Becca

I require a very high bar for spec fic books based predominantly on quantum mechanics, but I think Thomas did a very good job here. She clearly learned her stuff, and uses it sparingly and deeply when used. I'm less a philosophical expert, but it seemed to be handled similarly. All of that being said, while many books use quantum mechanics in service to the plot, Thomas seems to be writing more of a Sophie's World style, where the plot exists to advance her thoughts on quantum mechanics and philosophy.

While this seems to have turned a lot of people off, I found her completely forthright about it: this is a book about a main character who is writing her thesis about novels that are thought experiments. This is a novel that is a thought experiment: let's say we could enter thoughts. If that were possible, what would it mean for how thoughts are made? What would that say about what it means to be conscious? Is what we learned from this thought experiment generalizable even in a universe where thoughts aren't a manifest place that can be visited? Those are fun questions to ask and explore.

When she veers away from that core, the book really falls flat (the love story? The random officemate who was into evo bio and got totally dropped, even though I really wanted her to integrate into the main plot line?), but that's OK, because it's not supposed to be a proper novel. My only real complaint is the ending kind of petered out.

I thought Thomas had interesting thoughts about what it means to think, what defines consciousness and whether emergent consciousness is possible. I was intrigued by the thought process of whether defining phenomena mathematically instantiates them or merely defines them and I think she explores this in a particularly deft and nuanced way.

Rocannon's World is interesting. LeGuin maintains a fairy tale quality of sorts while setting the story in a high science-fiction world, complete with FTL ships and ansibles. The combination is almost dream-like and provocative, but unfortunately falls into LeGuin's most common flaw – a slowness that makes the book hard to want to pick up and difficult to concentrate once you have.

The problem sometimes is that I fall so in love with a title, that the book cannot possibly compare. This is one of those books. It was good - a cute YA book about dealing with a sibling with severe autism. Alcatraz loosely features as a supporting character, mostly in cameo.

I am NOT the sort of person who reads or watches Westerns. I vaguely knew Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, The OK Corral and “Get out of Dodge” as concepts, but I could probably only give you a 50-50 bet on whether they were fictional or not, and I certainly had no clue that they were connected. That the OK Corral was a shootout completely exhausts my a priori knowledge of all things Western.But, Mary Doria Russell is one of those authors for me. If I could only read one book for the rest of my life, it would probably be [b:The Sparrow 334176 The Sparrow Mary Doria Russell http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1333578682s/334176.jpg 3349153], so I wasn't going to let something like a genre get in my way. That was a good move on my part. Doc is filled with rich, vivid characters. None of them are better than they ought to be, but none of them are caricatured lawless villains either. Doc is my favorite - quiet, quick to take insult, but quicker still to lend a helping hand, proud and frail, but simple, virtuous Wyatt and temperamental, brilliant, very rarely tender Kate are also beautifully depicted. To say nothing of a host of supporting characters.I am, by nature, partial to cleft lip/palate stories, and Russell's description of Holliday's cleft repair and his diction difficulties following is precision embodied. It goes without saying, given that Russell taught anatomy at my own alma mater, that her treatment of historical dentistry leaves nothing to be desired. This is, after all, a Russell novel, so it is meticulous in detail, flawlessly researched, accurate to a T. Of course, there are original characters, who, of course, include a Jesuit and multi-ethnic characters who challenge our understanding of race and racial relations. These characters flirt with being a little too perfect, especially in light of their historic setting, but overall add to the flavor (shockingly, there is no unlikely Jew of even more unlikely ethnic extraction. I kept waiting for it.)My only criticism is that, for people like me who come naive to Westerns, the book almost completely omits the OK Corral and the events directly leading up to it. Since it represents everything I will ever know about the genre, probably for the rest of my life, I would have liked Russell's take on that central piece of the Doc Holliday mythos. Nonetheless, it is by far the best book I have read that heavily features Nevadan prostitutes this month (cough [b:The Lonely Polygamist 6944566 The Lonely Polygamist Brady Udall http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1291169474s/6944566.jpg 7178069] cough_

The first thing to say is that I'm someone with a relatively hypoplastic sense of humor. Very little makes me laugh out loud, and I usually find the idea of comedy kind of intimidating, because I never know if I'm finding it as funny enough. But even for someone as humor-stunted as myself, Yes Man is quite funny. Ever wonder what would happen if you said yes to the random pan-handlers, and spam e-mailers and signature-collectors and advertisements and dozens of other offers we're bombarded by? The idea is so simple, and Wallace has a beautifully dry sense of humor.

