This has been on my shelf for years. I think it's from my class on Nonlinear Narrative. Time to get started.

I'm finished with the first two books, which is the first installment that was published. Good so far.

Ok. Done with the first four. Still fun.

Interesting, but one gets the feeling that Pollan had decided which system of food production he favored at the beginning, not after he'd researched them.

Great. Rich, evocative. The writing was a pleasure to read.

Amazingly un-PC. Fun adventure.

I found this pretty disappointing. The world didn't make much sense to me, which I think is a pretty bad failure for SF. Why are these people squabbling over petty change when they have energy surpluses large enough to quickly terraform ice planets? Why do the AIs let humans make the important choices? If linking human and AI minds leads to such amazing advances, why has it only been done once? If the main character's antique weapon is so powerful, why doesn't everyone use things like that?

Overlooking the SF shortcomings, the book was pretty flat. The characterizations weren't interesting. The plot seemed contrived.

Very good. The theme of becoming someone else to be able to tell a story is compelling. Lots of very interesting material about the history of Istanbul and Turkey.

A graphic novel exploring some of the ideas of Bertrand Russell. It covers some interesting territory, particularly the attempt to systematize mathematics and the relationship between logic and madness. But it doesn't delve very deeply. I didn't feel that the graphic novel presentation added very much, and I felt like there were a lot of extra levels of framing that were ultimately clumsy attempts to pull threads together.

Fun. Gives some insights into the mentality of supervillains. The hero thread was a bit too mid-90s for my taste.

Makes the end of The Once and Future King even more depressing. Interesting look into White's anti-war, pro-capitalist views.

The first book of this (The Sword in the Stone) is a really nice read. The rest of it gives a lot of insights into the various important characters, but I felt like it became more and more depressing.

Weird. A relatively normal guy gets his head sewn back on after being decapitated and comes back to life. He ends up being taken out into the desert, where he meets caricatures of various American types.

During the siege of Leningrad, a young boy and an accidental Red Army deserter are sent off to bring back a dozen eggs to an NKVD colonel. Charming. Bleak.

The structure of this was very interesting: part diary, part collections of interviews. It jumps backwards and forwards in time, and almost demands a second reading after you know what happens in the pivotal section (which is, of course, at the end).

The actual content was less interesting to me than the structure. It focuses on a poetic movement in Mexico, and on a few characters involved in its creation.

It was interesting to be reading about Mexico while I was there. I learned at least one piece of slang from it that was actually being used around me.

There are some interesting spins on traditional motifs here: the eternal struggle between Light and Darkness, vampires, shape shifters, magicians. Unfortunately, after the first section, the main characters spends too much of his time moping around philosophizing.

This book did a good job of making me want to visit Venice, and a great job of making me want to never be involved in Venetian business or politics.

Sonic loaned me a copy of this and it was sitting in my to-read pile for a while. I recommended it for bookclub without even flipping through it. It turned out to be quite good. It's deceptively short, pithy, and quite funny.

Tinny predicts I'll hate every character! She's right! More entertaining than I expected.

Bookclub book. Depressing.

Excellent. Darker than In the Night Garden, but still enchanting. I think that the next time I read these books, I'm going to have to diagram the relationships as I go. Knowing that it all does fit together in a large pattern will make things simpler.

This is a collection of four novels, three of which focus on the emergence of psychic powers in humanity and the consequences thereof, and two of which deal with a struggle between humans and alien organisms. There's a thematic thread running through them all about the morality of survival and the value of life. I found them stronger on character than on plot.

Quick read. Not sure what to make of it.

Powers clearly did too much research while working on this, and felt it necessary to include it all. It was a decent adventure, but would have been better if it had been a bit more focused.

It was really interesting to learn about the process by which the OED was constructed. I'd never really given it a lot of thought, but my hazy suppositions would not have been even close to the actual method.

I particularly liked the essay on ice cream. I had no idea it was so old. I was lukewarm on the collection as a whole, though.

A beautiful, surprising, and strangely familiar set of tightly-linked stories. In addition to new ones, the stories include many standard motifs and creatures from fairy tales and mythology, but they're combined in inventive ways. It feels like this is a retelling of stories that I've internalized, but they're (as far as I know) actually new.

A collection of travel writing, along with some notes about how the stories were written. Potts spends quite a bit of time musing about the difference between "travelers" and "tourists", and if there is one. Potts is a clever writer, and this stories have lots of great turns of phrase.

A really neat collection of maps.

The author seems a little obsessed with the Beck London Tube Map. Every diagram gets compared to that one and graded on whether its angles are 45 degrees and whether it uses black circles with white centers for interchange stations.

Mostly an exhortation to get outside and look around. Lots of interesting little tidbits about the "built environment", like that cities tend to not have street trees because they get tangled in overhead wires.

Some interesting diagrams, but a lot of weird cosmological material that I'm not really keen on.

Awesome. Really good explanations of how the patterns are derived. Lots of beautiful diagrams.

This was one of the "you might also likes" for Transit Maps of the World.

Some great maps, but the text was pretty annoying and I only skimmed it between looking at the pretty pictures.

I thought most of these were only okay.

Good description.

Randomly grabbed off of my roommate's bookshelf. Man, I hope this was better in the original Spanish.

Extremely detailed. You get the sense that the author knows how much change each character has in their pocket at all times. And that it matters. Amazingly engrossing for a novel about British inheritance law.

I think O'Brian has written himself into a corner. The lead characters, the ones we really care about, are too settled. As a result, all of the interpersonal tension in this book focuses on secondary characters, and a lot of the action takes place in stories that one character tells to another, rather than in the main narrative.

Very good. A solid adventure novel, with lots of evocative references to a fascinating historical period. At the same time, it gives the reader a lot to think about. Well balanced.

Fantasy/Horror book centering on a rivalry between two stage magicians. Neat premise. Good execution. I was worried that it was going to leave me wondering what had happened at the end, but, if anything, it did the opposite and explained a little too much.

Only decent. Again, this one was too easy.

This one seemed a little too clear, almost over-explained. But I didn't understand why some of the threads were there. Maybe I missed something big.

This turned out to be a bit younger than I'd anticipated. A pretty good boy's adventure story.

A fairly light but informative history of the British Longitude Prizes, focused on the development of the marine chronometer. I read the illustrated version, which I thought added a lot.

This one seemed like it was a little too easy.

I really enjoyed both the language and the ideas. I'll have to re-read this to get a better sense for how it fits together.

Well, one of the stray threads got resolved, and another got to a critical point. Overall a fairly depressing installment. These books are feeling more and more like chapters, and less like complete works.

Huh. Well, the stray plotline from the last book totally didn't get resolved in this one.

This is one of those books that you start, thinking it's one kind of book, but, somewhere along the way, you discover that it's a completely different kind of book.

Much darker, and much more focused on religious experience than I anticipated.

This felt like half of a book. One of the major plotlines doesn't resolve at all. I'm sure it's covered in the next book of the series, but I was annoyed.

Excellent. The Devil pays a visit to 1930s Moscow. All hell breaks lose. I wish I'd found the translator's endnotes before I read the novel, because they explained the jokes embedded in the Russian character names, which would have made keeping them straight easier.

A solid book, but not as much fun as the previous few.

Cyberpunk set in Cairo. I didn't end up liking it much. Many of the books I read are thinly-veiled gazetteers, showing off interesting places that the author has invented. This book did the same with people. Unfortunately, I didn't find most of the people to be compelling, and the protagonist in particular didn't feel like he held together as a character.

Fun. O'Brian is still finding ways to keep it fresh.

Somewhat disappointing. Whereas Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell built up a world, layering on references and citations until the reader began to believe in it, these are too short to do that. What's left is fine, but not amazing fairy tales.

