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?

2015.Book54 - Started Early, Took my Dog (Atkinson)

Very good conclusion to Jackson Brodie series

2015.Book53 - When Will There Be Good News (Atkinson)

Another very good Jackson Brodie mystery

2015.Book52 - Modern Romance (Ansari)

Pretty good. Interesting stuff, not really funny.

2015.Book51 - One Good Turn (Atkinson)

Very good.

2015.Book50 - The Aeronaut's Windlass (Butcher)

Excellent. Really great swashbuckling adventure. Totally fun.

2015.Book49 - Case Histories (Atkinson)

Excellent mystery. So sad.

2015.Book48 - Wake of Vultures (Bowen)

Very good. Cliffhanger ending though.

2015.Book47 - The Familiar I (Danielewski)

Lots of style, little substance.

2015.Book46 - Illuminae (Kaufmann, Kristof)

Pretty good. The typographical innovations don't add anything, but it's a good story. Maybe if you love comics and novels scare you this would be non-threatening?

2015.Book45 - The Only Average Guy (Filion)

Very interesting inside story of council during Ford. Filion takes some flak for being too sympathetic. And it's true that being Rob Ford is not the worst thing to be; you could have a bad family and bad brain chemistry like him, and also be poor. But it's still pretty bad to be him.

2015.Book44 - Number 9 Dream

Some really good stuff, some just weird.

2015.Book43 - Sons and Mothers (Loewen)

Very interesting book of stories of sons of Mennonite mothers. Good stuff about growing up and sometimes out of that culture

2015.Book42 - Smekday (Rex)

Pretty good. Movie loosely based.

2015.Book41 - Rumors of Glory (Cockburn)

Kind of interesting.

2015.Book40 - Ash & Bramble (Prineas)

Very good.

2015.Book39 - Karen Memory (Bear)

Very good.

2015.Book38 - Dune (Herbert)

Pretty bad. Some cool ideas, but badly written.

2015.Book37 - The End of All Things (Scalzi)

Very good. Standard Scalzi.

2015.Book36 - Zer0es (Wendig)

Very good.

2015.Book35 - Between the World and Me (Coates)

Excellent.

2015.Book34 - The Power of the Dog (Winslow)

Excellent. Really great.

2015.Book33 - The Devil You Know (Carey)

Very good. A bit slow to start, but the last half's great.

2015.Book32 - Dark Orbit (Gilman)

Excellent. SF about phenomenology.

2015.Book31 - Mathematics without Apologies (Harris)

First half very interesting, second half kind of fragments off

2015.Book30 - Sex Criminals Volume Two

Pretty good.

2015.Book29 - Hyperbole and a Half (Brosh)

Sometimes funny.

2015.Book28 - Harrison Squared (Gregory)

Excellent.

2015.Book27 - The Buried Giant (Ishiguro)

OK. Like watered-down Gene Wolfe.

2015.Book26 - The Three Body Problem (Liu)

Pretty good. Disjointed.

2015.Book25 - The Vorrh (Catling)

Excellent. The Chess Garden's evil twin.

2015.Book24 - The Martian (Weir)

Nice. Will be interesting to see how this translates to the screen. Lots of internal action.

2015.Book23 - Acceptance (Vandermeer)

Pretty good. Some cool parts.

2015.Book22 - Authority (Vandermeer)

Just OK. A little boring. Some cool things near the end.

2015.Book21 - Of Noble Family (Kowal)

Good stuff.

2015.Book20 - The Just City (Walton)

Pretty good.

2015.Book19 - The Scorch Trials (Dashner)

Pretty good.

2015.Book18 - Cloud Atlas (Mitchell)

Very good.Hard to categorize.

2015.Book17 - Annihilation (Vandermeer)

Pretty good weird stuff.

2015.Book16 - Pacman (Poole)

Interesting guy, but bad writing.

2015.Book15 - Willful Child (Erikson)

Good space comedy.

2015.Book14 - The Peripheral (Gibson)

Really high-quality stuff. Just great.

2015.Book 13 - The Maze Runner (Dashnell)

Definitely a page-turner.

2015.Book12 - Gods of the Hammer (Pevere)

Teenage Head bio. Interesting that something that means so much to people sounds just kind of OK now.

2015.Book11 - The Lives of Tao (Chu)

Pretty good. Cool concept, good action. Needed some editing.

2015.Book10 - Behemoth: Seppuku (Watts)

Pretty good conclusion. The torture is a big problem for me.

2015.Book9 - Behemoth: Beta-Max (Watts)

Pretty good. I think the underwater stuff in this series just doesn't appeal to me. Liked Maelstrom better than Starfish. We'll see what the Behemoth: Seppuku has in store.

2015.Book8 - The Boy Kings (Losse)

OK.

2015.Book7 - John Dies at the End (Wong)

Pretty good. Last quarter is the best.

2015.Book6 - Methland (Reding)

Kind of superficial, not well-written. Some interesting parts.

2015.Book5 - See a Little Light (Mould)

Fairly interesting. The early parts were better.

2015.Book4 - Lock In (Scalzi)

Pretty good.

2015.Book3 - Vicious (Schwab)

Kind of underwhelming, maybe I expected too much.

2015.Book2 - Code Name Verity (Wein)

Excellent. Wow, so good.

2015.Book1 - Maelstrom (Watts)

Wow, so excellent. How is he not more famous? Grim, all bullets bitten dystopia.

2014.Book34 - Stardust (Gaiman)

Good stuff.

2014.Book33 - Full Fathom Five (Gladstone)

OK, so Gladstone's just awesome all over the place. Nice tie-ins to the first two, too.

2014.Book32 - Sex Criminals (Fraction/Zdarsky)

Again, I'm not a big comic person, but this one had a lot of great reviews, and Steve Murray's pretty cool, so I tried it. Very very good. Brimping, indeed.

2014.Book31 - White Teeth (Smith)

Very good. I don't usually read these modern literary novels, but this one was enjoyable. Heard some comparisons to DFW, which is ridiculous, but I liked it.

2014.Book30 - Wolf in White Van (Darnielle)

Pretty good stuff. Probably missed a lot of what was going on.

2014.Book 29 - Jack Glass (Roberts)

Finally a good book by Adam Roberts. Very cool.

2014.Book 28 - Burning Paradise (Wilson)

Pretty good. I think I loved Julian Comstock so much that anything else Wilson does suffers by comparison.