Reflecting on the Light and the Dark of Science - A Review of Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In recent years, I’ve become rather leery of comparisons between books and other books (or books and TV shows and movies) in a way that I wasn’t when I was younger. It used to be that, if someone wanted me to read something, they could get away with comparing it to something they knew I liked, and that would be enough to get me reading. Lately, however, I only take such recommendations from those I know very well, as such attempts at recommendation, if made by the media or by someone who is merely an acquaintance or a total stranger, rarely ever works out well.

The worst incidence of this was when I chose to pick up Son of the Morning by Mark Alder, partly because of the high star ratings it had on both Amazon and Goodreads, but also partly because the blurbs and reviews compared it to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series - a series I actually enjoy. However, Son of the Morning turned out to be an enormous disappointment, with none of the depth and richness I’d expected due to the comparison to Martin’s series (a comparison made, it turns out, solely because both borrow from the Hundred Years’ War as inspiration). There have been other incidents prior to this, but Son of the Morning is pretty much the straw that broke the back of this particular camel; since then I taken comparisons between books with more than a grain of salt.

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