Valerie

I think this book landed for me in the cool concept but not enough connection bracket. Divya is obviously a super intelligent person, and she's done a terrifyingly good job of imagining the future of AI, nanotech, tip jars, gigging, and streaming, but I think there's so much time spent on what the world is, I forgot to connect to the characters. Which is a shame because I love a hero mom and a space cult. I liked it overall, but rarely made extra time to read it.

My sister introduced me to this series last year, and I managed to get the whole collection at a book fair. The story is 3 parts Studio Ghibli and 1 part H.P. Lovecraft. Great pacing, great art, great monsters. Also, I love a pink bunny that can also pilot a mecha.

This is a book I wouldn't have picked up from the subject matter alone, and but a couple of trusted sources recommended it, and man, were they right. On the surface, this is a story about a marriage, but it's also about how much or how little you can know the people around you in life. It's about perspective, and trauma, and the things that make us who we are, and it's done within the context of a modern Greek tragedy. The writing style, as I'm coming to expect from Lauren Groff, is superb enough to just make me angry at how good it is. Groff is good. Read her books.

My husband has been talking about this book for a long time, and he finally gave it to me for Christmas. I'm so glad he did. I don't often read mystery books, but this one is exceptional, largely because it isn't actually about the mysteries. Don't get me wrong, the mystery is very good, but the story itself is so much about the characters. I hate Detective Ryan. He's an awful person, and I couldn't look away from his story. That to me, is the mark of a well-written novel. The story is suspenseful, creepy, and rides a fine line very near magical realism. Recommended especially to people who think they don't like mysteries.

I must've picked up this book at bookstores a couple dozen times and put it back with a, “No. No more buying books till you read what you have.” Like that has ever stopped me. Then it got picked for Sword & Laser, so shucks darn, I had to get it. I'm really glad I did.

The Golem in the Jinni is a story of parallels, two undocumented immigrants forced to live exactly the opposite as they were born to be. The Golem, a creature whose very nature is defined by servitude, living in terrifying freedom. The Jinni, an embodiment of fire and freedom, bound to human form and forced to serve the masses to pay bills and live a life of quiet desperation. It's a brilliant concept, brilliantly executed.

The story takes place during the Ellis Island immigration era of New York, primarily in the Jewish district and Little Syria. The two main characters are a pleasure to read, but almost equally enjoyable are the cast that surrounds them, each nuanced and unique portraits of people who might actually existed. I think I especially like Sophia Winston, who gives some depth to the idea of a Jane Austen style heroine and Arbeely, who really was doing just fine until a naked man appeared on the floor of his forge... really he was.

By far, Chava and Ahmad carry this story, though. Their struggles to understand what they are, where they are, and eventually who they are, made these 500 pages fly by all too quickly. I can't recommend this book enough to people who love mixing their mythologies. It is a fine piece in that tradition.

Ugh. I loved the House in the Cerulean Sea, so when my book club decided to try another TJ Klune book, I was optimistic, but this? This is very far from HitCS. This is closer to Hearne/Dawson's Kill the Farm Boy series. Every line is a joke, or thinks it is a joke. Very few are funny. The characters are underdeveloped at best and flattened copies of other actually funny books/movies at worst. It's also over 400 pages long. 400 pages of anal sex jokes. 200 would have been stretching it to cover the plot. Sorry TJ, this series is not for me.

If you're looking for something like Annihilation or Borne, this isn't quite in the same vein. I'm used to turning to VanderMeer for New Weird, but this only barely touches the edge of science fiction. It's much more of a thriller with a conservationist core. VanderMeer does not pull punches reminding the reader exactly how thoroughly we have ravaged our planet, and uses the arc of the thriller to get readers to ask themselves some tough questions. It's fast-paced, well-constructed, and often surprising with some Roshamon levels of perspective thrown in as well. It's not what I was expecting, but it was definitely worth the read.

