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Sequel to Earth Made of Glass. Disappointing. I wasn't terribly interested in the interactions between the characters (the major characters seemed obnoxious in uninteresting ways), and Barnes focused on them to the detriment of the plot. There was some food for thought about what humans will do after the Age of Scarcity (to borrow a Banks term), but the treatment is much less interesting than in an Iain M. Banks novel.

The way the plot wrapped up towards the end of the book smacked of a deus ex machina. I was left utterly unconvinced that such influential opposition could be so easily defeated, once the scheme was exposed.

Quite Good.

The Stars My Destination made me want to read this. I read an abridged version as a kid.

This Penguin edition (no translator named) turned out to be abridged as well, but I don't think I missed much. The book started out very well, but after the focus shifted to Paris I found myself bored by all of the machinations. It was hard to care about the families or reputations of the villains.

Re-read. A solid book. Explores life and death in the Culture. Gives more insight into why anyone would do anything in a society where everything can be provided. Less gripping than some of the other Culture novels, though.

I didn't realize that this was the first of a series (apparently of four books). It's frustrating to expect a book to resolve, only to find that it ends pretty abruptly. I had a sneaking suspicion towards the end that there wasn't space to satisfactorily resolve all of the plot threads in the time left, but I was ambushed by the fact that there is a substantial Appendix.

That aside, I liked the book. Creative. Surprising. More depth and darkness than a lot of books for children. The paintings add a lot. I look forward to the rest of the series.

A letdown. The premise was fascinating: the old gods of European, African and Asian myth were brought to America by their believers, but now they're in a struggle for mindshare with new gods of technology and progress. But the execution was unexciting. I would have liked to see a lot more of the new gods. I would also have liked a protagonist who was more defined.

A disappointingly large amount of this book is devoted to Raskin selling the reader on features of his interface for the (failed) Canon Cat computer. There is some interesting material about how to evaluate interfaces, and some interesting ideas about task-focused computing (as opposed to os/application-focused computing).

Spectacular. Dreamlike. Entrancing. Densely linked to itself, but never hard to read. I'm sure it will bear another reading in a few months. I expect I'll discover many more layers.

Got this on a whim.

This was perfect for reading while I ate dinner over the course of a month or so. Short, self-contained interviews with Neil Gaiman about the Sandman series. Interesting insights. Bender asks good questions, and seems to have a good dynamic with Gaiman. It prompted me to go back and re-read some of the graphic novels, looking more closely at some of the themes. It was particularly interesting to read about the reception of the series as it was being written. I hadn't realized the extent to which The Sandman affected the Goth scene.

Oddly, I found the most interesting material in the book to be the chapter on Jungian Types. But there's plenty of good Human Interface Design material here as well. It's fairly 90's Mac-centric in the main, and many of the examples not directly applicable to the kind of thing I'm working on right now, but the basic insights are the same. This book also prompted me to finally check out Ashlar Vellum, which turns out to be the drawing program that I've been looking for for years.

Quite good. A collection of reworkings of fairy tales. It's neat to see stories like "Beauty and the Beast" get several different treatments.

Thoroughly engaging. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the detective-story aspects of it. It was neat to see the whodunnit solved in no time, but the story go on. The implications of mental powers are well thought through, just as in The Stars My Destination.

It's abundantly clear why JMS felt an obligation to name the main Psycop after Bester.

Finally got around to reading the 4th book. It's pretty good. It was refreshing to discover that Harry is more normal than I expected. The chosen child who's the only one who can save the world is hackneyed, so it's nice to find out that there are reasons why things always seem to go his way.

Evil Ted told me to re-read this one. He may be right: it may be the best of the Culture novels. It's extremely well constructed. The main character's struggles highlight everything that the Culture seems to have given up: struggle, challenge, the savor of a battle narrowly won, the bitter taste of powerlessness. And their willingness to use him to their ends highlights their hypocrisy.

It's hard to not loathe the Culture by the end of the book. The perspective of a non-Culture citizen working as a Culture agent gives us more of an insight into their base morality than that of an adversary (Consider Phlebas), or an ordinary Culture citizen (Player of Games). If the Culture is "A tiny core of Special Circumstances, a shell of Contact, and a vast chaotic ecosphere of everything else", then the core is as thoroughly ruthless as its agents.