Reviews and Comments

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.

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.

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.