2018.Book14 - The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (Barron)

Very good Lovecraftian horror collection.

2018.Book13 - Gender Hurts (Jeffreys)

Very good. Lots to think about.

2018.Book12 - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Very strange, but very good.

2018.Book11 - Unsettling Canada (Manuel)

An unexpected alliance, a foreign power.

2018.Book10 - The River of Consciousness (Sacks)

Some interesting parts.

2018.Book9 - Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Thien)

Wow, so boring. By the end I just didn't care at all.

2018.Book8 - The Thing Itself (Roberts)

Pretty cool attempt to ground horror SF in Kantian "ontology". Reminds me of Wilson (?) building Lovecraftian monsters in VR. But the idea at the end of this being some kind of apologetic? Very weak and I want to say typically British.

2018.Book7 - Blackout (Hepola)

Pretty good memoir

2018.Book6 - Exploring Diabetes with Owls (Sedaris)

Occasionally funny.

2018.Book5 - The Little Friend (Tartt)

Pretty good.

2018.Book4 - The Goldfinch (Tartt)

Excellent. Just wow.

2018.Book3 - The Will to Battle (Palmer)

Another very good one.

2018.Book2 - Collected Tarts (Southey)

Good-natured humour

2018.Book1 - In the Black (Jolly)

Very good, interesting autobiography

2017.Book41 - The Bees (Paull)

Pretty good

2017.Book40 - I Don't Want to Talk About It (Real)

Very good.

2017.Book39 - Heaven's Crooked Finger (Early)

Pretty good. A bit uneven, but it kept me turning the pages.

2017.Book38 - Borne (VanderMeer)

Pretty cool.

2017.Book37 - Perelandra (Lewis)

About one-third good. When he's not fighting his current-day battles, it's enjoyable.

2017.Book36 - The Stone in the Skull (Bear)

Just OK. Might have been better if I'd read the previous trilogy?

2017.Book35 - Revenge of the Vinyl Cafe (McLean)

Pretty funny stuff.

2017.Book34 - Hammers on Bone (Khaw)

OK attempt at noir/Lovecraft.

2017.Book33 - Crash Override (Quinn)

Pretty good; such a sad situation

2017.Book32 - The Ballad of Black Tom (LaValle)

Really good; totally fixed Lovecraft.

2017.Book31 - Raven Strategem (Lee)

Pretty cool.

2017.Book30 - October (Mieville)

Kind of dry, but some interesting stuff.

2017.Book29 - Perfidia (Ellroy)

Pretty much standard Ellroy.

2017.Book28 - The Unholy Consult (Bakker)

Incredible. So good. Huge payoffs from years of books. Wow.

2017.Book27 - The Refrigerator Monologues (Valente)

Good stuff. Feel like I should read it again to get all the connections.

2017.Book26 - Up Ghost River (Metatawabin)

Sad story of a kid who went to an abusive boarding school, then was raped by a community leader and succumbed to alcoholism. Eventually got out.

2017.Book25 - The Fifth Season (Jemisin)

Really good.

2017.Book24 - The Black Company (Cook)

Pretty good.

2017.Book23 - Golden Hill (Spufford)

Pretty good. Interesting characters. Twist at the end didn't have much effect.

2017.Book22 - The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Chambers)

Pretty good. Very episodic, like a TV series. Problems raised and resolved too quickly.

2017.Book21 - The Boy on the Bridge (Carey)

Very good military/scientific thriller.

2017.Book20 - Walkaway (Doctorow)

Good politics, clumsy novel.

2017.Book19 - Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company

Sometimes interesting.

2017.Book18 - The Collapsing Empire (Scalzi)

Excellent. Fun and fast-moving.

2017.Book17 - Three Act Tragedy (Christie)

Nice.

2017.Book16 - The Stars are Legion (Hurley)

This was good. A little line near the end put the whole bio-horror stuff in a new light.

2017.Book15 - White Tears (Kunzru)

Good stuff. Liked the parts about music.

2017.Book14 - Fifteen Dogs (Alexis)

Not good. Approaching this from an SF perspective, find it hard to get interested in intelligence without tool-making.

2017.Book13 - Seven Surrenders (Palmer)

Very good. Excellent when plot happens. Biggest drawback is I find Madame D'Arouet's source of power basically implausible.

2017.Book12 - vN (Ashby)

Cool ideas; a little jumpy.

2017.Book11 - Universal Harvester (Darnielle)

Pretty good. Kinda weird; think it's one thing, but it's another.

2017.Book10 - Fathers/Prophets (Eggers)

Very cool.

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.

2017.Book7 - The Revenant (Punke)

Very good. Western.

2017.Book6 - The Brothers K (Duncan)

Excellent. So many feels.

2017.Book5 - Americanah (Adiche)

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

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.

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

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.