I would put this book in that “fairy tales for people old enough to understand what fairy tales are about” category. It's a little over-the-top on its symbolism but also pretty heart-wrenchingly poignant when you get to the core: a boy trying to deal with the adults in his life revealing they are also mistake-making humans. That he does this through building and exploring an entire video game-esque alternate reality just means that this story would make an amazing Studio Ghibli animated feature.

It was a little hard to get into which might have something to do with the translation (Japanese is really awkward directly translated to English and the balance isn't always perfect) and might just be part of that slow-burn storytelling culture. It was probably 3 hundred pages before I felt really involved, but Wataru and Mitsuru were interesting enough to keep me going. The human characters are remarkably realistic and balanced, and both maintain a sense of righteousness even when making terrible mistakes.

That said, the characters of Vision are all really flat and occasionally annoying. In Vision, everyone is either really really good or really really bad, with the exception of the people who are reflections of the real world characters. I guess it makes sense given that vision is built by Wataru and Mitsuru who are really just creating their NPC cast, but the tireless optimism of our heroes allies gets a little annoying, especially filtered through translation.

The heart of the story is so very close to my own though, that I ended up loving the book anyway. Emotional honesty is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, especially for children, and I think we need more stories geared towards them with flawed heroes and relatable antagonists. We need our future to know that feelings, even dark and depressing ones, even ones your parents obviously wish you didn't feel, are valid and are a part of you. No one should be coping with a crisis by smiling and pretending it isn't happening. It took me a long time to learn this, and honestly, I'm still not all the way there, but books like this are good affirmatives in that direction.

It's hard for me to put an age range on this because I think I would have loved it as a kid and glossed over the real world bits that might get a little too real for some. Also, reading a book as thick as this one would've made me feel very grown-up. However, it's definitely going to require a bit of reading stamina to get to the action and adventure, so know that before giving it to your kids. Maybe read it with them. For adults, it's going to be more challenging getting through the stock hero's journey sections to see if that core resonates. I think it will for most people.

I really love Abraham's ability to write character evolutions. Meeting our characters again fifteen years later, each of them extremely different people, makes for such a powerful story. This installment is certainly the bloodiest (as the title implies) but it follows the same outline of very moral people placed in extremely morally gray zones and figuring out what to do. If you've enjoyed the series thus far, I'd say keep at it.

One of the best books I've read in a long time. Theres's not one moment (or fingersnap of 65 moments) that hasn't been carefully thought through to create this beautiful exploration of time, entanglement, and a life (or a death) with meaning. The research that went into this book must have been incredible. Everything from the daily life of a Japanese high school student in Tokyo to neighborly mechanisms that keep a British Columbian island functionings to the realities of life as a WWII kamikaze pilot and the magical realism that is quantum mechanics. I care deeply for the characters. I feel like I've lived in the setting, and I savored the prose. I don't know what else you could ask for in a novel. It's my first Ruth Ozeki book, but definitely not my last.

Oh Neil, I never get tired of hearing your voice in my head. This collection of Neil's non-fiction is not exactly what I was hoping for, but I still enjoyed spending time hearing his thoughts. This issue was that I only had a frame of reference for some of his thoughts because so many of these articles are very out of context. When I was familiar with the book or person he was discussing, I really enjoyed reading; when I wasn't, I had a harder time getting into it. It does provide a handy reading/viewing/listening list for anyone who wants slowly absorb all the Gaiman knoweldge and references in existence. I may or may not attempt that.

I was disappointed in this one. I love a fantastical murder mystery, but this one was too light for the mood I was in. It's fine if you're just looking for a glittery steampunk popcorn read, but the story spends too much time on what the world looks like and not really enough on the characters for me to really enjoy it. Also, I guessed the murderer from the minute they were introduced, which always annoys me. I kept hoping I'd be wrong, but it just kept making all these obvious references to who really dunnit that I was frustrated that a character as supposedly adept as Fatma couldn't figure this out.