The other promise – that I would find Yes Man insightful or thought-provoking – didn't pan out, though. As a woman trying to make my academic career work I get the opposite advice, all the time: “Learn to say no.” And Wallace did nothing to convince me that I shouldn't be working harder on not stretching myself too thin. Would it be fun to spontaneously go to Singapore? Yes. Can most people handle the major work, family and financial consequences to more spontaneity? Probably not. I had a lot of second-hand anxiety about Danny's financial straits when reading...maybe for independently wealthy mid-twenty somethings emulating this experiment is possible, but for the rest of us, taking out and using dozens of credit cards is more nightmarish than a life lesson.

Finally, the first half had an affected naivete that was neither interesting, nor convincing. We all know Nigerian princes offering millions of dollars is a scam. Say “yes” if you feel you have to, but it's tedious when you pretend to believe that there is anything real to the situation.

Overall, I found the book light and fun, but I was happy it was him and not me.

The best part of the book was so nostalgic – the idea of combing bookstores and finding The Book! The Amazing Fantasy or SciFi book that you've never heard of before, but it's by your favorite author and it is just so perfect! Finding The Book in bookstores and on my friends' book cases was a huge part of my adolescent years. It makes me kind of want to earmark the authors that Walton name checks that I've never read: (Zelazny, Delany, Tiptree embarrassingly enough) and never Amazon or Google them and only hunt down their books in used bookstores to recreate the feeling. But I know that truly that feeling is a little eradicated, because even if I play by the rules, I know that they're arbitrary and in real life I can get whatever book I want whenever I want, which is great, except that it ruins the mystique.

I also liked that “is it real or isn't it?” feel of the book. Reading as a teenager, I never would have questioned that the subtle magic in the book was indeed the highest reality. But I love Walton's depiction of that subtle magic, which as an adult, you can't help but second guess: “maybe Mor is just subconsciously coming up with a narrative to explain why bad thing X happened.” I love that the book works on both levels and that it forces you to consider both – it's such a great way to depict magic.

So what didn't I like? Well, I think my expectations were set too high by Jon and Beka, who both said this book was the most amazing thing in the history of books. Also, while reading the book I had an overwhelming, terribly distracting sense of how much I would have loved this book if I had read it back when I was 18. My 18 year old self would have promptly declared it her favorite book in the history of books, too, but since I'm no longer her, I felt almost guilty reading it.

Ultimately, I just felt like I didn't “get it.” So, there's this girl, and some bad magic happened in her past, and now she goes to a boarding school, where she's a little social isolated, but then she joins a book club and along the way she buys a lot of books and sees a lot of faeries, and that's all well and good, but when is the plot going to begin? Oh, the book is over, so I guess there just isn't a plot? And I can handle a lack of a plot if the character growth and development is well done, but after awhile I got bored of reading about Mor read and go to bookstores, and I would rather be reading and going to bookstores myself.

It's hard to imagine a breezy, funny memoir about OCD and eating disorders, but that seems to be what Traig has written. This slender work is mostly a series of vignettes in the author's childhood plagued by scrupulosity, a religion-tinged variant on classic OCD. If you look too long at any of it, it's hideously sad – the author's starvation as she invents ever stricter kashrut variants, and growing alienation from everyone – but it's basically all played for laughs, without really connecting the dots between the episodes.

