Reviews and Comments

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.

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.

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.