The next Aubrey/Maturin. Quite good. A balance of action and intrigue. A few places where it felt contrived though. Do ships just burst into flame? HMS Pinto?

This is a book club book from before I joined. It took a long time to get through it, partly because it's dense, and partly because it changes gears a lot. Initially, I wasn't convinced that it was really a "novel", rather than a collection of short stories. In the end, I'd probably admit that it was. It's a close thing, though. It's a puzzle book that's not really hiding anything. Clever fun.

Book Club. A bit too focused on "relationships" for my taste, but lots of interesting history and solid characters.

A fairly satisfying ending.

Fun. Fischer does a great job of writing an obnoxious, ancient pot.

Book Club runner up. Borrowed from KBK.

Fun. Quick. Broken up into many little chapterlets, so it's great for the short breaks during jury duty. It manages to be openly ridiculous without crossing the line into obnoxiousness.

It's odd. I just re-read my review of the first book in this pair, and was surprised at how positive I was about it. Somehow, I had a memory of it not being very good, and kind of avoided reading this one for... oh, about three years.

This book is definitely flawed, but not bad overall. The tech pushes my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, and I don't mean the alien tech. It's the stuff that's supposed to be commonplace for the humans in the book that seems ridiculous. The characterization is weak, and the aliens seem implausible (why would an alien trader with many civilizations' worth of experience tip its hand?). But it's a pretty zippy adventure story.

Very good. Dense, noirish sci-fi. Almost too dense, but not quite. Towards the end, I felt almost like I should have been keeping a list of who all the minor characters were, since loose ends kept being tied up that I had lost track of. That person the protagonist met for a page wasn't a throwaway? Nope, she was there for a reason, and it was...

Book club book. Quite good. It's one of those books where you have the feeling of dread midway through that everything is going a little too well and that something awful is going to happen. Sure enough...

Dave says I only need to read the first 5 books. I did. Pretty good. A quick read with some neat ideas.

Starts out in the traditional way, with the chosen child getting strange hints that something weird is going on and then being transported to a strange world. Then it gets much better.

Hard-boiled SF/mystery set in an alternate future Egypt. Pretty good.

One of the things that distracted a bit was the author's constant mentions of brand names, particularly the ones which should logically not have existed in a world where the World Wars didn't happen (VW, BMW).

Intriguing. I think I still don't understand what happened in all of the plot threads.

Disappointing. Fairy tales, but too "nice".

Chuck left this around. It's a quick read about how maps necessarily bias the information they portray and how the design choices of mapmakers can clarify, confuse, or conceal — intentionally or not. Pretty basic stuff, and fairly dry.

This turned out to be a double-book with Empire Star printed upside down. I happened to pick it up that way up when starting, so I read that first. I found the novella annoyingly pat, which was part of the point, I guess. The mechanism was clever, though.

Babel-17 was better. An interesting premise about language shaping thought, and some neat ideas in the world. It had that 60s SF flavor, but I enjoyed it.

A collection of short detective stories. Generally pretty good. Centered on understanding motivation, rather than observing details. Never invite Father Brown to a dinner party unless you want someone murdered.

Good. Well constructed. Engaging. Solid characters and a real sense of place.

Fun. Fairly light.

Quick. Interesting premise.

I'm normally skeptical about non-M Banks books, but Ted says this one is good.

It was better than the other non-M books I've read. I didn't really get into it until after it became a mystery. I can see the appeal of the characterization, but it's not really my thing.

MacLeod seems to be skipping a lot to bring this to a close in the third book. Major parts of the action take place offstage, and the sense of caricature is even stronger than in Dark Light. The conclusion seemed to lack finesse. Satisfying in that the plot wraps up, but not otherwise.

In Cosmonaut Keep, MacLeod gave us some pretty good characters in an interesting setting. In the second book, they've mostly devolved into ideas, their personalities lost behind their driving ideals. Less satisfying.

Decent near-future SF. First of a trilogy, it turns out.

Surely, I'll read this one work (or a few) at a time, rather than all at once.

Started with The Picture of Dorian Gray which was delightfully witty.

Done with the short stories and half of the plays. Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest are my favorites so far.

Since I haven't picked this up in... two and a half years, I'm probably finished with it for now.

Didn't hold my interest. Stopped reading.

Another Aubrey/Maturin book. Fairly different in tone from the previous ones (the naval battle is kind of a sideline!), but still pretty good.

Didn't hold my interest. Stopped reading.

Occasionally very funny, but I didn't like it overall.

I think this is my favorite of the Aubrey/Maturin books so far. Lots of action and plenty of strong personalities, but the main characters managed to not behave like idiots at any point along the way.

Not very good.

Dana Sachs is a San Franciscan who fell in love with Vietnam while on a trip through Asia and returned to live in Hanoi. She writes in great detail about adapting to a remarkably different culture. It makes Vietnam sound like a very daunting place to visit, but also a very rewarding one.

Sequel to In Conquest Born. A solid adventure, but not as focused as the first one. Much of the action takes place outside of the Holding and the Star Empire, and it seems like the other settings are less well-developed.

(Re-read). I lost my old copy of this somewhere along the line and bought a used one to fill out the gap in my Infocom books collection. It's really light reading and has less of the grue than I remembered.

(Reread.) My mom had the new sequel to this lying around, so I stole both and reread this one first. It's a really good space opera. Lots of strong personalities. Bitter feuds. Solar-system-spanning action.

A fascinating history of mapmaking. It's by a NYT science writer, so he's concise enough to maintain interest while still conveying a lot of information. I hadn't realized many of the reasons why mapping is so hard until I read this. You come away knowing things like why Mercator's maps were revolutionary and why the Mason-Dixon Line was originally important, as well as what surveyors are doing with their theodolites and why accurate timekeeping was so important to navigators.

The library had a copy of the edition from the early 80s, which is a little too gee whiz! about computers and satellites, and was written just before the launch of the GPS satellites. There's a revised edition from 2001. I'm tempted to find a copy of that and read what's changed.

Third in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Hopefully it'll be less romance than Post Captain.

Well, the first half did manage to be romance-free. Maturin managed to be an idiot again for a good portion of the second, but it wasn't as belabored. Plenty of fun action.

Started well, but the dreamy quality didn't hold through to the end. I felt like it became too grounded. Oddly, I seem to enjoy Murakami more when I don't really know what's going on.

Fun swashbuckling adventure set at the close of the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean. Plenty of swordfighting, ship-to-ship combat, magic, and intrigue. A neat, coherent theory about magic.

Second of the Master and Commander series. I liked this one less, since a lot of it is romancing and the main characters being stupid. Still some good bits of adventure, though.

A fun adventure story, larded with lots of nautical jargon. I was amused that the frontispiece was a diagram of the dizzying array of sails on a ship like the one described, yet the crew is constantly raising sails that aren't mentioned.

Lots of interesting snippets of statistical research, but short on the actual statistics. It describes the conclusions, but doesn't go into a lot of depth or provide much data supporting them. The air of argument by assertion is strengthened by the chapter headings praising Levitt. It gives the feeling that the argument doesn't stand on its own, so we need to be told how smart Levitt is by experts.

Tried to buy On Stranger Tides by the same author, but neither library nor bookstore had it available. Picked up this short story collection instead. Mostly horror/dark fantasy. Pretty good.

I wasn't expecting The Fall of Ile-Rien to be a trilogy. I had anticipated at least a couple more books, so when things looked like they might resolve when I was two-thirds of the way through this, I braced myself for a really annoying cliffhanger. But no. It all resolved. A good adventure book. I need to go back and re-read Death of the Necromancer, though. I feel like the atmosphere of that book was a little lost in all of the world-hopping that was going on in this series.

