User Profile

An autobiography with lots of art. It was entertaining to see someone who leans on serendipity as much as I do. I'm glad he's made such good use of the coincidences.

I didn't realize this was a graphic novel when I added it to this list. I don't usually track those. This is a collection of stories about the Endless. Generally pretty good.

I thought this was the Martha Wells book that I've been looking for for years, so I borrowed it from Maggie while helping them move. Now I'm pretty sure that I've read this one before (though not totally sure), and that the one that I've been looking for is actually The Element of Fire.

It's pretty good. The setting is cool: it has the feel of a magical Victorian Europe, with lots of little details about dress and manners to add verisimilitude. Oddly, the characters have the feel of a party in an RPG: very different characters, each with a suspiciously useful skill-set, thrown together with a flimsy rationale. One wonders if it was inspired by a Castle Falkenstein campaign or some such.

I'm looking forward to Wells's new books in the same world.

Ok, now I understand why Jess didn't want to see the movies. They really color perceptions when you go back to the books. I had forgotten just how much stuff there was in this book.

Re-read. For some reason, this was the only gap in my mainline Vorkosigan series, so I stole it from my Mom's bookshelf (where I'd probably left it on a previous trip). A solid Miles book.

An early book set in the universe of the Vorkosigan series. It's interesting to see it from a slightly different perspective, though the main character's outlook is quite similar to Miles's. Nothing amazing, though there are some references in Diplomatic Immunity that I would have picked up on if I'd read this first.

Generally good vignettes, but they lack a lot of the layered appeal of her longer works.

It's fun to read futuristic books written a long time ago and see how the conception of the future has changed. A lot of Huxley's world seems quaint, but some of the consumerist bread-and-circuses material is still chillingly accurate.

Another quick, fun read. Set in the same little town as Practical Demonkeeping, but now it's a B-Movie threat, rather than a demon.

I had trouble finding any books to buy in Belize that weren't recent bestsellers or guidebooks. Managed to find a copy of this in a bookstore recommended by a cab driver.

Addictive little tidbits of story. It's hard to stop reading them, once you start. Holmes's deductions aren't amazing, but his attention to detail is. He finds enough clues to make the answer obvious, where I'd be hard-pressed to find any at all.

Clearly one of Sterling's earlier works. Covers a lot of the same conceptual ground as Holy Fire: what will societies do to maintain control in the future, what kinds of changes will result because of vastly expanded lifespans. Definitely less fully realized. I didn't think that the short stories added much.

A fun romp. A demon and its unwilling master make their way to a small town full of idiosyncratic characters. Chaos ensues.

In the not-too-distant future, improvements in life-sustaining technology and a fear of infection resulting from an age of devastating plagues has created a suffocating gerontocracy where every act is monitored and morality is founded on how much you cost to keep alive. Sterling's strength is that he thinks deeply about the societal changes that technology causes; it's Science Fiction in the best sense. Occasionally, the plot seems to meander because Sterling is eager to show off one implication or another, but it's pretty fast-moving, so the digressions don't drag.

Emotionally brutal for me. Hit close to home.

Very gossipy. Gives a feeling for what these guys might have been like as people. It's fascinating material. It had never occurred to me how much the Founding Fathers were making it up as they went along.