I like to think my taste in books is pretty eclectic, if forced to label myself it would be as a science fiction fan, but I also enjoy mystery novels, fantasy, modern novels, classic literature and even the occasional romance. Every year I say that I'll read more non-fiction and every year I fail, although there's usually a spattering of business and marketing books.

I've read 22 books so far this year, last year I read 45, 31 the year before and there are 310 reviews in total.

Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

Completed: 2010-07-22
Stross is one of those writers that I tend to enjoy, despite not really understanding a lot of what his books are on about. This one was particularly confusing until I realised that it's the third book in a series and I missed out the second one. Ah well, I'd started so I figured I might as well finish it. I enjoyed the book, the trials and tribulations of civil service, even in an occult fighting agency, seemed entertainingly (and depressingly) familiar. I really had very little idea of the details of the plot, but that didn't really effect my enjoyment, so I just went along with it. (321)

Ann Patchett - Bel Canto

Completed: 2010-07-18
I loved 90% of this book, really beautifully created characters in an interesting and different situation. I was anticipating the focus on music from the blurb, but the descriptions of language and communication were a fascinating surprise. I didn't much like the ending, although I did understand why it was written that way, anything else would have been too easy really. Unfortunately I really hated the epilogue, it didn't really make sense to me and felt a bit like being blindsided. A disappointing ending to an otherwise superb book. (320)

Tom Holt - Paint Your Dragon

Completed: 2010-07-02
Holt is always entertaining, but seldom in his early works is he entirely coherent. I can't help but compare him to Pratchett, who writes in a similar style, but far exceeds him in elegance of plot and construction of just-about-alternate worlds. In Holt's favour though, he does have a much more consistently funny writing style, every other paragraph was making me smile and chuckle. They're entertaining books to read on buses and the like, but they don't really light the world on fire or anything. (318)

George Mann - Ghosts of Manhattan

Completed: 2010-06-17
George Mann has created himself an interesting steam punk alternate universe and seems to have decided to set several series going in it at the same time. With Ghosts of Manhattan he leaves his British Museum based detective duo behind in Victorian London and takes a trip across the pond to create a Batman-esque vigilante fighting the Mob in New York. Like his other books it's an enjoyable read, although nothing particularly spectacular. The characters are not particularly creative, but they are interesting enough stereotypes to keep the pages turning. Likewise for the mystery and the setting. It would be nice if a bit more was made of the steampunk, or the characters or plots were a little more adventurous, but for a disposable but fun read, I like this author pretty reliable. (317)

Muriel Barbery - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Completed: 2010-06-11
I picked this book up because I couldn't resist the title and it sounded sort of charming. Unfortunately I didn't enjoy it at all. The characters are reasonably interesting, but the plot minimal. I don't know whether it was an issue with the translation or the source material, but the whole tone of the book was smug and arrogant, trying so hard to be clever yet lacking any real substance. The patronising way in which the author writes about the astounding intelligence of this 'mere' concierge ended up being offensive rather than inspirational and the abrupt ending was manipulative and obvious. An utter waste of an entertaining title. (316)

Mary Doria Russell - A Thread of Grace

Completed: 2010-06-04
This book in many ways replicates the success of The Sparrow, where that was a fascinating collection of character studies in a science fiction framework, Thread of Grace does the same thing in a historical setting. A book set in occupied Italy during the Second World War is never going to be an easy read, but Russell once again creates a beautiful work, touching on issues of faith, courage and hope without becoming preachy or patronising. It's a difficult book to read, with a similar sense of inevitable doom that The Sparrow had, but it's also very difficult to put down. On a technical note, I found it quite easy to follow, even though I had very little idea about the details of that period and location in history. (315)

Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Completed: 2010-05-31
An enjoyable, modern mystery novel. The bulk of this book is a really enjoyable, engaging mystery novel, with dynamic characters and a nicely paced investigation. The combination of a journalist and a private investigator who focus on data munging and hacking rather than more police-like methods made an interesting set up. As did the setting in Sweden, a location I'm far from familiar with. The only problem with the book was that the first 50 pages or so were so badly written that I almost gave up, the third time I had to reread the section on economic issues I very nearly put the book down in disgust. Then it gets good and you forget the rocky start. But then to me it felt like the story had finished... except there were another 50 pages of financial stuff at the end. That weird structuring somewhat spoiled what would otherwise have been a really entertaining read. (314)

Peter Aughton - The Transit of Venus: The Brief, Brilliant Life of Jeremiah Horrocks

Completed: 2010-05-23
It's a very grand title (I even cut off the final "Father of British Astronomy" because it was too long) for a not terribly exciting book. While it is clear that Horrocks has been largely overlooked in the history books, the level of hero worship makes the book a little uncomfortable. The lack of definitive details about the man's life also makes the book quite unsatisfying and I found myself 'fast-forwarding' through chunks of conjecture about where he may have gone to school and the like. It's quite an academic work (possibly a conversion of a PhD thesis?) and I was far from riveted, but there is some interesting stuff buried in here that's worthy of a quick speed read. (312)

Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger

Completed: 2010-05-14
A well deserved winner of the Man Booker Prize and a fascinating debut novel. It's the kind of book that I would really have enjoyed studying properly, having group discussions on and revisiting the metaphors and structure. Read by itself it's not exactly what I'd describe as an 'enjoyable' work, but it's a really well constructed look at a world that I know nothing about, and a character that's rarely featured in prominent roles. It really is the sort of book that gets better and better the more you think about it in the days and weeks after you've finished reading. (313)

Neal Asher - Gridlinked

Completed: 2010-05-03
I enjoyed reading about 80% of the book, but for some reason the plot kind of got away from me at the end. I don't know whether it's the book's fault or mine, but for some reason at about page 400 I lost interest in the main plot and just started page turning. Up to then, I'd enjoyed the characters and the carefully constructed universe that they inhabit. The two plots running alongside each other were interesting, although the contrast of following both the 'good guy' and the people who wanted to kill him was a little conflicting to start with, but gradually settled down as the various motivations sort themselves out. I did enjoy the book, but I don't think there was enough there to make me pick up the next book in the series. (311)

Patrick O'Brian - 1) Post Captain

Completed: 2010-04-23
I enjoyed the first book in the series so much I immediately bought the second, which then sat on my shelf for half a decade. I finally got around to reading it and again really enjoyed it, but much like book one, I had very little idea what was going on a lot of the time. I have no doubt the history and settings are extremely accurate, and the characters are all very well formed, but in terms of plot it's a all over the place. There's a pretty solid beginning at least, but then it meanders about until a surprisingly abrupt ending. But despite this usually pretty big flaw, I found the book very hard to put down, thoroughly enjoyed it and will probably buy the next book, although it will probably sit on my shelf for another 5 years. (310)

Chris Anderson - Free

Completed: 2010-04-19
Chris Anderson's books don't come along very often, but when they do, they're a real event, because someone is finally writing down things that you already know in the back of your head, but couldn't possibly articulate. Not only does he write it down though, he does the research, talks to experts around the world and puts down the numbers to prove what you could only really suspect.
Free, like The Long Tail, is an economics book, but one written for 'normal people' not economists, or CEOs, but people living in the modern world. It occasionally gets a little preachy, but for the most part it tells you how things are; what's inevitably going to happen not what might, or should. It only occasionally gets into the philosophy of why information wants to be free, for the most part it focusses on the facts and how to succeed in this inevitable market. How you can use pirating to make more money from music or publishing.
This book is extremely readable, even entertaining. Anderson writes with personality and keeps things personal with anecdotes and hundreds of examples of real people innovating and succeeding. It's informative and inspiring, and even though I paid a premium for the hardback, I really felt I got my money's worth. (309)

Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons

Completed: 2010-04-12
I've previously read three Culture novels, and my response to each was quite different and this fourth one is different again. I've previously complained that there was too much stuff going on, this one had too little. Despite having multiple different threads interweaving, nothing ever really seemed to happen, it was all hinted at and implied, but never really described fully. I was permanently in the dark about how stuff fitted together, and while I'm positive that if I paid attention to things like the chapter numbering system it would have made more sense, I didn't care enough to bother. Even though I often don't like them, for some reason I keep picking up books in this series, but I really think it's more for the potential than the actual works. (308)

Deborah Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters

Completed: 2010-03-06
A very dramatic title, a very dramatic story and a very dry book. I love the history of geology and palaeontology, there's loads of really great characters and arguments and hilarious wrongness. Unfortunately this book approaches the whole thing very very slowly and academically; it wasn't until the last few chapters that I began to find the interest in what was going on. The first half is particularly hard going and I found myself frequently losing track of who was who, what they were looking for and when they were looking for it. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention, but I was hoping for something a little more 'popular' and a little less proper. (307)

Keith R.A. DeCandido - Supernatural: Bone Key

Completed: 2010-02-10
An enjoyable and disposable tie-in novel. DeCandido has a very good sense for the show and characters and it really feels like an episode of the show. My only complaint is that there's a lot of time in the book dedicated to the large number of victims. While it's impressive that so many characters are created so competently even for just a few pages, it is frustrating to not spend more time with Bobby and the brothers. (306)

Cory Doctorow - Makers

Completed: 2010-02-01
This is the third of Doctorow's books I've read and I finally feel that he's written a complete book. His other works I felt had some cool ideas in them, but it felt like I was more interested in the ideas than actually writing a book with plot and characters. Makers however takes one focussed idea and small group of characters and tells the story from start to finish. While it does cover a number of Cory's pet ideas, he approaches them with some maturity, following things through to their conclusions, even if it's not pleasant. It took me a while to get into the book (the first few chapters read more like an extended magazine article than a fiction book), but I ended up reading the whole second half in one sitting. (305)

Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

Completed: 2010-01-30
I was recommended this by a programmer who loved it and as a project manager and former programmer, I loved it too. As with most of these books the ideas and suggestions are fairly common sense and obvious if you put a bit of thought into it. But there's a lot of theory here to back up those ideas and explain why they work. It's all written with humour and the voice of experience, whereas some of these books start out making the effort to be funny and get progressively more dull, this maintains the light yet informative tone throughout and actually ends up being fun to read.
I think there's a lot in this book both for programmers, people that work with them or just anyone who's not going to be scared off by occasional references to Pascal. Some of the bigger recommendations may be a bit of a pipe dream, but there's plenty of inspiration and loads of stuff that can immediately have an effect on the way you work and learn. (304)

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Completed: 2010-01-25
The ideas in this book are great and in a blurb it sounds like a lot of fun - a mixture of Harry Potter and Narnia written for adults. But it is very poorly written. There is no sense of solidity to the work, no sense that the author isn't making things up as he goes along. The book covers several years and I got the impression that the author had planned a longer series and maybe been advised to stick it all in one book. But the characters aren't strong enough to show their growth, they're supposed to be 17-25 or so, but they never really seem anything other than high school kids.
The plot is mediocre. It's nowhere near funny enough to be a parody and it's not clever enough to be an homage, so it just comes across as cheap borderline plagiarism. So you're just left with a badly written book with a plot that you've already read. (303)

Steven Brust - Taltos 12: Iorich

Completed: 2010-01-17
Brust is one of the very few authors I buy in hardback and when it arrived I immediately put down the other book I was in the middle of and proceeded to polish it off in less that 24 hours. It's an extraordinarily satisfying read, the whole book just made me smile both with it's written humour, it's implied humour and just with the sheer slickness of its characters and writing. It's a great instalment in the series, bringing Vlad back to the city and featuring appearances by familiar faces, some of whom you don't realise how much you've missed until they appear. I really enjoyed it and just wish it had been longer. (302)

Jeff Marriote - Supernatural: Witch's Canyon

Completed: 2010-01-15
Marriote doesn't have quite as good a connection to the source television series as DeCandido managed, there were a few lines and actions that just didn't feel right. |There also seemed to be a relatively high percentage of the book spent away from the Winchester brothers. But for the most part it's a fun story with a good variety of monsters and ghoulies. (301)

Jane Harris - The Observations

Completed: 2010-01-12
An impressive debut novel that somehow manages to be extremely enjoyable and compelling without really seeming to have much in the way of plot. I really am a bit mystified as to what filled the 500+ pages, but I enjoyed reading each of them. The characters are vividly created and the mystery elements revealed gradually and satisfyingly, without dragging everything out and finishing in a rush. While a little more plot wouldn't go amiss, The Observations is beautifully constructed and written and I look forward to the authors future work. (300)

Dave Cullen - Columbine

Completed: 2010-01-04
If you're the kind of person (like me) that enjoys reading wikipedia pages on disasters, but also feel guilty about not really getting the full story, this is the perfect book for you. Published nearly ten years after the shootings, the book compiles all the research and reports filed and released, covering not just what happened that day, but going into great detail on what the boy's motives were. It comes across as fair and unbiased for the most part, working from facts rather than hearsay and a drive to make a good story.
It's a difficult book to read, the glimpses of people's grief and fear sometimes crossing the line from objective to intrusive. I read the first hundred pages in one, slightly devastating, session. The structure of the book got somewhat frustrating as it went on however. While at first tehy worked well, I found the interweaving timelines got increasingly frustrating and at times confusing. Holiding back the stories of what happened in the Library and the final acts of the killers until the very end of the book made it feel unbalanced somehow, as if the whole rest of the book was waiting for the telling of that moment, yet when it eventually arrived there was no more analysis. I understand why the author did not want to tell the story linearly, but I think it would have improved the quality of the book, even if it did mean that some people only read the gory details of the massacre and not the considered psychological information.
I have no doubt that there are still sides to the Columbine story that have not been told, but I think this is as close to a definitive work as is likely to happen. It's an impressive piece of journalism and I recommend it to everyone. (319)

Keith R.A. DeCandido - Supernatural: Nevermore

Completed: 2009-12-31
I picked this up as part of my obsession with Supernatural and was not disappointed. DeCandido is a great media writer, he really knows and understands the series he writes for and makes the most of the opportunity to do something that the series may not be able to do due to filming concerns. With Supernatural he's got the characters absolutely spot on, the dialogue is perfect. By taking them to New York we get to see them in a different environment and it's a lot of fun. I read this book in one day, utterly unable to put it down. (297)

Terry Pratchett - Wings

Completed: 2009-12-30
The final instalment in the Bromeliad trilogy and it's a much stronger work than the second. There's a more coherent story and a better focus for this work and although it would still have been better woven in with the second book, it functioned much better independently. I adore Pratchett's writing style and there were several points that I laughed out loud, not at the big story, but just at the turn of phrase. I think I made the right decision spreading the books out over time, all together they would have become boring, but independently they form a nice series. (298)

Nicholas Knight - Supernatural: The Official Companion: Season 1 and 2

Completed: 2009-12-30
Another part of my Supernatural obsession. I'm bundling the two books together because they pretty much have the same thing and aren't terribly substantial. I read each in only a couple of hours, although maybe some readers will spend longer staring at the (sadly black and white) pictures than I did. There's a lot of interesting behind the scenes stuff, although personally I would have preferred more from the writers, directors and actors and a bit less from composers and prop people. There's some good stuff here, but I wish there'd been more of it. (299)

Iain Banks - Canal Dreams

Completed: 2009-12-17
Another solid work from Banks although a difficult one to catagorise. The first half was a fairly easy going character piece, developing the character of a Japanese cellist through flashbacks and her current experiences trapped on a boat in the Panama Canal. She and her crewmates are in the strange position of being at the centre of a war, but not actually being a part of it and it's not until about half way through that the war actually comes to them. From then on it's an entirely different book, full of brutal action and darkness. The contradictions kind of work, but I felt the politics and violence were a bit over the top and forced. For something so dark I don't think it should feel as disposable as I found it. (294)

George Mann - The Osiris Ritual

Completed: 2009-12-10
Mann has created a nicely developed alternate world with a lot of fun elements to it and his second work trots along a lot like the first and has an equally shiny cover. Thanks to a day full of travelling and waiting I read about half of the book in one day and was still slightly reluctant to put it down. I didn't think the mystery elements were as good as the first, I was actually a bit surprised when I realised that what I thought was going to be a minor side mystery, was the primary plot; it just didn't really feel big enough. That aside, it's a really enjoyable read and I look forward to the next. (295)

Laurie Lee - Cider with Rosie

Completed: 2009-12-03
It took me a while to really get this book, it seemed far too slow and without any real flow. But then I realised that you really do need to read a chapter at a time and then the narrative works and the seemingly random remembered events have carefully constructed messages. Once I'd worked that out (which really shouldn't have taken me as long as it should have) I enjoyed the book and its quiet beauty. (296)

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 31: Unseen Academicals

Completed: 2009-11-12
I wasn't overly impressed with this instalment of the Discworld series. I thought there were a few too many ideas going on here, each of which could have made a book on its own. The football was supposed to be the central satire, but it didn't really feel like it was worked through the story evenly. The elements that worked best for me were the 'upstairs downstairs' stories of Unseen University and I think they might have been better served with a classic murder mystery or something like that. The least effective element to me was the mystery of Nutt, it felt like that was forced into the story as padding. The book is still entertaining to read, but I felt it lacked consistency and spark. (293)

Anne McCaffrey - White Dragon

Completed: 2009-10-31
Periodically I peer at my To Read shelf and discover there's nothing there that actually appeals. My solution is frequently to declare loudly to my housemates that I need something to read and see what appears. As they have a more focussed reading pattern in the fantasy and SF genres they can generally be relied upon to either produce an interesting new author (Scott Lynch, Naomi Novik) or older authors I’d not encountered (Stephen Brust, Alan Dean Foster). This time they recommended Anne McCaffrey.

I've always been quietly dismissive of McCaffrey, without reading a single one of her books I'd written her off as a fantasy author who churns out hundreds of books with tacky covers and no real meat to them. I should have known better really, that an author doesn't really get to publish dozens of books without having some merit, even if it's just in their early works before they start cashing in.

There was a considerable debate about which book I should read, either Dragonflight the first in the Pern series or The White Dragon the third book in the series. I generally prefer to read series books in publication order, on the theory that it stands the best chance of making sense. However the counter-argument that White Dragon was a better book swung me round, so I opted for that one first.

It didn’t get off to a great start. At 8 o’clock on a Monday morning while waiting for my tube to arrive I opened the book to be confronted by twenty pages of concentrated exposition covering the previous books. Ordinarily I’d probably find that quite helpful, but in my slightly bleary pre-work state there were a lot of names to assimilate – who lived where, what guild they were part of, which dragon belonged to who, weyrs, holdings, stars, thread and oh, apparently time travel too! By the time I’d finished it I was a little bit stunned, but also intrigued. I very nearly stopped reading the 3rd book and went back to the 1st, but didn’t for the simple reason that I’d just been spoilered.

So I ploughed on into the book, where I had a similar response to when I read Dune for the first time at the tender age of 30. Here was an extremely complicated set up with a deeply rooted mythology and yet it all made sense in a very satisfying way. Each time a new character was introduced they were brought in so carefully that they almost instantly had a personality and a place within the universe, without any cheesy narrative clichés. The only things I had difficulty with was keeping track of which dragon was associated with each person, but it didn’t really matter if a few references were missed and if all else failed there was an appendix, or rather ‘dragondex’ to help out.

The plot meanders around a bit, but at its core is a young man finding his place in the world, sorting out his relationships and establishing his position as a leader of his people. It’s fairly standard stuff – who am I, where did I come from and where am I going. Meanwhile he and his fellow leaders are asking the same questions for their race as a whole, where did they come from and where are they going? It’s all a fairly loose plot, there’s no real start or end and very few particularly significant events along the way. It’s more that we’re sharing a chunk of these people’s lives, important things happened before and will happen after, which may or may not I guess be in the other books of the series, but this book works perfectly well as a self contained work.

Of course the key thing missing from that paragraph is any mention of the dragons, because to be honest while they’re important to the mythology and context of the book, they’re not huge factors in the plot. That’s not to say they don’t contribute OR that they are used just as convenient devices. they’re secondary characters in the same way that the people are, but they have a very limited scope of involvement. The dragons are powerful creatures, vital to the survival of the settlements, but they’re not very intelligent, they have poor memories and react largely on instinct. What’s fascinating though is the bond between a dragon and his or her rider. They are telepathically linked and utterly devoted to each other. Whilst the riders may posture and compete between each other, with their dragons they’re unashamedly affectionate and it’s really very sweet. The smaller fire lizards are even more pet like and are very endearing with their constant chattering and fussing.

