Reviews and Comments

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.

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.

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

Disappointing. Fairy tales, but too "nice".