This book has a terrible title, but it's actually a pretty fun book, so I'm glad my book club chose it because I would never have picked it up on my own. The ladies in question are not particularly ruthless nor is this structured as a guide. Instead, it's an engaging adventure in an alternate Victorian London that's part murder mystery, part Breaking Bad, and part “Period Lesbian Movie.” That makes me sound a bit dismissive, but I honestly had a pretty good time. The characters are fun and not too cardboard, the magi system is entertaining, and above all the quality of the writing is a cut above most Steampunk/Steampunk-adjacent books I've read. Recommended as a fun, gay summer read.

While it doesn't top Xenogenesis as my favorite Butler writing, I think I read this book at a very apt time. It is one of those stories that is becoming relevant yet again. You think we humans would figure out ways to avoid dystopian apocalypse instead of continuing to follow every fictional plotline leading up to that apocalypse ever, wouldn't you? Butler's is particularly grim as the thesis behind this dystopia isn't a zombie plague or alien invasion, but a simple matter of too many otherwise intelligent people ignoring major problems until it it too late to fix them, over and over again.

Of course, since it is Butler, one difficult to tackle theme is not enough. This book exlores race relationships, the nature of empathy vs, survival, and a philosophy of embracing “shit happens” to a religious level. I can get behind the philosphy of Earthseed. I definitely want to continue on to the next parable as soon as I take a break to go back to ignoring the problems of my own society. Life is a cabaret, old chum.

I both went into this and out of this feeling pretty blah. I picked it up because it is the S&L book of the month, but I don't think I would have picked it up otherwise. Sometimes, that works out well (Ancillary Justice), but this time the reasons I thought I wouldn't enjoy it all turned out to be pretty valid.

Promise of Blood suffers from First of Trilogy syndrome. It has a ton of stuff going on and it wraps very little up. It's told from four perspectives, one of which is completely superfluous to the story of this novel. I imagine Nila and Jakob will be important in later books, but that doesn't excuse the fact that they serve absolutely no purpose in this book besides allowing the author to talk about “auburn curls.” Auburn curls are always unruly. Always.

The story has a lot of merits. I enjoyed the parts with Mihali and Tamas and would have loved a lot more information on the religions (again, this seems to be in the MORE TO COME category). Tamas himself is interesting though Taniel less so. Ka-poel seems like a giant plot device, and I hope her brand of sorcery is explained more later. The concept of powder magery is pretty neat, but not really my thing. I think I would have been more into it if it were explained as a more “man-made” sorcery rather than just “some people are born like that.”

There's a lot of war, a lot of blood, and a lot of guns, pretty much as advertised. Nothing wrong with that, but there wasn't enough else to really hold my interest. While there's nothing wrong with writing a first book as a lead in, barely any of the plots in this story got proper resolution. That doesn't make me want to read this next book so much as it annoys me for spending so much time on this one with no pay out. Probably not a series I will be continuing, but if you're into the war and guns fantasy, it might be more your thing.

I really enjoy China Miéville, but this is the first of his short stories I've ever read. The collection definitely veered further into horror than I expected. The writing is exquisite, but do not attempt if you are at all squeamish. It reads as an exploration of the weird, of little details and urban legends and bits of dream turned into explorations of our world, our bodies, our relationships. I think that “The Design” will stick with me for a long time, one of the most macabre and most subtle romances I've ever read.

I'd say it's different from the other Miéville works I've read, but also each story is so different from each other story.

This book really impressed me. I keep using the word “smoky” to describe it. I'm having trouble voicing it in any other way. It's haunting and mysterious, poignant and tragic. While it's set in the 40s, the themes of racism, misogyny, colorism, and classism still ring through to today. The magic system is fascinating, the characters all a fine shade of moral gray, and the plotting tight as a spring. It's no feel-good, for sure, but it's quite a masterpiece.