Essays on travel. Seemed appropriate reading for traveling. The author is actually unexpectedly supportive of not traveling. Some insights, but not great overall.

Amusing.

I've been meaning to read this since seeing it mentioned as an inspiration in To Say Nothing of the Dog. Happened to run across a Wikipedia entry that mentioned it and grabbed it from the library. It's amusing. Full of clever anecdotes and observations.

This turned out to be a collection of Eco's humorous columns from a literary magazine from the late 60s and early 70s. I would probably have gotten more out of it if I were more familiar with the works and events that Eco satirizes. Several of them were quite clever.

This keeps coming up on AskMeFi best-of-SF lists. And with good reason. Excellent. Very cleverly constructed.

Covers the history of piracy and contrasts it with how pirates were depicted in fiction. A wealth of interesting material, but the organization was strange. For example: the chapter on the types of ships that pirates tended to use segues into a general discussion of the depiction of pirates in movies by mentioning that they used larger ships because they were more impressive looking and easier to film on. Why aren't those separate chapters?

Great. Excellent characters. Good worldbuilding.

Japan's history chopped up into bite-sized pieces. An interesting approach to getting familiar with the subject.

Got this from the library. I was worried that it would be nonstop "I gave up my job as a lawyer to save orphans, and now I'm totally fulfilled!" stories. There were some of those, but not that many. In fact, most of the people in the book don't actually have it figured out. They're grappling with the question, and might see a path that could get them there, but it's not clear that the path they see is the right one, or that they're capable of taking it. As the book goes on, Bronson seems to insert his opinions about what people should do more forcefully, and I found that less and less appealing.

I'm not sure that the central question is the right one. I instinctively resist the idea that I "should" do anything with my life (and Bronson makes it clear that that's not an accidental phrasing). After reading it, I don't have a feeling that there's something that I want to be doing differently. Perhaps I'm just obstinate. Or maybe things are just going well right now.

I grabbed this book from Quincy probably almost a decade ago. It was one of the texts of a Russian history class he was taking. It's been on my shelf since. I'm not sure why it suddenly looked appealing, but I started it. It's very dry. I'm sure the historical detail is fascinating to scholars in the field. Less so to me. Now that I've started something else, I'll probably never finish this.

Fun. A very personal view of a strangely-interrelated set of historical facts. Charmingly written.

Tedious. I was hoping for a more coherent book, but this is a collection of lists and personal anecdotes.

Charming collection of short essays about books and the author's family's relationship to them.

When my flight was cancelled, I was pleased to find that the bookstore at SFO had a bunch of things on my list.

Quick and engaging. About half of the book is a biography of Ghengis Khan and a rather sunny description of his contributions to the advancement of the world. It focuses on how he instituted meritocratic advancement, improved communication, and spread wealth and innovation through trade across all of Asia, and mostly glosses over the cities he destroyed along the way. The second half covers his descendants, the collapse of the empire, and the shift in popular opinion against the Mongols.

A short story collection, mostly Fantasy/Horror. Generally quite good. Some neat ideas, and some good observations. Miéville has a talent for the creepy.

The basic idea is that you play hard to get. This weeds out the potential husbands who aren't devoted enough, and at the same time encourages the ones who run the gauntlet to treat you as something special because you're hard to attain.

Less instructive than I'd hoped. I was hoping to find some ideas about reversing it, so I'd stop attracting the people who are looking to settle down, but it's so extreme that those reversals would only work on people who are following The Rules. Other people wouldn't pick up on the cues.

Also tiresome, repetitive, and obnoxiously dogmatic.

Funny to read just after re-reading The Passion. It's hard to imagine more opposed books, one embracing the idea of being swept away and the futility of trying to hold on, the other preaching the denial of pleasure in the search for blissful matrimony.

A convincing account of the lives and loves of a group of astronomers. Captured the feeling of some of the tech-heavy groups I've interacted with. Depressing.

Surprisingly little happens in this book. The plot was pretty uncompelling. Felt like a filler book.

The last of the His Dark Materials series. Pullman starts getting pretty heavy-handed about the religious (or rather the anti-religious) overtones. The over-plot doesn't really resolve convincingly, since it was hard to tell what's so special about the hero and heroine that their actions should have such a large effect. Still a fun read, though.

The second in the His Dark Materials series, after The Golden Compass. The story gets markedly weirder as it starts moving between worlds. It ends with a cliffhanger, so I'm glad that I had the next book handy.

Disappointing. Bujold's weakest in a long time.

A heady stew of dialect and cultural references that I don't feel like I picked up on, suffused with vivid imagery. At its core, the characters' stories were strong and sympathetic. Every action they took made sense, and that held the book together despite the chaos going on around and within them.

Dave loaned this to me. It was really good. Adventurous kid's book with plenty of plot twists and a sense of menace.

Started this long ago. Good, but dense. Deserves another try.

Finished the first book. It seemed less daunting the second time through. Wolfe immerses you in a world where familiar words and assumptions turn out to have surprising meanings. I'm interested to see where the story goes.

Ok. Finally finished the second book. More overt SF, but still pretty deeply immersed in symbolism, it seems. I'm not totally sure I'm going to keep going.

Pretty good, but not great Blade adventure. Interesting whodunnit elements. Less compelling plot than usual. Duncan's been introducing more and more magic elements in these books that are making the world harder to believe.

Erik loaned me the UK edition. It's good — a solid adventure with plenty to think about. It's a refreshing departure from a lot of the issues raised in the Culture books, set in what feels like a more densely populated universe. I felt like the resolutions of some of the plot threads were forced, though. Things just fall into place too easily.

I didn't actually finish this. It was too dense, and focused on Mercator's life rather than his work. Perhaps I would have enjoyed the later chapters more.

Barker's best when writing villains. He gives them real motivations: they're not mindlessly evil, they're vengeful or greedy or so tired that they'll do anything. Overall, this was a good, but not amazing fantasy novel. It was well-layered, with several different threats operating in parallel rather than just being one thing after another. I was surprised by how little of the fantasy world we actually get to see.

Another fun adventure.

Odd. Intricate. I'll probably have to re-read it to really understand everything that was going on.

This is the third in a neatly-dovetailed trilogy (after The Gilded Chain and Lord of the Fire Lands) that describes the same events from three different perspectives. The first two conflict in important ways. Not trivial "Well it might have seemed that way to you, but..." differences. Huge differences in plot.

Duncan had me wondering if he'd just forgotten what had happened in the first book well into the third, but, once I realized how it could work out, I could see the setup going way back. Very well crafted.

And, incidentally, great tales of adventure to boot.

After months on the waiting list, the SFPL has loaned me a copy of this.

Extraordinary. A description of the re-discovery of practical English Magic that took place in the Napoleonic era. Full of historical and bibliographic detail. Witty. Funny. Striking.

My father gave me this book. I suspect that someone had given it to him, hoping he'd read it. He hadn't. Parts of it are definitely addressed to him, rather than to me (particularly the material about deconstructionism).

Pinker argues that recent work in Cognitive Science, Sociobiology, and Evolution has pretty much laid to rest the theory that Human Nature is a "blank slate" . He believes that our minds are founded on strong, evolutionarily explicable structures and predispositions, rather than being mostly shaped by culture. He then goes on to argue that this doesn't mean that racism, sexism, or modern art are justified. An interesting read even for people who accept his premise, since Pinker goes into a good deal of depth in his discussions of the implications of these discoveries.

While this covered a lot of ground and presented a compelling argument, I found it rather dry overall. I'd definitely recommend How The Mind Works over this, unless you're about to become a parent or are deeply entrenched in Liberal Arts Academia.