Based on this one book, I would say McCaffrey excels at writing characters and relationships. There’s probably two dozen notable characters in this book and a complex network of relationships between them but the characterisations and interactions are all instantly clear and real. Be they the complete devotion between a boy and his dragon, or the difficult politics between rival leaders bandying for power, each relationship is logical and fascinating. They are also for the most part all positive relationships – there’s no unreasonable hate or maliciousness, just people and creatures reacting according to their histories and trying to do their best for themselves and those that depend on them.

To be honest, this review is probably a lot longer than the book really requires. I could sum it up by just saying that it’s a very enjoyable, extremely competent work with some interesting concepts at its core. However that doesn’t really give enough weight to just how important and rare I find those qualities. Even when an author actually has a coherent story worth telling, too often they end up trying too hard to sound clever, or they get too precious and fail to be ruthless in their editing. McCaffrey has clearly been an inspiration to a lot of writers (Naomi Novik should practically have paid royalties!) and The White Dragon was a real pleasure to read. Now my only decision is whether to allow myself to be lured in to the rest of the series! (292)

Markus Zusak - The Book Thief

Completed: 2009-10-20
A really beautiful book that manages to be both sad and uplifting at the same time. A book narrated by death, set during the second world war in Germany has no right to be as enjoyable as I found this to be, but the way the story is told from the point of view of a child gives a really interesting take on things. There were a few irritating writing tricks that got old quite quickly, particularly the frequent hints at what was going to happen followed by "oh, but that's jumping ahead". But overall I was impressed to finally have a random 3-for-2 purchase turn up something interesting and different. (291)

Poppy Adams - The Behaviour of Moths

Completed: 2009-10-14
A nice enough little book, but not really anything spectacular. I got a bit frustrated at the constantly jumping timelines, particularly as the chapter's were indicating a strict and tight chronology of a few days, while the plot actually meandered over the last 5 decades quite freely. The primary character was very interesting and well written, and the descriptions of the house vivid. But the surrounding plot wasn't exactly thrilling at every turn and while it was a nice enough read, I wouldn't exactly recommend it as anything outstanding. (290)

Tim Clare - We Can't All Be Astronauts

Completed: 2009-10-09
Three quarters of this book was rubbish. Absolute complete, whiny, whinging, self-obsessed, miserably overwritten tosh. Frankly that's not surprising given the subject matter of a writer who's failing to get his book published while all his friends get massive book deals. Then after I nearly gave up on it multiple times, the end was actually sort of beautiful. His epiphany and reveal of the meta nature of the work are sort of brilliant, but at the same time, don't quite make up for the misery of the rest of the book. The sort of thing I put down and say "yes, yes, very clever, now shut up and go away.". (289)

Harlan Coben - Hold Tight

Completed: 2009-09-22
A perfectly acceptable mystery/thriller that trundles along quite nicely. It has believable characters, each satisfyingly competent at what they do - from the police, through all the victims and witnesses through to the criminals themselves. The only thing that let it down a bit was the resolution which I felt was a bit contrived and weak, but not so bad as to make the rest of the book a waste of time. (288)

Taylor Clark - Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture

Completed: 2009-09-03
I was impressed at how balanced this book is, it's neither a gushing adoration by a fanboy, nor a bitter rant by someone on a crusade. The book starts with a detailed history of coffee and cafe-culture and then moves on to cover just about every aspect of Starbucks and its history. While Starbucks as a whole comes off quite well, with some popular myths being dubunked, Howard Shultz sounds rather more crazy. It was a really enjoyable read, the author has a charming style and it was laugh out loud funny. It's a shame the book ages so fast, it's already a couple of years old and is notably out of date in places. (287)

Terry Pratchett - Diggers

Completed: 2009-08-18
This really isn't a very strong book. It's really only half a book, clearly a partner work to the final book Wings. It would have made both books stronger to just interweave the two plots. It's also not as interesting as the first book because there's not so much of the nome mythology and funny ways to explain the human world. It just all seemed like filler to me. (286)

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Completed: 2009-08-15
There are not many books that I read and then immediately want to seek out cliff-notes so that I can think more about the book, but this is one of them. I really wish the edition had come with one of those essays you sometimes get at the start or end of books which puts the book in context and tells you how amazing it is. Although it is clearly an extremely important feminist text, for once I didn't really feel like I was being shouted at for letting the side down. It felt like it was genuinely just trying to show what could happen when people do nothing, but wasn't necessarily saying that those who ignored the issues and wanted a quiet life were necessarily doing anything wrong.
The story itself is fascinating and beautifully developed. The book and the world immediately make sense, from the first few pages, but elements continue to be revealed through to the very last pages, make everything make even more sense than it did to start with. I'm not really sure how to describe it, but I read the whole second half in one sitting, utterly unable to put it down. Another book which I wish I'd read when I was younger and one of the very few books that I can see myself reading again in the future. (285)

Charles Stross - Halting States

Completed: 2009-08-11
I didn't get on with this book. There were a couple of good concepts rumbling about, but I wasn't very impressed with the actual story telling. There were way too many ideas crammed in and explained in a rushed and clumsy method, with lots of acronyms and buzzwords thrown out in a rush. I rapidly lost the plot and got bored because I couldn't keep track of what was going on. I also thought the characters were pretty uninteresting and there were too many points of view and overlapping timelines to keep track of. (284)

Sarah Pinborough - Torchwood: Into the Silence

Completed: 2009-08-06
It's really quite disappointing that a book that's so short (I finished it in under 2 hours) would chose to give so much time over to non-Torchwood characters. It's not that the new characters and victims aren't interesting or well written, but when I buy a media tie-in book it's because I'm shamelessly addicted to the show and characters and I want more. If it wasn't as well written as it was, picking up the tone of Torchwood well, I wouldn't have been so frustrated at its shortness. (282)

Peter Anghelides - Torchwood: Pack Animals

Completed: 2009-08-05
This book didn't really work for me, it seemed to have a lot packed into it's (once again) frustratingly short page count and it didn't quite work for me. Too many new characters and too many aliens and pieces of technology, it just didn't really fit together. The characterisation and tone were right although verging on the silly end of the Torchwood spectrum. Pretty disposable fun. (283)

Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Completed: 2009-08-03
This is a genius idea, but possibly not worthy of an entire book. It's a lot more Pride and Prejudice than zombies, the 'unmentionables' make relatively rare appearances although there are subtle influences throughout the book with the characters. The language and style of the book are still very Austen though, making it a real slog at times. Basically the title, cover, blurb and illustrations are the best bit of this book, they're wonderfully weird. But dragging it out into a 300 page novel full of romantic waffle dampens the fun too much. (280)

Mark Morris - Torchwood: Bay of the Dead

Completed: 2009-08-02
I succumbed to my weakness for media tie in novels and picked up a Torchwood novel as part of a 3-for-2, partly to remind myself of happier times from the series before the excellent but depressing Children of Earth mini-series. The book did exactly what I wanted, a relatively mindless but fun adventure. It's pretty grim and bloody in places, a bit like a Torchwood version of Shaun of the Dead. My only criticisms would be that the percentage of the book given over to non-Torchwood characters (all be it well written, believable ones) was frustratingly high and that at less than 2 hours reading time it was way too short. (281)

Stephenie Meyer - The Host

Completed: 2009-07-29
I was nervous starting this book, I loved Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and knew how attached she is to that series, I read somewhere it literally came to her in a dream. I was worried that she was going to be a one trick pony and that The Host would either be not as good, or just a thinly veiled re-hash of that story and characters. Thankfully my fears were unfounded.
The Host is a fascinating story. The core concept is well thought out and carefully developed through the book. The characters and relationships are complex and charming, I really cared about all the characters and the problems they had to deal with. It has the same easy readability of the Twilight series and still elements of girly romance, but there's a more mature and complicated plot. It took a little while for the book to get going, but once I got into it I found it impossible to put down and I didn't want it to end. (279)

Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers: The Story of Success

Completed: 2009-07-23
I really enjoy Gladwell's books, they manage to both educate and entertain - using a combination of research and anecdotes. Outliers is no exception, it is well structured with an interesting core concept and a lot of great examples. There were things in here that I already knew about but even then there was plenty of additional information, ranging from trivia through to more academic research. Like all Gladwell's books - this isn't going to change your life, but it may help you understand it a bit better. (278)

Charles Elton - Mr Toppit

Completed: 2009-07-17
This book enthusiastically falls into the category of 'blah' modern fiction. It has a quirky concept and then does absolutely nothing with it, bumbling around for 300 or so pages with 'blah' characters, 'blah' writing and 'blah' plot development, it's just a lot of blah blah blah. As a throw away summer read it's ok I guess, but I felt no sense of engagement or sense of satisfaction. (277)

T.H. White - The Once and Future King

Completed: 2009-07-03
I had a bit of a rollercoaster with this book. I started out loving it, the first 'book' of the book is what Disney's Sword in the Stone was based on, with the brilliantly weird anachronistic Merlin and quirky tone. But then the quirkiness seems to dry up and everything gets rather dull. It takes so long time for the book to pick up again, I very nearly gave up on it. However it does pick up and becomes a different book, more what I was expecting about the chivalry and politics and duels and quests and romance and I really enjoyed it.
As much as I enjoyed the Sword in the Stone section, I think the book would actually have been better as a whole without it. It takes too long to transition between the two halves, and it feels too disconnected. The second half of the book feels 'right' and is more enjoyable for it. (276)

Alan Dean Foster - Lost and Found

Completed: 2009-06-20
This was passed to me by a friend who suggested that I'd find it hilarious fun. Sadly this was overselling it somewhat. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, it's a nice little plot with nice characterisation and a nice writing style... but it's really not terribly remarkable. It's fun to read and I'm not disappointed I read it, but I don't really see why it jumped out to them as one they recommended I had to read. (275)

Scarlett Thomas - Popco

Completed: 2009-06-15
My second Scarlett Thomas book, although Popco was actually written before The End of Mr Y, but it is going to get a similar review - both good and bad. The good bit is that I really enjoyed reading 80% of the book, maybe even 90% as in place of the metaphysics and philsophy of Mr Y we get cryptography and idea development, which I appreciated a lot more. The characters and plot are engaging and believable, with quirky pasts and secrets again expertly revealed. The downside again however was the ending, which I won't give away here, but I felt was rushed and preachy, meaning that despite the fact I'd enjoyed the first 500 pages or so, I was left with a bad taste in the mouth. I don't think I'll be reading another of her books. (273)

Max Allan Collins - Criminal Minds: Finishing School

Completed: 2009-06-03
I didn't write a review of this at the time and now I can't remember enough about it to comment. I doubt it was a work of brilliance, but I can't remember being irritated by it either. Desposable entertainment. (274)

Stephenie Meyer - Twilight 3: Eclipse

Completed: 2009-05-30
Maybe I'm all Twilighted out, but this book was a bit disappointing after the first two, when it should have felt a bit more like a resolution. I think there was just a bit too much padding around the central interesting concept of the confrontation between werewolves and vampires, and Jacob and Edward. I really love the carefully built structures of powers and abilities and how they play together to make interesting alliances and dynamics. Introducing more characters, or more detail to background characters is also very satisfying.
However I got a bit tired of the teenage melodrama. I'm not sure whether these elements were extended in this book, or just an overload of reading the series too fast, but I really did get a bit bored of the "will they won't they" plan for the future. The love triangle was handled reasonably well, usually focusing on the humour of the two boys competing, but it did occasionally (particularly at the end) plummet into painful teenage angst.
I'm worried about the trend of these books to get longer and worry that they'll become self-indulgently fluffy. I still enjoyed reading this book and finished it off in just a couple of days - there's plenty of excitement and laughs, but I'm worried that the series may sputter out. I find myself increasingly nervous about how the long term question of how Edward and Bella can be together will be resolved, it can't be dragged out much longer, but can the series continue after the answer? (272)

Stephenie Meyer - New Moon

Completed: 2009-05-28
I was impressed that the author very bravely decided to spend most of the book without the lead protagonist, having Edward the vampire abandon Bella for her own good. I don't know whether it's the quality of the writing and characters or the fact that I'm pathetic that meant that I didn't mind the angsty seperation and whininess. The slow burn of the 'mystery' of Jacob and his friends was a mirror of the first book; not much of a mystery really if you've read the blurb, but quite satisfying. Again the book explodes into action at the end and the whole thing was impossible to put down! I've already started reading the third one. (271)

Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca

Completed: 2009-05-23
I've always loved the film version of this story but hadn't got round to reading the original until I spotted it on a "best adaptations" list. I mean, if I love the film and it’s a good adaptation, then the book must be good to right? Thankfully in this case, the logic holds. The book is brilliant, creating such a vivid character for the new Mrs de Winter without ever giving her a name. Her sense of isolation and anxiety are wonderfully evoked, the way she lives in her own head having entirely imaginary conversations and confrontations and shying away from the real world. Despite seeing the film a few times, I couldn’t actually remember the resolution and was delighted at the way the mystery gradually revealed, even if it was on somewhat dubious moral ground. (270)

Stephenie Meyer - Twilight

Completed: 2009-05-16
I liked this book a lot more than is healthy for someone who is a little bit away from a teenage girl. I adored the believable yet slightly cheesy characters, loved the slow revealing of the mystery and couldn't put down the final third of the book where the action finally kicked off. It was a struggle to resist the temptation to go straight out and buy the following books and everything else Stephenie Meyer has ever written. I'm ashamed. (269)

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Completed: 2009-05-12
An intriguing book, that much like my previous read of Dune, starts out really well but drifts too far towards mysticism for my tastes. The characters are all very well crafted and real feeling, even the fact one of them can talk to cats feels natural. However while the mysticism starts out as part of philosophical discussions, it starts to become more and more 'real' with ghosts and otherworlds and I'm not really sure what else. I suspect all that content is well written, but I didn't feel that it meshed with the start of the book and I felt a bit cheated by the lack of confirmed answers that were provided. (268)

Frank Herbert - Dune

Completed: 2009-05-02
I don't know why I haven't read this book before - my parents had all the Dune books and loved them, but I just never got round to it. Maybe it was that facing the seemingly never ending series of giant paperbacks that made the whole thing seem like a bit of a chore.
Anyways, I finally picked it up and settled in and discovered that it fell into the category of "classics that I can actually see why people call them that". I ended up spending whole afternoons reading 'cos I couldn't put it down. The world and characters were so elegantly created - describing really complex political and environmental situations without ever sounding dull. I did start to lose interest with the final third or so of the book which drifted a little too far into mysticism and prophecy for my tastes and started feeling a little fluffy and all over the place. But I think that irritation was mostly from the fact that the first half of the book was so tightly controlled and flawless that in comparison the rest was a bit weak.
The big question is whether I'll read the rest of the series. Despite the fact that I did think the book was superb, I feel no particular drive to continue reading the books. I guess it comes back to the chore element, if I read the second one, I'd have to read all the rest and that would pretty much eat up my book allowance for the year! Maybe when I have nothing to do but sit in the garden and read for months on end! (267)

Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

Completed: 2009-04-20
It's only ten days since I finished this book and yet I can't really think of anything to write. It was resoundingly ok, nicely written in places and an unusual story. But there wasn't really a spark for me, nothing that would make me recommend it to anyone or ever consider re-reading it. It's just a book that was ok to read, but really nothing outstanding. (266)

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 5: First Among Sequels

Completed: 2009-04-13
This seemed something of a reboot to the series, with a lengthy explanation of how the world worked and summary of previous events. There's also a number of not so subtle references to poor quality sequels and changing characterisation that nicely acknowledges problems with previous works.
I really enjoyed reading this book, reading through it over Easter weekend and finding it quite hard to put down. The alternate world finally feels more stable and well formed, previously it's felt like it's clinging to coherence with its fingernails. There's still a huge problem with the fact that the plot didn't arrive until nearly the end of the book and then all got squashed together, but it was still a very enjoyable read. (264)

Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Completed: 2009-04-08
I was unenthused by this book, despite recommendations from a number of people I usually agree with. I was particularly frustrated by the fact that I was expecting a science fiction book (it won the Nebula and the Hugo award) and found that it was actually a noir mystery with only a small overlay of alternate world. It wasn't that it was bad, it was a pretty good noir, but given that I don't really like that genre and didn't know enough about the history to accurately work out which bits were alternate. All in all, pretty disapointing. (265)

Primo Levi - The Periodic Table

Completed: 2009-03-14
It's strange reading books which have been translated, particularly books like this where it feels as if delicate tricks of language are being lost in translation. It's a strange book, half reasonably intense chemistry, half autobiography of an Italian Jew who survived Auschwitz. I loved the structuring and tools used to tell stories, but I was unsatisfied by the jumping quickly through his life, particularly fast forwarding through his time in the concentration camps because it was covered in another book. It's intriguing and I've never read anything like it, but it's only going to be appealing to a small number of people. (263)

Seth Godin - Meatball Sundae

Completed: 2009-03-07
I seem to be reading Seth's books in a weird order, so although this was written before Tribes, I read it after his latest book and therefore this felt like a return to form. While Tribes was poorly structured, egotistical and unfocussed, Meatball Sundae had a selection of clear, well described and illustrated points. While they could still be summarised in just a couple of pages, the expansion into a book felt worthy thanks to plenty of examples, anecdotes and suggestions.leading to a well rounded and interesting book. (262)

Kate Atkinson - When Will There Be Good News

Completed: 2009-02-22
Well with a title like this it was never going to be exactly laugh a minute, but I didn't really expect it to be quite as sad as it turned out to be. It also seemed to be a little all over the place, made up of little bits and pieces, which I wasn't really getting along with reading a couple of chapters each evening. However I finally got a chance to lay in bed reading for a couple of hours and couldn't put it down. The characters are interesting and I enjoyed reading about them and their crappy lives. The mysteries are well paced and interweave nicely and it's fun that the characters acknowledge that they seem to be trouble magnets, which somehow makes the ridiculous things that happen to them kind of ok. So an enjoyable, addictive and satisfying, if not exactly happy read. (261)

J.D. Williams - The Complete Strategyst

Completed: 2009-02-14
I don't know how this made it on to my wish list, someone must have recommended it to me and the blurb on the back certainly sounded compelling. But the "entertaining, witty introduction for the non-scientist" was really a bit of an overstatement. It started off well, easy to read and written in a very friendly style. But then it degenerated into matrices and horrible phrases I remember from my physics degree. I would have been interested in how the maths of games theory relates to the psychology of playing games, but mostly it was just maths. (259)

Cornelia Funke - Inkheart

Completed: 2009-02-14
I bought this book because I'd seen the film and loved the concept but not the realisation. The film felt like it had been badly edited, leaving inconsistencies and gaping holes in the narrative. Unfortunately it turned out to be a flaw with the original source material. The film had managed to smooth out some of the confusing character choices, while the book had explanations for some of the film's holes... except they weren't very satisfying ones.
I still thought it was a wonderful concept - someone who can read characters out of books, with a beautiful love of literature (it opened with a quote from Children of Green Knowe, one of my favourite books going up). But at over 500 pages it felt meandering and fluffy. I won't be bothering to pick up the rest of the series. (260)

Elisabeth Hyde - The Abortionist's Daughter

Completed: 2009-01-29
I think this book is either mis-marketed, mis-titled or just mis-pitched, because the blurb on the back and the title make it seem like a lot more than it is. It is not a complex thriller looking at political issues with deep insight. It is however a fairly fun, fairly predictable little murder mystery. The characters are all interesting and the setting well crafted, but the mystery is pretty mediocre and pretty easy to solve. It was a fun and engaging read, but it wasn't really what I was expecting, so felt disappointingly simplistic. (257)

Meera Syal - Anita and Me

Completed: 2009-01-25
I really enjoy Meera Syal's writing, I'm not sure there's anything particularly special about it, but I find it really charming. This book is told through the eyes of a very young girl growing up in an ex-mining town in the 70s. She goes through all the usual childhood experiences, but with the additional issues associated with being the daughter of Indian immigrants. It's a really touching story, painfully familiar at times, colourfully different at others. (258)

Kate Summerscale - The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Completed: 2009-01-16
I felt deeply misled by this book, or maybe more fairly by the WHSmith's shelving system. I didn't realise at all that it was a non-fiction book, I thought I was getting a kind of modern Agatha Christie, a Victorian country house murder mystery with maybe some modern realism thrown in. Instead I got a painfully dry traditional style documentary about this historical murder and the early days of police detectives.
I think if it had been a little more story based, a proper narrative with developed characters it would have been a better read. I found it very slow and clunky, random facts thrown in about Victorian England and the history of the police force that I didn't really care about. On top of that the story itself wasn't that great. I found the 'ending' both predictable and unsatisfying. It's an impressive piece of research, but I wouldn't recommend it as either fiction or non-fiction I'm afraid. (256)

Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

Completed: 2009-01-09
I didn't think this was as good as it's sequel, which I accidentally read fist. This is an enjoyable read, but it lacks polish and feel a little indulgent in places. I liked the concept of the multiple story threads, linked by the PI investigating them, but in practice it is quite fragmented and feels unrealistically forced to get the elements to link up. The characters and writing style are enjoyable enough, but I found the mysteries unsatisying. (255)

Scarlett Thomas - The End of Mr Y

Completed: 2008-12-31
This book started really well. The lead character is an engaging PhD student who is researching thought experiments, hunting out obscure books and stuggling to afford food. She's a character with an interesting past which is slowly, but satisfyingly revealed as the plot calls for it. Life for her gets weird when she finds an extremely rare, apparently cursed book and decides to read it regardless of the consequences.
80% of the book is brilliant, the lead character is very well written and interesting and the concepts are well thought out and original. The 20% I didn't like were the extensive sections of philosophy and metaphysics, which frankly were more than I signed up for in a "thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel". I think it's probably very smart and insightful, but to be honest I found it too much hard work and felt the end of the book really suffered for it. (254)

Frederik Pohl - The Age of the Pussyfoot

Completed: 2008-12-27
A copy of this book randomly turned up in our house and I felt sorry for it so read it. I found it quite fun and engaging to read, but it didn't have that spark that makes certain science fiction books (or books in general) turn into classics. So now it just seems like a slightly quaint idea with a misplaced history and bunch of frustrating characters. (249)

Alan Moore - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Vol 1

Completed: 2008-12-27
I've liked the idea of this story a lot more than I've liked any of the implementations. I'd not thought a great deal of the film, but in comparison it seems much closer to my dream of the idea than the original comics. I wasn't hugely impressed with the artwork or storytelling of the comics, I struggled to make out details in the pictures and work out what was going on in the story. Maybe I sholdn't have tried ereading it on a lazy holiday afternoon, but I was quite disappointed. (252)

Jonathan Stroud - The Amulet of Samarkand

Completed: 2008-12-25
There's an extensive and fascinating mythology here, a mixture of another dimension filled with ancient and powerful demons and an alternate London filled with beauracratic magicians who use their ability to summon demons to reinforce their power. The background is brilliant, but the implementation was spotty. The lead demon is a lot of fun, he's bitter, grumpy and manipulative. Sadly the lead human character is an angsty, irritating, drippy boy. The book is about hundred pages too long lingering on the boy and his petty story way too long before finally settling into what would have been an interesting plot if it hdn't taken so long to get there. I don't think I'll bother reading parts two and three. (251)

Seth Godin - Tribes

Completed: 2008-12-23
Seth Godin's books have always been a little like reading a three page presentation that's been turned into a hundred and fifty pages by just repeating the same message over and over and over again. This one was even worse. It didn't actually read like a book, it read like somone's collection of blog posts or notes on an idea that have been prepared to be crafted into a book, but someone forgot to actually do it. There's no coherent message beyond "groups of people working together are stronger than alone" which isn't particularly revolutionary anyway. There's absolutely no narative, no flow, no story. I felt like I was being shouted at by an obsessed blog which was trying to indoctrinating me into a cult. (250)

Terry Pratchett - Nation

Completed: 2008-11-22
I've been waiting a long time for Pratchett to write this book and I didn't realise it until about 50 pages from the end when I realised what a stunningly brilliant piece of writing it was. I've always enjoyed Pratchett books, but rarely have I been able to say that they are great pieces of literature. Nation however is a really wonderful piece of writing. By taking himself out of the Discworld he's given himself the freedom to do something different, new restrictions and a completely new style. The result is very beautiful and insightful, not of institutions and organisations like the Discworld takes on the post office or banking system, but of people themselves and what it means to live and survive.
This is a book that will appeal to all ages on all levels, there's a bit of everything - just like there is in life. I'd liken it to a Pixar film, or The Princess Bride in the way it turns a fairly unexceptional plot concept into something that really touches you and connects. I think maybe this could be a turning point in Pratchett's writing, moving from being popular author to being a superb author. (247)

Richard Hammond - As You Do

Completed: 2008-11-14
I tried to resist this book, it's so tacky buying celebrity books, but I really enjoyed Hammond's last book and was impressed at the openness of his writing. This book, while less focussed and more meandering, was equally open and enjoyable to read. The story telling is easy and fluid, moving from funny to embarassing to touching and insightful smoothly. It's just like reading blog posts from your friends, if they happened to travel the world having adventures for the BBC. (246)

George Mann - The Affinity Bridge

Completed: 2008-11-10
Another success from selecting books based on the need to make up a three-for-two offer and it being on the selection table with a shiny cover. I don't usually get excited about steam punk, but something about the gold shiny cover and the promise of airships and automatons and magic called to me. It lived up to everything it offered in the blurb, a fun packed murder mystery in a very weird victorian London. There's a nice balance between the character's complete acceptance of certain elements of their alternate world and sense of wonder at new-fangled automobiles and women who are useful assistants. It's a lot of fun to read and the mysteries are paced out nicely, with some things being left unanswered to lead you in to the sure to follow series. I look forward to the next book and hope they keep the shiny covers. (248)

John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men

Completed: 2008-10-18
An amazing book that does so much in just a hundred pages, with style and elegence. There are no wasted words or phrases, but it never feels dense or overworked. It's just effortless to read. The mingled senses of doom and hope which were present in the Grapes of Wrath is present again here and makes the book quite painful to read, yet impossible to put down. (245)

Joanne Harris - Runemarks

Completed: 2008-10-10
This may be the only time I ever say this, but this is actually a book that would have been improved by being split into a trilogy. The book as a whole was too long and the pacing was all wrong - rising and falling throughout the story with no satisfying resolutions to any of the 'big' moments, always in the knowledge that there were still a large number of pages to go. I think it's a shame that an interesting mythology felt like it was being rushed through to fit into one book. That said, I'm not sure I'd actually have been sufficiently enthused by the first book to pick up the other two. (244)

Naomi Novik - Temeraire 5: Victory of Eagles

Completed: 2008-08-30
Finally! After four books of journeys and treking it felt like this book was finally actually focussed on a coherent plot. There was a start, middle and end and they came at the correct places rather than all in the last 30 pages like the previous ones. I do wish we could keep the same supporting characters around for more than a few chapters at a time, there's a lot of really interesting ones but they seem not to linger. These books are sort of fun, but they're also quite depressing to see things fall apart. (242)

Steven Brust - Taltos 11 - Jhegaala

Completed: 2008-08-02
At a time in my life where it's usually taking me two weeks to read a book, I finished this one off in a day. Which tells you both that it was very good and that it was pretty straightforward. The last couple of Taltos books have required some time and consideration, being about the big story with epic events. This one feels like a filler a bit, partly because it's taken a step back in time and partly because the events are (mostly) pretty disposable. The reader knows what Vlad is like after these events because we've spent time with him afterwards. That said, as interludes go it's a fun story and definitely interesting to see Vlad in yet another part of the world he doesn't fit with. (240)

Max Allan Collins - Criminal Minds: Killer Profile

Completed: 2008-08-02
Pretty much exactly the same feedback on this book as the last Max Collins Criminal Minds book - not really anything to distinguish it from a regular episode (maybe a two parter in this case, but only barely) and a really worrying obsession with what the characters are wearing. Amiable time wasting, but I'm not sure I'll bother with any more. (241)

John Scalzi - The Android's Dream

Completed: 2008-07-26
A really fun action adventure book that's actually very well written. There's a huge number of complex political issues, characters and convoluted plots but they're all very clearly explained without any apparent lengthy exposition. Many 'fun action' books are extremely simplistic, but this one manages to be funny and charming without being patronising. Plus it's a wonderful title! I look forward to reading other books by this author. (236)

Edward de Bono - Six Thinking Hats

Completed: 2008-07-13
There are two seperate issues to Six Thinking Hats - the concept and the book. One is interesting and could be a useful tool. The other is a book.

The concept first - in a nutshell, six hat thinking is a methodology for meetings and discussions to promote focussed thinking on issues. Rather than arguing or going round in circles by defining sections of a meeting as a specific hat colour the debate is focussed. So for instance a meeting could start with a 'Red Hat period' for everyone to express their emotions on an idea. Then 'White Hat' to put forward facts, 'Green Hat' for creativity and new ideas. Yellow Hat forces people to be positive about things, Black hat negative and Blue Hat...well to be honest I'm still a little hazy on that one but I think it's some kind of summary.

This is called parallel thinking, althugh I feel that's a bit of a misnomer. It's not thinking about lots of things at once, but instead boxing things up into categories. it gives a much more focussed debate preventing ideas getting stuck in either negativity or positivity or pure "I don't like it and I'm not giving up" stubborness. I can see the value of that for delicate issues, or for training children to debate, but for grown ups it all seems a bit forced.

We did a practice discussion at work, admittedly we had minimal training in the method and were using a defined order of hats (which isn't necessarily recommended) but I found it horribly in-organic and stupid. It meant that in a Green Hat creative phase all you could do was list ideas, not evaluate them and point out any critical flaws. Likewise if you were in a Black Hat cautious phase you weren't supposed to creatively come up with ways to fix the issues. The whole thing felt very forced.

I think elements of it could be useful, but aren't anything groundbreaking - look at the positives and negatives seperately, seperate facts and opinions. That's just basic debating skills. A rigid structure can be enforced if more organic meeting flow isn't working but I feel you're just as likely to stiffle creativity as you are to promote it.

The second part of the issue is the book itself which is almost painfully funny in the level of ego on display. I don't doubt the Edward de Bono is something special, but he really does know it! As with most of these style of books, it could actually have been just 4 pages long, explaining the concept and giving a couple of examples. Instead it's surrounded with puff information about the writer and how successful his idea has been.

It also feels like every single sentance is partnered with three different examples, all of which are cheesily awful and exemplify exactly why I never want to have to sit in one of these meetings. It's all "Let's have some new ideas on this. Put on your green thinking hats", "If you make any more red hat statements, I am going to put your red hat out of reach" and "Lets have some black hat thinking". I had to take a break every 5 pages to talk to normal human beings!

So, an interesting idea that I think has some elements of use, but runs the risk of being overused and turning into something too restrictive. But I cannot recommend highly enough NOT reading the book, just find a decent overview on google somewhere! (243)

Dodie Smith - I Capture the Castle

Completed: 2008-07-06
A very charming book that I wish I'd discovered when I was younger as I suspect it would have been a real classic for me and the minor irritations wouldn't have been so noticable. My biggest niggle was that a couple of the relationships didn't really work for me and I found the lead character to be a bit erratic in her maturity. However the narrative is interestingly done (a would-be novelist's journal) and I found it extremely difficult to put down, which maybe why I found the ending a bit disappointing after 3 hours solid reading. Perfect for a summer afternoon in the garden. (235)

Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker

Completed: 2008-06-20
This is an amazing book, packed full of adventurous ideas, complex stories and before their time concepts... and I really didn't like it and had to give up reading it about half way through. It's stunningly hard going, more of a collection of essays than a coherent story. It tells the story of a universe and in doing so kept losing touch with humanity making the story cold and impersonal. It would occasionally reconnect, but these became to few and far between for me to actually want to continue reading and I gave up rather than have what's actually a superb book become a chore to read. (239)

John Wyndeham - The Day of the Triffids

Completed: 2008-06-10
I'm always surprised when a 'classic' turns out to be good, readable and extremely enjoyable. It turned out that even the elements of the plot I thought I knew, turned out to not be handled in the way I expected. Many classics now feel cliche, because so many have retold the stories since, that when you finally get round to reading the original, it's not longer original. This however felt like a very modern book, telling the story in an interesting way with unexpected twists, delicate handling of complex issues and a very elegant story telling technique. (238)

John O'Farrell - An Utterly Impartial History of Britain

Completed: 2008-05-24
This does for British history what Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything did for science. It covers a huge amount of ground and frequently suffers because there's no real depth to any of the coverage, whereas Bryson occasionally focused more on a particular area giving a bit of a break from the relentless pace. There are flashes of absolute genius in the writing, extremely funny throwaway lines that have had me laughing in a number of cafes and forms of transport, but some of the jokes are flagged so far away that it gets painful.
Little changes would have made the book a lot more readable, and improved the educational elements. Things like clearer signposting of dates, even some timelines in a glossary or something. There were a number of times when I suffered plot loss, not really knowing what was going on; it was still funny, but I didn't necessarily know why.
Overall - a good read and laugh out loud funny, but there are a few irritating flaws that mean it's best read in relatively short installments. (233)

William Goldman - The Princess Bride

Completed: 2008-05-23
A really charming and extremely weird book. I was never a huge fan of the film, but the book worked much better for me. I really enjoyed the autobiographical elements that drifted back and forth between fiction, reality and who-knows-what in the middle. It's a book that makes you doubt everything - what's real and what's make-believe. Very bizarre, but really delightful. (237)

Steven Savile - Primeval: Shadow of the Jaguar

Completed: 2008-03-30
I'm currently a big fan of mindless, fast to read cheesy books and media tie in novels of tacky Saturday evening tv is about as good a fit for that as you can get. The nicest thing about this book is the cute size of the hardback and the fact it's a hardcover that's somehow been printed on and shined up. The book is what you'd expect from the series with the added bonus of less daft angst and more guns. (231)

Alan Moore - Watchmen

Completed: 2008-03-30
I read this book ages ago and somehow failed to review it! So months later I come to write a review and find I can't really remember why it's so brilliant, but I know it was. I'm sure there's plenty of reviews out there that will tell you why it's great. (253)

Reginald Hill - A Cure for All Diseases

Completed: 2008-03-27
The previous book suffered for lack of Dalziel and this one redresses the balance by having too little Pascoe. The whole point of a crime-fighting partnership is that there's two of them. By themselves they both come across as manipulative and a bit annoying, although being blown up seems to have mellowed Dalziel a bit. Meanwhile the murder mystery seemed a bit of a side note to the overuse of some writing tricks - various diary and correspondences used to death. It was nice to see some of the junior team members back, but frankly I can't remember who any of them are. Enjoyable but maybe a bit tired feeling. (232)

Terry Pratchett - Truckers

Completed: 2008-03-15
I love reading smart kids books. They're easy to read when you only get a chance to read a few pages a day and they can encourage a good writer to really focus on pacing and simplifying concepts. Truckers is an excellent example of a good writer being forced to tone down his occasionally rambling style to make a much more elegant story. Pratchett is at his best when looking at the world sideways or, in this case, from 4 inches off the ground. It's cute and satisying which is perfect for an unchallenging lazy read. (230)

Yvon Chouinard - Let My People Go Surfing

Completed: 2008-03-15
An inspirational business book in every sense. Before I'd even finished it I was making a mental list of people I wanted to buy copies for. So much of this book would be utterly ridiculous, complete pie in the sky dreams if not for the fact that their company is successful and thriving. It doesn't matter what area you work in, there will be bits of this book that speak to you so clearly you could cry. Absolutely brilliant. (234)

Stephen Barker and Rob Cole - Brilliant Project Management

Completed: 2008-02-25
Largely a 'no-shit-sherlock' book, for the most part this book is full of blindingly obvious information. There's the occasional gem or helpful piece of advice, but mostly it's all really obvious stuff. It is however well suited for non-project managers, people who have to be project managed or have tiny elements of it in their job and don't fully appreciate the complexities. For that it's probably very good, easy to read and frequently broken up with tip boxes and cartoons. (229)

Max Allan Collins - Criminal Minds: Jump Cut

Completed: 2008-02-24
The man that churned out a couple of dozen CSI novels moves onto another procedural show with efficiency and accuracy but no real sparkle. Books based on tv shows should be more than just a regular episode, they have the opportunity to do bigger stories. This one was an ok episode, engaging storyline, well written, good science... but nothing special. I also find it worrying when the authors of media tie ins introduce 'facts' which aren't actually canon. Oh, and Max Collins seems to have a weird obsession with what people are wearing. Fun and diverting for a couple of hours, but nothing special. (228)

Frederik Pohl - Jem

Completed: 2008-02-08
It took me nearly a month to read this book, thanks to a reduction in available reading time and a complete lack of interest in this book. The attitudes of characters and the futility of the situation just frustrated me. Reading only a small amount every now and then made it hard to keep up with jumping plot and characters. I was dubious about how any of the plot could possibly come about, from both a political and evolutionary point of view. I suspect the author was Making a Point. (227)

David Lester - How They Started: How 30 Good Ideas Became Great Businesses

Completed: 2008-02-03
This book presents a quick snapshot of how 30 odd companies got to where they are today. All the stories are focussed around individuals or small groups of people who have a strong motivation, if not necessarily any real talent to get their business off the ground. Some of the stories lead to an increased respect for the businesses, some of them made me heartily believe the 'anyone can do it' theory. Each business is only given a few pages, but the editing is nicely done to make the most of the material. If you're interested in finding out how Dyson, Innocent Smoothies and Pimlico Plumbers came to be, you'll probably enjoy it, but if you don't care so long as your vacuum cleaner works... I wouldn't bother. (226)

Isaac Asimov - The Gods Themselves

Completed: 2008-01-06
I read Asimov when I was quite young and re-read a few recently which I found very disappointing. The Gods Themselves however doesn't disappoint at all, it's a fascinating story with some well developed, familiar feeling characters. The story is fragmented in a similar way to the Foundations, but what's different here is that each of the three sections are interesting and feel as if they're moving in the same direction, developing the story. All three; the near present acadmeia, the very alien world and the slightly future moon colony; are enjoyable and I was sad to leave each one. (225)

Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Completed: 2007-12-31
This is a masterwork on how complex interweaving plots should be done. Multiple characters and plots unravel from the starting point of a road rage incident in Edinburgh during the Festival, gradually revealing a much larger, sinister and complicated plot. The pacing of the strands is perfect, the twists frequent, surprising and logical, building to an exciting conclussion which largely speaks for itself, not needing pages of exposition squashed in at the end. A really great mystery novel, with wry touches of self-parody and a believable collection of characters. Absolutely brilliant. (224)

Richard Hammond - On the Edge

Completed: 2007-12-28
It felt wrong to buy this book, particularly in hardback, somehow cheesy and tacky but I could only resist so long. Once I started reading it I couldn't put it down, I paused once for dinner and that was all, I stayed up until 3.30am unable to stop until I reached the end.
It's a fascinating book, not exactly a great work of literature, but it has an extraordinary honesty to it. The sections written by Hammond are quite self-aware, admitting when he's a bit of a pratt, but also honest about how scared he was. His wife Mindy describes what happened while he was unconscious and unaware. She writes with a beautiful simplicity, describing the rushing and the waiting involved with a sick loved one.
This really isn't an autobiography, the period before the crash is only covered briefly, basically explaining what led to him being in that jet car. The bulk of the book is written by Mindy, describing his surprisingly fast recovery in the first few weeks after the accident. The end point of the book is his arrival back home which felt a little strange. To him his aim was always to get home to his family, but to the reader the end point was actually his return to Top Gear, so it felt like the book finished too early.
It's a fascinating book, giving insight into brain injuries and how a relatively normal family deal with a life-changing event. It's very touching and utterly compelling. (223)

Samuel R. Delany - Babel-17

Completed: 2007-12-21
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, right up to the last 20 pages or so which I felt didn't really do justice to the rest of the story. The characters, universe, plot and science were all introduced and developed so flawlessly that they felt completely natural. Compared with modern works there is are so many ideas crammed into just 150 pages that you'd expect it to feel chaotic and complicated, but at no point did I feel overwhelmed with information, it all made perfect sense. My only complaint is that the end felt a little too rushed and it really needed a little more time to resolve the plot without feeling rushed. (116)

Ewan McGregor And Charley Boorman - Long Way Round

Completed: 2007-12-13
I read this after watching the dvd and I'm very glad I did it that way round. The dvd is fascinating, a true insight into planning and executing an adventure and view into very different parts of the world. It has the right balance of travel, adventure, personality and drama. The book however is told exclusively by the two actor/adventurers and therefore focuses on how they are feeling and the impact of things on them. It's interesting to read and at times very difficult to put down, but it really needs to the context of the dvd to make it something other than two actors talking about their feelings. That said, they talk very eloquently and honestly about how they feel and it's particularly interesting to see the two different points of view. (222)

Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe

Completed: 2007-12-08
A vast improvement on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This is a much tighter book with what felt like a more complete concept and much more likeable characters. It still suffered slightly from a slight failure to explain what on earth was going on, which always makes me feel stupid. Overall though, I really enjoyed reading this book, completing it in a couple of long sessions. (221)

Harry Thompson - Penguins Stopped Play

Completed: 2007-12-05
I found myself reading a book about cricket without really having the first idea about the game. I picked it up because I was looking for a non-fiction book to complete a 3-for-2 deal, it had penguins on the front cover and because the reviews said it was funny. Funny doesn't begin to cover it, I was laughing out loud while sitting on tubes. I found it funny because so much of it felt familiar - the trials and tribulations of trying to organise people and events against the conspiring powers or irritating people and incompetent organisations. I really enjoyed reading this book, understanding the characters if not the game. My only advice might be to skip the chapters after they return to the UK, they made me cry. (220)

Steve Krug - Don't Make Me Think

Completed: 2007-11-19
If you read any book on web usability, a lot of people say this one should be it and I'd be inclined to agree. Not because it's particularly extensive or detailed, but because it's got completely the right philosophy and it's very well written. It didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, but it did remind me of why I care about some of these things. (219)

Robert Asprin - Another Fine Myth

Completed: 2007-11-12
I enjoyed reading this book; it's fun and light-hearted and faintly silly. Unfortunately like with many books built around puns I got the distinct impression I was missing half the jokes, leaving me feeling slightly stupid (alternatively I wasn't missing half the jokes, in which case the book needs twice as many jokes than it has). It was good fun, but didn't really inspire me to head straight for the next book in the series, let alone the next (ye gods) 16. (218)

Stef Penney - The Tenderness of Wolves

Completed: 2007-11-05
This is a wonderful book that manages to be both beautiful and enjoyable. It's an interesting study of a period on Canadian history that I know nothing about (as opposed to other periods on which I'm an expert) but is very well created. The mystery elements are also interesting and very nicely paced. The resolutions are very satisfying, but incomplete enough to still feel realistic. The beautiful descriptions of the Canadian wilderness work best if you read this book snuggled under a duvet while the wind blows outside. (217)

Lucy Hawking and Stephen Hawking - George's Secret Key to the Universe

Completed: 2007-10-27
I was intrigued by the concept of Steven Hawking writing a children's book, also utterly overwhelmed by the amount of shinyness on the book cover. It is a really beautiful book with wonderful illustrations on every page and sections of colour photos and fact sheets. Sadly though, when compared to a lot of the other children's books around at the moment, it just doesn't hold up very well. It came across to me (although obviously I'm not the target demographic) as patronising and forced. It reminded me a little of Sophie's World, but the story elements are aimed more firmly at young children, even thogh I'm dubious of their ability to understand the science bits. (216)

Naomi Novik - Temeraire 4: Empire of Ivory

Completed: 2007-10-24
I enjoyed reading this book, as I have all the Temeraire books, but when I reached the end and looked back I found myself wanting more. For some reason it never feels like the plot gets started, it feels like a never-ending journey. It doesn't have much structure to it, so the reader never really gets the chance to take a breath and reflect on the impact of events.
I also found myself realising that I don't actually like the character of Temeraire so much anymore, he's becoming a somewhat annoying patronising smart-arse. I wish a bit more time were given to characters on the periphery and their relationships - particularly the other dragons and their captains. I enjoy the books, but with number 4 I feel she's no longer a 'new author' and I'm beginning to expect a little more, especially when I read her immediately after a Scott Lynch novel. (215)

Richard Matheson - I Am Legend

Completed: 2007-10-14
At just 150 pages long I'd really recommend trying to read this over a short period, I found the first half intriguing and engaging, really drawing me in to the character's life and living it with him. However I then didn't pick it up again for a few days and found it very hard to get back in to, feeling like I was looking in again and not really following things. That's a shame as I think this book may well be superb. (213)

Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora

Completed: 2007-10-07
One of the key things I look for in books, films, television is interesting and real characters. Characters that are far from perfect and realise it, that have the occasional strop, pout and whine and realise how bizarre their lives are. Locke Lamora definitely falls into this category and I love him for it. This book is a cross between Oceans 11 and Brust's Taltos series and it's brilliant! Scott Lynch is an exciting new author who carefully creates a whole new universe without you really realising he's done it. He is utterly un-precious of his creation, not being overly concerned about breaking things if it benefits the story. The reveals are all done in the perfect place so you're not confused or overloaded with whole chapters of exposition at the end. The book has a wonderful pace to it that led to several "just one more chapter" incidents. I'm really excited by this series and can't wait to pick up the next one. (212)

Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies

Completed: 2007-10-07
The second book in the Gentleman Bastard series is every bit as enjoyable as the first. The large scale plot was a little less coherent and logical than the first book, suffering occasionally because he needed to get his characters somewhere that didn't necessarily make sense. However given how much I enjoyed reading their adventures when they were there, it seems a little petty to complain. All the new characters, heroes, villains and middle ground alike, were fascinating, entertaining and perfectly rounded. I cannot recommend these books highly enough and eagerly await the next one. (214)

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 30 - Making Money

Completed: 2007-10-01
An enjoyable Discworld novel that doesn't quite have the spark they used to. Moist is an interesting returns for his second installment and makes an interesting lead character although to be honest I couldn't remember much of what had happened in Going Postal. There seemed to be a lot going on and I'm not sure I really followed all of it. Usually with Discworld books I find them very hard to put down, this one though I was happy to read in short installments on tubes and I think it suffered for that. I'd like to find time at some point to go back and re-read the last 1/2 dozen books as I think they'll be better in bulk. (211)

Iain Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Completed: 2007-09-24
I could repeat my review of The Crow Road here almost word for word. Great book, loved it to pieces, brilliant characters, amazingly natural descriptions, complete lack of plot. This one sort of hinted at the idea of a plot and that there would be some big reveals, but they kind of fizzled out. But it just doesn't matter as it's so nice to read. (210)

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

Completed: 2007-09-17
I enjoyed reading this book, although my standard comments apply regarding books with dialect in. It's a sad book, but for some reason it also manages to be full of hope. Each step the family takes I really felt that right around the corner things might get better for them. The unfairness of their situation is frustrating and their reactions are varied and yet all very real feeling. It's a beautifully written book that was in many ways depressing, but enjoyable and engaging in a way that many 'classics' no longer manage. (209)

Robert A. Heinlein - Starship Troopers

Completed: 2007-09-09
What a brilliant book! It reminded me a lot of The Forever War and Ender's Game, both of which I also absolutely loved. It's a snapshot of a universe and a war seen exclusively through a young soldier's eyes and it's done brilliantly. The things you find out are intriguing and the things you never find out don't really matter. It's nothing like the film (although I enjoyed that too) and one of those books that it's tempting to start over as soon as you finish it. (208)

Roderick Gordon and Brian William - Tunnels

Completed: 2007-09-04
So this is "the next Harry Potter"? For all the criticisms I can and have made about Harry Potter I really enjoyed reading them and actually cared. This book - not so much. The central characters and concepts seem to waver all over the place, the 'hero' in particular being really quite dull and unlikable for the most part. The concept wasn't very interesting to me as it's basically the same as the story in Baxter's Coalescent which is unsurprisingly much better written and thought out. I had no sympathy for any of the characters and won't be bothering to read the obviously planned for sequels. (207)

Will Self - The Book of Dave

Completed: 2007-08-28
A hilarious concept, the blurb is brilliant and everyone I've described the book to thought it sounded great. But sadly that's where it ends. I almost immediately found the book irritating with its use of dialect that I stumbled over but made an effort with in the hopes of finding the hilarious underneath. Sadly it never really materialized and the interweaving plots didn't really do anything for me. By the end I'd given up on trying to decode the dialect and just turned the pages of the increasingly depressing and pointless work. Really disappointing. (206)

Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Completed: 2007-08-15
I picked this book up on a whim 'cos it had a pretty cover, funky title and was in a 3 for 2 collection. It has a unique style to it that's a perfect fit for the character who's telling the story - a kind of academic paper crossed with a mystery novel. The characters and plot are interesting and quirky, the mystery element is nicely structured in that you know what happens from the opening chapter, you just don't know how you get there or why it happens. I found the ending a little disappointing, it suffered from exposition overload - a sign that the author has left too much to the end and then needs to have 20 pages of explanation. I think it's an interesting debut novel and will certainly pick up her next book. (204)

Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archive

Completed: 2007-08-07
I have to admit, there was a good 20% of this book that I didn't really get, any lengthy bit of exposition lost me at some point and the throw away lines frequently just sailed over my head. However I still enjoyed reading the book and was really impressed at the depth of the universe and the realness of the characters created in a relatively short amount of time. The structure was a bit odd until someone pointed out it's actually a novella with a short story with the same characters tacked on the end. (203)

Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events 1: A Bad Beginning

Completed: 2007-08-03
A really quirky and beautifully written book. It's got so much character to it that I just wanted to read it outloud to someone and do all the voices. It was spoilt a little for me by the fact that I've seen the film which it turns out is a brilliant adaptation and therefore leaves no surprises in the book. The little hardback editions are lovely, with wonderful illustrations and a lot of quality to them. (201)

Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events 2: The Reptile Room

Completed: 2007-08-03
I didn't remember this story from the film as well as the first book in the series, so it had a bit of mystery to it. I enjoyed reading it but some of the elements were a bit repetitive, and I will leave a gap before reading the next instalment otherwise I fear they will become irritating. (202)

Ben Elton - Chart Throb

Completed: 2007-08-02
Like the Pop Idol shows it's based on, I disliked this book yet found it addictive and fun to read. Ben Elton's books always feel like I'm being told off for something that isn't really my fault, and this book is no exception. It's all laid on a bit thick, particularly the repetitive use of certain phrases by the judges ("you owned that song!") and the balance of the plot is a bit strange, as if he lost interest and rushed the end a bit. There's nothing particularly new or revelatory about it, but it's a fun read. (200)

Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum

Completed: 2007-07-31
What a great concept on paper and what an awful one in practice. The plot behind this book is that three overly intelligent, bored researchers put together the conspiracy theory/secret society to end them all making it all up as they go along. Of course they get caught up in it and suspicious characters appear and paranoia abounds. It sounds like a lot of fun, but what actually happens is about 500 pages of ridiculously tedious exposition about templars, quests and god knows what else. I speed read vast chunks of this 'cos it was just so very boring. The language was also tedious, although as it's a translation I won't hold that against the author. Utterly tedious, wish I had never picked it up. (199)

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter 7: The Deathly Hallows

Completed: 2007-07-22
Non-spoiler review: I enjoyed most of the book, most of it I found extremely hard to put down and thought it both developed and concluded the story, characters and universe really well. Rowling made some moderately tough choices admirably and had me laughing and sniffling a few times each. On the other hand... there was a stunningly poor choice of sub-plot which was just pointless filler and a whole section in the middle of the book where I just kept shouting "get on with it!" at her. A satisfactory ending, but Rowling hasn't really learnt from mistakes she made with earlier books. For more spoilery thoughts check my blog (198)

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter 6: The Half Blood Prince

Completed: 2007-07-20
This is a well written Harry Potter book with better writing paragraph to paragraph and much better editing to remove fluff. I was however a little disappointed that the plot wasn't a little more coherent and adventurous and succumbed to cliche quite so much. I greatly enjoyed reading the book but frankly having finished I can't quite think what the central story was. Happily the kids are generally less irritating and caused me to cringe and shudder a lot less. I think this book acted as a lengthy introduction to the final conclussion, but it left me feeling a bit empty. I wish some of the decisions were a bit more daring and interesting and not predicatable from page 3. (78)

Nick Hornby - The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

Completed: 2007-07-20
Another book where the idea is better than the actualisation. I fell in love with the blurb of this book in the bookshop and couldn't resist. It sounded perfect. A book about someone who loves books, but has grown fed up of reading books just because he feels he should. At first I loved it, his attitude to books seemed to match mine and make me feel better about my own reading. But the book soon became a bit of a slog when it made two glaring departures from my reading habits - it talked about poetry and it disliked science fiction. It was frequently funny and only occasionally too silly for my tastes, so I still enjoyed reading most of it, but towards the end if became a bit of a labour, so by Hornby's own advice I should have stopped reading. (205)

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter 5: The Order of the Phoenix

Completed: 2007-07-17
I didn't review this book the first (or possibly even second time) I read it, so this review is based on re-reading it after seeing the movie and just before reading the final book. It's nearly two years since I'd read a Potter book and had forgotten how much fun they are to read. They're not the greatest works of literature, Rowling's style is getting better but is still fairly basic and while the editing is also improving there's still a fair amount of padding. However nothing can overcome the pure enjoyment I get from reading them, in this book I was particularly aware of the unfairness the kids have to deal and the familiar realisation that life just isn't fair and I couldn't help but smile when they worked out ways to get around the problems. (197)

Mark Haddon - A Spot of Bother

Completed: 2007-07-07
What a brilliant book. There is absolutely nothing in this book that is big - the events described are pretty day-to-day, the characters are people that you know, even the chapters only run to a few pages each. However it was amazing fun to read, I had such difficulties putting it down that I lost considerable sleep to it. The dialog jumps off the page and all feels beautifully real, getting the humour/angst balance completely right in each sentence, chapter and across the book as a whole. A wonderful read for a lazy afternoon. (196)

Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light

Completed: 2007-07-03
This is supposed to be one of the greatest works of SF ever written; everyone on Amazon raves about it. I thought it was truly dreadful and couldn't wait to finish it. I read the first chapter twice in an attempt to grasp what was going on, after 80 pages I looked up the Wikipedia synopsis which informed me that the storyline was jumping around in time, which explained some of my confusion, but not really all of it. Maybe if you have an understanding of Hinduism and read the book multiple times it will actually make sense, but to me it was just an incoherent, pretensious waste of time. (195)

Stephen Baxter - Coalescent: Homo Superior

Completed: 2007-06-26
This book has been on my shelf for ages, possibly even years, I'd been put off by the thickness, the fact it said book 1 and the disappointment of Baxter's collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. I finally got round to reading it having been reassured that it was pretty standalone and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The story is an interesting one and the interleaving viewpoints are extremely well handled. There are occasions when it loses itself a little and I thought the ending was a bit shaky, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it and will probably pick up book 2 at some point. (194)

Meera Syal - Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

Completed: 2007-06-17
I picked this book up 'cos it was cheap in a charity shop, it is set near where I grew up and 'cos it looked funny. It was indeed funny, but I also actually formed a really good connection to the characters and found myself looking at how issues applied to my own life. I was very impressed that a book could be so entertaining while creating a very vivid collection of realistic characters and situations. (193)

Chris Anderson - The Long Tail

Completed: 2007-06-12
This book is a mixture of economics, psychology, history, technology and marketing and they are all used brilliantly to clearly explain and extend the idea. Some of these works can focus too much on explaining everything in great detail and you're actually left with a 3 page article that's extended into 200 pages of babble. There's so many good examples and interesting quotes in this book I ended up bookmarking about a dozen pages. A fascinating concept beautifully told, read it as soon as possible before the examples go out of date. (192)

Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes

Completed: 2007-06-04
I shouldn't have read this book in short bursts on the tube and in crowded cafes. I suspect if you curl up in bed to read it on a dark and stormy night it's spectacular, very creepy and emotive. However in daylight, in short bursts it's just a bit dull. I wasn't really paying attention to it properly and kept getting confused between the characters and events. I really think there's a much better book in there than the one I experienced. (191)

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Completed: 2007-05-28
What an astonishingly boring book. I turned it into a challenge to see just how fast I could read without completely losing track of what happens. It turns out that I can read this book pretty fast because nothing at all happens. The bouncing perspectives and timeline would have made the uneventful storyline interesting, but as the characters never change and are fairly non-descript I was continually bemused about who was talking and when we were. I found the poetic style lollopy and uneven, the only thing shining out being the children's twisting of language. Epically boring and completely uninspiring. (190)

Charles Stross - Glasshouse

Completed: 2007-05-21
I enjoyed the central section of this book, I thought it was a really fascinating way to look at society and history, taking a step back and looking at how ridiculous and scary attitudes can be. That bit of the book I found very compelling, but the start took a bit of time to get going. Stross throws a lot of ideas out very fast with a "work it out on your own" attitude that I'm not that keen on. The end I also found frustrating, the way the plot resolves is satisfying, but I would have preferred to have a bit more time spent on it, it felt very rushed.
I'm not sure it will encourage me to read any other Stross, but it was certainly an interesting read. (189)

Stephen Baxter - Traces

Completed: 2007-05-16
I don't often read short story collections; I loved reading them when I was younger, most notably Clarke and Asimov's, but have gone off them a lot. This book has been languishing on my to-read pile for ages and I finally picked it up as an easy read. I actually found myself enjoying the genre again, it's quite well suited to tube and lunchtime reading and feels like less of a commitment. If a story isn't making sense, or just isn't connecting, it's only a few pages to the next story.
The stories themselves are quite enjoyable and suit Baxter's strengths quite well. There are some elegant ideas, occasionally clumsily told. I think his alternate world writing is much better than the stories where he tries to explain an alien way of life. What's missing compared to the Clark and Asimov story however are the wonderful moments of realisation when it turns out the last 20 pages have been a giant set up for a pun. If Baxter has a sense of humour, it doesn't show much in his writing, and it can be rather depressing to continually read about death and the end of the world. (188)

James Ellroy - L.A. Confidential

Completed: 2007-05-09
Every time I picked this book up I found it tricky to get into, but within a few minutes I was hooked again and reluctant to put it down. I was glad to have seen (and loved) the film so many times before as it provided a valuable head start on the characters, world and plots. The book however is hugely more detailed than the film, with a truly epic twisting plot and dozens of supporting characters. It was frequently confusing and even with the very helpful catchup newspaper snippets I lost the plot frequently. This didn't damage my enjoyment of the book however and indeed only encourages me to add it to the very small pile of "books I'd like to read again". (187)

Bob Shaw - Orbitsville

Completed: 2007-04-28
There were at least 5 good books squashed into this 200 page novel, all of them interesting and fun. Every time I thought I got a handle on what the book was about it would switch to another plot strand. It was a little disconcerting at first, it's not often I find myself wishing that writers took more time and pages over things. That said it's a very fun little book to read that throws a lot of core SF elements in a pot together and makes an interesting stew. (186)

Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Completed: 2007-04-26
I was really enjoying this book, disappointed each time I put it down and looking forward to picking it up again. It had a really fresh voice to it and a compelling narrative, even if the actual plot was a bit scruffy and I kept losing track of the family trees. Unfortunately I found the last 30 pages or so very depressing and just a bit cliche, suddenly taking a turn towards whiny, poetic livejournal. The sudden acceleration into the 'future' of the narrator didn't work well for me either and left me with a slightly sour taste in the mouth. In a book which seemed about possibilities and real life, I think it might actually have been a mistake to show how everything ended. (185)

Naomi Novik - Temeraire 3: Black Powder War

Completed: 2007-04-13
I love these books, they're amazing fun to read and Naomi Novik has a wonderful eye for characters and relationships. The plot pacing of this book is better than the previous two which tried to condense too much plot in the last two chapters, this one spreads it out a little bit more although it still accelerates up to a bit of a dash. This book is criminally badly edited though, with dozens of jarring errors that force you to reread and try to decode sentences. There are a few dodgy plot and character moments that don't quite ring true as well, but for the most part this is a wonderful series to read and I can't wait for the next one. (184)

Reginald Hill - The Death of Dalziel

Completed: 2007-04-11
I don't read many crime novels, but I do love the Dalziel and Pascoe series. They are a wonderful double act that has evolved naturally over a number of years and stories. Unfortunately for most of this book Dalziel is hovering in a coma and Pascoe is trying to act as both parts of the partnership, the absence of the rest of the team doesn't help him either. The story and mystery rattle along, touching on a number of current issues in a very interesting way. I enjoyed reading the book, but was disappointed at the huge Dalziel shaped hole. (183)

Ursula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed

Completed: 2007-04-07
I'm not sure why I didn't like this book. I can see why it's well respected and an "SF Masterwork" but I just didn't connect with it until quite near the end. I honestly don't think it was anything to do with the book and if I'd read it at a different time I would have got much more into it. As it was however I found it very cold and distant. (182)

