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.

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.

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.