandably go unanswered here, there were a lot of interesting reveals to be had.  Going along with this new information was plenty of action and intrigue, not to mention a huge cliffhanger ending.   Put this all together and it made for an excellent bridge novel wrapping up the previous story and starting the next.  It certainly made me eager to press on.

Jack’s Abby Craft Lagers – Bourbon Barrel-Aged Framinghammer

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Beer, Beer Review, Craft Beer, Framingham, Massachusetts, New England

I picked this up not intending to review it, since I was sure that I must have done so at some point already.  Since it turns out that I haven’t, I figured I might as well.  As a fan of this beer and its variants for a few years now, I did this more for fun than experimentation.

Beer Name: Bourbon Barrel-Aged Framinghammer

Brewery: Jack’s Abby Craft Lagers (Framingham, MA)

Style: Baltic Porter

ABV: 10.0%

Description: Stylistically similar to all those big imperial stouts I’ve been drinking lately, you can read a bit more about this barrel-aged version of the brewery’s popular Baltic Porter here.  My .5 liter bottle was dated 03/07/2017 and cost a reasonable $10 downtown.

Appearance: Poured a thick black body topped off by a thick, two-plus finger head that formed without much encouragement.  The foam gradually settled down to a thin coating as the beer went on.

Smell: Light mix of oats and sweet bourbon.  Inviting, but not as strong as I was expecting.

Taste: Rich, sweet dark malts upfront set the tone for this beer.  Following up on this were hints of vanilla, grainy oats, and an extremely subtle bit of roast.  A sweet bourbon presence carried this through to the finish, mixing with oak and vanilla along the way and leaving a pleasant lingering sweet heat at the end of the sip.

Mouthfeel: Smooth, thick body with low carbonation.  Accentuated the beer perfectly.

Hype: This is a very respected beer, but the hype isn’t really what it once was.  When this first started being released it flew off the shelves, but since then the brewery has ramped their production way up and can better meet demand.  Doesn’t make it any less tasty though.

Overall: Excellent beer, every bit as good as I remembered.  Highly recommended, definitely check this out if you haven’t already.  I also highly recommend picking up any of the variants you may find as well.

Book Review: Mistborn: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson (Book One of the Mistborn Series)

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Book, Book Review, Brandon Sanderson, Fantasy, Mistborn, Reading

Reading this book taught me an important lesson.  Namely, that when my wife recommends something I should listen to her.  Picking up this series gave me another revelation as well: reading books you already own can be just as worthwhile as finding new ones.

Set on the planet Scadrial, we are introduced to a feudal society roughly analogous to our own Middle Ages.  Dominating the land from his fortress in the capital city Luthadel is the despotic Lord Ruler, a once-prophesized hero who has reigned as king and deity for roughly 1,000 years.  With his ascendency came many changes to the Earth-like world; all plant-life turned brown, frequent volcanic eruptions regularly pour ash over the land, and every night a dense mist engulfs the land and confines most of the terrified population indoors.  Society has stagnated in this time and a rigidly enforced strict class system emerged.  Beneath the Lord Ruler and his bureaucracy lays a heavily regulated noble class to oversee the Skaa, a brutally subjected class of laborers who work, live, and die at the mercy of their masters.  A few other groups fill in the gaps, but as a general rule if one is not at least noble born they are not doing too well in this world.  Holding this order together is magic, which here revolves around the ability to metabolize particular metals.  Each metal grants a different mental or physical power to its user, or Allomancer, though practitioners can typically access only one type.  There are however, rare and powerful individuals known as Mistborns with the ability to burn them all.

Now that I’ve set up the background, our two primary characters are both Skaa, one a teenaged thief named Vin and the other a legendary dissident named Kelsier.  Vin has spent the majority of her life on the streets and we first meet her as a low ranking member in a group of thieves. Prized by her boss for an uncanny ability to influence people and situations she is brought in on a plot that goes wrong, drawing the attention of the authorities in the process.  With the Lord Ruler’s agents closing in, Vin is approached by Kelsier, who shocks her with the news that her role in the incident has exposed her as Mistborn.  Being Mistborn himself, he invites her to train with him and join the small but skilled crew of Allomancers he is assembling in Luthadel.  She accepts, and in doing so agrees to help them they to accomplish the impossible – overthrow the Lord Ruler and avenge society’s poor treatment of the Skaa.  

I really got into this book and the world in which it takes place.  I found myself eagerly looking forward to finding out more information about what was going on and enjoyed the teasers offered by the chapter introductions, especially once I got far enough in that I was able to get a sense of what they were suggesting.  In addition to liking both Kelsier and Vin, there was an excellent group of supporting characters that were all well written with a clear purpose beyond exploring the full scope of powers available.  Speaking of powers, the magic system was not only different than what might be expected, but very well thought out, balanced, and rewarding of ingenuity in some really interesting ways.  The one negative for me was there were a few places I felt the story slowed down a bit, most notably in relation to Vin’s drawn out love/hate musings on ball gowns and a slow-moving courtship with Elend Venture, a potentially sympathetic noble.  My wife, on the other hand, strongly disagrees with me on this so take my opinions for whatever they’re worth.  Regardless, I really enjoyed this novel and jumped right into the next book.  I guess that’s an advantage of reading something you already own.

Third Anniversary Imperial IPA – Other Half Brewing Company

Tags

Beer, Beer Review, Brooklyn, Craft Beer, New York, Other Half Brewing Company

I am probably fashionably late in celebrating this occasion, but I figure I’m OK since this wasn’t exactly a personal milestone.

Beer Name: Third Anniversary Imperial IPA

Brewer: Other Half Brewing Company (Brooklyn, NY)

Style: DIPA

ABV: 10.0%

Description: I’ll just come out and say it: I got lazy this time.  Given the lack of clear and easy to locate official information about this release I went to Beer Advocate for my description.  This triple dry-hopped features “copious” amounts of Citra, Motueka, Galaxy, Simcoe, and Citra Lupulin powder.  The can was dated 01/27/2017.

Appearance: The body was a hazy, juice-like yellow/orange color.  A thin, foamy white head sat up top.

Smell: Lots and lots of tropical fruit sweetness with a touch of bitterness in the background.

Taste: Bursting with fruit upfront, lead by pineapple, mango, and apricot.  A sweet and piney bitterness gradually built up toward the end and lingers for a bit after the sip.  There was also a hint of bready malts underneath this all, giving the flavors a nice smoothness which gave absolutely no indication of the higher ABV.

Mouthfeel: Medium, slightly creamy body with a moderate carbonation level.  Finish was a little bit sticky.

Hype: It sounded like there was a ton of hype around this release, which I guess is to be expected when a popular brewery makes a special release these days.  Based on the ratings I saw in the link above, it looks this was well received.

Overall: Very impressive.  Something about this beer just made it really relaxing to sit down and drink it.  It managed to impart all the juicy highlights of the style without being overly aggressive in the process.