Rick Moody - The Diviners

Completed: 2007-03-28
Absolutely awful, I didn't realise just how awful it was until i was already 250 pages in and STILL no plot had developed, by which point I felt that I had to at least finish it so I could write a fair review of it. On the positive side there are some moments of beautiful writing, the last sentance is wonderful. However those few paragraphs are spread throughout 570 pages of complete drivel. The characters are flat the plot strands are filament thin and dull and to add insult to injury none of them are actually given the respect of being finished. For the most part the prose is whittering drivel that drones on and on inducing nothing but sleep and daydreams. Don't touch this book with a barge pole. (181)

Lori Lansens - The Girls

Completed: 2007-03-12
A powerful 'autobiography' of conjoined twins. The story is beautifully crafted with sections written by each twin, occasionally overlapping and telling the same story in their two voices and sometimes just telling completely seperate anecdotes, reflecting how the two girls have very seperate but also very linked lives. The voices feel very real, but I was continually concious of the fact that it was fiction and the author had no experience of being a conjoined twin. It's a superb work, beautifully written and constructed, but it made me feel slightly uncomfortable, knowing it was made up. (180)

Naomi Novik - Temeraire: Throne of Jade

Completed: 2007-03-06
Another very well written, enjoyable book in this series. It suffers from the same problem as the first novel again though in that the pacing is very poor. 200 pages of the work pass in a day-to-day adventures on ship, feeling a bit as if the author has just gone "wouldn't it be cool if there was a sea serpent". by the time the crew and story finally reached China there were alarmingly few pages left and a lot of plot to be crammed in. It's frustrating to spend so long on a journey and then have a rushed ending.
All that said however the journey is still beautifully written with a lot of fun touches and evocative descriptions. It's an enjoyable read that I'd highly recommend, just not necessarily a great work of literature. (179)

Naomi Novik - Temeraire

Completed: 2007-03-02
A wonderful idea and a very very well developed alternate universe. The idea of adding dragons into the Napoleonic wars as an air force is inspired. The author gradually introduces us to the world and the gentle pace leaves nothing startling ro confusing. The dragons themselves are wonderfully complex creatures and the relationships with the riders are beautifully described. My only criticism of the book would be the occasional drift too far into sappiness and the actual lack of plot. Because it's an introductory novel it doesn't really matter that much, but it is notable that it's more a collection of chapters than a real story. (178)

Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

Completed: 2007-02-22
The concept behind this book is a wonderfully interesting one and also a beautifully balanced one. Despite being about death and the afterlife it doesn't really touch much upon religion and I found it strangely un-emotional. I do think that the actual telling of the story was not as powerful as the actual idea, too often I found myself skimming paragraphs as it got overly poetic and I was dissapointed by the ending, although I'm not sure how it could have been done differently. Well worth a read if only for the idea. (176)

Seth Godin - The Big Red Fez

Completed: 2007-02-22
I was disappointed by this book. I worship the ground Seth Godin walks on usually, but this book felt like a shameless cash project. For a full price book it was a ridiculously short 100 pages, half of which were screenshots and many of the rest half empty. It took me only about an hour to read. The things it talks about are extremely obvious and lacking Godin's usual style. As a free ebook, I'd have recommended it highly, as a 7quid book, it's embarassing. (177)

Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point

Completed: 2007-02-14
Another interesting book from Gladwell with a very carefully developed structure that gradually builds upon the previous examples and themes. The core concept does occasionally get a little lost as examples become more diverse but the sections are all interesting and include fascinating examples of psychology. It shows just how many aspects of life can be boiled down to core psychological issues. I'm not sure that anything in this book will actually help you predict what things will tip, but after they'll make the subsequent analysis more interesting. (175)

Martha Wells - Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary

Completed: 2007-02-11
It's a media tie-in novel, so it's not going to be winning any awards but I really enjoyed reading this book. Despite being written very early on in the series the author has a great feel for the characters. The plot and ideas also fits nicely with the ethos of the series. Lots of fun. (174)

Juliet E. McKenna - The Aldabreshin Compass 4: Eastern Tide

Completed: 2007-02-09
I could pretty much just cut and paste the review of book 3 in here and all the same stuff would apply. It's mostly fun to read but a very lazy variation on a theme of the previous books. Add to that the utterly pointless padding by introducing an extremely minor subplot (maybe 4 chapters out of 30) and this book feels largely like a desperate attempt to make a 600 page work out of a 20page idea. This whole series would have been a lot better if it was only 2 books long. Disappointing, must try harder. (173)

Dava Sobel - The Planets

Completed: 2007-01-28
This book was a little twee for my tastes. The first half was ok as an surface level description of the inner planets, but then it all started getting cute around Saturn and the author tried too hard to make each story cute - a fake letter about the discovery of Uranus being the low point. It would also have made more sense to stick with 1 chapter per planet instead of appearing to rush the last couple of chapters. It felt very much like she lost interest in the idea. It was all just a little too flowery and poetic for my taste. (172)

Zadie Smith - On Beauty

Completed: 2007-01-24
This is a strange book to review, I don't really know where to start. I didn't really think I enjoyed reading it, but regretted having to put it down each time. The writing itself is superb, only occasionally getting too flowery, but mostly providing insightful comments and presenting information creatively and effectively. The plot was for the most part solid, but I thought the racial issues came across as parody like stereotypes, do characters like Levi really exist? I hope I never have to deal with them if they do, I'd be tempted to slap him and tell him to get over himself. An interesting book, but I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone. (171)

Sahar and Bobby Hashemi - Anyone Can Do It

Completed: 2007-01-11
I bought this book because I was interested in the story of Coffee Republic, not because I wanted to be instructed on how to be an entrepeneur. To be honest their advice came across as really patronising; yes they've got a hugely successful company started, but it's only one, why does that make them experts? All that proves so far is that they're very lucky. If I was looking for advice on starting a business their advice is all pretty obvious and I'd look for someone with more experience for a better sampling. Anyways, the bits about their personal story are a lot more interesting and enjoyable. I wish they'd just focussed on that aspect a bit lot more and made it a straightforward biography. (170)

Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony

Completed: 2007-01-07
I can't really say anything about this book that I haven't already said about the first four books. They keep developing and growing without losing touch with the original ideas and without getting too big and outlandish. I'm looking forward to the next one and will probably be sufficiently enthused to buy the hardback, about the highest praise I can give a series. (169)

Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl and the Opal Deception

Completed: 2007-01-03
The Artemis Fowl series continues to impress me with each installment. This fourth book in the series is just as much fun as the previous works and still manages to advance the characters and arc. Colfer has a nice writing style that appeals to grown ups without (I think) being inaccessible to kids. I've found all of these books hard to put down and a lot of fun. (168)

Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code

Completed: 2006-12-26
Another interesting installment in this series. Colfer does a good job of creating an exciting story for the book whilst also creating an ongoing arc and developing characters. I'm finding these more satisfying and fun to read than the Harry Potters where I spend a lot of time wanting to slap characters. (167)

Valerie Martin - Mary Reilly

Completed: 2006-12-22
Taking the story of a character named only very briefly in a classic is a brave idea for a story, but works well here. Telling the story of Jeckyl and Hyde from the point of view of the house made actually makes a much more interesting story as it makes the whole thing linear, instead of revealing it all through narative at the end. It's also an interesting look into the life of housemaids during the period. A lot more interesting than the original story! (166)

Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Completed: 2006-12-11
It took a while for me to settle into this book, but once I got there I found it quite pleasant to read. I'd use words like 'amiable' and 'nice' to describe it, which is a bit like damning with faint praise, but fits well. It's a Sunday afternoon type book, ambling along without any moments of real drama or comedy, but elements of both. There seems more plot than many of the contemporary 'classics' and it keeps moving, slow but steady. Possibly my only disappointment was a somewhat unsatisfactory ending, but even that fitted with the nature of the book. (165)

Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident

Completed: 2006-11-30
I fancied something a little more fun and easy going after my recent reads and headed straight for the Young Adult section in Smiths. I read the first book in this series last year and had been meaning to read the next one for a while. It's a wonderful adventure book that's got a nice subtle sense of humour and is almost impossible to put down. A fun, fast read and the perfect antidote to too much grown-up-ness (164)

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Completed: 2006-11-28
I could easily become addicted to Philip K. Dick's works - he manages to write mind-twisting stories that are hugely enjoyable and very easy to read. I'm not quite sure how he manages that. While it's clear to see how Bladerunner emerged from this book, it's a very different story and it's a bit weird to read because you think it's familiar, but in actual fact it's very different. (163)

Jack Kerouac - On the Road

Completed: 2006-11-22
I was so amazingly bored by this book! It took an amazing amount of effort to even finish it and most of the last hundred pages or so was speed read. I don't know why I found this book so dull while others rave about it. I found the drifting nature of the characters and plot just boring and couldn't form a connection to any of them. The insights into the America and Americans of the period was interesting, but rather thinly spread through the book. (162)

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Completed: 2006-11-10
A very atmospheric short story. The structure of the book was interesting, the use of letters from Dr Jekyll allowed his voice to appear even though the story was told by someone else. It did suffer a little from exposition overload in the last third, but it was a short enough work overall that it didn't really matter. (161)

Jostein Gaarder - The Christmas Mystery

Completed: 2006-11-08
This book has the same elegant concept and structure as Sophie's World, but unfortunately it's more preachy than educational and thought provoking. It's still beautifully written but the religious plot didn't interest me at all. (160)

Philip K. Dick - Ubik

Completed: 2006-11-02
I'd never read Philip K. Dick before and don't quite know what I was expecting, but I was surprised at how fun and easy to read it was. I really enjoyed this work and found it very hard to put down. The plot is weirdly simultaneously mind-twisting and straightforward, it hovered just on the edge of making sense all the time. I was also amazed at how funny it was, some of the wonderful little touches that makes a book like this connect. I'll certainly be reading more of his works. (159)

Joseph Heller - Catch-22

Completed: 2006-10-30
I didn't actually like this book very much, and to be honest, didn't really think it was that good. There were definitely some funny and some powerful scenes, but as a whole I found the book overly complicated and poorly structured. I continuously lost track of which character was which and how the various incidents fit together in the time line and while I'm sure with a bit more effort it would have become clearer, I didn't really feel it was worth the effort. The whole thing just left me with a craving to watch M*A*S*H again. (158)

Lynne Truss - Talk to the Hand

Completed: 2006-10-15
This book was quite entertaining, Lynne Truss has a lovely style which is very funny and I really connect with. However the contents were a bit depressing and led to moderate despairing about the state of the world. I also can't help but think that anyone who thinks long enough about these matters to write a book really isn't going to be able to leave the house very often due to the paranoia of what they may find. Funny, but not one to be read if you're already teetering on an edge. (157)

Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day

Completed: 2006-10-10
I picked this book up because having read Never Let Me Go I felt the author's style would be a much better match for a period piece such as this, and I was correct. Ishiguro has a wonderful talent for writing people's memories, it feels so natural as his characters get slightly muddled over unimportant details but remember key phrases or expressions so vividly. The fluid writing style is very beautiful and immersive to read, although I was a little disappointed with the speed of the final chapter. (156)

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels

Completed: 2006-10-06
I enjoyed the first two thirds of this book, particularly the contrast between Gulliver being giant in Lilliput and tiny in Whatever-the-name-was where the giants were. I thought these worlds were interesting and the story well told. The final third of the book however seemed a little bit more like a few ideas thrown together without being fully developed. The final section set in the land of the horses just degenerated into a cynical, bitter rant about the world and I was quite glad when it was over. (155)

William Gibson - Neuromancer

Completed: 2006-09-27
I really really really didn't get this book. It was a huge slog to get through and by about a third of the way through I was just skimming the words to get to the end. I can see that it was visionary, ahead of it's time, genre defining and all that stuff... but I just didn't get it. To be honest I wasn't particularly surprised by that. (153)

Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games

Completed: 2006-09-20
I really enjoyed reading this book, I found the plot entertaining and engaging, the characters interesting and the writing style extremely readable. Usually with Banks books I feel somewhat out of my depth, playing catchup with the rules of his universes, but this one just clicked with me and made sense from the very start. (152)

George Orwell - Animal Farm

Completed: 2006-09-12
If I'd known this book was so short, I'd have read it ages ago. While I can accept it's powerful historical importance, I didn't actually think much of the book itself. I found the lack of subtletly quite tedious and just didn't feel engaged by the book at all. (151)

Jane Austen - Emma

Completed: 2006-09-10
This book was spectacularly long winded and for the most part I found it amazingly dull. While I can appreciate the beautiful language and the historical relevence, I just couldn't get past the fact that the main characters are horribly irritating. I spent the whole book wanting to slap Emma and most of the book finding the rest of the characters simpering and dull. Really not my genre. (150)

Steven Brust - Taltos 10 - Dzur

Completed: 2006-08-23
Yay! Vlad is back! This book thankfully picks up immediately after book 9 finished and I spent most of the book eagerly awaiting various meetings and conversations. Brust's writing is wonderfully efficient, he never says anything that the reader can't extrapolate, even if that does mean occasionally slamming to a halt when you realise something said 20 pages back was not what you thought was said. The chapter introductions discussing a meal form a good sidenote, leaving the reader wondering at how deep the metaphore goes, or whether it is actually just about food. (149)

Isaac Asimov - Second Foundation

Completed: 2006-08-21
This is possibly the best of the Foundation books, but unfortunately that isn't saying much. I found Asimov's story telling style clumsy and forced - some things he explained to death, others just whizzed past in a blur. This book was really three (I think) mini-stories set in the same universe and each individual story was fun, but the connections were a bit forced. The multiple reveals also got very irritating - even the characters reference it! (148)

Seth Godin - Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea

Completed: 2006-08-16
Seth Godin has some wonderful ideas, and some wonderful case studies and anecdotes to back them up, but this book could have been half as short and possibly have been more powerful without losing any content at all. The points can become a bit laboured, particularly as many of them seem totally obvious once they've been pointed out. But you're not reading the book for the writing, it's for the marketing concepts and those are absolutely fascinating. (154)

Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination

Completed: 2006-08-11
I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm not really sure why it's so highly regarded. The concept was interesting if somewhat unlikely but the execution seemed rather poor to me. The writing is often clumsy and the characters seemed forced and un-natural. It was a good book, with some fascinating and fun ideas, it's just the development of the ideas and the movement between them is not as slick as some other writers manage. (147)

Lynne Truss - Eats Shoots and Leaves

Completed: 2006-08-09
I absolutely loved this book. Not only was it a clear and concise guide to good punctuation and the history and possible future of the subject, but it was bloody funny! I got many a strange look on the tube when I couldn't help but laugh out loud at the wonderful turns of phrase and the personality that shone through. A wonderful book that I'm tempted to read through a second time immediately. (146)

C.J. Cherryh - Downbelow Station

Completed: 2006-08-06
I enjoyed reading this book, despite its many flaws. Most frustrating and damaging was the fact that the sentence structure is frequently utterly dreadful. I rarely went more than a few pages before stumbling over a sentence with confusing grammar and being completely dropped out of the narrative. Secondly I thought the book could have been greatly improved by tightening up the story and cutting it down, seeing as all the characters were almost identical, it really didn't seem worth having so many of them! Despite those issues however the plot is fascinating and engaging and the universe (or universes plural maybe) are very well crafted and interesting. (145)

Paul Strathern - Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements

Completed: 2006-08-03
I was quite angered by this book in places. The author takes an extremely judgemental view on history, regarding anything which was later to be revealed as incorrect as a dead end and even damaging to the development of the science of chemistry. His attitude towards alchemy is particularly scathing and very poor form for a historian. Beyond that there are numerous diversions in this book from the history of chemistry, telling the standard stories of general science (eg Galileo) over again. (144)

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

Completed: 2006-07-18
I found the start of this book intriguing and well written, but by the end I was disappointed. The writing itself is quite beautiful in places, I've not read something that recollected school days in a way so close to the way I do - sharp pictures of moments surrounded by fuzzy memories and confussion over details and motivations. However the actual plot lets the book down, it may be interesting to 'mainstream' readers, but to anyone that's read sf the concept is unoriginal and the implementation is nothing special either. It's an ok book with occasionally brilliant writing, but I was expecting something spectacular and original. (143)

Steven Brust - Taltos 9 - Issola

Completed: 2006-07-14
Another great book in the series. It answers some questions, yet generates even more. Definately a good thing. By reintroducing characters it is interesting to see how Vlad has been changed by recent events. The new characters that are introduced are fascinating and we learn more about some of the recurrings as well. Brust once again falls into the trap of concentrating a lot of complex exposition into small amounts of space, one section I had to read 3 times and still not really grasp all the details. (14)

Steven Brust - Taltos 8 - Dragon

Completed: 2006-07-11
Vlad and the readers once again find themselves in a completely unfamiliar environment - this time in the middle of a dragon war. It's very amusing to see Vlad try to settle into the new environment, while not actually forget who he is or why he's there. The bouncing timeline, similar to that used previously is frustrating and clumsy, again leading to a somewhat anti-climactic feel. Brust is also getting a little careless with spreading his exposition about and not concentrating it all in lumps. Fun new characters and insight into the dragon philosophy though and important plot points for previous and future books. (142)

John D. Barrow - The Book of Nothing

Completed: 2006-07-09
I can't actually remember the last time I completely gave up on a book, but this one has driven me to it. I managed about half of it before getting to the point that I'd rather read the adverts on the tube than read any further. I don't really know why I found it so uninteresting, the flowery language (refering to 'Nothing' continuosly with particular stress on the capitalisation got particularly irksome) but became less annoying as you got further into the book. I think my biggest issue was just hat it tried to cover so much stuff that it never lingered anywhere. It jumped about between science, maths, philosophy and literature with gay abandaon, just leaving me confused and bored. (141)

Steven Brust - Taltos 7 - Orca

Completed: 2006-07-05
I really enjoyed this book, although I wouldn't list it as the best Vlad book it was a much more interesting break from the standard style then Athyra was. While we get to see Vlad through someone else's eyes again we also get to hear from Vlad himself and I almost cheered the first time I read him talking to Loiosh. The mystery is a bit convoluted and it's a shame so much exposition got crammed into the last couple of chapters, but the journey was fun and it was great to see more of Kiera. (136)

Steven Brust - Taltos 5 - Phoenix

Completed: 2006-07-02
This is the first major tipping point in the Vlad universe (at least by my definitions) and marks the point where Vlad changes his life. There's an element of train wreck about it as the reader (and Vlad himself) watch events unravel without the ability to stop them. There are some genuinely shocking moments and character choices along the way, but for the most part everyone is just a passenger on this journey. It's kind of depressing, but also kind of amazing. (134)

Steven Brust - Taltos 6 - Athyra

Completed: 2006-07-02
A noticably different Vlad book, not only because it is chronologically (so far at least) the first book after Vlad's self-imposed exile but also because it is the first book not told by Vlad himself. Looking at Vlad through the eyes of a teenage Teckla who has lived his life in a rural farming community gives a very strange view of the assassin and his jheregs, removing most of the mystery elements (at least to the reader who already knows what Vlad is) but in turn giving a very different view of Vlad's philosophy and sarcasm. (135)

Steven Brust - Taltos 4 - Taltos

Completed: 2006-06-30
This book never really felt particularly coherent, it felt just like an interlude in the middle of the series (although it's actually chronologically near the start). The interleved timelines were well constructed but actually left the ending of the book feeling like an anti-climax. It's an important story for the series, but not particularly interesting compared to the murder-mystery style first three books. All that said of course, it's Brust writing Vlad so it's quite amusing to read. (133)

Andrew Smith - Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

Completed: 2006-06-28
I have mixed feelings towards this book. While I enjoyed actually reading it and found some bits of it beautifully written, for the most part I was frustrated by all the things I thought it was going to be but wasn't. The author puts a huge amount of himself into the work - it's an acknowledged personal journey as much as it is a journalistic endeavour and I often just didn't care. Because of the narrative following this journey the historical flow was completely surrendered and I frequently became confused between missions and people. I think the book just turned into something a little too personal for the author and in the process it lost it's way. (132)

Steven Brust - Taltos 3 - Teckla

Completed: 2006-06-25
This is not my favourite of the Taltos novels, not because it's not good, but because it does some evil things to the characters I like. While Vlad has previously been concerned with his life and his business, now he's concerned with his marriage, sanity and philosophy - not nearly as much fun. The first two books were about the Dragaerans, this is about the Easterners and the stuttering start of a righteous revolution which Vlad gets reluctantly put in the middle of. It's painful to read because the character seems so thoroughly stuck. The novel also suffers because of the absence of the larger than life Morolon and his associates and I was unconvinced (as Vlad seemed to be) by Cawti's very sudden change in personality. (131)