So this is probably the best series I've read in years. How good is it? Well, I've listened to all the books on audio (and I highly recommend doing the series that way because the narrator just embodies Murderbot's voice so well), and then my book club picked it for the May book of the month. So I thought, whelp, I guess I'll just read it in print then. We're talking weeks between rereads, and I regret nothing. They are that enjoyable. It's like the badass version of Marvin the Paranoid Android. I literally couldn't ask for more.

Note, this is book 5 of the series but the first full-length novel. My book club chose to start here, and I'm sure you could enjoy the series starting here, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice. If you like one, you'll want to read them all, and they would be much better enjoyed in chronological order. Plus the first book is a tiny novella, so you aren't investing much if it's not your cup of tea. It will be though. It will be the best cup of tea you've ever had.

I ended up a little on the fence about this one, I think because it turned into a very different story than the one I was expecting. On the one hand, the ending packs a lot of punch and really took me by surprise. On the other hand, it was not a very pleasant surprise.

Also, as a new mom, the part where Martine abandons her newborn to the murder clone is both heart-wrenching and hard to believe given what we know about Martine as a person. My brain just went, "Nope," and I think Martine's would too given that she is programmed to be a mom and to put her child first. I can't imagine she wouldn't have considered how to get the baby out during their plan, even if it meant continuing to fake her relationship with clone Nathan. Evelyn might forget to consider this, but Martine wouldn't

Other than that, I did enjoy the book as a sort of reverse murder mystery even though Evelyn herself is pretty horrible all around. Get a therapist, Evelyn. Seriously.

Admittedly, I grabbed this book because I needed 1 more nonfiction to complete my New Year's Resolution and this one was short. It's also the first in the Harvard 5 foot shelf that I downloaded when it went on sale this year and I enjoyed making the tiniest dent in that. That said, I was fascinated by a lot of Franklin's proposals. He wrote this in 1781, folks, and in it he condemns anti-vaxxers, promotes taxation for infrastructure, writes about founding a public religious space where anyone (he cites the Mufti of Constantinople preaching Mohammadanism) could speak, and even suggests a rudimentary public health care system where anyone, regardless of what lands they are from, could be helped. I guess the only part our current politicians have read are the racist asides about drunken Indians...

I am a big Neil Gaiman fan. I have gotten to meet him at book signings three times and have cosplayed as Death double that. I've read all of his novels and children's books as well as most of his graphic novels. I read Coraline aloud to every class I teach. I've watched every movie he's ever been a part of (except Beowulf... didn't think I could handle that). I've force-fed Gaiman to skeptical friends. I own “American Gods” in four different formats right now. I am a serious Neil Gaiman fan.

I say this because I'm biased. I knew I was going to enjoy “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” before I read it. I was not wrong, but I thought I should warn you that you are about to read the account of a very biased fan.

Ocean is a very different book from any of Gaiman's other novels. I was much more reminded of his short stories (it's less than 200 pages), and at the end I felt like I'd just read a very well-crafted short story. The pacing was a lot different and I'd say about half of the action is internal. It is not your typical Gaiman fare by any means.

Having been lucky enough to hear him speak at my local bookstore last night (sprawled on the floor of the wildlife section outside the reading all listening to him on speaker like we were in some weird SFF fan love-in), I learned some of the reasons for these differences. First of all, this was intended to be a short story that he was writing for his wife while she was away recording an album. She doesn't like fantasy much, but she does like Neil and she likes feelings. Therefore, this book was initially written with a lot of personal details and feelings which any healthy British male avoids on penalty of asthmatic attacks. Neil said he was surprised that so many people liked this book of feelings. It made him want to run back to England and tell all the men.

The childhood details are so intimate and perfect. I don't know which ones are real and which ones are added to suit the story, but they form a very believable young narrator with one of the most natural voices I've ever read. I strongly respect an author who can accurately write a child's point of view. Gaiman does it again and again in a way that makes me seethe with jealousy.

