{"id":35464,"date":"2026-07-12T12:58:46","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T17:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35464"},"modified":"2026-07-11T06:17:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T11:17:28","slug":"when-is-a-book-report-not-a-book-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/12\/when-is-a-book-report-not-a-book-report\/","title":{"rendered":"When Is A Book Report Not A Book Report?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BookI bought this book when I went to the Thursday night book signing for Garage Sale Vinyl<\/a><\/em> by Christopher Jones. As you might remember, I have bought Samuel Rikard\/Levi Samuel’s books at various LibraryCons in the Before Times (before the government spergout in 2020), and I’ve read Dammit Bre!<\/a><\/em> (Samuel Rikard) and The Pandora Gambit<\/a><\/em> (Levi Samuel)–which means I still have, what, five or six of his books around here to read, including a fantasy trilogy whose spines together make a picture (which I would say is why I haven’t picked them up–I don’t want to spoil the look on my bookshelves–but that’s not really it; I just don’t want to commit to a trilogy, and even C.S. Lewis<\/a> could change my mind on that).<\/p>\n

So I picked up this book because it never left my desk after I bought it, and it looked short, and…. It seemed rather familiar.<\/p>\n

Apparently with the repseudonyming from Rikard to Samuel, Rikard\/Samuel renamed this book to The Pandora Gambit<\/em>. Perhaps so that he could have thematic names for the sequels–but, no, his Web site<\/a> indicates the series is Miami Knights. I dunno. Maybe he thought The Pandora Gambit<\/em> was a better title. I suppose it is.<\/p>\n

I thought about re-reading the book, which often happens here when I pull something from the stacks where I’ve picked up a duplicate copy, but the second night, I thought, geez, I have thousands of things in my stacks to read that I don’t know<\/em> I’ve read before (or that I’ve restocked because I explicitly wanted to read it again). So I’ll put it on the read shelves and in the 26-year-old books database, creaking atop its Microsoft Access backend and Visual Basic type-ahead feature, but I will not count it on my annual total.<\/p>\n

So if “Levi Samuel” ever reaches his goal of being one of the greatest fantasy writers of our era, I will have a real collectible here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought this book when I went to the Thursday night book signing for Garage Sale Vinyl by Christopher Jones. As you might remember, I have bought Samuel Rikard\/Levi Samuel’s books at various LibraryCons in the Before Times (before the government spergout in 2020), and I’ve read Dammit Bre! (Samuel Rikard) and The Pandora Gambit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35466,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35464\/revisions\/35466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}