Steven Brust - Taltos 2 - Yendi

Completed: 2006-06-24
This story jumps back to look at the origins and growth of Vlad's business. While the first book showed us a bit about how the Dragaeran houses interact, this one is more focussed on how the Jhereg work and 'work'. It can occasionally become a little bogged down in names and dates forcing re-reading and cross-referencing. I'm not convinced about the resolution of the mystery, it's rather convoluted and dependant on coincidence, but that would be why it's called Yendi. This review probably doesn't make much sense if you haven't read the novels ;0) (130)

Steven Brust - Taltos 1 - Jhereg

Completed: 2006-06-22
The first book of the series which I'm re-reading for probably the 5th time and still finding hugely enjoyable. There's a lot of Agatha Christie in the construction of the mystery and like those works the joy isn't necessarily in the resolution of the mystery, it's in watching the detective at work. The first book is not actually the chronological first story, so you're dropped right into the middle of a universe and group of characters, but Brust masterfully makes sure that this doesn't actually matter, re-reading for references is a joy, but it didn't feel lacking on the first read either.
Great fun to read, a great launching point for the series and a very slick bit of universe creation. Ranks as one of my favourite books of all time. (129)

Neal Stephenson - The Big U

Completed: 2006-06-18
This is definately a book of two halves and which one you prefer depends on whether you prefer a slanted look at the stereotypes of college life or out and out bedlam of whacky situations set in the familiar environment of college. Personnally I prefered the first half which was a very cleverly done satire on university, I found the second half to be just too confusing and ambiguous as to whether I was supposed to have the faintest clue what was going on. An enjoyable read with some interesting ideas that require a slightly more seasoned author to write brilliantly. (128)

Isaac Asimov - Foundation and Empire

Completed: 2006-06-14
I'm really not enjoying the Foundation series very much, I love the concept of predicting the future through mathematics, but I find the story telling clumsy and it just doesn't connect with me. This one is slightly better than the last, but I still felt very disconnected from the plot and characters. (127)

Frederik Pohl - Gateway

Completed: 2006-06-05
The structure and concept of this book reminds me a lot of the Sparrow, but it's quite different in tone. The emphasis here is more on the sf ideas, which are very interesting and well described, rather than on the ethics and characters. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and polished it off in just 2 days. My only complaint about it would be the pacing is slightly off with the end feeling very rushed and not particularly clearly explained. (126)

William Golding - Lord of the Flies

Completed: 2006-06-02
I just couldn't get into this book, the writing style just left me cold. I couldn't seem to get into it enough to pay attention to the slightly cryptic style, so I kept missing stuff. I found the second half paced a bit better and when things actually started happening it was more interesting to read and watch the train wreck unravel. I don't think it was a bad book or anything, I just couldn't seem to connect to it. (125)

Alistair Cooke - Letter from America

Completed: 2006-05-24
It's taken me the better part of 5 months to read this book, it really isn't the kind of thing you sit down and read in large chunks. I've been carrying it around reading a couple of letters per tube journey, for which it has worked perfectly. These letters cover 60 years and an amazing variety of topics. They give a fascinating insight into living in America during the twentieth century, looking at the lives of everyone - presidents, movie stars, imigrants, journalists, golfers and just the people next door. As my history is a bit shaky, it would have been nice sometimes to get a brief introduction explaining the context of the letters. It may have taken me forever to read, but it was always enjoyable. (123)

Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon

Completed: 2006-05-24
I read the SF Masterworks edition of this book, but it's another work that I'm really not certain is science fiction. Primarily it's about intelligence and how we perceive ourselves and how we treat others, the science fiction elements are just there as a method to emphasise these different attitudes by putting all the levels of intelligence into one person. Whether it's sf or not though, this is a superb work with great subtlety and great emotion. It's quite startling to think this was conceived in the 1950s, although it does partly excuse the horribly lax approach to experimental procedures. (124)

Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife

Completed: 2006-05-21
Absolutely beautiful! I couldn't put this book down and couldn't wait to pick it up again. This is the very height of "love story with a twist", Niffengger never allows the love story to get overwhelmed by the twist and never lets the love story wallow. The characters are fascinating and the topsy turvey way they are developed keeps you on your toes, their lives seem so ordinary and yet so bizzare. I didn't want this book to end and now having finished it I want to start it all over again. (122)

Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

Completed: 2006-05-14
I really enjoyed reading this book and found the examples and the discussions absolutely fascinating. I was a little concerned it was going to be a bit new-agey and self-help like (Improve Your Memory in Fust 12 Hours type thing) but it was actually very well researched and balanced. Gladwell introduces a number of examples and themes and gradually layers them and builds them up throughout the book, returning to previous examples and extending them, giving the book an interesting structure. The interviews with psychologists, scientists and other experts also makes this book more than just a Guru style guide. This book isn't going to change your life, but it is a very interesting read. (121)

John Diamond - C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too...

Completed: 2006-05-11
This is a very powerful and brutally honest account of one man's cancer. It doesn't really *do* anything, it's not there to tell you how to deal with a diagnosis, to recommend treatments or to discuss philosophy, it's just about how John Diamond (broadcaster, columnist and husband of Nigella Lawson) dealt with his cancer. I read the first 2/3 in one afternoon but then found it very difficult to pick up to finish the final 1/3 which featured some fairly graphic descriptions of surgery and post-op issues. That section was also less interesting and more depressing to me as it just became about getting through each day, it was all about the condition rather than about living and it becomes much harder to form a connection. A fascinating book and a remarkable insight. (120)

J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

Completed: 2006-05-05
I enjoyed reading this book and found it fairly difficult to put down, polishing it off in just two days. The focus on just a few days in the life of the narrating teenager makes for an incredibly immersive work with an interesting look on things. The only complaint I have is that not much happened and that the ending was horribly abrupt. (119)

Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

Completed: 2006-05-03
I spent most of the book not entirely sure of what was going on, once I accepted this I really enjoyed the first 400 pages or so as Reynolds carefully built up the layers of mystery and intertwining. However the last 150 pages or so when he tried to explain things and bring it all together I found pretty clunky and confusing. There was quite a large shift in scale from focusing on individuals and their plots to relatively suddenly dealing with millenia old alien races and their schemes for the future of the galaxy. I just found the ending all a bit overwhelming after the slow, careful and interesting build up. (118)

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

Completed: 2006-04-21
This book wasn't really anything like I was expecting, it doesn't really seem like gothic horror at all, much more like a dickensian diary. All the iconic scenes I expected ("It's alive!") were completely absent and replaced with verbose ramblings and a somewhat unexpectedly complex structure. I did actually really enjoy some sections of the book, finding it difficult to put down at times. However other sections dragged heavily with melodrama and frustrating characters and weird plot holes. (117)

Isaac Asimov - Foundation

Completed: 2006-04-16
I was rather disappointed in this book, I found the writing itself to be somewhat clumsy (and my edition really needed better proof reading) and the plot to be a bit eratic. The first half or so, featuring the foundation of the foundation and the first couple of crises was interesting, different and adventurous. The second half however moved too far away from the ideas of psycho-history and just become fairly standard space trader type stories. I don't know whether this was just a coincidence of where I stopped reading for a couple of days, but I just couldn't be bothered to care about the second half of the book. Oh, and the complete lack of any female characters beyond a whining wife didn't help matters either. (115)

Joanne Harris - Five Quarters of the Orange

Completed: 2006-04-13
I think the author was trying a little too hard to be clever here. I enjoyed Chocolat partly for its simplicity, but this work was trying to use some complex ideas to gradually reveal an event through the eyes of both a child and the old woman she becomes. I felt the author sometimes muddled the different visions and tripped over things that a child wouldn't understand or that an adult conveniently remembers at the right moment. I also found it very hard to picture a 9 year old doing the things as described, okay an independent child in a difficult time, but it was quite unsettling. I was very dissapointed by this work, but may well try to read another book by Harris to see if Chocolat is actually the odd one out. (114)

Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebus

Completed: 2006-04-06
I wasn't particularly impressed with this book, it had some good ideas but they were thrown about with a bit too much enthusiasm and too little coherence. I found myself just not really caring about the quest or the characters due to a lack of focus on them and very little sense of urgency. I liked a lot of the concepts but would much rather they were developed more fully with a greater concern for an actual plot and a hefty cut to page count. (113)

David A. Aaker - Building Strong Brands

Completed: 2006-03-07
Yes, it's a marketing book, get over it. There's some fascinating stuff in this book, which gives a great incite into the world of global branding and marketing. A lot of the content is actually just common sense, but it is very clearly spelled out here - maybe too clearly in places, it's not always necessary to provide an example, a bullet point diagram and an explanation for each point. The book suffers a little towards the end when it starts talking about more specific cases which unless you're brand manager for Pepsi, you probably don't care about. It would also have been nice if the examples weren't all US and they weren't all 10 years out of date, but then the book can't magically update itself I suppose. A very well written and very interesting introduction to the field. (112)

Joss Whedon - Astonishing X-Men V2: Dangerous TPB

Completed: 2006-03-04
I didn't enjoy the second collection of this series as much as I did the first. This one read a lot more like a traditional X-Men comic series, focusing on action and fighting rather than the dialogue. Given that I'm reading these because Joss is writing them I was rather disappointed at the lack of actual dialogue. This one just felt like any other X-Men comic. (111)

Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain

Completed: 2006-02-12
This novella is beautifully understated and amazingly restrained. Rather than spelling everything out and covering decades of a relationship in the way the film does, Annie Proulx just focusses on 3 or 4 meetings between the characters. This brings you straight to the heart of the story and doesn't give the time to wallow that the film possibly over did. (110)

Martin Brundle and Maurice Hamilton - Working the Wheel

Completed: 2006-02-10
I was expecting this book to be a bit of a vanity project, an autobiography masquerading as a track guide, and while this is true to a certain extent it's also very informative and great fun to read. The history of F1 is all about the characters and the outstanding incidents and this book is full of spectacular accidents and amazing drives. Brundle's 13 years as an F1 driver, near decade in commentary and lifetime of racing give him an amazing perspective and a contagious enthusaism. This isn't any work of literary genius, but it's neatly constructed to cover a range of technical issues in a concise way. Up there with Sid Watkins books as a great insight into the racing world. (109)

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

Completed: 2006-02-07
This book seemed like quite a long hard slog, despite only being just over 100 pages long. I think this was mostly due to the length of the sentances, paragraphs and (3) chapters. There were sentances that made me smile, ones that made me intrigued and ones that made me want to read more... but for the most part I found the book horribly dull. I didn't really follow what was going on particularly well, the plot was conceptually good I think but the telling was eratic and oddly paced. (107)

Joss Whedon - Astonishing X-Men V1: Gifted TPB

Completed: 2006-02-07
I'm not usually one for comics (or graphic novels) but I have always been an X-Men fan and with Joss Whedon writing, how could I resist. I wasn't disappointed and Joss' writing shines through an otherwise fairly standard X-Men storyline, with lines that made me laugh out loud. The artwork is superb, beautifully complimenting the writing and conveying so much beyond the words. It's not sold me on reading more graphic novels, but it's sold me on getting volume 2. (108)

Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Completed: 2006-02-05
Another classic ticked off the list, but frankly that's about all I got out of this book. I didn't find it particularly enjoyable to read and have already been overwhelmed with inmates taking over the asylum storylines in other books and tv shows. Of course those are all referencing this book, but I much prefered K-PAX for example. I found myself skimming through the sections of 'crazy' talk, probably missing a lot of clever subtext, but I just couldn't focus on it. I'm glad I've read it, but didn't really like it much. (106)

John O'Farrell - Things Can Only Get Better

Completed: 2006-01-29
The subtitle of "18 miserable years in the life of a Labour supporter" pretty much sums this book up. It's an autobiography of a labour activist from when he enters university in 1979 as Thatcher is elected and runs until labour get back in in 1997. It's not really a history book as none of the events are explained in much detail (I wasn't particularly into politics for most of the first 18 years of my life so didn't really know what was going on). This book is more an extended rant than anything else, a witty and charming rant, but there is a strong theme of bitterness throughout. It's quite interesting as an autobiography and an insight into local politics and is funny to read, but I can't help but feel I was missing a lot by not understanding the events and issues discussed. (105)

Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

Completed: 2006-01-25
This is a strange take on a fairly normal story - the story of a family told by a teenager growing up. The strange bit comes from the fact that the teenage narater is murdered on page 15 and she comes of age by looking down from heaven at her family and friends. Although at times the book drifts rather too far into sentiment and overly mystical descriptions it is mostly a fascinating look at a family dealing with a murder and trying to live their lives. (104)

Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter - Sunstorm

Completed: 2006-01-22
The sequel to Time's Eye was pretty dissapointing in all it's aspects. While Time's Eye had an interesting concept at it's core, Sunstorm has a fairly standard disaster plot - the sun is going to go blooey and wipe out life on earth. The cause of this potential disaster are laughably ridiculous and the solution to the problem is completely predicatable. Bubbling underneath the dumb B-movie disaster plot are some vaguely interesting ideas and sf concepts, but no effort is ever really put in to developing them. The characters are straight out of the cliche pile and I can't think of a single time in the book I was surprised by anything. I guess it's an ok b-movie style disaster story, but I expect much better from these authors. (103)

Yann Martel - Life of Pi

Completed: 2006-01-13
I was expecting a Booker Prize Winner to be a bit weird and out there, particularly given the description on the back of a boy sharing a lifeboat with a small menagerie. However I was delighted to find that this book was not only amazingly fun and easy to read but told a simple and engaging story. From the early chapters a Pi tells of his youth in India and his investigations of religions through the shipwreck and time spent aboard the lifeboat struggling to survive to the charming and thought provoking ending I found it very hard to put this book down. A great piece of literature and a very enjoyable read. (102)

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Completed: 2006-01-08
I'm not really sure why this is considered one of the best books of all time, it's a great book, but I don't really see what's so spectacular about it. It reminded me a lot of Breakfast at Tiffany's (although of course it was written before that) in that it's a study of an odd character reported on by someone who's close to them, but they are always out of reach. The characters of The Great Gatsby are all subtley and carefully fulfil their roles. The prose is spectacularly easy to read and descriptions jump off the page. It's an enjoyable book to read (although the ending left me feeling a bit cheated) and has some interesting comment on society of the time, but I'm not sure I see why it's considered so great. (100)

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

Completed: 2006-01-08
This short story came in a volume with The Great Gatsby and made a nice contrast in style while maintaining the themes. Fitzgerald is still talking about money and love and how the two can be blind to each other, but this story is far more of a fairytale. The characters all have a single focus and the world they live in is fantastical. It's a charming little story with some very dark aspects. (101)

Cory Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Completed: 2006-01-05
A fun read that's quick to get through, but comes across as a bit jumbled. I liked the concept of an sf novel set in the future Disney World, but wasn't convinced that so little would have changed when the world had changed so much around it. It's also a bit tricky to have a murder mystery where all the characters are so irritating you really don't care who did it or who dies. There were some intersting concepts in this book, but I think there was actually too many ideas fighting each other. (99)

Eric Idle - The Road to Mars

Completed: 2005-12-31
I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that Eric Idle can write engagingly. This book does a pretty good job of merging an academic treatise on comedy and a science fiction mystery novel. It's a fun read most of the way through and it only really suffers in the last 1/3 or so when there's a rush attempt to develop the plot which ends up muddled and confusing. (98)

Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl

Completed: 2005-12-20
A fun children's book with a wry sense of humour that makes it enjoyable for adults as well. Having the principle character actually be the villain of the story is an interesting twist that kept me guessing throughout as to how the story was going to be resolved. I picked the book up to read on a plane as my previous choice was just too thick and complicated. This was the perfect choice. (97)

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

Completed: 2005-11-22
Bank's first novel is rather like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, except with more "ew". The book is told entirely by Frank, a 17year old who manages to sound perfectly sane and rational as he explains how he killed 3 people while he was still just a child or as he performs the rituals of the Wasp Factory. The casualnes with which violent and unpleasant events are described is possibly more horrible than the events themselves and the irony that Frank considers himself the sanest person he knows is understated throughout. This is not a particularly pleasant read, but it is very well crafted and intriguing. (96)

Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

Completed: 2005-11-15
It may not be fair to either book, but I couldn't help but compare this to Harry Potter while I read it. Ender's Game beat Potter in just about every field - it felt very much like what Potter could be if written for a slightly more mature audience and with a harsher eye to style and editing. Ender's Game is an addictive book for all it's predictability, the author gets inside the head of this bizare boy and how his world works. The occasional drop-outs to other characters prevents the book becoming too claustrophobic. I found this book impossible to put down and very enjoyable. (95)

Gordon R. Dickson - The Dragon and the George

Completed: 2005-11-10
A cute book that follows the fairly standard fantasy plot of a group of misfits going on a quest together. However this one spins it by having the lead character be a modern man who's been transferred into the body of a dragon. Conceptually it's a bit weird, but is a fun enough tale that bumbles along quite merrily. I most enjoyed this book for the fact that the film Flight of Dragons was based on chunks of it and it brought back happy childhood memories of the film. (94)

Jostein Gaarder - Sophie's World

Completed: 2005-11-03
This is a great introductory text to the history of philsophy, focusing on individual philsophers and the progression of ideas. The structure of the book is a thing of beauty, keeping the reader interested by surrounding the philosophy lessons with the compelling story of Sophie as she learns about philosophy and tries to solve a mystery. The lessons themselves are well crafted with lots of examples and timely reminders of previous chapters. I wouldn't really recommend it for children as it is quite heavy going at times and quite long (it's taken me about 4 weeks to read) but for a more mature reader it's a fascinating introductory text and a compelling story. (93)

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 29 - Thud!