This was a fun read, reviewing patriarchal and gender-defining thoughts and marketing in the 1940's-1960's. It's not particularly methodical or thorough, nor does it attempt to be, but full of period-relevant pictures, and artifacts.

Dear Flavia De Luce,
It's not you, it's me. I was charmed at first by your precocious but naive approach to crime-solving, not to mention your chemical knowledge and derring-do. But I'm not good at series and so, even having spaced reading the three books apart by nearly a decade, the things that I once found charming now strike me as twee and a little redundant. Don't get me wrong: I'm thrilled that trimethylaminuria was the final clue to solve a murder and I'm in to Christian separatist sects but the story overall failed to catch my interest. OK, I lied, it's not entirely me: I thought that the story dragged and some clues were a little to on the noise (like the omnipresent fishy odor). But overall, I'm just not built for series that are all a little same-y. So Flavia, I still really adore your pluck and scientific detective work, but I'm not going forward with the series.

Love,
Me.

It's difficult for me to understand how a book could have such deep, creative and compelling world-building and such shallow and cliche romance.

The good: The world Taylor built is really lush. The politics in the war between the angels and chimera are nuanced and interesting, and more than that, you get a feeling that there's a depth of culture to both sides much more than what you even read.

The start of this book is one of the best I've ever read – I loved the descriptions of Prague and the rapport between Karou and Zuze. I found Brimstone and Issa and the rest a compelling mystery, and I felt myself quickly caught up in the mystery of who Karou was and what the teeth were for.

For all that there are hundreds of books about the morals for and against magic, I thought that this was the first that really made doing magic feel weighty, but not objectively bad and I loved that. I liked the metaphysics of magic in general.

I love books that explore the tension between “real life” and the supernatural and for at least the first half of the book there was still classes and grades and friends that Karou was trying to balance with saving the world.

The medium: Karou is the Mary Sue to end all Mary Sues. She's slender (as we're told at least seventeen times) and The Best Draw-er and Everyone Loves Her Ideas and she has
“naturally” blue hair and never gets scared and is good at everything. But...I kind of liked her anyway. She's strong and self-contained and has a ton of agency, even once she meets up with the male romantic lead.

The ugly: Ugh, the romance. I'm not a romantic; I don't read romance and I certainly don't do paranormal romance, so clearly not the intended audience. But he's handsome and perfect and they're instantly in love and ugh, ugh, ugh. And even though they're star-crossed lovers from a past life, they were instantly in love then, too. So.... And when they're together all of the descriptions are bland and shallow and cliche.

Supposedly the sequels are more world-building, less romance. I'll check them out...

To be fair to Bel Canto, it's probably a 4 star book; however, I came into it with 5-star expectations. Having read [b:Truth and Beauty 5083254 Secrets of Truth and Beauty Megan Frazer http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1239242179s/5083254.jpg 5149972] and seeing the combination of grace and brutal honesty with which Patchett depicted herself and [a:Lucy Grealy 57229 Lucy Grealy http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-F-50x66.jpg], I had the highest expectations for her treatment of fictional characters. And, in some cases, she lives up to expectations.The highlight of the book is clearly Gen, the peon translator, turned by his captivity into essential personnel. The topic of language - who owns which language and what they can do with it - as the supreme power is fascinating and unique and the character is well suited by his theme. His foil, the slightly less multilingual Rubuen - Vice President turned into housekeeper by his captivity is nicely set up and the many conversations between the two really showcase the artificiality of status. Hosokawa's story is also well done. The trope of important business-person stunned by once in a lifetime event into realizing that there's more to life than work and deciding to live like it counts once it may be too late is a little overdone, but that distracts little from how well Patchett does it. The terrorists developing rapport with their hostages portion of the plot is by fair the most lauded and perhaps fell a little flat as a result of that. The developing of relationships didn't really feel organic and the terrorists were depicted as relatively sympathetic from the beginning.However, where the books really falls flat is its female characters. The reader is constantly informed how both Carmen and Roxanne are the most beautiful, smartest, most talented women to ever exist. Every scene staring either of them is filled with male characters perseverating on their beauty. Neither of them have any flaws at all (except maybe an endearing stubbornness.) Roxanne is so beautiful as to sway terrorist organizations. Both of them feel extremely one-dimensional as a result. Music is treated the same way – it's beautiful and uplifting and world changing. We're never really told why, but instead subjected to the same refrain in every musical scene. As someone who could take or leave music as a whole, and definitely opera in specific, it was teeth-gratingly annoying.