This is not to say the book is straight-up emotional fiction. There is a fantastic story here where Gaiman fans will recognize his more familiar style. He builds terrifying monsters and incomprehensible allies and cats, lots of cats. At the reading someone asked him why his books always feature a mesh of the natural and supernatural. He responded that was because his life was a mesh of natural and supernatural. Someone else asked why cats figured so heavily and he answered that cats are a part of that mesh. They are humans' way of bringing the supernatural into their lives. I'd agree if I wasn't so upset at my jerkcat right now who isn't so much supernatural as merely petulant.

Still, it's a quiet book even at its most dramatic points. It is filtered through an adult's retelling, and the fog of memory leaves much to be doubted and questioned. It isn't my favorite in the Gaiman collection (I prefer either the epicness of American Gods or the wit of Neverwhere), but it's certainly deserving of its place on the shelf. I tried to stretch the reading out (because I'm terrified there'll be another eight year wait for the next adult book), but it still only took me a couple of hours. It is probably not the best starting point in his works, but if you're looking for a fantasy book for a friend who's hesitant about genre fiction, this would be a great gateway drug. If you're already a Gaiman fan, this will not disappoint except in that it is over far too quickly.

I have something of a book buying problem. I walked into a bookstore because I was bored, saw this sitting on the shelf and read names like Andy Weir, Hugh Howey, Rhianna Pratchett... and the darn thing just jumped into my car. Oops. Video games are something of a peripheral hobby for me, but my own limited experience did not diminish my enjoyment of this collection at all. The stories center around games ranging from Zork and Oregon Trail to Warcraft and Halo, so everyone with even a mild level of video game interest can find a reference to which they can relate.

This is hardly a collection of silly stories, though (well, maybe Rouguelike is a bit silly, but it's one of my favorites in the book anyway). Instead, the anthology makes a point of using video games to address the issues facing the video game generation. Racism, sexism, homophobia, apathy, climate change, war, grief, a healthy sampling of issues from which people might escape into video games, only to confront them head on. That, however, is just how they need to be confronted, and something that makes this anthology stand out on the shelf.

The other thing that makes it stand out is the colorful cast, altough my favorite stories in the collection were not from my favorite authors. It's hard to pick a favorite, but Holly Black's “1Up” and Catheryne Valente's “Killswitch” rank pretty highly. The only one I felt a little odd about was “Survival Horror” which seems like a spin-off from a much larger universe that I just couldn't digest in such a short amount of pages.

So if you like gaming and/or socially conscious science fiction, you'll find something to enjoy here. You can laugh and cry and think deeply about your character selection process right through the final page.

John Scalzi has been on my “To Read” list for ages, and now I'm only upset it took me this long to get to him. This book is exactly the kind of sci-fi I love, and I was gripped by the concept, characters, pacing, and humor. I've never been able to get in to hard sci-fi, and much prefer something that focuses more on the psychological/social implications of the tech rather than the how do they do that. Scalzi may very well have woogldy boogldied the “hows” in the book, but he is very thorough on the “so whats.” That's what makes the science fiction genre interesting to me, and that's why I'm giving this book 5 stars.

The characters impress me more than anything. Scalzi is not an old man by any definition, but (as far as my analysis goes), he is very much able to make the reader feel old and by contrast appreciate being young. The contrast with the Ghost Brigades serves has a nice foil to that same string of social commentary. I also love how gender lines never really figure into this vision of the military. It's nice to see a future where humans have just figured out that gender is just not such a big deal.

This book definitely wants to make me read more Scalzi. Highly recommended.

John Scalzi's writing is something I enjoy reading as stress relief. It's fast-paced, quirky, sarcastic sci-fi with a stronger influence on the effects of crazy future technology than on the causes. I didn't like this book as much as “Old Man's War,” mostly because I miss John Perry as the narrator, but I still enjoyed exploring the themes of Scalzi's future. The first chapter throws you right into the plot twists, and from there on you know to believe absolutely none of your preconceptions.

