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Spectacularly good. A fresh fantasy with a well thought out cosmology and a very interesting set of worlds. Barker creates a setting that's at once enticing and foreboding and populates it with a variety of heroes and powers, humans and monstrosities, each with their own very believable drives and failings.

There are worlds beyond Earth—four of them, in fact—separated from Earth by a magical void full of ravenous monsters. Three of them are under the control of a cruel Autarch, who rules from his huge city of Yzordderrex. God seems to have walled himself away in the last of them. Two centuries ago, the greatest magicians of all of these worlds tried to join Earth to them, and caused a catastrophe when they failed. Now an opportunity to try again has come, but what's worse: failure, or success?

There's a lot of interesting material in this book, but it's a brief survey of the territory, rather than an in-depth exploration. I felt like it got hand-wavey towards the end. A surprisingly large amount of the argument in grounded in evolution, and it clearly owes a debt to The Selfish Gene.

Like The Fionavar Tapestry, this feels like an early work. The world is interestingly designed, but it feels strangely empty. I got the feeling that nothing would happen in the world if it weren't for the main characters. Rather than a complex society they're moving around in, the world is a simple system for them to manipulate at will.

And, also like Fionavar, it felt like there were a lot of throwaway details stuck in for no compelling reason. For example, one of the characters dreams of being in Fionavar, though there's no real connection between the books.

It's unfortunate that the first of Kay's books I read was The Lions of Al-Rassan, because that book is so good that his other works are vaguely disappointing in comparison.

Rota was my favorite professor. This is a collection of fairly random writings of his. There are short biographies of mathematicians that Rota knew, some writings on Phenomenology that are well beyond my understanding, and musings on what Mathematics is and how its practitioners actually work.

The biographies seem to be somewhere between gossipy and irreverent and flat-out mean. Rota seems to be trying to show that a great mathematician needn't be a good person. Perhaps unintentionally, he seems to be underscoring the point by being unpleasant himself.

The Phenomenology is well outside my ken. I tried to make sense of it, but I'm failing on basic vocabulary. I wish I'd read the afterword first. It warns that almost nobody understands the distinctions Rota is making in these passages.

The musings on Mathematics were very interesting. Rota hits the nail on the head a number of times.

Weird. I thought it was one kind of book and it turned out to be another. I'm not sure I got it.

Jorm loaned this to me. It was okay. It's nice to see Harry as something other than the golden boy, but the book was pretty mediocre overall.

After years of reading references to this book, I finally got around to reading the book itself. It's now clear to me just why there are so many references out there to it. There are some very interesting ideas, presented in a very coherent fashion.

The thesis is that evolution happens on the scale of "replicators" (genes, usually), not on the scale of individuals or groups. This explains the evolution of altruistic behaviors: a gene can sacrifice the good of the individual carrying it if there's enough benefit to others who are likely to be carrying it as well.

There's a chapter at the end about how genes may no longer be the state of the art in replicators, and that ideas (Dawkins coined the word "meme") may be the next big thing.

A solid Vorkosigan book, but not quite as good as others in the series. Miles wasn't in over his head nearly enough.

This book has been on my shelf since 1994. I'm not sure why I never read it. It's spectacularly good. Amazing, thought provoking short stories, sketches of larger works, and reviews or commentaries on imaginary works. Remarkable, unadorned pieces, without the dilution of the intriguing central idea that would have come of expanding them into longer formats.

Suggested as a follow-up to Guns, Germs, and Steel. Not nearly as interesting as that book. It takes four plants (apple, tulip, cannabis, potato) and discusses how they have co-evolved with man to reach their current state. There's a lot of interesting material: what the real value of apples in the American frontier was (hint: they weren't for eating), descriptions of the weird not-quite-apples and proto-potatoes in the evolutionary homelands of those plants, and comments from potato farmers about how they wouldn't eat what's in their fields because of the pesticides. But it's mixed in with a lot of boring musing about the Apollonian/Dionysian tension in humans, tales of the author's visits with Johnny Appleseed historians, and anecdotes about hiding cannabis plants from the cops. I would have preferred more information and less story.

Surprisingly undramatic. No tension. Seemed to move on rails. No real decisions seemed to be made during the play, just expressions of the personalities of the characters. Perhaps I would do better to see this enacted, rather than just reading it.

Contemplative. Thought-provoking. Not a narrative, per se, but a collection of evocative descriptions, organized around multiple layers of themes.

Clive Barker's first book for children. Structured pretty traditionally, with an extra helping of menace. Good, but not fantastic.

Lots of charming detail.

Jorm gave me a copy as a gift. Definitely grittier and more down-to-earth than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, as befits a book with "Hard-Boiled" in the title. The premise was interesting, and I liked the structure of the book, but I didn't find myself empathizing with the characters.