This caught my eye in the Lima airport. It's Isabel Allende's first foray into "young adult" fiction, and it happens to be about the Amazon (where we were headed next). How could I resist?

I was a little disappointed. Some books in this age category stand up well to older readers, but this one tried too hard to make sure its messages were understood.

Started this, found it very good, but too dense for my attention level. I'm saving it for my trip abroad, when the density in such a thin book will be a great time/weight ratio.

It was very good. At times bizarre and meandering, but always mysterious and deep.

Many interesting ideas.

Dark, moody fantasy. A deeply realized world.

An engrossing, extremely detailed account of the construction of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killings of one H. H. Holmes.

Surprisingly frenetic. Fun, once you get used to the trauma.

Some interesting pieces in this short story collection, but nothing truly amazing. Lots of Cold War and post-Cold War ruminations.

Beautiful.

Horror story written in a slow-building style, full of the protagonist's unfocused dread. Reminiscent of Lovecraft, structurally. Quite a bit of the plot revolves around San Francisco geography, and some of the climactic scenes take place just up the hill from my apartment.

The library insisted on taking this back before I was finished with it.

I was expecting more emphasis on genetics, but this turns out to be a survey of Zoology, structured around evolutionary divergences. It starts with the modern creatures most closely related to humans and proceeds to more distant relatives. In addition to the overall survey, Dawkins introduces short "Tales" about related topics that a particular organism exemplifies. These are filled with interesting facts about Anthropology, Zoology, and Genetics. At each stage, Dawkins talks about what common ancestors of the relatives might have been like. I got as far as the insects before I had to return it.

I found The Selfish Gene more compelling because it made a very coherent argument, rather than surveying a broad territory, but there's a lot of fascinating trivia and some interesting ideas in this as well. I will probably attempt to reclaim it from the library in a few months.

Good. Interesting world(s). A little overexplained. Seemed like the author had a bunch of different ideas that he wanted to fit into the book, and some of them didn't have the room to be properly fleshed out. It would have been interesting to explore the world a bit more before everything was explained.

My first book from the SFPL. Sequel to The Wizard Hunters. A solid continuation of the story from the first book. Wells is doing a good job of revealing the over-arching plot slowly, but bringing things together for the end of each book.

Sequel to The Curse of Chalion. Fun, well-constructed adventure.

Amazon suggested this while I was looking at the page for Gormenghast. Sounds interesting...

...Interesting to read. Seems to be trying to be almost Homeric. Lots of epithets and poetic description. I found it a little slow...

...I think I've given up on this. I keep starting other books instead of finishing it (always a bad sign), and I've noticed that when I do read it, I'm skimming over most of the description to get to the plot. Since there's a huge amount of description and fairly little plot, the exercise seems pointless...

Sadly, I found this rather dull. It's literary criticism about Infocom-style text adventure games. Because this is a pretty new field (the games have been around for decades, but apparently nobody has given them a serious critical reading), the author spends a good deal of time just defining terms and providing a history of the genre.

Montfort spends an early chapter arguing that text adventure games are descendants of riddles, a more established literary form. This seems to be the meaty idea in the book, but I felt it wasn't very well-developed. Perhaps I'm just not used to reading criticism, but it seemed like he was constantly telling the reader about the point he was about to make, rather than making the point.

I'm tempted to play a bunch of the recent works he describes. I didn't get much more out of the book than that, though.

Oddly, the hardcover of this was cheaper than the paperback.

My mother thought I'd like this one. She was right. Gibson has captured a certain feel of the early 21st century and put it on paper. The plot follows a "coolhunter" named Cayce (pronounced like the very different protagonist of another Gibson novel...) whose talent is being able to tell marketers whether a new branding concept will be effective. In her free time, she's been obsessing over mysterious videos that have been distributed on the Internet. Gibson nails a lot of details. He's at least as good a "coolhunter" as Cayce, and he works the theme of recognizing patterns (of cool and of other types) into the novel in an amusing variety of ways.

A lot of this book is about traveling. Normally, lots of travel in a book really annoys me (Bungee ruined much of the fantasy genre for me by pointing out that they're books about walking. Or perhaps saved me from it.), but Gibson actually talks about the travel, rather than just talking about it happening. The description of the feeling of entering a culture where you can't read the signs reminded me of some of my travels, and I liked the thread about jet lag being soul delay. I may have appreciated the travel writing more because I read the book over the course of a trip and finished it just as we landed at SFO.

A lively adventure. Wells is making her world progress nicely as time goes on. This book is set a generation after Death of the Necromancer and several hundred years after The Element of Fire. It's great to see technology marching on in a fantasy world. I'm still suspicious about the Falkenstein-ness of this series.

I kinda wish I'd waited for the series to be finished before I started on it. The first book doesn't resolve much.

Documents the tragic case of a Hmong girl with severe epilepsy and the numerous communication failures caused by the cultural disconnect between the girl's parents and her doctors. Pretty painful to even read about, especially because of my phobias about brain damage. Lots of that "oh, this can't possibly end well" feeling.

The book did a good job of presenting both sides. It's clear that both the doctors and the parents mean well, and the decisions that each side makes are understandable. But both sides have complex sets of assumptions that don't mesh at all. The language barrier is formidable, but it's a small part of the disconnect.

Fast-paced. Starts out like a typical cyberpunk novel, but quickly veers off in other directions. Gives lots of glimpses of an interesting world, but rushes through to an unsatisfying conclusion. A quick, fun read.

I grabbed this off the shelf, wondering if I'd ever actually read it. The first page caught my interest immediately. It turned out to be great. Poetic re-workings of Grimm tales. Wonderful use of language. Contrarian mindset.

Thoroughly fun. Now I'm eager to play the new version of Sid Meier's Pirates! when it comes out.

Dave loaned me a copy. Easily my least favorite of the Lord of the Rings. I found the big battle scenes pretty dull, but they were positively riveting compared to the slogging-across-Mordor scenes.

Very cyberpunky. Lots of futuristic slang and fast-forward description. Lots of symbolism.

Dave got me a signed copy when Miéville from was in town. I'm sad I missed that.

I really enjoy the way Miéville's books in this world have characters who experiment with the way magic works. I like fantasy novels where the author has come up with an intricate, consistent cosmology to explain the magical effects that make their worlds unlike ours. (Maybe books that have this quality are really SF, rather than Fantasy...)

Usually, this cosmology is presented from a medieval perspective: the classical ancient civilizations had it all figured out, and their wisdom is passed down through ritual and lore. We, the readers, are presented the whole thing as a complete system.

That's interesting for itself, but Miéville offers an alternative: a researcher who sees a strange effect and tries to figure out how it works through trial and error. A discoverer, rather than a receiver of wisdom. This presentation of magic as science appeals to me, and the incompleteness of the picture makes me want to read more about this world.

Gift from Melissa and Aaron.

I would have adored this book if I'd read it when I was maybe 14. It's a political pipe-dream about rational anarchism and the ability of a small group of people (with the aid of a near-omnipotent friend) to change their society.

Today, I can't forgive Heinlein for his simplistic politics, flat characters, and over-the-top sexism.

A very interesting portrait. It spends a lot of time on the obsessive, anti-social aspects of Newton's personality: his feuds with Hooke and Liebniz, his delving into theology, his alchemical researches, his sulking refusal to publish his research in a venue that would provide criticism. Engaging. A surprisingly quick read.

Now that I've been called a Darcyist, I guess I have to find out just what it means. Melissa was kind enough to loan me her copy.

