Reviews and Comments

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.

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.

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.