What a satisfying, scientific tale. [a:Walter Alvarez 48103 Walter Alvarez https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] of the eponymous “Alvarez Hypothesis,” the hypothesis that a large impact caused the mass dinosaur extinction could have written many different types of books about his work. This is a deeply humble book that seems to be equally about How To Do Good Science as it is about the deeply fascinating scientific work that Alvarez has done.The story is just so freaking cool – both the human and geologic aspects. How could we possible understand what happened to the planet 65 million years ago? Alvarez, as a postdoc, sets out to Italy looking for evidence of plate tectonics by measuring magnetic drift, as anticipated if a plate shifted rotationally. Instead, he finds that the magnetic data from his region is too poor to pick up such subtle changes and he can only detect magnetic reversals. Then he realizes that the particular region he picked happens to have other clues in the rock bed (forams) that can be used to date magnetic reversal events, which has never been done before. However, forams were living organisms, and in the process of using them for dating, they noticed an abrupt boundary of absence of large forams, consistent with a mass extinction. Each step along the way is so nicely laid out – not the way the lay public views science: hypothesis, easy test, confirm results, new hypothesis, the end!. But the real way: totally different hypothesis, interesting observation, new hypothesis, accidental discovery, new hypothesis, need to invent a brand new assay, and endless repeats. To do their work they ended up inventing new ways of performing neutron activation analysis, blowing up the conventional geologic belief in uniformism, rather than catastrophic events and discovering potentially periodic impacts on the earth (the downside to an old book – the 1997 view of the Nemesis star has largely been discredited, but the discrediting was nearly a decade of work for the astronomy community and has led to new interesting hypotheses about the solar system)Alvarez is deeply humble about his role in all of this, instead highlighting the many multidisciplinary collaborations he was engaged in with his work. That's another great facet to the book, to hear about all of the geologists, astronomers, paleontologists, archeologists and oceanologists involved. He also discusses the false roads they go down (they only discovered extraterrestrial material in the first place because they had a hypothesis that a nearby supernova was responsible for the mass extinction, a theory they nearly published due to bad data) and circles back when the evidence that pointed them one way later gets solved by something else – like the shocked quartz that suggested an oceanic impact, which were later explained by secondary impact from debris. Finally, in what turns out to be a prescient move, instead of criticizing his main rival, who believed in a volcanic theory of extinction, Alvarez confirms that there is evidence to support the involvement of volcanic activity at the Declan traps in the extinction event, which would not become part of the mainstream wisdom until 18 years after the book was published.There are only two major downsides to this book: one is the first 33 pages of front matter about the story as we know it and how science works is relatively dry – Alvarez should have jumped in with his personal story and then circled back. The second is that 19 years have passed since publication and new discoveries have been made – read with google handy!

Pitched as an exploration of whether free will exists and what to do about it if it doesn't, but really a broader neuroscience review about the genetic and environmental influences on behavior. I deeply enjoy Sapolsky, who is accessible, funny and opinionated (and uses musicals for examples!) but I think some of his conclusions were a little over-argued without truly discussing what does “free will” mean and can we have a sense of self while also having a high degree of biological determinism? He agrees that environment influences behavior extensively, but in the discussion about how we mete out justice, he doesn't really follow through with that to the obvious conclusion that we should identify environmental factors that will more positively shape behavior and then do those things, for example. Some of the digressions through chaos theory feel not very on-topic and Sapolsky admits he isn't an expert in this topic.