Ghost Brigades more or less ignores the CDF corps of the rejuvenated elderly and focuses instead on the “child” army, born fully formed and programmed to serve. I don't think this is as fertile ground as the earlier subject and part of me expected more of their childish nature to stick around longer than the introductory chapter. That said, I'll grant Scalzi leeway here because children raised in war are likely to lose childish attitudes quickly, and there is all the training Special Forces goes through.

That said, I had a bit of trouble with the Colonial Union not doing a better job of programming them. If you are training soldiers from birth to do all the nasty things regular humans have a moral compass pointing decidedly away from, it seems to me you should do a better job of indoctrinating their ideals. Jared should never have gotten far enough in his questioning of the Colonial Union if they really are as vicious as everything else in the book leads us to believe. Then again, there's twists about the Colonial Union at the end too, and I may be judging too quickly before the series is finished. Still, if the Nazis could convince people that killing children was okay, I think a future with computers literally plugged into our brain should be able to do that.

To me, Special Forces worked better as mysterious allies than point of view protagonists. However, they were useful in illustrating the most interesting theme to me: identity. Scalzi proposes a body, mind, and soul/consciousness trifecta of identiy. Jared Dirac is born with the body and mind of another person (as opposed to Jane Sagan, who was only born with someone else's body). The soul/consciousness, however, is uniquely Jared's and can only be changed by revolutionary and terrifying procedures. Jared's struggle to deal with someone else's memories invading his own consciousness was fascinating to watch, and I love the way Scalzi interjects them over time.

The Obin, on the other hand, have no consciousness at all. They are basically bees with technology... which is a scarier image than I really like. The Rraey intrigue me in their “charitable” efforts at improving the universe, and I'm sure we're not done exploring that culture.

I also really liked the Gamerans. I'm hoping they figure more prominently in the later books because that's what'd I'd be making if I had the ability to build my own being from whatever DNA was around.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about the colonialism and expansion themes. Like Jared, I don't feel I have all the information. Since the first book, I've disliked the pictures of an earth that keeps sending soldiers out to win planets without really telling them why. It's ugly and a little uncomfortably realistic. Then, just when it was getting a little too heavy-handed a moral for me we find out that Boutin's Conclave is not necessarily made up of peace and goodwill either. That twist keeps me interested, and I'll definitely finish off the series. The only other thing that bugged me would probably bug me if I reread OMW too. I usually read pretty fast, and I tend to skip speech tags, but someone pointed out that Scalzi overuses "said." Then I listened to the audiobook of his serial, and the amount of "He Said She Said" forced me to turn the thing off. It doesn't bother me reading because I speed over speech tags, but now that I know it's there, I can't un-read them.I feel I'm being a bit too severely critical. I still enjoyed this book as the sci-fi adventure it is, and I enjoyed musing over the ideas it suggests. It's a fast read and character banter is one of Scalzi's strongest points. Still, there were a bit too many loose ends and needling questions for me to love it as much as I loved Old Man's War. 3.5 stars, but I'll definitely keep moving with the series.

Just a little bit of time to grow on me, but I'm really glad I stuck with it. I think I prefer this book to the name of the wind. It has a lot more adventure and plot lines than the first book, and it also has a number of more interesting characters. We get to learn about the Adem, the Fae folk, and a number of interesting places. The mystery surrounding our main character increase rather than decrease, and I fear it will still be a long time before we see the third installment. Bast still remains my favorite character although he's even more confusing now than before.

As, an English major, One of my favorite points is how Rothfuss deals with language. He understands that language both shapes and reflects the cultures to which it belongs. He even go so far as to invent subtle sign languages and discuss the differences body and facial expressions have on a conversation. The fact that he does this more than once is the most impressive part of his world building.

The Book remains as a slow of a burn as the first volume, and I don't recommend it for anyone looking for a quick, light fantasy. However, for those who want a truly epic adventure with regular surprises and truly unique World building, this series will not steer you wrong.