A wonderful piece of work. With the story taking place in the universe, two different planets with different cultures, attitudes and behaviors cross paths, and the whole book is set in delicious irony. Told in the viewpoint of a highly intelligent intergalactic bomb who tries to find out about th...
I finally finished this damn book. It started off so promising, and that first chapter is absolutely hysterical. Unfortunately it's all downhill from there. The book just drags and drags with boring characters and no real plot, until the very very end where it suddenly comes back together with th...
I finished reading this book a day ahead of my Sci-Fi Fantasy Book Club Meeting (August 12, 2014) to discuss the book. This fiction is a zany exploration into the concept of multiverses and how to use them for fun and profit. It contains very little hard science (which is good; my background is i...
Not my favourite Tom Holt book, but a reasonably enjoyable escapist read nonetheless. Don't want to spoil it for other readers, but I found the ending a bit flat. I do enjoy his zany world of magic and mayhem, but this one didn't quite hang together as well as others. Saying all that, if you want...
This book kinda reminded me of what would happen if Haruki Murakami and Terry Pratchett got together to write a book... then it went a bit wrong. The story was OK if a little boring but I found the characters rather flat. The back of the book described the exact kind of story I enjoy, and I am a ...
See that girl with the cloak and basket? She doesn't need a woodchopper to kill the wolf--she can handle it on her own. And Prince Florizel?--He really doesn't come from around here. He doesn't even know that there's something repulsive about food with a hole in the middle! There's the knight...
This is only my second Holt surprisingly, the first being The Portable Door earlier last year. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I gather he is very popular amongst fans of Terry Pratchett but I think comparisons here are wrong. I find Holt's work far less like Pratchett and perhaps more along the lines o...
This is a follow-on from The Portable Door, but could probably be read on its own. Hapless Brit becomes involved with magic, gods, random heroes and bureaucracy, finds frustration, danger and love. I really should post a couple of the contract provisions for selling your soul to the Devil, which ...
This was my first Tom Holt book, follow ups included a quick read i cant find here but was awesome in its portrayal of a man creeping along a tunnel hunting a monster. Of course this lead me to the second proper book of his i have which is 'you dont have to be evil to work here but it helps' whic...
So what is The Portable Door? Well, you'll have to read a fair bit of this novel before you discover that, encountering mishaps and madness, madcap mayhem and wonderful weirdness along the way. Expect the unexpected. Expect craziness and confusion. You can't be any more muddled than the hero of t...
Having read this book based on its ravenous reviews, I feel cheated and slightly suspicious about the general population's sense of humour. Tom Holt has been compared to Terry Pratchett, but his fantasy creatures set on a contemporary setting could not be any less funny than Pratchett's. The awok...
This omnibus consists of two of Tom Holt's earlier works. I have reviewed each one below.Who's afraid of Beowulf?What are the deeds of heroes, except a few frightened people doing the best they can in the circumstances? (p. 222)What striked me first was how much Tom Holt's writing reminds me of T...
It's been a while since I read anything by Tom Holt, but I enjoyed returning to his weird and wacky world. In this adventure, Jane wants nothing to more than to peacefully commit suicide in a railway station waiting room, but instead is inflicted by the genie of the aspirin bottle, of Kiss, as h...
This book gives a different account of the fate of Vanderdecker, the Flying Dutchman, and his crew from that presented in Wagner's opera and other sources. Instead of being cursed by the Devil, they accidentally drink an elixir created by the alchemist Juan de Montalban, which makes them immortal...
I'm very surprised that nobody has written a review of this book, yet. In the hopes that this will be useful to someone, here goes.For me, reading Tom Holt's Ye Gods is another attempt to find a funny fantasy writer like Terry Pratchett. The book actually reminded me of some of Pratchett's earl...
Here's a synopsis from fantastic fiction: Wagner got it wrong. The twilight of the gods isn't that cataclysmic. After all, there's a comfy chair, a warm fire and three meals a day at the Sunnyvoyde Residential Home. Passing the time with Aphrodite, who's still quite sprighty with the aid of her Z...
While not as humourous as some of his previous books, Tom Holt still delivers the fun. (Judicious editing will make that as good a blurb as any of Rex Reed's.) I think I missed out on a lot that was going on here because I can't read French and thus was unable to translate the many chansons inclu...
Tom Holt is the English equivalent of Christopher Moore. The big difference is that Mr. Moore puts setup/punchline sets in his chapters, while Mr. Holt is much more subtle and restrained. Douglas Adams is an apt and accurate comparison. Where they are alike is that they both are not shy about set...