Quite fun. I was particularly fond of Mr. Bennet. His sense of humor at the absurdity of the entire situation was very entertaining. Rooting for Elizabeth is easy, of course. Her refusal to put up with arrogant nonsense is refreshing.

Witty and thought-provoking. I particularly enjoyed the early chapters (dominated by the musings of Lord Henry Wotton), with their delightful turns of phrase.

Won a copy on eBay. Now that I see the cover, I'm sure I've never read this one before, which means I had read Death of the Necromancer before.

The book starts slowly. Too many unimportant characters are named, with too little to distinguish them. However, once the important characters take over, the story does get going nicely. It turns out to be a fun adventure, with sympathetic (though not "nice") characters.

I'm psyched to read what Wells does with this world, now that she's a more experienced writer.

Maybe it's just that I happened to be reading the Castle Falkenstein rulebook before reading this, but there are striking similarities between the details Wells mentions and those in New Europa.

Dave loaned me a copy. Good, though slow in places.

An autobiography with lots of art. It was entertaining to see someone who leans on serendipity as much as I do. I'm glad he's made such good use of the coincidences.

I didn't realize this was a graphic novel when I added it to this list. I don't usually track those. This is a collection of stories about the Endless. Generally pretty good.

I thought this was the Martha Wells book that I've been looking for for years, so I borrowed it from Maggie while helping them move. Now I'm pretty sure that I've read this one before (though not totally sure), and that the one that I've been looking for is actually The Element of Fire.

It's pretty good. The setting is cool: it has the feel of a magical Victorian Europe, with lots of little details about dress and manners to add verisimilitude. Oddly, the characters have the feel of a party in an RPG: very different characters, each with a suspiciously useful skill-set, thrown together with a flimsy rationale. One wonders if it was inspired by a Castle Falkenstein campaign or some such.

I'm looking forward to Wells's new books in the same world.

Ok, now I understand why Jess didn't want to see the movies. They really color perceptions when you go back to the books. I had forgotten just how much stuff there was in this book.

Re-read. For some reason, this was the only gap in my mainline Vorkosigan series, so I stole it from my Mom's bookshelf (where I'd probably left it on a previous trip). A solid Miles book.

An early book set in the universe of the Vorkosigan series. It's interesting to see it from a slightly different perspective, though the main character's outlook is quite similar to Miles's. Nothing amazing, though there are some references in Diplomatic Immunity that I would have picked up on if I'd read this first.

Generally good vignettes, but they lack a lot of the layered appeal of her longer works.

It's fun to read futuristic books written a long time ago and see how the conception of the future has changed. A lot of Huxley's world seems quaint, but some of the consumerist bread-and-circuses material is still chillingly accurate.

Another quick, fun read. Set in the same little town as Practical Demonkeeping, but now it's a B-Movie threat, rather than a demon.

I had trouble finding any books to buy in Belize that weren't recent bestsellers or guidebooks. Managed to find a copy of this in a bookstore recommended by a cab driver.

Addictive little tidbits of story. It's hard to stop reading them, once you start. Holmes's deductions aren't amazing, but his attention to detail is. He finds enough clues to make the answer obvious, where I'd be hard-pressed to find any at all.

Clearly one of Sterling's earlier works. Covers a lot of the same conceptual ground as Holy Fire: what will societies do to maintain control in the future, what kinds of changes will result because of vastly expanded lifespans. Definitely less fully realized. I didn't think that the short stories added much.

Following up a book predicated on plagues with a book predicated on... plagues! The premise is that the Black Plague effectively wiped out Europe, and that Islam and China are the dominant powers in the world (with some interesting input from India and the Americas).

The book's scale is huge, spanning about 700 years and covering many of the pivotal moments in the (alternate) history of the world. The frame that holds it all together is really interesting: it follows souls through incarnation after incarnation, but, as a result, it suffers from the same plausibility problem as a lot of Robinson's other big-picture books: the set of people making all of the important advances is just too small.

Lots of fascinating ideas. Drags a bit in places, and occasionally feels forced. Overall quite good.

A fun romp. A demon and its unwilling master make their way to a small town full of idiosyncratic characters. Chaos ensues.

In the not-too-distant future, improvements in life-sustaining technology and a fear of infection resulting from an age of devastating plagues has created a suffocating gerontocracy where every act is monitored and morality is founded on how much you cost to keep alive. Sterling's strength is that he thinks deeply about the societal changes that technology causes; it's Science Fiction in the best sense. Occasionally, the plot seems to meander because Sterling is eager to show off one implication or another, but it's pretty fast-moving, so the digressions don't drag.

Emotionally brutal for me. Hit close to home.

Very gossipy. Gives a feeling for what these guys might have been like as people. It's fascinating material. It had never occurred to me how much the Founding Fathers were making it up as they went along.

Spectacularly good. A fresh fantasy with a well thought out cosmology and a very interesting set of worlds. Barker creates a setting that's at once enticing and foreboding and populates it with a variety of heroes and powers, humans and monstrosities, each with their own very believable drives and failings.

There are worlds beyond Earth—four of them, in fact—separated from Earth by a magical void full of ravenous monsters. Three of them are under the control of a cruel Autarch, who rules from his huge city of Yzordderrex. God seems to have walled himself away in the last of them. Two centuries ago, the greatest magicians of all of these worlds tried to join Earth to them, and caused a catastrophe when they failed. Now an opportunity to try again has come, but what's worse: failure, or success?

There's a lot of interesting material in this book, but it's a brief survey of the territory, rather than an in-depth exploration. I felt like it got hand-wavey towards the end. A surprisingly large amount of the argument in grounded in evolution, and it clearly owes a debt to The Selfish Gene.

Like The Fionavar Tapestry, this feels like an early work. The world is interestingly designed, but it feels strangely empty. I got the feeling that nothing would happen in the world if it weren't for the main characters. Rather than a complex society they're moving around in, the world is a simple system for them to manipulate at will.

And, also like Fionavar, it felt like there were a lot of throwaway details stuck in for no compelling reason. For example, one of the characters dreams of being in Fionavar, though there's no real connection between the books.

It's unfortunate that the first of Kay's books I read was The Lions of Al-Rassan, because that book is so good that his other works are vaguely disappointing in comparison.

Rota was my favorite professor. This is a collection of fairly random writings of his. There are short biographies of mathematicians that Rota knew, some writings on Phenomenology that are well beyond my understanding, and musings on what Mathematics is and how its practitioners actually work.

The biographies seem to be somewhere between gossipy and irreverent and flat-out mean. Rota seems to be trying to show that a great mathematician needn't be a good person. Perhaps unintentionally, he seems to be underscoring the point by being unpleasant himself.

The Phenomenology is well outside my ken. I tried to make sense of it, but I'm failing on basic vocabulary. I wish I'd read the afterword first. It warns that almost nobody understands the distinctions Rota is making in these passages.

The musings on Mathematics were very interesting. Rota hits the nail on the head a number of times.

Weird. I thought it was one kind of book and it turned out to be another. I'm not sure I got it.

Jorm loaned this to me. It was okay. It's nice to see Harry as something other than the golden boy, but the book was pretty mediocre overall.

After years of reading references to this book, I finally got around to reading the book itself. It's now clear to me just why there are so many references out there to it. There are some very interesting ideas, presented in a very coherent fashion.

The thesis is that evolution happens on the scale of "replicators" (genes, usually), not on the scale of individuals or groups. This explains the evolution of altruistic behaviors: a gene can sacrifice the good of the individual carrying it if there's enough benefit to others who are likely to be carrying it as well.

There's a chapter at the end about how genes may no longer be the state of the art in replicators, and that ideas (Dawkins coined the word "meme") may be the next big thing.

A solid Vorkosigan book, but not quite as good as others in the series. Miles wasn't in over his head nearly enough.

