Arthur Tazhitdinov

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

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.

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

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

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.

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