Reviews and Comments

Surreal and chilling. Less thought provoking for me than some of Lem's other works.

Surprisingly fast read. Finished most of it on a plane flight. Some interesting ideas relating to the structure of the Business itself, but not a lot of meat to the book. The Couffable plot-line seemed entirely tacked on to provide forward motion. I'm still of the opinion that Iain M. Banks books are vastly superior to Iain Banks books.

Fairly disappointing. I'm not very impressed by the translation. Drier than it seemed like it needed to be. Really didn't give much insight into characters and motivations. Rama came across as an arrogant jerk who did the wrong things for the right reasons. At least we're told that they're the right reasons. It's never really made clear why his word is more important than his responsibilities to his subjects. Nor why it's okay for him to torment a demoness who's fallen in love with him. Nor why other people's opinions of his wife are more important than his own. This translation actually gave less detail and less insight than the Indian comic books I read as a kid. Perhaps it would be better to read another translation.

Still charming. A little more thinly written than I'd recalled.

This took me quite a while to get through, and after reading the literary criticism at the back of the Norton Critical Edition I still feel like I read it very shallowly. I liked the translation. I got the feeling that a lot of the wordplay and jokes were rendered into English well. Much of the material struck chords with me. The image of a man out of his time, doing things in a certain way because that's how he's read that they're done resonates particularly well.

Recommended to me by a number of people recently. Loaned by Jascha. Very good. Somewhat annoying because Eco constantly uses languages that I don't read (French, Latin, German), but I found that most of the things in those languages were skippable, and it was pretty obvious when I needed to translate one to understand a plot point (yay Babelfish). Rips the world-conspiracy genre to shreds, and at the same time provides some insights into obsession and value.

A very quick read. I wish I hadn't noticed the comparisons to Heinlein on the dust jacket, because it was very hard afterwards to not think Stranger in a Strange Land as I was reading this. A shame, since Barnes does a much better job with some of the same material. Overall: solid, thought-provoking hard SF. Interesting treatment of the messianic themes that entirely avoids Heinlein's obnoxious forays into omniscience. There's no side trip to Heaven here to cheat the essential question of doubt. There's plenty of other material here as well. The personal relationships between the main characters are often painfully true to life, though Barnes seems to have a heavy hand at times. There's some interesting musing on why humans keep going in a world where their efforts aren't actually necessary to survive that hits close to home for me, after all of these months of unemployment, but it isn't as keenly focused as in an Iain M. Banks. A good book, but not really much new ground broken.

This seemed like a Dave Duncan book, rather than a Bujold book. Strong characters, but the focus seemed more on the theological system than on the story. I kept thinking that it was a perfect framework for an Assassin's Guild game.

The deeply unsatisfying ending to this came up in a conversation, and I decided to reread it (again). The ending is still deeply unsatisfying. Just as it's starting to get really interesting, it's over. Still a great book, though.

Though I don't usually read business books, this one was fairly interesting. The thesis is that established, customer-focused companies are essentially helpless when confronted with a cheap, less-effective alternative. Because the interests of their customers force them to allocate resources towards maintaining and improving their current products, they can't muster the organizational will do develop and market lower-end products that don't meet their customers' needs. Christiansen points out a number of examples where these lower-end products repeatedly developed into larger markets and eventually displaced their higher-end competitors. The book was much longer than it needed to be, visiting and revisiting the same material many times, so I ended up skimming most of it.