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Didn't hold my interest. Stopped reading.

Another Aubrey/Maturin book. Fairly different in tone from the previous ones (the naval battle is kind of a sideline!), but still pretty good.

Didn't hold my interest. Stopped reading.

Occasionally very funny, but I didn't like it overall.

I think this is my favorite of the Aubrey/Maturin books so far. Lots of action and plenty of strong personalities, but the main characters managed to not behave like idiots at any point along the way.

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.