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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.

The second in the His Dark Materials series, after The Golden Compass. The story gets markedly weirder as it starts moving between worlds. It ends with a cliffhanger, so I'm glad that I had the next book handy.

Disappointing. Bujold's weakest in a long time.

A heady stew of dialect and cultural references that I don't feel like I picked up on, suffused with vivid imagery. At its core, the characters' stories were strong and sympathetic. Every action they took made sense, and that held the book together despite the chaos going on around and within them.

Dave loaned this to me. It was really good. Adventurous kid's book with plenty of plot twists and a sense of menace.

Pretty good, but not great Blade adventure. Interesting whodunnit elements. Less compelling plot than usual. Duncan's been introducing more and more magic elements in these books that are making the world harder to believe.

Erik loaned me the UK edition. It's good — a solid adventure with plenty to think about. It's a refreshing departure from a lot of the issues raised in the Culture books, set in what feels like a more densely populated universe. I felt like the resolutions of some of the plot threads were forced, though. Things just fall into place too easily.

I didn't actually finish this. It was too dense, and focused on Mercator's life rather than his work. Perhaps I would have enjoyed the later chapters more.

Barker's best when writing villains. He gives them real motivations: they're not mindlessly evil, they're vengeful or greedy or so tired that they'll do anything. Overall, this was a good, but not amazing fantasy novel. It was well-layered, with several different threats operating in parallel rather than just being one thing after another. I was surprised by how little of the fantasy world we actually get to see.

Another fun adventure.

Odd. Intricate. I'll probably have to re-read it to really understand everything that was going on.