This book has been on my shelf since 1994. I'm not sure why I never read it. It's spectacularly good. Amazing, thought provoking short stories, sketches of larger works, and reviews or commentaries on imaginary works. Remarkable, unadorned pieces, without the dilution of the intriguing central idea that would have come of expanding them into longer formats.

Suggested as a follow-up to Guns, Germs, and Steel. Not nearly as interesting as that book. It takes four plants (apple, tulip, cannabis, potato) and discusses how they have co-evolved with man to reach their current state. There's a lot of interesting material: what the real value of apples in the American frontier was (hint: they weren't for eating), descriptions of the weird not-quite-apples and proto-potatoes in the evolutionary homelands of those plants, and comments from potato farmers about how they wouldn't eat what's in their fields because of the pesticides. But it's mixed in with a lot of boring musing about the Apollonian/Dionysian tension in humans, tales of the author's visits with Johnny Appleseed historians, and anecdotes about hiding cannabis plants from the cops. I would have preferred more information and less story.

One afternoon while I was in college, I was hanging around in the Math department lounge and noticed an issue of Scientific American with an article by Nijhout about butterfly wing patterns. I've been interested in the subject ever since. This book expands on the material in that article and adds a great deal of information about the history of research in the field. This book has been on my shelf for at least five years, and I've only read one chapter. Time to fix that.

Ok. Fixed. This book describes a much more complex model than I'd previously thought. It's fascinating to see how a few simple processes might lead to such a huge variety of different kinds of patterns.

Compelling, like all of the Connie Willis books that I've read. This one centers around researchers who are investigating the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience. Hospital drama has never particularly interested me, but Willis creates a charming cast of characters and evokes the obsession inspired by almost having something figured out.

Though I felt compelled to finish it, I thought it was longer than it needed to be.

Surprisingly undramatic. No tension. Seemed to move on rails. No real decisions seemed to be made during the play, just expressions of the personalities of the characters. Perhaps I would do better to see this enacted, rather than just reading it.

Contemplative. Thought-provoking. Not a narrative, per se, but a collection of evocative descriptions, organized around multiple layers of themes.

Clive Barker's first book for children. Structured pretty traditionally, with an extra helping of menace. Good, but not fantastic.

Lots of charming detail.

Jorm gave me a copy as a gift. Definitely grittier and more down-to-earth than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, as befits a book with "Hard-Boiled" in the title. The premise was interesting, and I liked the structure of the book, but I didn't find myself empathizing with the characters.

Sequel to Earth Made of Glass. Disappointing. I wasn't terribly interested in the interactions between the characters (the major characters seemed obnoxious in uninteresting ways), and Barnes focused on them to the detriment of the plot. There was some food for thought about what humans will do after the Age of Scarcity (to borrow a Banks term), but the treatment is much less interesting than in an Iain M. Banks novel.

The way the plot wrapped up towards the end of the book smacked of a deus ex machina. I was left utterly unconvinced that such influential opposition could be so easily defeated, once the scheme was exposed.

This is actually a trilogy (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road). Normally, I wouldn't read a trilogy without a break, but this one was a very quick read.

It's Kay's early work, and it shows. It felt strangely like a young adult The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe with as much Celtic myth and Tolkien homage as possible thrown in. I kept expecting to turn the page and find out how the Kitchen Sink had joined the armies of Brennin. Most of the action seemed beside the point: there was only one plot thread that really mattered, and everything else was clearly just "Meanwhile...".

Despite all of the material crammed into these books, they felt thin. Whenever it looked like there would be a power struggle, it was neatly resolved. Everything just fell into place.

Given to me by my father. Apparently, it was life-changing for my parents.

This book started with a premise that strikes me as true, but unhelpful (that a person has no existence without the universe as context, and therefore is — in some sense — the same as the universe/god/whatever), spent a lot of effort complaining about the difficulty of accepting this premise, and didn't make much effort to convince me that it was helpful. I had high hopes for the chapter entitled "So What?", but was disappointed.

Set in the same world as Perdido Street Station. Like that book, it's filled with spectacular and strange places and peoples, this time focused around the pirate city of Armada, rather than the urban bustle of New Crobuzon.

The Scar does a better job with character and plot than its predecessor, but there's some of the same sense that it's a travel guide rather than a novel. For all of the description, you still want to actually go and see the sights—the book is tantalizing, rather than satisfying.

Quite Good.

The Stars My Destination made me want to read this. I read an abridged version as a kid.

This Penguin edition (no translator named) turned out to be abridged as well, but I don't think I missed much. The book started out very well, but after the focus shifted to Paris I found myself bored by all of the machinations. It was hard to care about the families or reputations of the villains.

Re-read. A solid book. Explores life and death in the Culture. Gives more insight into why anyone would do anything in a society where everything can be provided. Less gripping than some of the other Culture novels, though.

Recommended by Lauri. The problem with jumping into a really long series in the middle (or at the end, as in this case) is that there are a host of established characters that you don't have any particular attachment to. It's a hard balancing act to introduce these characters in a way that doesn't bore your faithful long-time readers, but still forms a bond with the new ones. This book didn't really work for me as a member of the latter category.

The book starts with a long road-tripping sequence, which serves to establish the characters and provide some meaty character development. I'm sure this is appealing to old fans, but as a newcomer I was just waiting for them to get the setup over with and start on the adventure. I was fated to disappointment, since the road-tripping was a large part of the adventure. The more typical adventure material came and went in about the last third of the book. There wasn't much feeling of danger; most of the tension was between characters. Again, I'm sure this appeals to fans who've seen these characters grow and change, but it wasn't very exciting to me.

I didn't realize that this was the first of a series (apparently of four books). It's frustrating to expect a book to resolve, only to find that it ends pretty abruptly. I had a sneaking suspicion towards the end that there wasn't space to satisfactorily resolve all of the plot threads in the time left, but I was ambushed by the fact that there is a substantial Appendix.

That aside, I liked the book. Creative. Surprising. More depth and darkness than a lot of books for children. The paintings add a lot. I look forward to the rest of the series.

A letdown. The premise was fascinating: the old gods of European, African and Asian myth were brought to America by their believers, but now they're in a struggle for mindshare with new gods of technology and progress. But the execution was unexciting. I would have liked to see a lot more of the new gods. I would also have liked a protagonist who was more defined.

A disappointingly large amount of this book is devoted to Raskin selling the reader on features of his interface for the (failed) Canon Cat computer. There is some interesting material about how to evaluate interfaces, and some interesting ideas about task-focused computing (as opposed to os/application-focused computing).

Spectacular. Dreamlike. Entrancing. Densely linked to itself, but never hard to read. I'm sure it will bear another reading in a few months. I expect I'll discover many more layers.

Got this on a whim.

This was perfect for reading while I ate dinner over the course of a month or so. Short, self-contained interviews with Neil Gaiman about the Sandman series. Interesting insights. Bender asks good questions, and seems to have a good dynamic with Gaiman. It prompted me to go back and re-read some of the graphic novels, looking more closely at some of the themes. It was particularly interesting to read about the reception of the series as it was being written. I hadn't realized the extent to which The Sandman affected the Goth scene.

Fascinating. Diamond makes a convincing case for geographic determinism: the idea that the course of human history is heavily dependent on the advantages and disadvantages of the various areas that people have inhabited.

For example, Eurasia enjoyed a very powerful advantage over the Americas simply because of its East-West orientation, which allowed crops domesticated in one area to spread easily throughout large areas of similar latitude (and climate). The predominantly North-South orientation of the Americas meant that crops suited to Mesoamerica couldn't spread very far North or South because of the rapid climate shifts. Thus, Eurasia achieved higher populations more quickly, which allowed more specialists (inventors, soldiers, bureaucrats) to develop a more complex society.

