Reviews and Comments

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.

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.