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This book does great things with a totally cliched premise. At first it was just the tight, evocative, perfectly paced writing that kept me enjoying it, but ultimately it took the story in a much more interesting direction than the expectation the initial premise gave me.

Content warning: in the first few pages there is a scene chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust. I don't think that's accidental, and I do think it's actually appropriate for where the book will ultimately go, but I wish I'd been warned about it because I had a really intense visceral reaction to that.

I liked this even better than the first volume, which I already loved. It's mostly slower paced, but it manages to be simultaneously E.M.Forster in space, chapter after chapter of excellent world building, and a wonderfully sharp critique of the modern world.

I do definitely recommend reading these in order. Direct references back to Ancillary Justice are explained enough that I don't think reader would be lost starting here, but I don't think I would have got anywhere near as into it without the setup of book 1.

Strong end to a fantastic trilogy. Along with developing everything that Sword set up, it does a fantastic job of deploying comedy. I can think of very few other writers who've managed to have real laugh-out-loud comic relief that not only doesn't detract from all the serious things in the book but actually develops the plot and builds the world further.

I really want to read more about the Presger, and to read a book or short story that looks at Breq through other characters' eyes.

I read this in a day and haven't stopped thinking about in the couple of weeks since. It's an incredibly uncomfortable read. At the end I was angry with Butler for writing such a grotesque scenario, but on reflection that reaction amounts to shooting the messenger. It's an absolutely brutal exploration of what complete loss of autonomy does to people

An absolute delight! As a thought experiment about different ways gender might work, this is already an excellent, compelling book, but its genius is that it's also a compelling story, a great exploration of how people react to the unfamiliar, and an exposition of Le Guin's daoism, and a critique of nationalism. Somehow she managed to cram all of those things into one not especially long book and make it work well as all of them together.

I'm very late to discovering how great Le Guin was--this is the first non-YA novel I've read by her--and wishing I'd started much earlier.

An absolute joy of a book. It takes the form of a lot of fantasy and/or fairy tale cliches but repeatedly twists them into much more interesting things, and takes on some pretty grim thematic content without being a grim read overall. I loved how bluntly it dealt with antisemitism and the purposes that prejudice serves, and the repeated thread through the whole book of people who looked greedy or outright evil from the inside looking reasonable and/or desperate once the author lets us see the character's own perspective.

That said, I hated Miryem's ending. It felt like a very jarring return to fairy tale cliches, and I'm basically pretending that the last 2-3 pages of a book that I otherwise adored simply don't exist.

This was a fun read, and evokes its setting very effectively. But it also falls into some formulaic fantasy traps that detracted a lot from the ending for me.

Wow. In the classic way of much great sci-fi, this book uses a couple of outlandish inventions to explore the human society of its time. The inventions themselves are interesting, but their reflections in earth society much more so.

This is partly a book about China--particularly about how the horrors of the Cultural Revolution still shape survivors even now--but it also has a lot to say about globalised culture, especially the divisions within the environmental movement.

The first 2 or 3 chapters are set in the Cultural Revolution and are absolutely harrowing. If you have a hard time getting through them, it's worth knowing that the book doesn't stay that dark.

I hadn't even realised Le Guin had published poetry until I saw this on a shelf. It's a wonderful collection; very clearly from the same mind that gave us her scifi novels but focussed much more on Earth and her own life.

An essential introduction to the rather distinctive body of scifi coming out of modern China. It's hard to pin down exactly what the characteristics of "Chinese Science Fiction" are--in fact one of the essays at the end labours that point somewhat--but much more fruitful to show than tell, which this collection does by covering a very wide range. There are stories that are obviously mocking the Party, openly enough that I'm surprised they were allowed to be published, and stories that feel much less political but go deep into technological fantasy or just straight fantasy worlds. And in between there are some social commentary stories that bite just as hard in the US as they must in China.

As with any diverse collection I didn't love every single story, but there are so many that I did that I'm already looking forward to getting my hands on the next volume that Liu's edited and translated. And adding books by at least half of the authors to my wishlist.

On some level this is a deeply haunting book, confronting us with the people society leaves behind in a sympathetic first-person perspective. But the devices Ishiguro uses to achieve that effect also put me off the book itself. Without wanting to get too spoliery, the smallness of the narrator's world is kind of the point, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a slow paced book in a very small world, which I kept getting frustrated with.

This book introduces a large number of practices that seem potentially useful for coping with fear of things we can't control. But that's all it does - each chapter is a short, superficial description of a practice, very few of which I feel able to really engage with from just that description. I suppose this is more a case of just not being what I was looking for than a real flaw in the book.

This was so close to being an incredible, essential book, but some fatal flaws halfway ruined it for me.

First the good: it's a powerful story, primarily about the atrocity that was the US's WW2 internment of Japanese-Americans, and with some important secondary themes like how the war itself damaged people and how men can hurt ourselves by internalising all our problems. Guterson's also a very talented writer, switching easily between a precise clinical style that fits the courtroom elements of the story, and a lyrical style that captures the feel of Puget Sound in winter beautifully.

But there were three flaws that by the end of the book really took a lot away in my eyes:

1. The two Japanese families who have major parts in the story feel like instances of a culture, not sets of living breathing characters. Even the two individuals from those families who are at the centre of the story felt more like roles than people. By halfway through I found myself really wanting to read a Nisei author's telling of the same story. And it's odd because this isn't about trading in nasty stereotypes--the author is clearly very much on their side, but still can't quite get past essentialising their culture.

2. Guterson has a strange obsession with penises, the size thereof, and writing very mechanical sex scenes in which the insertion of peg A into slot B is jarringly unsexy but kicks off massive emotional repercussions. Those scenes felt like they were written by a teenage boy feeling pressure to lose his virginity, and it's all the stranger because he's so good at writing other types of scene.

3. I'm going to hide this one. It's not exactly a suspense spoiler, but I don't want my impression of it to colour other peoples' reactions if you're reading this book with fresh eyes. I hated how at the end the book suddenly becomes Ishmael's redemption story. That character was interesting--I liked him a lot at the start of the book and progressively less as the story unfolded--but ultimately worthwhile for how disturbingly relatable his faults were. But suddenly at the end Guterson made the story not about Kabuo, Hisao or Carl at all, and all about the emotionally-still-a-teenager white boy saving the day by getting over his baggage. I wish I could rewrite it to either not require him to be the one who announces the new evidence, or having his mum coerce or shame him into revealing it.

Oh, this book was frustrating.

It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.

So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF does a "smart wheel" do, Mr. Rajaniemi?), but the layering and interweaving of the plot itself. And I enjoyed the appreciation of craft, be it the thief's, the detective's, the watchmaker's, and so on.

But in the end the plot felt like a con at the reader's expense, and all the other characters just felt like foils for the insufferably smug thief, and random violence just happened to rip the sexy warrior lady's toga at least one time too many, and there are so many better books out there.