Monday, March 06, 2017

2017.Book9 - Who Killed Sherlock Holmes (Cornell)

Another excellent Shadow Police novel. I forgot too much of the previous one!

2017.Book8 - My Brilliant Friend (Ferrante)

Very good.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

2017.Book5 - Americanah (Adiche)

First half or so was excellent. Got a little boring after that.

Thursday, February 02, 2017

2017.Book4 - A Game for All the Family (Hannah)

Pretty good. Not a great ending, but an enjoyable trip.

2017.Book 3 - Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee)

Excellent. Really weird, lots of action. Reminds of Too Like the Lightning with its strange future.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

2017.Book2 - The Divine Magician (Rollins)

Very interesting. Not there yet.

2017.Book1 - The Monogram Murders (Hannah)

Very good buildup. Payoff was just OK.

2016.Book52 - The Liberation (Tregillis)

Pretty good conclusion to a good series

Friday, December 16, 2016

2016.Book51 - Station Eleven (Mandel)

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

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Saturday, December 03, 2016

Thursday, November 17, 2016

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.

Tuesday, November 08, 2016

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.

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

2016.Book43 - The Great Ordeal (Bakker)

Unbelievably good. So epic. Every storyline. Wow.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

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.

Friday, August 26, 2016

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?

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Monday, August 15, 2016

Thursday, August 11, 2016

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.

Tuesday, August 02, 2016

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?

Friday, July 29, 2016

2016.Book33 - Lungdon (Carey)

Very good ending to the trilogy.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Monday, July 25, 2016

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.

Thursday, July 07, 2016

2016.Book30 - Galore (Crummey)

Pretty good. Covered a lot of ground.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

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.

Monday, May 30, 2016

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.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

2016.Book21 - Half the World (Abercrombie)

Really good. Thorn's a great character.

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

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.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Monday, April 25, 2016

2016.Book17 - Fellside (Carey)

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

Thursday, April 14, 2016

2016.Book17 - Life (Richards)

Fun stuff.

2016.Book16 - Heap House (Carey)

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

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

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.

Friday, March 25, 2016

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.

Monday, February 08, 2016

2016.Book8 - Broken Monsters (Beukes)

Pretty good. Kind of standard King-style horror.

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

2016.Book5 - The Rising (Tregillis)

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

Friday, January 22, 2016

2016.Book4 - The Map of Chaos (Palma)

Very good. Nice conclusion to the series.

Thursday, January 07, 2016

2016.Book3 - The Cartel (Winslow)

Very good. Overwhelming violence.

Sunday, January 03, 2016

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?

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

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

Very good conclusion to Jackson Brodie series

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Thursday, December 17, 2015

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

Excellent. Really great swashbuckling adventure. Totally fun.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Thursday, December 03, 2015

2015.Book48 - Wake of Vultures (Bowen)

Very good. Cliffhanger ending though.

2015.Book47 - The Familiar I (Danielewski)

Lots of style, little substance.

Monday, November 16, 2015

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.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

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

Friday, November 06, 2015

2015.Book42 - Smekday (Rex)

Pretty good. Movie loosely based.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Monday, September 28, 2015

2015.Book38 - Dune (Herbert)

Pretty bad. Some cool ideas, but badly written.

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

Very good. Standard Scalzi.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

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.

Sunday, August 09, 2015

2015.Book32 - Dark Orbit (Gilman)

Excellent. SF about phenomenology.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Friday, July 24, 2015

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Friday, June 26, 2015

2015.Book25 - The Vorrh (Catling)

Excellent. The Chess Garden's evil twin.

Monday, June 15, 2015

2015.Book24 - The Martian (Weir)

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

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Wednesday, June 03, 2015

2015.Book22 - Authority (Vandermeer)

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

2015.Book21 - Of Noble Family (Kowal)

Good stuff.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015