Still, an amazing book, especially first third with heavy incorporation of modern neuroscience research, including neuroendocrinology, where Sapolsky particularly shines.

In the future, when an author thinks that his book isn't worth reading, I'm going to take his word for it. The Big U is too over the top to be an enjoyable, subtle satire of the large university life, although it had that potential in the beginning. On the other hand, the melodrama and large scale events are too trivial for the novel to be epic. The overall effect is pretty “meh.”
The detail and fact finding that Stephenson is known for is all but absent in this book. The only signature Stephenson move that the Big U contains is the litany of story lines and multiple character narratives, but with uncharacteristic brevity and lack of details, the constant storyline switching is irritating and makes the novel shallower rather than deeper.
Also, Stephenson should know that his fans are the physics majors, hackers and LARPers of the universe and be a little more careful with the negative stereotyping

A really excellent, if slightly outdated, resource on the Darwinistic underpinings of our responses to disease. By far the best part of the book was the table categorizing disease responses (protective v. quirks v. secondary purpose). The book may have been made slightly stronger if it stuck more strictly to the topic of disease; however, as an introduction to the rigorous scientific ideas behind Darwinism, it was made richer by the discussions of pregnancy, foodstuffs, kin altruism and selfish gene phenomena. Thoroughly enjoyable, although not much new for the already versed reader.

The almost melodious writing style of Ann Patchett is, of course, this book's best feature. And, as I am coming to understand is typical Patchett, the story before the story truly brought me in: a stolen Virgin Mary statue, a question of what it means to be family, rife with sibling rivalry, single parenting and trans-racial adoption. That was a story that was full of potential.

And I really liked huge chunks of Run, but most of it felt just like that – palpable potential resting underneath: the woman who claimed to be the birth mother, and was she or was she just a groupie and the creepy, loving way she stalked her biologic sons. The saintly, dying Catholic priest uncle, and the did he or didn't he actually have the power to heal the sick. The forgotten mayor of Boston, fading into obscurity, trying to live by proxy through his sons. The prodigal son, returned home, a murderer and a thief, but possibly a modern Robin Hood, with a heart of gold and a knack for saving children. The problem is that by shifting around between all of these stories, none of them were really ever given an opportunity to come into their own.

The ending came too quickly and, as I'm also beginning to realize is typical Patchett, with a completely unnecessary time jump that left way too much unexplored. I would read the heck out of a story about an ichthyologist turned doctor turned ichthyologist (goodness knows I'm one quarter-life crisis away from writing an autobiography about the topic) and Patchett played with a lot of interesting concepts about why people go into medicine in specific, and careers as a chance of penance in general, but it A) had nothing to do with the first 300 pages and B) she didn't exactly do the topic justice in the 10 pages she had to deal with it. It added little to the book.

I'm giving Ann Patchett's fiction one more chance before I resign myself to the idea that it was truly Lucy Grealy who made Truth & Beauty come alive.

So, this was a fun romp into the world of park rangers. They're dashing and daring and spend a lot of time in extreme weather situations with tourists doing dumb things. The book pacing is a little odd, the chapters are disconnected, and mostly it reads kind of like a listicle, but it's fun. I will say, this book makes a terrible travel companion. Don't be me: reading it before hiking is a bad idea that will cause you to quake in your hiking boots, imagining everything that can go wrong. Lankford pulls no punches telling us that it is only the illusion of safety that gets us into the great outdoors. I read it while hiking in the Alps and wanted my illusion of safety back!