Completed: 2005-10-31
A solid entry into the Discworld and Guards series, although not one that I'd hold up as a favourite. It's a little similar to Going Postal in that it's not really doing anything new or interesting and somewhat lacks focus. There are moments when it appears to be setting off to parody things (most noticably The DaVinci Code) but doesn't quite do it with enough enthusiasm to convince me that I'm not imagining it. Even the writing style felt off, usually when Pratchett writes Vimes he jumps off the page and feels completely natural, but this time it felt forced and clumsy. Not bad as such, maybe my standards are just going through a high patch. (92)

Keith R.A. DeCandido - Serenity Novelisation

Completed: 2005-10-25
A fun novelisation of the movie that makes some attempts to be more than just a direct conversion of the script. Sometimes the author appears to be tring a bit too hard though and the reflections on Firefly episodes come across rather more like the author trying to complete a checklist of references. However it's a fun and fast read that stays consistant with the film and the series. (91)

James White - Sector General

Completed: 2005-10-24
I read it on a recommendation for something fast and fun and it was exactly that. It's pretty cheesy pulp sf which feels a lot like an original Star Trek episode, particularly a James Blish novelisation of one. The book is actually 4 short stories, 3 of which with the same 'crew' and mostly the same set up, although I thought the odd one out which related the incident which led to the founding of the space hospital was actually the best of the set. The other's suffered a little from a rather formulaic pattern of "discover weird sick/injured new alien, wonder about how it works, reveal the twist". The twists were often a little too weird to seem entirely practical, but they weren't lingered over so it's probably a good idea not to think too hard. Fast and fun, I won't be rushing out to read the other books in the series, but I'll keep them in mind for future desires for simple reads. (90)

Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog

Completed: 2005-10-12
A book that just begs to have phrases like "enjoyable romp" and "super fun" thrown at it with gleeful abandon. Stealing from both Three Men in a Boat, Agatha Christie and goodness knows what else it's a thoroughly fun book throughout, although I didn't find it as laugh out loud funny as some seemed to. The mystery is engaging and parts of it kept me guessing to the end, while other bits seemed humourously obvious from the start. The science fiction elements of the time travel are interestingly done, discussing the ability of history to fix itself in a way I haven't encountered before. The characters are fun and are gloriously upstaged by a Bulldog named Cyril and a cat called Princess Arjumand. (89)

Juliet E. McKenna - Aldebreshin Compass 3: Western Shore

Completed: 2005-09-27
I found this book a reasonably enjoyable read but was at the same time quite disappointed with the quality and plot. I had a distinct sense of deja vu throughout the entire story feeling it was largely just the same story as book two with slightly different characters and setting. The style also became a bit grating as we continually dropped out of narative to hear the lead character's thoughts - most of which were either uninterestingly whiny or just blatantly obvious. I would actually prefer a bit more of the politics of the region and a bit less of the sword and sorcery - particularly if it's just gonna be the same thing each book in a different wrapping. An enjoyable read, but hopefully the final book in the series will be a bit different. (88)

Reginald Hill - A Clubbable Woman

Completed: 2005-09-18
The first Dalziel and Pascoe novel and it kind of shows. It's still an enjoyable read but the characters haven't quite arrived at their final destinations yet and the mystery is a bit clumsy. The resolution of the crime was a bit of a damp squib, there were a couple of interesting twists along the way but also some very clumsy setups. (87)

Jack McDevitt - Chindi

Completed: 2005-09-15
I had a great time reading this book, it was amazingly difficult to put down and caused me to be late for work and lose sleep on more than one occasion. It's much more horror/thriller novel than science fiction, I'd maybe even push it so far as to say the science fiction was quite poor - unimaginative aliens and slightly confused technology levels and political structures. However the thriller aspects of it were very well structured making it a great read and kept me on my toes. There may have been one too many twists in the last phase of the story, it was just beginning to get a bit "oh another potential disaster" when it finally concluded, although that could have had something to do with me reading 300 pages in 2 days. (86)

P.W. Atkins - The Periodic Kingdom

Completed: 2005-09-11
The concept behind this book is quite cute - a travel guide to the land of the periodic table. It has all the chapters you'd expect to find in a country guide - geography, history, government etc and twists the theory of the periodic table to fit in the structure. It sounds fun enough, but it lacks the humour necessary to pull it off enjoyably. What you actually have is a GCSE chemistry text with occasional flurries of artistic phrasing. The early chapters laid the geography stuff on too thick and it came across as contrived, later chapters seemed to all but give up on the idea. It's ok, but I didn't really get anything out of it and I suspect it would confuse anyone that didn't know the stuff already. (85)

C.J. Cherryh - Wave Without a Shore

Completed: 2005-09-08
At the heart of this book is a fascinating philosophical concept and how this concept can be taken to an extreme to form a political system. For the residents of this planet reality is based on what they want to believe and your position in society is determined by what you chose to have in your reality. The book investigates what happens when two rival thinkers collide - one an artist, one a politician and how their realities interact. It's an interesting concept, but makes for a rather heavy going read. I also didn't find Cherryh's writing style to be the most fluid and effortless and was not 100% convinced the plot and philosophy stayed consistant. However this is a good example of using sf to explore concept and is an interesting book. (84)

Jasper Fforde - The Big Over Easy

Completed: 2005-09-03
I enjoyed reading this book and moving away from the Thursday Next series has definately added some more life to this rather odd universe. Unfortunately this book has some pretty severe flaws which prevent it actually being 'good'. The biggest problem is that he's trying to parody something and in doing so causes exactly the same problems as are present in the original format. In this case he's trying to point out that all lead detectives are eccentrically interesting characters by making his lead detective average and dull (much the same as Thursday Next was). Also while most of the book is well paced and interesting the end came across as very quick with several dramatic moments thrown in just to make dramatic moments. The other problem with Fforde's novels is that I never feel he's got as good a handle on his universe as Pratchett or Holt have, that it's always one step away from completely disintegrating. For all that it's a good summer read, so long as you're not expecting anything outstanding. (83)

Bill Bryson - Mother Tongue

Completed: 2005-08-29
I was disappointed by this book. Having loved Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything I was expecting something very similar - a fun read that was informative at the sametime. However the very subject matter made that somewhat difficult to achieve. Bryson appeared to not want to get bogged down in technicalities of what a pronoun is, or any of the more sedate rules/standards that make day-to-day english. The focus seemed rather more towards giving a long list of examples of any oddity. A standard paragraph would go - "such and such a formation is called a thingy - here are 10-20 examples". While quiet educational and occasionally interesting, it did make it very difficult to get into any kind of flow when reading. English by it's very nature is a hodgepodge of things and sadly this book felt the same. Most disappointing however for me was that in the midst of all these lists and examples it was very difficult to hear Bryson's voice and hence the book just wasn't fun. From anyone else this would be a fine book, but from Bryson I found it disappointingly dry. (82)

Jules Verne - The Mysterious Island

Completed: 2005-08-28
I suspect the writers of Lost have flicked through this book, there are an amusing number of similarities although I hope that Lost manages to come up with a less disappointing solution to its various mysteries. I enjoyed reading this book even though very little actually happened and it was amazingly slow. The characters were bland in the extreme and much of the book was taken up with describing the minute details of crafting improbable technologies using just the resources of the island and an all knowing engineer. The mystery was well developed and intriguing right up to the resolution which was rather self-indulgent and cheesy. Then the book was suddenly over. Probably more interesting from a historical or referential point of view than in any literary sense. (81)

Simon R. Green - No Haven for the Guilty

Completed: 2005-08-07
An enjoyable sword and sorcery mystery novel type thing. It's part of the Hawk and Fisher series but is absolutely fine being read by itself. It's nothing astounding and in many respects probably isn't actually very good - the plot and characters all meander about a bit and the universe seems a bit of a mishmash. But it's a fun read for a few hours and doesn't really claim to be anything more. (80)

Justina Robson - Natural History

Completed: 2005-08-06
I'm sorry to say that I really didn't like this book. I don't think there's anything actually wrong with the book, in fact I suspect it's probably quite good, but i just couldn't get into it. I couldn't keep track of the plot or the characters and just didn't find it particularly engaging. I was expecting something different given the title and cover and never really caught up with what the book was actually about. By 2/3 through I'd pretty much given up and was just reading in a desperate attempt to get to the end. I've heard some glowing reviews of the book, but it just wasn't to my taste. (79)

Andrew Crumey - Mobius Dick

Completed: 2005-07-22
I picked this book up on a whim as part of a 3 for 2 deal, intrigued by "perhaps the only novel about quantum mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach". Sadly if I'd been reading this on a beach I'd have fallen asleep and either drowned when the tide came in or burnt to a crisp. I found the book tedious and overly confusing. The whole thing is built on alternate world ideas, and the main storyline following a character's investigation of this idea and bouncing between worlds is interesting. However the lengthy sections dedicated to historical scientists, musicians and writers were boring to me, not least because I didn't have the faintest idea most of the time which details were 'true' and which were alternate. Had the book focussed more on the central character's storyline and worlds I would probably have enjoyed it a lot more, although I'm still not sure I'd go so far as to recommend it to anyone. As it stands this was a book that sounded intriguing but ended up being pretensious and irritating. (77)

Juliet E. McKenna - Turns and Chances

Completed: 2005-07-17
I think this is probably the first novella I've actually ever read, it's a very strange format so I'm not sure how much of this comment is on the format and how much on the book. At just 120 pages I charged through in less than two hours and found it very difficult to accept that I was reading neither a short story nor a full novel. Considering the content of the story is actually quite large - with over a dozen main characters and a complex political situation there's an amazing amount crammed into those pages. I just felt a bit cheated at the end when the conclussion seemed quite simplistic and there was no follow up epilogue type thing wrapping up all the lose ends. I'm impressed at the amount that was in these few pages and liked that there was little padding, but I disliked the fast ending. (75)

Dan Simmons - Olympos

Completed: 2005-07-16
This was a doozy of a book, epic in everyway from pagecount to plot, timespan to style. I didn't re-read Ilium before starting this sequel which was probably a mistake as I spent the first 300 pages or so trying to work out what on earth was going on. I couldn't work out whether stuff they were talking about had happened 'on screen' in the previous book or not. There were about 12 pages in the middle of the book where I felt I had a pretty good grasp of what was going on and then everything went to hell in a hand basket again. This isn't to say I didn't hugely enjoy reading Olympus - it's superbly written and doesn't really matter whether you understand what's going on. The characters are engaging, the mini-plots make sense, the style is intersting and everything is thrown in with a sort of gleeful abandon that makes it hard not to like. One day I'll go back and read them again and see if it makes more sense, but for now I'm happy to have enjoyed them. (74)

Bill Bryson - Notes from a Small Island

Completed: 2005-07-16
This is billed as the companion to Notes from a Large Island which is a collection of columns talking about life in America that was printed in a British newspaper. However this book is actually a travalogue for Bryson's farewell tour of Britain, making it a little less pithy and a bit more... sanctimonious. There's the usual Bryson humour which I absolutely love, however after a while his descriptions of the wonder of Britain's nooks and crannies do get rather flowery and preachy. It's probably best read in small chunks to prevent the overload. (76)

Robert Harris - Pompeii

Completed: 2005-06-20
Not the most challenging of books but it was quite fun for a summer read in the garden. As historical fiction it was a bit light on the history, but what was there mostly matched my distant memories of facts with only a few bits that made me go 'hmm'. The thriller bit of it wasn't particularly thrilling not really getting beyond 'mildly intriguing'. A fun read, but not really enough to make me recommend it to anyone. (73)

Joanne Harris - Chocolat

Completed: 2005-06-15
A very sweet book with just about the right amount of everything in it - humor, magic, romance, drama and sap. It's not really a work of genius, or a book that's going to change your life, but it is an engaging read that knows exactly how much not to say. (72)

Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter - A Time Odyssey 1: Time's Eye

Completed: 2005-06-12
A good sf book, but I was expecting something a little more epic than it turned out. The story's interesting and different - featuring an unlikely collection of people taken from throughout history and put together of a glued together Earth. The groups bond together and eventually collide in a battle between Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. The pacing of the story is good and the characters entertaining, but it never quite felt like it deserved the grand title of A Time Odyssey Book 1. It is at least self contained with the implication that book 2 will tell a completely different aspect of the story. (71)

David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Completed: 2005-05-28
I was disapointed by this book, probably due to overly high expectations induced by the award nominations and blurb which led me to expect some masterpiece spanning generations and genres. What I got was 6 not hugely special seperate stories tenuously linked together with a throw-away sentance here or there. I think my biggest disappointment was the 6th story (which actually comes in the middle) which I found practically unreadable due to the heavy use of dialect. Stories 2 and 5 I found either interesting and number 3 was quite fun, but 1 and 4 really didn't interest me much. A fascinating concept for a novel, I just wish that it had actually lived up to it's ideas. (70)

Clifford D Simak - City

Completed: 2005-05-14
I wasn't expecting a collection of short stories and it took me a while to realise that it wasn't actually short stories, just chapters of a story spread over a huge time period. The initial proposal of a world where dogs rule seemed ridiculous, but by the end of the book the steps to get there are fully explained and it actually makes sense. I found myself wishing that the earlier stories had included Jenkins the robot to better bond them with the later chapters as they seem very disconnected otherwise. The inter-chapter literary analysis is very fun and keeps reminding you that this story is aiming for a point in time and the development of Earth. Very cleaverly done and wonderfully understated. (69)

Arthur C. Clarke - Prelude to Space

Completed: 2005-05-10
This book is intersting because it does exactly what the title says, it's a prelude to man's first mission to land on the moon and it ends as the craft takes off. I thought I would feel rather cheated by this ending, but in actual fact it was quite satisfying. Written in the 50s it is fascinating to see that it is over generous in it's estimates for how long it would take man to reach the moon and then over enthusiastic for how fast space exploration would proceed after it. For all that I think this book is a lot more interesting as a historical resource and literary quirk than it actually is as an evening read, it was extremely slow going and rather bland throughout. (68)

J.M. Dillard - Star Trek Enterprise - Surak's Soul

Completed: 2005-05-06
A passable Star Trek book although it really didn't feel any bigger than a standard episode. The first half dragged rather and threatened to get buried in Vulcan philosophy, but the second half was a bit more lively. Several of the characters got a bit of a raw deal in terms of consistancy, T'Pol not least. Glad I only paid a quid for it and it only took a couple of hours to read, I wouldn't recommend it. (67)

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye

Completed: 2005-05-04
I really enjoyed this book, particularly the idea of a space navy with nods to historical ideas such as the young midshipmen. There's some interesting politics and history going on with the idea of the human race gradually rebuilding following the collapse of their first empire. The sudden appearance of aliens throws everythign into confusion and the train wreck that proceeds is somewhat inevitable. My biggest complaint was that sometimes it felt too much emphasis was placed on the politics and military issues withuot consideration of scientific solutions (even by the scientists). For all my enjoyment of the book it also seemed to drag in places, felt like I'd been reading for hours and only managed 30 pages. An interesting story, a fascinating universe, fun characters and an engaging writing style all combine to make a great book. (66)

Francis Gilbert - I'm a Teacher, Get Me Out of Here

Completed: 2005-04-25
This book was quite interesting and entertaining to read but felt very light weight. It was a very short read being under 200 pages of largish print and big spacing with 'chapters' ranging from 1/2 a page up to just 4 pages. Fleshing out some of the events, characters and information would have made for a much more engaging read. Although I was amused that the school he ends up as seemed to be one of the schools that neighboured mine. An interesting concept but badly in need of fleshing out. (65)

Mary Doria Russell - Children of God

Completed: 2005-04-20
This is a very different book to The Sparrow and while it continues many of the superb aspects of the previous book it sadly (to me at least) falls short in overall quality. While The Sparrow was fundamentally a collection of character studies in a science fiction universe Children of God focusses much more on the universe itself and tells a more classic sf story of first contact gone wrong. Where it suffers is that the story telling and characters are on occasion somewhat forced to get to the point the authors wants to reach. Whilst I spent most of The Sparrow with a feeling of inevitability and sorrow I spent most of Children of God feeling annoyed and frustrated at the characters for being stupid and arrogant. The mistakes the characters make are far more obvious and unforgivable than those in The Sparrow and this made the story seem less real and more fictional which was a real shame. The bouncing timeline of the plot also feels more forced to me, particularly nearer then end when the narative suddenly jumps into the future. For all those criticisms Children of God is still a superb book. I think it is a better book than it is a sequel: in comparison to The Sparrow it suffers, but in its own rights it is a fascinating story in a very well crafted universe. (64)

Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

Completed: 2005-04-14
I was seduced into reading this book by a pretty cover, a reduced sticker and needing a fast read. It's one of a great number of fantasy books for kids that twists some of the classic ideas of children's stories around and uses them in fantasy. The slightly disturbing trend in writers to kill off families to leave a child who has to take care of his own future is used again here and includes the classic evil "step-mother" trick, here in the form of an uncle. Throw in a mystical destiny and you've got yourself a moderately entertaining read which manages to avoid drifting too far into pretensious waffle and even manages an entertaining twist at the end. Don't know what kids would think of it, but this 26 year old found it quite enjoyable and definately more relaxing read then some of the rest of my reading list recently. (63)

Mary Doria Russell - The Sparrow

Completed: 2005-04-13
This is a beautifully written and absolutely compelling and will feature highly in my all time favourite book list. I can't remember the last book I read that had such a large number of characters who were so amazingly realistic and fascinating. The depth of these characters is so great that it's actually painful to read when you know from the very outset that most of them are doomed, I spent most of the book dreading what would happen while being completely unable to put it down. It's rare that a book told in the flip-flop past/present method actually works without making you impatient for more speed however Russell maintains interest by contrasting present characters with their origins and having some of the actual storytelling told by the characters in the present, particularly powerful for the final punch of the storyline. The story is fascinating with mystery, drama, romance and tragedy all with a marvelous humour spread over it. Despite knowing from the start that certain things are going to happen, I didn't find a single part of the book that dragged or didn't do something interesting and unexpected.
I was originally doubtful of the religious aspects, but this really is not a book about religion, rather it is about faith. The discussions are frank and fascinating with characters representing all sorts of opinions and frequently realising that everyone is right. Likewise it's not really a book about science-fiction, it just uses science fiction as a framework to explore various issues. (62)

Alan Dean Foster - Nor Crystal Tears

Completed: 2005-04-08
An interesting book that isn't really just a quick, fun read, but never quite manages to hit the polished level required to boost it into the upper leagues. The story and characters are compelling and the writing style is wonderfully easy to read. However I felt that it pulled punches a bit and maybe strived too hard for the happy ending. The alien race and society was fairly well developed but frequently stumbled back into humanisms. For all my grumbling I really enjoyed the book and the ideas behind it and would recommend it, but I think I was expecting a bit too much of it. (61)

Max Allan Collins - CSI: Binding Ties

Completed: 2005-04-03
Another fun and pretty mindless CSI novel. It has some interesting dynamics as the team works on tracking down both a decade old serial killer and his recent copy-cat. There's some interesting to-and-fro between the two cases and the groupings working on them. Only minor niggle is that it was rather more of a detective novel than a CSI story, most of the investigation was just plain old detecting rather than science and forensics. Great fun though. (60)

Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Completed: 2005-03-30
This book was a long hard slog (I started reading it 3 months ago and took a huge gap reading it 'cos I couldn't be bothered to lug it around with me) but was well worth the read. The uncovering of the world is beautifully done so that it only gradually becomes clear how alternate its history is. The book is written more as a historical novel than as fantasy which makes it's slow centre section logical if a rather tedious. Personally I feel that the book would have been a much more enjoyable read (and less likely to induce hernias) if it lost 200 pages from the middle, but I can see why other's may feel this a cruel cut.
The story and characters are fascinating and carefully revealed over the course of the book, so the reader is still guessing about motivations and decisions up to the very end. The footnotes are cleverly written to maintain the feel of the historical novel although I didn't think the pictures added anything at all. I might recommend waiting for the paperback, but I would certainly recommend reading it, can't wait to see what else this author comes up with. (59)

Ursula K Le Guin - Left Hand of Darkness

Completed: 2005-03-23
This is an interesting concept and story and I can see why it seems to be considered such a classic, although I think maybe I was expecting a little too much of it and hence was disappointed. There were a few flaws in the storytelling that dropped me out of the narative and frustrated me. There were a number of places where I felt it slipped out of the concept of the world. I also got a little peeved at the occasional sexist comments. That said it's a spectacular piece of world building and storytelling which uses some interesting techniques and tricks to elegantly communicate the concepts and plot without dragging anything out. (58)

Brian Stableford - Genesys 2 - Salamander's Fire

Completed: 2005-03-17
The second book in a series with all the issues that can carry with it. The chaos from the first book involving multiple first person pov's continues and increases. The groupings are even more fluid occasionally leading to frustrations when the same thing is told to you 3 times or when they skip bits over. The pacing of the book is not good, being drawn out to make a whole book out of a few chapters of story and yet still managing to pack all the exposition into long talky sections. I can't help but feel that this is a very interesting concept, just not very well written. (57)

Brian Stableford - Genesys 1 - Serpent's Blood

Completed: 2005-03-02
The first book in a trilogy that appears to be completely standard fantasy adventure fair. It covers all the usual characters - adventuring princess, exiled rogue prince, guard captain, thief, merchant, philsopher, witch, you name it they're in here somewhere. So the band of merry adventurers sets off independantly and amazingly all manage to meet up by the end of the first book having uncovered a threat to the world as they know it, formed uneasy alliances and encountered strange beasties and cryptic prophecy type things. Oh and there's a pet monkey. The opening 1/3 of the book is quite interesting exploring the city and politics, but once they're on the road it's just absolutely standard stuff. The storytelling is rather bizarrely told from 1st person bouncing between 1/2 dozen different characters which is somewhat disjointed and also makes it even more obvious that none of the characters actually have any. They're all bland, slightly sarcastic, self-doubting and pretty confused. For some reason I've started reading the 2nd, I'm not sure why. (56)

Francis Spufford - The Child that Books Built

Completed: 2005-02-26
I looked up this book on amazon to check the spelling and glanced at the reviews (which is not something I usually do imediately before writing my own thoughts) and was entertained to find a complete split between people declaring it to be terrible and those proclaiming that said reviewers should be ignored and it was actually wonderful. Afraid I come down on the side of terrible. I was expecting some nice reminising about childhood favourites and how a person's tastes developed and changed, while these ideas were present they were bogged down by huge amounts of pretensious waffle. I found myself skim reading this faster and faster as I wasn't getting anything at all out of it. Maybe it would have been better if I'd read more of the books he mentiones, but for the most part the books are actually only bit part players in a clumsy autobiography littered with pop-psychology and waffle. (54)

John Courtenay Grimwood - The First Arabesk 3 - Falaheen

Completed: 2005-02-13
The third book is definately the most consistant of all three with the characters finally coming to accept who and what they are, even if the reader is still not 100% certain what that might be. The plot is by far the tightest and is well paced. I have to say I found the end very unsatisfying and mystifying. I failed to understand the motivations of a couple of the characters and thought that there were several contradictions, but this could be due to reading it at 2am due to inability to put it down. Oh, also the hardback version I had had a considerable number of spelling and grammar errors which was pretty bad form. (53)

