Reviews and Comments

Good and grabbed me almost as much as the first one. Has some great concepts and discussions. I think the book could have been tighter overall and cut out some of the content and still be just as good. So that made it a bit of a slog in places. Character development was also a bit uneven.

Well, I had to start reading it after finishing the first one! So far: good, but I think there are some opportunities to cut it a bit shorter.

Really excellent. I guess everyone knows this at this point, but this is top-tier sci-fi. Incredibly creative and realistic story set more or less now, rather than far into the future, which isn't common for novels with such big ideas.

In retrospect, now that I'm over 300 pages in, this was probably the wrong week to start reading this. Captivating, though.

A nice installment to this venerable series. I LOL'd a bit less on this book than in the previous ones, however, I thought the mystery was a bit better and much less obvious than in earlier books. The continuing story with Stephen and Elizabeth is well-written and heartfelt, bringing the reader close to the difficulties of a person suffering from dementia.

I'm about 35 pages in and can already tell this is a must-read for learning about and understanding recent developments in Aritificial Intelligence.

This is part of the now non-canon series of novels; I hadn't read a Star Wars novel for some time, but written by Tomithy Zahn and including Mara Jade, it seemed like a decent read for a long flight.

This was a pretty nice read, taking place between episodes IV and V, we have a still wide-eyed Luke, a Han trying to figure out his place, if any, in the Rebel Alliance, and Leia just generally being a bad ass because now she's back among her people and fully in charge.

The story wasn't grossly obvious, like so many of the pulp Star Wars novels can be, so that kept it pretty interesting from a plotline perspective. This is pretty obviously a follow-on from some other novel, with references to previous actions by some of the characters. Not having known of or read that book, I didn't find it to be a problem. There's also an interesting group of ex-stormtroopers that really appear to be a model for the Clone Wars' Bad Batch.

This is the first novel in the Culture universe that I've read. There is rich world-building, and some very good characters in here. For the most part, I was kept enthralled with the story as it unfolded, however, the thing came apart near the end for me as it just sort of ended. While the main plotline was addressed satisfactorily, I thought there were a number of other threads left unpulled a bit.

I'm not sure how I came across this, but I tore through this action thriller in just a few days. The writing is fast-paced and once you get going, it's difficult to stop. Definitely a great summer vacation read or something to pass the time while traveling.

This may be somewhat novel to many readers, however, the topic, where the State and major tech enterprises know everything about everyone, is basically what I've been reading in my fiction for the past 25 years. The author glosses over a few of the technical bits and there are a couple "hacks" that I can't quite suspend enough disbelief for, but I think this is meant for a mainstream audience and not cybersecurity folks. Still, I really enjoyed it and recommend.

I had to go back and read some summaries to remember what happened in the first two books. Luckily, Stross puts enough recap as he (re)introduces events, so I was able to recollect what had happened previously.

I got a new Kobo eReader and needed something to break it in. What better than test of a new palmpad than to read something from the Laundry Files collection?

This is the first in the series and a lot of fun to read. If you measure fun the same way as stepping into an abyss that's darker than black yet you can feel an otherness in it. Wonderful stuff really!

Unlike me, I have gone at this series very a-linearly. I'm usually a "start at 1, move forward sequentially" kind of person, but my book club read one of the later books about 6 years ago, and every once in a while, I dip my toe back into the seeping ichor, pick one at random and go for it, cluthcing my HoG the entire way. I'm trying to remember, but I think this is heavier on some of the IT humor. I did some amount of system administration back when this book was set, so I particularly love derogatory references to things like DLT drives.