Wow. Oryx and Crake is a masterpiece of literature. I almost didn't read it because of my disappointment in [b:The Blind Assassin 78433 The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/416HQRCQjnL.SL75.jpg 3246409], which I mention not to further disparage but rather because I'm the third person I've spoken to who feels similarly, and I would hate for anyone else to miss out.Oryx and Crake is phenomenal. Yes, it hits on the major tropes of our time: commercialization, corporate ownership (of ideas, culture, people), isolation via computers and instant gratification and, of course, genetic engineering. And in all of those areas, Atwood draws apt, occasionally chill-worthy parallels. Even without agreeing with all of her conclusions, the skill is evident. But nearly all of those points have been made by roughly a trillion other dystopic fantasy novels and reading it yet another time, even if superlatively done, would not be worth it in and of itself.Rather, where Atwood shines is the novel's treatment of existential questions: how easy it is to exterminate a species, a language, a culture, an idea. How irrevocable extinguishing something can be. And yet, underneath that, the converse: how honed the survival mechanism is. How a single organism still carrying a philosophy can seed it universally until it is impossible to extricate. These ideas are so fascinating that I spent probably hours with Oryx and Crake propped on my lap thinking about the implications.The other existential theme is what the nature of humanity really is and what can be sanitized to make a better world versus what are the qualities that are necessary to call a being actually human. Atwood's handling of these themes is unapproached by any other modern novel, making Oryx and Crake a must-read for everyone.

I wanted to like this book; I love Connie Willis and have adored pretty much all of her other works. Maybe it's that I'm not a movie buff, or maybe it's the pacing (Willis is usually at her finest in her novellas, but this reads slowly for such a short book) or something else entirely. Whatever it was, I failed to love this book despite my best efforts.

I haven't read an anthology in several years, so I wasn't sure what to expect in terms on consistency of theme and quality.

Overall, for an anthology that is looking to branch out beyond genre categories, the stories mesh relatively nicely with each other; although many fail to achieve the intended theme of “and then what happened?” The editing was well done, with the collection laid out in a way the flows, with stories with similar themes placed near each other, but not such that they blur with one another. There's a nice mix of long and short stories that makes the collection readable for long stretches of time. I found most of my favorite stories bunched at the back end, so keep reading if you don't like the beginning too well.

In terms of quality, I felt that most of the stories were well-written, although several were not to my liking.

The introduction by Neil Gaiman is probably the best part of the book. I loved the description of why people read and write fantasy and where fantasy as a genre can let us down. The desire to defy genres is ambitious and motivating.

