Arthur Tazhitdinov

X-Men in victorian times. Much less exciting than that sounds. Included black&white photos are really great, and they well incorporated into the plot, but the story gets weaker with every page.

Невероятная книга. Весь русский менталитет аккуратно препарирован и разложен по полочкам. Можно читать вместо учебника обществознания

Took me a long time to finish, which is saying. It's a detective novel set in modern Edinburgh during Art Festival. Technically book is very, very well written, full of background details for a dozen of main characters, but the main plot left me cold, it's just not engaging enough. Also, it's a story that treats every character with russian origin as some kind of “deus ex machina”, I'm getting tired of that.

I expect to enjoy this kind of crime stories much more when I get old, though.

Best of Mieville so far. The police procedural plot is predictable, but the concept of divided city is one of the best ideas I've ever read in sci-fi. Scale of Mieville's imagination is a bit scary sometimes.

The cover is the best thing about this brick of a novel. Utterly boring and predictable from first to last page. Pretty sure King churned out this one without waking up.

Best use of the medium I've seen in a while

Very bad writing; no idea how this got nominated for both Nebula and Hugo

Сорокин сделал как всегда — раскопал самое больное место у современных русских (боязнь распада страны) и забил туда свой теллуровый гвоздь. Литература-боль

Nicely written, but overall cliche and not very interesting as a detective. Why then I couldn't put this book down?