It was really interesting to read a history of early agriculture and domestication of animals. It has solidified my attitudes towards genetically modified foods and the like. We've been changing the plants and animals around us by "artificial" selection for thousands of years. Why stop now?

The book itself is somewhat repetitive. It reads as if the author expected readers to read chapters in isolation, and therefore summarized the results of previous chapters. On the other hand, the book is chock-full of interesting bits of trivia.

The argument is strong, but almost disappointingly simple. I want history to be more than a big game of Civilization, where whoever builds the Granary in each of his cities first wins.

Oddly, I found the most interesting material in the book to be the chapter on Jungian Types. But there's plenty of good Human Interface Design material here as well. It's fairly 90's Mac-centric in the main, and many of the examples not directly applicable to the kind of thing I'm working on right now, but the basic insights are the same. This book also prompted me to finally check out Ashlar Vellum, which turns out to be the drawing program that I've been looking for for years.

Quite good. A collection of reworkings of fairy tales. It's neat to see stories like "Beauty and the Beast" get several different treatments.

Thoroughly engaging. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the detective-story aspects of it. It was neat to see the whodunnit solved in no time, but the story go on. The implications of mental powers are well thought through, just as in The Stars My Destination.

It's abundantly clear why JMS felt an obligation to name the main Psycop after Bester.

Finally got around to reading the 4th book. It's pretty good. It was refreshing to discover that Harry is more normal than I expected. The chosen child who's the only one who can save the world is hackneyed, so it's nice to find out that there are reasons why things always seem to go his way.

Evil Ted told me to re-read this one. He may be right: it may be the best of the Culture novels. It's extremely well constructed. The main character's struggles highlight everything that the Culture seems to have given up: struggle, challenge, the savor of a battle narrowly won, the bitter taste of powerlessness. And their willingness to use him to their ends highlights their hypocrisy.

It's hard to not loathe the Culture by the end of the book. The perspective of a non-Culture citizen working as a Culture agent gives us more of an insight into their base morality than that of an adversary (Consider Phlebas), or an ordinary Culture citizen (Player of Games). If the Culture is "A tiny core of Special Circumstances, a shell of Contact, and a vast chaotic ecosphere of everything else", then the core is as thoroughly ruthless as its agents.

Loaned by Jorm. I have mixed feelings about it. It's clearly a product of its time, which I can't fault it for. The world was fascinating. Quite a bit of thought about the repercussions of Jaunting — the sort of thought that separates Science Fiction from Space Fantasy, in my view. The over-plot was really neat. Enough hints were dropped early on to let you figure it out ahead of time, but not so many that it wasn't a surprise to see just how it falls out.

I didn't like the characterization much, though. There were too many places where a character underwent a transformation that changed their essence in a way that didn't seem to jibe with what had gone before. For example: Jizbella, a strong female character who doesn't take shit from any man finds in another of the characters a man who justifies the "double standard".

A much better translation than the one by Lakshmi Lal. It seems to humanize Rama much more than Lal's more literal rendering. Rama (and Lakshmana, and Ravana), seem to have actual motivations, rather than simply roles in a pre-scripted drama.

Narayan clearly has some of the same questions about Rama that I do. His interjections into the narrative don't resolve my confusion about Rama's character, but I think they help. For example, when Rama kills Vali from hiding without any direct provocation, Narayan expresses doubt about whether it's actually right, and why Rama tries so hard to justify it after the fact.

A meditation on an empty life, made less solitary by an odd job: writing obituaries for people who haven't yet died. As the job goes on, it seems to fill the empty life with characters in almost-normal relationships with the protagonist (Viktor). The job makes him leave town, so he acquires a "friend" so that there's someone to take care of his penguin while he's gone. A referral from the job results in another "friend", and later a "daughter" who necessitates a "wife".

But all of the relationships are tenuous. Fortune has nudged these people together, but there's no reason for them to stay together except a desire for normalcy or a strange sense of duty. Viktor never really feels more towards them than he feels towards his penguin, who is aloof and seems to mostly share Viktor's space rather than being an actual companion.

Thoughtful. Melancholy. Quick read.

The third book in the Gormenghast series turned out to be very different from the first two. It had some of the same hyper-reality that made Titus Groan and Gormenghast so appealing, but the focus on setting seemed thinner, with many more places described, but in much less detail. The world beyond Gormenghast has some striking and beguiling places, but they don't feel as real as the castle did.

The characterization was also less striking, though this was in part because Peake wasn't dealing monomaniacal characters this time around. This set seemed multifaceted in a way that was never apparent in the first two books. It was hard to understand even the major characters (with the possible exception of Muzzlehatch) in the same way that it was possible to understand Flay or Steerpike, and there were several important characters (The Helmets, Anchor), who seemed to appear from nowhere and disappear without any real explanation of their presence.

Reading the critical commentary included in the omnibus edition sheds some light on the difference. Titus Alone was published from manuscript fragments after Peake had been essentially incapacitated by Parkinson's disease. I wonder how much more density the world beyond Gormenghast might have had if Peake himself had finished it.

I was looking for something light, and what's better for that than a little story about the end of the world? A fun re-read. I love all of the little digs at Americans.

Even more bizarre than Titus Groan. It flows along, seeming to make sense in its own odd way and suddenly reverses itself. Everything changes in an abrupt sentence, leaving me to re-read the relevant part over and over to assure myself that it actually said what it seemed to. Very rich. Full of haunting imagery.

Excellent. There's something fundamentally broken about a four-color world. How can people have superpowers without it drastically changing who they are? What could prompt someone without any special powers to dress up in a funny costume and fight "evil"? What could possibly be going on in the mind of a super villain?

Moore makes the people behind the masks real, gives them plausible motivations and doubts, and manages to complete a full super-heroic storyline at the same time. Thought-provoking and disturbing.

Good. Less lushly described, and definitely more grounded than Perdido Street Station.

Surreal and chilling. Less thought provoking for me than some of Lem's other works.

Excellent. Dense, engrossing detail. Very slow going at the outset, but full of characters with almost palpable presence: so strange and abstract that they hook the imagination, yet realistic in their obsessions.

Neat world. I really like big-picture fantasy cosmologies, and this one was very cool.

Surprisingly fast read. Finished most of it on a plane flight. Some interesting ideas relating to the structure of the Business itself, but not a lot of meat to the book. The Couffable plot-line seemed entirely tacked on to provide forward motion. I'm still of the opinion that Iain M. Banks books are vastly superior to Iain Banks books.

Fairly disappointing. I'm not very impressed by the translation. Drier than it seemed like it needed to be. Really didn't give much insight into characters and motivations. Rama came across as an arrogant jerk who did the wrong things for the right reasons. At least we're told that they're the right reasons. It's never really made clear why his word is more important than his responsibilities to his subjects. Nor why it's okay for him to torment a demoness who's fallen in love with him. Nor why other people's opinions of his wife are more important than his own. This translation actually gave less detail and less insight than the Indian comic books I read as a kid. Perhaps it would be better to read another translation.

Quite good for the first hundred pages, then abandons its focus on interactions between characters and switches over into Big Picture mode. The book starts rapidly switching between characters and destroys their verisimilitude. Characters swap allegiances and opinions for the sole purpose of making the giant Tech plot work out, and everything starts feeling heavily scripted. Interesting ideas, but, in the final analysis, an unsatisfying read.

Still charming. A little more thinly written than I'd recalled.