Blood is a great opening story. It's evocative and plays directly to the “and then what happened” theme.
Fossil Figures was not to my liking. It's a kind of generic twin story with some nice turns of phrase, but not much substance.
Wildfire in Manhattan on the one hand, Gods are real and they live in cities has been done before and better (by two authors included in this collection, no less.) That being said, if not particularly original, this was still fun. I enjoyed the writing style and the characterizations. There was plenty of really nice imagery.
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains Gaiman's contribution to the collection was probably the closest to the intended theme. A very well-written play on the traditional fairy tale of Aladdin's cave of gold. Written in a very traditional folk tale style, but with new takes on the typical folk tale themes.
Unbelief A story of an assassin sent to kill a mysterious figure. Went straight in one ear and out the other. This has been done before and done better. I would have lost nothing had this story been excluded completely.
The Stars are Falling I hated this one, too. This is the typical story of a WWI veteran who comes home and tries to reconcile with his old life. It was so cliche in plot, tone and writing style and every piece of the plot was telegraphed from the beginning. Instead of “and then what happened?” I felt like “oh, that happened, really? I'm so totally unsurprised.”
Juvenal Nyx Sometimes, when you read fantasy, the setting is so complex that once author takes so long to set it up, you still don't understand it and you don't care. This story is how to do a complex setting correctly. Very little set up was ever done, but by the end you got the feeling that his world was so complicated and so rich. I wish I could have read whole series in this setting.
The Knife This story reminded me a lot of “Blood.” More a story-let, it felt like a nice palate cleanser after two relatively long stories; however, it's not something I would reread on its own.
Weights and Measures as a sad story about a couple that had lost their daughter, this worked. Picoult excels at writing emotion and this was a very sad, very moving story. As a magical realism piece, this didn't work. The conceit of the magic didn't make sense to me, and it distracted me from the emotions and themes of the piece rather than adding to it.
Goblin Lake A beautifully written piece of meta-fiction that nicely explores the relationship between fiction and reality. I found this very insightful on the topics of why we read and why we write.
Mallon the Guru The writing in this was so evocative and full of gorgeous imagery. The feeling of mysticism and growing feeling of dread worked their way into every sentence. The story left me more with feelings than with a concrete understanding of the plot (such that I immediately reread the story to make sure I hadn't missed anything.)
Catch and Release Another nice twist on a genre – a story told from the point of view of a reformed serial killer. I found the narrative chilling and fascinating. The analogy of fishing really carried the story.
Polka Dots and Moonbeams one part 1920's gangsters, one part...something else. The writing is outstanding; the setting is established impeccably from the first sentence. Although as the reader you never quite figure out what's happening, the feelings of needing to escape, of love and of desperation all come through so clearly that it doesn't really matter.
Loser Chuck Palahniuk always writes in the same Chuck Palahniuk genre and this is no exception. Take something banal, such as the Price is Right, and add grit. This was a fun, but superficial, read.
Samantha's Diary I was so disappointed by this that I almost don't want to review it. I love Jones. I've read every book she's ever written. I bought this collection because it advertised a new Diana Wynne Jones story. But there's no two ways about it: this story sucked. There was no intrigue, none of the plot twists Jones fans live for and no depth of characterization. It was the saddest thing ever.
Land of the Lost Maybe I could have handled this story better had I not been still grieving from Samantha's Diary. As was, this was a trite story about a woman who will find the grave of a serial killer's victim, even though the police have given up. Sound like something you've read about a million times before? Well, that's exactly what it was like.
Lief in the Wind On the other hand, this was so fantastic. A completely original science fiction story about a team exploring a new planet and contacting the alien life there. Sound like something you've read a million times before? Well, this was absolutely nothing like all of those others. This started with the beautiful imagery of the “birds that get smaller as they get closer” and built open that with so much metaphor and so much detail of language. The story was also about how to recollect yourself when loved ones die and hope is lost and was gorgeous on that front as well.
Unwell This story gets you totally lost in the mind of a toxic woman and you realize too late that although she's toxic there might be something else to the story. I adore stories with untrustworthy narrators and this was done perfectly.
A Life in Fictions One of the few stories that felt completely new. Not a twist on a genre, or an old tale with a new spin, but just something new. It's a story about a woman who disappears into her boyfriend's novels when he writes characters based on her and how this affects her life. At a larger level it's about the many facets of self and what we do to integrate them. I really loved this piece.
Let the Past Begin A lot of fluff surrounding a middle segment of a beautifully told folk legend. The meat of the story was haunting and so well-described that I could close my eyes and see the fortune teller. But the rest of it was chaff.
The Therapist I loved this work. Very soft science fiction about what causes people to lose their tempers mixed with court fiction. I loved the idea of a neme (a contagious feeling of rage). I felt the first part could stand on its own and then loved the twist brought by the second part.
Parallel Lines Now this was the twin story that I've been waiting for. At first glance, this is a boring Ouiji board twin-twin communication story. But it's actually so much more. The relationship between the twins and the characterization of each is done beautifully and the exploration of what we do and don't owe other people is unique.
The Cult of the Nose This read along the same lines as the Therapist. What of the narrative should the reader choose to believe? The narrative itself was spooky with the sinister members of the Cult of the Nose inevitably showing up amid chaos and destruction.
Human Intelligence about an alien spy on earth and the women who finds him out, but also about loneliness and goals and what one should do to achieve them.
Stories A fictionalized autobiography of Moorcock. The first half reads like propaganda for the breaking down of genre barriers, which Gaiman had already given us (and better) in the introduction. The remainder, once he gets down to it, is a character-driven piece about love, loss and betrayal that is well done.
The Maiden Flight of BellerophonI really enjoyed this while I was reading it for the well-drawn characters and the attention to detail (probably one highlight was a character who was obsessed with the flying machine Bellerophon having written the overly laudatory wikipedia article thereon.) However the plot never really came together for me.
The Devil Staircase First of all, the layout (like stairs) is so distracting and not set up correctly with the page breaks. But once I got past that, I found that the central part of the story – about a man who finds the devil's son, who offers him tempting gifts and who ends up taking a bird who sings when he lies – interesting and creative. However, the beginning of the story really drags.

