2016.Book51 - Station Eleven (Mandel)

Just OK. Going for a Bel Canto thing? Unconvincing post-apocalypse.

2016.Book50 - Empire of the Summer Moon (Gwynne)

Really interesting. Lots of bad guys.

2016.Book49 - The Warmth of Other Suns (Wilkerson)

Excellent.

2016.Book48 - Oryx & Crake (Atwood)

Average SF.

2016.Book47 - Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)

Very good. What is the value of that life?

2016.Book46 - Jerusalem (Moore)

Immense and epic. Gets good after the first 350 pages or so. Feel like he could have removed or trimmed most of that first part.

2016.Book45 - Walk this Way

Aerosmith bio. Interesting how they cleaned up in three senses.

2016.Book44 - Stories of Your Life (Chiang)

Kind of underwhelming. Lots of hype, so just OK seems poor.

2016.Book43 - The Great Ordeal (Bakker)

Unbelievably good. So epic. Every storyline. Wow.

2016.Book42 - Welcome to Night Value (Fink, Cranor)

A let down. What's entertaining in audio is kind of inane in print.

2016.Book41 - The Wheel of Osheim (Lawrence)

Pretty good conclusion to the trilogy.

2016.Book40 - A Borrowed Man (Wolfe)

Very good. Pretty cool that it's almost all dialog. You get a strange world with lots unexplained (or maybe I just missed it).

2016.Book39 - Alif the Unseen (Wilson)

Pretty good. Some intellectual insecurity?

2016.Book38 - My Search for Absolutes (Tillich)

Surprisingly accessible.

2016.Book37 - Born Again (Harpur)

Pretty good, slightly flaky.

2016.Book36 - Sex Mom and God (Schaeffer)

Pretty interesting.

2016.Book35 - Unapologetic (Spufford)

Mixed. Snarky English argumentativness is just annoying. Descriptions of personal experience are great. But there's a big gap between meditative experiences and social/political effects. He marvels that the massive edifice of Christendom has been built on such a tiny, fragile set of experiences, but I think he'll find that is hasn't.

2016.Book34 - The Affinities (Wilson)

Just OK. Should be a good story: a protagonist with a conflict between his unaccepting family and the community he finds in another city. But Wilson kind of glosses over how Adam fits in with the Taus.

Julian Comstock was such a good book, but nothing else Wilson has done has really grabbed me. Kind of like Hansen's Chess Garden. Maybe it's me?

2016.Book33 - Lungdon (Carey)

Very good ending to the trilogy.

2016.Book32 - Corporation Wars: Dissidence (MacLeod)

Pretty cool stuff. Lots of intrigue.

2016.Book31 - Too Like The Lightning (Palmer)

Some cool ideas and extrapolations (though a little too neatly relevant). More revelations than plot. The scale of characters and rebellion is wrong. Will be interesting to read the rest of the series.

2016.Book30 - Galore (Crummey)

Pretty good. Covered a lot of ground.

2016.Book29 - Quantum Night (Sawyer)

Unjustifiably optimistic, irritatingly arrogant. Like a kids' version of Neuropath.

2016.Book28 - Under Major Domo Minor (DeWitt)

Pretty good. Starts off boring, then good, then weird, then good again.

2016.Book27 - Why Evolution is True (Coyne)

Really good.

2016.Book26 - The Mount (Emshwiller)

Pretty good.

2016.Book25 - Incompleteness (Goldstein)

The exposition of the proof was fine, as was the biographical background.

Unfortunately, Goldstein makes the Vienna Circle positivists the goofy villains of the story, hypnotized by and yet misunderstanding Wittgenstein, with Godel sitting quietly until he can destroy their errors. To do this, she has to misrepresent the Circle's views; changing them from "nothing we can't experience is relevant" to "nothing we can't understand is real".

2016.Book24 - Witches of Lychford (Cornell)

Nice novella. Could see this being a comic series.

2016.Book23 - Light Time and Gravity (Bakker)

I didn't get it.

2016.Book22 - Half a War (Abercrombie)

Good ending to the trilogy

2016.Book21 - Half the World (Abercrombie)

Really good. Thorn's a great character.

2016.Book20 - Identifying Child Molesters (van Dam)

Pretty good. Very repetitive. Varies from extreme DSM inside baseball to vague summaries of interviews with 300 offenders (would have like to have seen some breakdown on patterns of offense). Central point was useful; offenders aren't the weird guy in the bushes, but the caring, giving, friendly, to-good-to-be-true types.

2016.Book19 - Foulsham (Carey)

Very good. Lots more action and I like the focus on Lucy. Tregillis' second Alchemy book was good too, and Lawrence's. Here's to second books in trilogies.

2016.Book18 - Something Coming Through (McAuley)

Just OK. Too much mystery.

2016.Book17 - Fellside (Carey)

Different from The Girl. Much slower, but some big pay-offs. Great stuff.

2016.Book17 - Life (Richards)

Fun stuff.

2016.Book16 - Heap House (Carey)

Good. Gormenghast-y and weird. I'll read the sequel

2016.Book15 - Prince of Fools (Lawrence)

Now that Abercrombie's doing Lawrence's thing, I guess Lawrence is doing Scott Lynch's. Or at least trying. Better than his earlier stuff, because it's much less grim.

2016.Book14 - Half a King (Abercrombie)

Pretty good. A bit mellower than his other stuff.

2016.Book13 - The Library at Mount Char (Hawkins)

Excellent. Absolutely incredible.

2016.Book12 - Smiler's Fair (Levene)

Just OK. Maybe I mis-remembered a recommendation

2016.Book11 - The Bone Clocks (Mitchell)

Reasonably entertaining.

2016.Book10 - Chasing the Scream (Hari)

Very good.

2016.Book9 - The Bone Clocks (Mitchell)

Pretty good.

2016.Book8 - Broken Monsters (Beukes)

Pretty good. Kind of standard King-style horror.

2016.Book7 - This Census-Taker (Mieville)

Kind of meh.

2016.Book6 - The Authoritarians (Altemeyer)

Very good.

2016.Book5 - The Rising (Tregillis)

Very good. Pretty much non-stop action, a lot better than The Mechanical.

2016.Book4 - The Map of Chaos (Palma)

Very good. Nice conclusion to the series.

2016.Book3 - The Cartel (Winslow)

Very good. Overwhelming violence.

2016.Book2 - Submission (Houellebecq)

Not much to this one.

2016.Book1 - The Mechanical (Tregillis)

Pretty good. Cool ideas. Maybe adding sex and violence for commercial reasons?