This took me quite a while to get through, and after reading the literary criticism at the back of the Norton Critical Edition I still feel like I read it very shallowly. I liked the translation. I got the feeling that a lot of the wordplay and jokes were rendered into English well. Much of the material struck chords with me. The image of a man out of his time, doing things in a certain way because that's how he's read that they're done resonates particularly well.

Very entertaining. A well-told fable. Delightful use of language, entertaining (if mostly simple) characters, and amusing flights of fancy.

Recommended to me by a number of people recently. Loaned by Jascha. Very good. Somewhat annoying because Eco constantly uses languages that I don't read (French, Latin, German), but I found that most of the things in those languages were skippable, and it was pretty obvious when I needed to translate one to understand a plot point (yay Babelfish). Rips the world-conspiracy genre to shreds, and at the same time provides some insights into obsession and value.

A very quick read. I wish I hadn't noticed the comparisons to Heinlein on the dust jacket, because it was very hard afterwards to not think Stranger in a Strange Land as I was reading this. A shame, since Barnes does a much better job with some of the same material. Overall: solid, thought-provoking hard SF. Interesting treatment of the messianic themes that entirely avoids Heinlein's obnoxious forays into omniscience. There's no side trip to Heaven here to cheat the essential question of doubt. There's plenty of other material here as well. The personal relationships between the main characters are often painfully true to life, though Barnes seems to have a heavy hand at times. There's some interesting musing on why humans keep going in a world where their efforts aren't actually necessary to survive that hits close to home for me, after all of these months of unemployment, but it isn't as keenly focused as in an Iain M. Banks. A good book, but not really much new ground broken.

This seemed like a Dave Duncan book, rather than a Bujold book. Strong characters, but the focus seemed more on the theological system than on the story. I kept thinking that it was a perfect framework for an Assassin's Guild game.

The deeply unsatisfying ending to this came up in a conversation, and I decided to reread it (again). The ending is still deeply unsatisfying. Just as it's starting to get really interesting, it's over. Still a great book, though.

Though I don't usually read business books, this one was fairly interesting. The thesis is that established, customer-focused companies are essentially helpless when confronted with a cheap, less-effective alternative. Because the interests of their customers force them to allocate resources towards maintaining and improving their current products, they can't muster the organizational will do develop and market lower-end products that don't meet their customers' needs. Christiansen points out a number of examples where these lower-end products repeatedly developed into larger markets and eventually displaced their higher-end competitors. The book was much longer than it needed to be, visiting and revisiting the same material many times, so I ended up skimming most of it.

Reasonably fun, surreal take on college life. Clearly an early work. Stephenson doesn't really make the multiple plot threads coherent until the end, and many of the characters are unsatisfying.

(Reread.) Not much to say. Great book.

An amazingly beautiful book that covers floral arabesques, calligraphic designs, geometric tilings, and muqarnas with hundreds of pages of gorgeous color photographs. Focuses on the design elements of tilings, with descriptions of how various patterns are derived and how to lay out new works.

(Reread.) I reread this to compare Gaiman's depiction of Faerie to Dunsany's depiction of Elfland. Gaiman's prose is very little like Dunsany's. It's much more matter of fact than Dunsany's lilt, and rightly so, as the realm he's describing is much less otherworldly than Elfland. There are plenty of nods to Dunsany though. I was amused to see a pair of foxes running alongside the unicorn in one of the paintings (unmentioned in the text). Gaimain's story is much more involved than Dunsany's. Where Dunsany spends long, flowing paragraphs setting a tone, Gaiman can rely on the beautiful illustrations by Vess. This frees up the text to present a much more intricate plot, with many more threads.

(Reread.) Dunsany's writing is amazing. Lyrical and evocative. It takes me a while to get into it each time I read one of his longer works — time to adjust the rhythm of my reading to match the prose. But it's worth it. Scenes like the forging of Alveric's sword and the arrival of the visitors in Erl sing with beauty.

Jascha loaned me this, and it sat in the to-read stack for a good long while. I should have read it sooner. An excellent book set in a very gritty, tactile city. The setting is unusual and very complex: one of the best depictions I've seen of a fantasy world with working magic that also has a scientific tradition. The characters have deep motivations and well-developed personalities, and Miéville isn't afraid to do horrible things to them. The writing is heavy on the description, which is well-justified by the unusual material. The plot is quite engaging, and it's entertaining to see Miéville work to bring the huge number of threads together.

The papers and presentations from the ACM's conferences on the History of Programming Languages. The first was interesting mostly for the historical descriptions of how the languages were created. The second was fascinating because the philosophies behind the languages were so different. The chapters on Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth and C++ were particularly interesting. I now have a hankering to play around with each of them (I never thought I'd want to learn C++, but Bjarne Stroustrup's explanations of why the language features work the way they do makes me want to give it a try). The Lisp chapter reminded me what I loved about coding in Lisp: a mix of programming elegance and humor that I haven't found elsewhere.

(Reread.) Revisiting this was rewarding. Probably my second-favorite Culture novel. I think I picked up on a lot more of the intricacies this time around. The plot is convoluted enough that motivations are hard to understand on the first go-round.

Having rediscovered Alexander's Prydain Chronicles (and the joys of witty children's books), I picked up this triple volume. They're very similar to the Prydain Chronicles and each other. The main character, a young man, flounders around looking for his purpose in life, encountering characters along the way who impart lessons to him. Though each has a different, amusing set of adventures and a different mytho-historical setting (Homeric Greece, Classical China, and the India of the Panchatantra, respectively), I don't think any of these three stack up to the Prydain books. But they're pleasant.

Great book. Fast-paced and fun. A time-traveling researcher visits the Victorian era looking for information about a mysterious object, and gets swept up in a tangle of mistaken attractions and humorous adventures. Highly recommended.

I'd never read this "classic" SF book before this summer, and I really wasn't missing much. I disliked pretty much everything about this book. Part of the problem was surely my distaste for the religious ideas that the book puts forward, but Heinlein's patronizing attitudes and unengaging writing style didn't help.

Lauri recommended this one, and I'm glad. I feel kind of odd. As much as I dislike the "Gen X" stereotype that has evolved since this book was written, the characters and their opinions really strike a chord with me. I'm going to have to pick this up again in a few months and give it another read.

Tremendously fun children's book. Plays around with Goth stereotypes, but doesn't fall into the trap of predictability. Almost makes me want to have children, just so I can read them books like this.

Presumably, this is the second book in the Abarat series.

This is actually my copy from when I was studying Cog Sci in school, finally returned to me. Maybe I'll finish it, this time.

More a reference book than a read.

Started. Was underwhelmed. May try again someday.

Sent to me by my father, who didn't read it before sending it. Looks suspiciously like New Age Pop Science.

Grabbed my father's copy after some people recommended it. I'll probably never read this. I started it, and felt almost immediately like I needed to start diagramming the characters and the relationships.

I'll probably never actually read this.

Browsed at Ken and Heather's. Neat geometric approach to body construction.

An amazing work. Requires more concentration than I routinely muster, though, so I'm only making progress in fits and starts.

An expansion of the paper in HOPL2. I need to return this to Paul. I'll never get around to actually reading it.

This looks like a good first book in Topology, which I've meant to study since my interest in math hit full steam. I made it as far as I could go on just reading the definitions. I'm going to have to start working the problems if I'm to make more progress.

Started. Stalled.

Recently (okay... in June 2001) reread Dune, and was even more impressed than the first time. I remember the series going sharply downhill after that, but I think I'll give it at least a try.

About the people who make dictionaries.

First in a trilogy.

Travelogue + Whisky

Short story collection.

About MUDs and their descendants.

About how language affects thought.

The first book was great, but I can't bring myself to spend that much money on short books. Must get a library card. Hmm... or borrow copies from friends with kids...