Overall, I would say that if, like me, you're picking up this book because you're a Diana Wynne Jones fan, do not do it!
Otherwise, this book is totally worth reading for the contributions from Gaiman, Mosley, Swanwick, Ford, Wolfe, Howard, Deaver and Powers, particularly and several other solid entries.

This was a light, refreshing read. Populated by surrealist situations and characters just on the near side of believability, This Book Will Save Your Life sometimes erred on the side of being too frivolous. On the other hand, the voyage of Richard was poignant and extremely applicable to modern times. Richard starts the novel as a perfectionist, number crunching, rich business man, who only eats the healthiest, most organic, of foods and has no real connection to other humans at all. Through the introduction of increasingly wacky characters including an Indian donut baker with a penchant for puns, a lonely housewife, a rich movie star and Richard's even more self-absorbed ex-wife, and even more wacky situations (kidnappings, all-white houses, horse-filled sinkholes and silent retreats), Richard learns to reach out and embrace the world. My only other complaint, beyond the twee-ness of several scenes would be the way that the only way Richard actually manages to meet so many people and free himself from the banality of life is by being incredibly rich, which kind of undercuts the message.

I'm not a giant fan of the Dexter franchise, but it's always sparked my curiosity. I've watched a couple of episodes of the first season of the TV show and flipped through the first couple pages of some of the books. So, I wasn't sure how I would feel about this book, as most of the readers seem to be long term fans.

In short, this was a fun romp. The story was much more imaginative than your run-of-the-mill mystery series. The writing was mostly pedestrian, but with some entertaining turns of phrase (mostly alliteration).

The theme of family and the contrasts between families of choice and families of biology was not particularly subtle, but was interesting.

I've read a lot of reviews about the mysticism with which Lindsay imbues the “dark passenger,” but I felt kind of ambivalent to the idea that there was a separate entity in Dexter that wanted to kill. It worked as a metaphor. I would have disliked it as more than a metaphor, but Lindsay never really pushed that point.

All in all, this was an entertaining, quick read. It would be a top notch airport or beach book and was good enough that I wasn't embarrassed to be reading it during my commute. It's better than the vast majority of serial mystery books out there, but it doesn't reach the ranks of Great Literature of Our Times (nor does it strive to.)

Leo says:
How do you feel about it? Meh
What do you like about it? “When the doctor says no more pink cupcakes! You can't eat pink cupcakes if you're still pink. It's so silly”
What don't you like about it? “All the pink!”

Becca says: Man, I hate this book. Way to make vegetables seem like a gross punishment, and there doesn't seem to be any real consequences or moral. It's not particularly fun to read, either. It's not straight up objectionable, like a lot of “girl's books” are but it's still on my “try to lose” list

This book deserves high praise just for how novel it is - I have never seen an ostensibly young adult book explore such abstract concepts, such as the sacrifices that the “good guys” make for victory. I found the role that Katniss was cast in and the tension between the role she had to perform and her own goals and personality particularly compelling. The use of media and “spin” by both sides was done in a very subtle, well-handled way.

I continue to object to Collins' writing style - her word choice and her decision to very explicitly explain concepts as she goes along both play to a much more juvenile audience than the audience who would be able to appreciate the concepts in the Hunger Games anyway, so I am not sure why that choice was made.

Well, if you told me you had a Margaret Atwood book about paleontologists falling in love, I would tell you you had my new favorite book. But apparently, it was not to be. The difference between this book and Atwood's later works is vast - this is redundant, with shallow characters and a flimsy plot. And the dinosaurs are shoehorned into a kind of annoying allegory