John Courtenay Grimwood - The First Arabesk 2 - Effendi

Completed: 2005-02-11
I think this is probably the weakest of the opening trilogy of this (apparently 9 part) series. There were two many plots trying to go on at the same time and hence some of them just didn't get enough time to develop, notably the murdered tourist bit. I found the continual promotions about as disruptive as the character did and vaguely wondered if he was going to be Grand Master of the Universe by the end. The story of the Colonel was a fascinating one however and I wish that more time had been spent on that rather than the other plot strands. (52)

John Courtenay Grimwood - The First Arabesk 1 - Pashazade

Completed: 2005-02-09
I enjoyed this book a great deal once I finally got into it. I found the opening 1/3 or so rather slow to get going and difficult to keep track of, I'm not particularly a fan of the jumping back and forth in the timeline and found it rather too difficult to keep track of. However once it got going and I realised that I wasn't reading an sf novel, rather a mystery novel with sf bits, I found it very enjoyable and intriguing. A very interesting and enjoyable start to the series. (51)

Simon Winchester - The Map that Changed the World

Completed: 2005-02-06
I should never have really reading this book. I do have an interest in the history of geology but I do not like Simon Winchester's writing. Unfortunately I bought this book before I read Krakatoa and discovered this, so decided to give him another chance while trying to clear it off my to-read shelf. Most of the issues I had with Krakatoa apply equally to this book. The writing style is 'hack-ish', overly flowery in places and suffering from fact overload in others. The continual "but all this would soon change" and "disaster was just around the corner" were just too cheesy for words, actually removing tension rather than building it. The story itself is an interesting one, William Smith indeed sounds like an overlooked character in the history of geology who got something of a bum deal from his colleagues. Although Winchester also overdoes the hero worship elements, Smith still manages to come through as something of a short sighted obsessive. There's nothing particularly new in this book, yes Smith has been ignored, but he wasn't actually *that* interesting to non-geologists or canal enthusiasts. Also there was a distinct absence of any justification for labelling it The Map That Changed the World making the whole thing feel even more like hack-journalism. The pacing of the book is slow in the extreme and it took me nearly two months to manage to plod through it. I've heard good things about some of Winchester's other works, but I don't think I'll be bothering. (50)

Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels - Star Trek - The Sundered

Completed: 2005-01-29
From the new Star Trek Lost Era series this story is mostly set a few years after Kirk's death and 'stars' Sulu and a flock of familiar background faces aboard the Excelsior. They're attempting to make peace with the Tholians (them of Web fame that are apparently gonna appear in an Enterprise episode at some point soonish) and find the entire thing complicated by a 3rd alien group that the Tholians are at war with. There's a series of flashbacks devoted to the development of this group charting how they came to be at war. This backwards approach was quite interesting at first, looking at how unique circumstances converged to this 3 way face-off. While an interesting story and moderately enjoyable read I felt this book was too ambitious - introducing so many new characters, 2 entirely new races and a wide range of time periods that aren't previously featured in Star Trek meant that none of them were very well developed. I never really got a very good sense of life onboard Excelsior or amongst her command team, I would have preferred devoting more time to showing how Sulu's command is different to Kirk's, how he and Chekov work as captain and first officer, how Chapel runs a sickbay, more insight into Tuvok. I thought the point of the Lost Era novels would be to develope things we've only glimpsed at before and I think this was a rather missed oportunity. If you want to read a better story about Excelsior, try L.A. Graf's War Dragons, part of the Captain's Table series. (55)

Aaron Sorkin - The West Wing Script Book: Season 3 & 4

Completed: 2005-01-05
Sorkin's scripts are some of the best tv has to offer, so his script books are pretty predicatably good. This book has more additional detail than the Season 1&2 equivalent, with longer introductions to the episodes and the occasional deleted scene/line. The additional direction notes are pretty interesting too. Sorkin's comments are extraordinarily honest and give a real sense of dedication to the show and crew. More comment would be good as usual, but not as disappointing as the first book. (49)

Paul Ruditis and Ian Jackman - The Official Companion: The West Wing

Completed: 2004-12-27
The official companion covers the first two seasons. The bulk of the book is made up of episode descriptions, about 5-6 pages per episode, with screenshots and script snippets. Scattered throughout the book are small panels of comment from cast and crew members, usually about the specific episode, memories, plot origins and technical points. Each of the main cast members also gets a 2-3 page section with a publicity shot and some info on the character and the actors background and route to the past. The tour of the West Wing rooms, foreward by Martin Sheen and other additional information are all very interesting, but much too short. All in all an interesting read that's beautifully presented, but disappointing in that there's not more actual 'companion' information. (46)

Max Allan Collins - CSI: Grave Matters

Completed: 2004-12-26
Another good media tie in novel. The characters are well written to match the series and the story feels very much like it could be an episode, although in some ways that's a little disappointing as I think that one of the plusses of media novels is that they can go places the series can't afford to. But a good read with the usual csi twists and turns. (47)

Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

Completed: 2004-12-23
I read most of this book right at the beginning of the year, but only just got round to finishing it thanks to the weight of the hardback. What I remember of the rest of it was supported by the last 5 chapters which are extremely readable, very enjoyable and pretty informative as well. It's a whistle stop tour of the history of science and the state of our understanding today. A great introduction to the subject and a very fun read. (45)

Alexander McCall Smith - The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Completed: 2004-12-16
I didn't partiularly enjoy this book I'm sorry to say. I found the structure, plot and prose too stilted and simplistic, I could predict the results of the mysteries and the end of the sentances equally and I wasn't particularly interested in getting to the end of either. Just not my thing I guess. (43)

Bill Bryson - Notes From a Big Country

Completed: 2004-12-12
I'm a recent convert to Bill Bryson following his excellent Short History of Nearly Everything. Notes... is a collection of short columns written not long after he returned to America having lived in the UK for 20 years or so. They range from sappy episodes delivering his son to college to explosive rants about anything from US college basketball, to Hershey's chocolates and basically anything he's happened to encounter recently. Americanisms are always poetically explained for the British readers and throughout all his rants you get a good sense of a wonderful sense of humour with the world. I'd say that the short chapters make it perfect for reading on busses except that I kept laughing out loud and getting funny looks. (42)

Hal Clements - Mission of Gravity

Completed: 2004-11-18
The final of 2004's Retro-hugo nominees that I've read for a book group. It can't really be compared with books like Farenheit 451 and Childhood's End, because it's not trying to be that sort of book. This is a book about a scientific concept, it's not particularly trying to tell a story, make a point, or make you think about issues. It's trying to describe a world that's completely foreign to us in a fictional way. It's a fun read and a very interesting concept, but it's not a great literary work. I heartily recommend it and enjoyed it a great deal more than the other 'better' books. I mean it has foot long caterpillars as it's main characters for crying out loud, how could you not love it!? (41)

Isaac Asimov - The Caves of Steel

Completed: 2004-11-03
I was really disappointed with this, I'd read it years ago and remembered not much of it beyond that it was quite fun. Sadly on re-reading it I found that it just couldn't compare to some of the other 'classic' sf I've been reading recently. My principle problem was the merging of the mystery novel and an sf story. The idea of the city life of people of the future, colonisation, robots and the future of the race was very interesting, but I just didn't like the balance. The quality of the mystery story was poor, but seemed to be given the primary focus, while the concept stuff was intersting, but treated as the background to the mystery. There were two too many 'I know who did it!' chapters, the final resolve relied upon the hero knowing something that hadn't been mentioned previously and the whole thing just kind of fizzled out. Really disappointing. (40)

Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human

Completed: 2004-10-27
I really enjoyed the majority of this book, being let down only by the beginning and end. The beginning I found to be rather pretensious and confusing, but whether it was just that I got used to the style or it did actually change the rest of the book was quite easy to read and slick. The ending I was disappointed by because it sort of sputtered out and drifted a bit too far into debates of what morals and ethics are. The rest of the book however I found to be interesting and very well structured. Bouncing back and forwards in the timeline of the story is handled very slickly and was perfectly aimed so that I could work things out by myself without getting too confused, clues came at just the right rate. I also liked how he kept the story very localised without too much drifting into 'consequences for mankind'. (39)

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

Completed: 2004-10-24
I suspect this is one of those books that you're not meant to like and it certainly worked. I found it very difficult to get into the style of the writing. The disjointedness of the writing and the characters just kept reminding me I was reading a book. I couldn't get imersed in the world or the heads of the characters.
That said, there were some sections so beautifully real and powerful that they just stay in your brain, for me it's the woman staying in her house and the vision of a group of itinerant professors remembering books and passing them on by word of mouth. The sense of hope at the end of this book is strong, some things just cannot and will not turn to ash. (37)

Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End

Completed: 2004-10-21
Just finished reading this at lunch time and decided to get some of my thoughts down before they evaporated and I forgot what I was thinking! This book is extremely powerful and one of Clarke's best. He uses 200 pages to describe a 100 years of human 'history' in a beautifully succinct way, telling a story about mankind using a handful of individuals, perfectly balancing the emotional and historical impact of events. The snapshots into this 100 years are nicely paced to build tension and give a tremendous sense of the frustrations and concerns that spread decades of the story while only taking up a few pages. Clarke knows exactly how much he has to tell to get a story across without force-feeding the reader.
My only disappointment was the ending. Not the actual end of the story which is very powerful and quite mindblowing, however the tools he uses to tell this ending I thought suffered a little. The story seemed to continue about 20 pages too long in my opinion. Returning to the story of Jan and introducing the Overlords' planet caused the story to peeter out and distracted away from the impact of the revelation and it's consequences. I'm not sure we really needed to see the final conclussion of the children's journey, leaving some things to wonder is a good thing. (36)

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 28 - Going Postal

Completed: 2004-10-18
While this book is still following Pratchett's recent return to form, I was somewhat disappointed. Throughout the whole thing I had the distinct sense I'd already read the story, and I had, in The Truth 4 books back in the series. Substituting the post office in for the newspaper and you've got the same basic plot. One man building the [post office/newspaper] up against impossible odds, ridicule etc etc.
Add to this the fact that it just doesn't feel very Discworld. There are very few things about the Discworld post office that are different to our own post offices, there's no discworld sparkle to it. I think Pratchett made a huge mistake in this book, it would have been much more interesting to tell the story of the clacks towers instead, with their parallels to email giving the opportunity for discworld magic.
All that said, it's Pratchett, so it's still fun and the stamps are great. Oh! And it's got chapters!!! (38)

Juliet E. McKenna - Aldabreshin Compass 2 - Northern Storm

Completed: 2004-10-08
I'm an unashamed fan of Juliet's work mostly because I've met her several times and been thoroughly charmed by her. They are not normally the kind of books I read - multibook spanning fantasy sword and sorcery type affairs. I started reading her work when she came to talk at an event as a first time author and I've been eagerly purchasing them as soon as they're published ever since.
This is the 2nd book in (I'm guessing) a 4 part series set in the same world, but different region as her previous series. However each of Juliet's books is a complete story in itself, leaving enough hanging for you to want the next in the series, but being complete enough that you don't finish each book with a disappointed wail as your hero hangs from the proverbial cliff. Northern Storm picks up the story of Kheda a while after the conclussion of Southern Fire. He is now warlord of Chazen, the region ruined by the wild men's invasion in the previous novel. As he tries to rebuild Chazen and remove the taint of wizardry he is set upon by a more iminent problem - a hungry dragon.
As Kheda tells the story you get a very good sense of the warring instincts in him. He wants to protect his new domain, but still has very strong ties to his old domain of Kaish, not wanting to harm his people or his son who is their new lord. Meanwhile he's desperate to purge himself of the dreadful taint of magic on himself and his land, but is continually faced with having to seek out magic to save his land. He's also conflicted in his need to be seen as a good warlord and husband to the last surviving wife of the dead ruler and his desire to be with Rishala, a travelling poet who knows all his secrets and his concerns. Throughout all this he clings to his belief in the power of omens, even if he doesn't always understand what they indicate.
I found this book, like Juliet's others, to be hugely readable, causing several lunch breaks to overrun. The pacing of the book is superb, large chunks of time are skipped between chapters so there is no lingering or descriptions of events that don't need describing. The intersting mix of 1st and 3rd person gives insight into how the characters are thinking without getting bogged down. The cast of supporting characters are very intersting, each with their own reasons for doing what they are doing, whether for themselves, for the general good, or for a combination. Few of the characters are withou ulterior motives and considerable 'flaws' in their character, but you find yourself liking most of them regardless.
Many people have said that Juliet's work is 'fantasy for non-fantasy fans' and I'm inclined to agree. Sword and sorcery has never appealed to me, but I find her work utterly engrossing, with interesting concepts, well-developed characters, engaging plots and superb pacing. My only reservation in recommending her work is that her books all tend to be about 500 pages and come in series so can be a daunting committment. However even though it can take me weeks to read 200 pages, I finished Northern Storm in less than a week as I couldn't put it down. I'd love to see her write some independant novels/short stories and take a shot at another universe, just to see what she comes up with. But for now I'll just wait until the next book in the series comes out next Sept. (35)

Max Allan Collins - CSI Miami: Heat Wave

Completed: 2004-10-04
This book is slightly more balanced for characters than the first CSI Miami book was, Horatio is still the centre point, but the other characters actually seem like supporting characters here instead of one shot guest appearances. Good use is made of the fact that this is a book unreliant on budget and time restraints and the plot is suitably scaled up, although the body count does get a little silly and maybe somewhat far-fetched. I read the entire thing in one night and enjoyed reading it, although it's unlikely to go down in my list of 'best books ever'. (34)

Max Allan Collins - CSI Miami: Florida Getaway

Completed: 2004-09-27
I really like Collins' books for how well he captures the feel and characters of CSI and manages to push them a bit further, doing things in the books that can't easily happen on the tv show. In this case he features some of the original CSI characters as they are forced to allow a man they know to be a murderer to leave Las Vegas and travel to Miami. The Miami crew are asked to help out and unsurprisingly crime and mayhem follow. My main issue with the book is not that it diverts from the ethos of the tv show, but that it suffers from exactly what I feel the tv show suffers from - too much bloody Horatio Caine. The whole book is centered on him, with the other characters getting barely a couple of scenes each. As with the show, the story is solid, well structured and interesting, but I found most of the time I was just desperate to strangle the supercilious Horatio. (33)

Simon Winchester - Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

Completed: 2004-09-27
A very dramatic title for a book actually manages to make the amazing event outstandingly dull. In 1883 the volcanic island of Krakatoa (WEST of Java) exploded killing 10s of thousands of people sending shock waves round the earth several times and producing the loudest noise ever heard on the planet. However this doesn't happen until somewhere around page 300 of this epic and by the time I got there, I wasn't sure I cared anymore. Winchester spends the majority of the book scene setting - there's pretty much everything here - the political history of the region, the history of plate tectonics, geology, ecology, religion, imperialism, transportation - the list goes on (bizarely not really including any extensive section on how/why volcanos are formed and erupt). Each chapter that takes another one of these areas gets right up to the point of the eruption and ends with a gloriously dramatic phrase of the order of "but all this was going to change one fateful night in 1883", then the next chapter starts with "back in the dark ages...". This gets a little frustrating, by the time it got to chapters on the eruption I'd already got fed up of waiting, looked up the facts on wikipedia and was just desperately trying to finish the book to tick it off the list.
Winchester is a journalist (although he trained as a geologist so does evidently understand what he's talking about) and this comes through in his style a lot. There are some beautiful turns of phrase and small sections are very well structured, but the larger structure is poor, one chapter for example is well over a hundred pages long. The use of pictures and maps is also very poor, the maps at the start of the book are poor and don't actually indicate a lot of the places he's talking about, and frequently there's paragraphs of discriptions when a nice map or diagram would have done. The narative just doesn't flow, each chapter takes a different chunk of the story but they never really tie together and form a coherent narative. The book should have been about 150 pages shorter and with some restructuring to tell the story of the volcano, rather than the entire history of anything vaguely associated with the region and scientific background it would have made an entertaining read. (48)

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 4 - Something Rotten

Completed: 2004-08-10
I was rather disappointed with this, the fourth and possibly last in the Thursday Next series. While Fforde has learnt the error of previous books where he's compressed an entire plot into the last few chapters, he seems to have discovered new and varied problems. My principle complaint was that the haracters didn'treallyhave much character to them. They're all readable but they don't go anywhere, even the real world people who aren't supposed to be frozen like the book people. Thursday varied between highly competant and pretty dappy, but was just much the same as in the previous novels, the addition ofhersonbeing treated more like a pet.
The plot seemed to have a few to many stringsto it, and although they all seem to be resolved it was just too much goingon. The time travel element also meant that there was pretty much no danger ofeverything failing to work out for the best.
Add to this some very clumsy mistakes (appearing/disappearing props, characters and a coule of misued names) and someflow breaking (and not very good) illustrations and you end up with a disappointing book. It's still an enjoyable read which I finished pretty quickly, butit seems to be missing most of the heart and soulthat thepreviousinstallments had. I eagerly await what Fforde will do next. (44)

Iain Banks - The Crow Road

Completed: 2004-07-29
I love reading Banks, his books are exceptionally readable with well developed characters, engaging dialogue and a very natural balance of humour and angst. The Crow Road is no exception to this and was a difficult book to put down. For all this however the book has the same 'issue' that many other recent books have - there's very little plot. The structure of the book is very similar to The Business in that the first 3/4 of the book is just about the characters and setting and then the plot is introduced almost as an afterthought. The early book does have hints and scene setters for the final plot resolve, but they're tucked away almost to the point that you don't notice them. Banks also heavily uses flashback in this book and it can be tricky to work out when/where and who you are, however this is probably intentional and gives an interesting illustration of how things change and how they stay the same (32)

Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Completed: 2004-05-31
The book is focussed on trying to show us what it is like to have a completely different view of the world to what is considered normal. The mystery elements to it are actually pretty weak, just being in place to give some semblance of a plot and structure to the book. The central character is brilliantly written and well developed and seeing his world (and how it's at odds with other people's worlds) is fascinating, although sometimes very painful. A very good book although not exactly a light summer read. (31)

Steven Sherrill - The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Completed: 2004-05-24
Recommended by numerous people and a book club favourite at the moment I felt that this was a boring story hiding behind an interesting gimic and extremely well developed character. The gimic of the main character being The Minotaur is nicely underused, the important thing is not so much what he is as the fact that he's isolated and lonely, an outsider to society desperately clinging to any connection he can make with people and communities. The brief glimpses of people from a similar background are intriguing but frustratingly undeveloped, frustrating for both the Minotaur and the reader. As with many books of the moment however there is very little plot, which means there's no real drive to keep picking the book up. What plot there is develops very suddenly about 50 pages from the end (although not without set up earlier on), at which point it's difficult to put down. A fascinating and beautifully written character, but I don't think I'd describe it as a great book. (30)

Dan Brown - The DaVinci Code

Completed: 2004-05-07
I was very disappointed by this book, blurbed as "one of the finest mysteries" which I actually found pretty obvious and straightfoward for the most part. I found the initial set up for the adventure to be pretty daft and hole ridden (why didn't the curator run, why weren't there more failsafes?). My hopes from the start were pretty slim when on one of the first page it stated "All descriptions of... secret rituals in this novel are accurate". And as soon as it was 'revealed' that the code and secrets were involved with the Holy Grail I gave up pretty much all hope.
The story telling is clumsy, with the extremely short chapters making the book seem extremely bitty. The painfully slow hinting and eventual revealing of various backgrounds and histories are quite painful. It works as a mystery in that once you've started reading it, it's hard to stop, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they're interested in grail history. (29)

Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

Completed: 2004-05-02
One of those books that I'd kept heard mentioned as a good read and finally picked up on the advise of a unknown lady in a bookshop. A fascinating read looking at both the training and life of a geisha and life in Japan during and after WW2. The level of detail is fascinating and the plot and characters engaging. My one complaint is that the overall romance seems completely dreamy, pinned on a fleeting glance that carries through 20 years. However for the most part the story telling is well managed with peaks and disappointments in all the right places. I read this in less than 24 hours, unable to put it down. (28)

Dan Simmons - Ilium

Completed: 2004-05-01
An enjoyable read with some great ideas and characters in it. A lot is going to rely on the second part to see if Simmons can actually tie everything together and live up to the promises he’s made. I suspect if I’d done a little more research on it before starting and been aware it was the first in a pair of novels I’d come away feeling less disappointed. I’d probably recommend it to people, but may advise considering postponing reading it until the conclusion is published. (more at Livejournal.) (27)

Steven Brust - Viscount of Adrilankha 1 - The Paths of the Dead

Completed: 2004-04-24
This is book 1 of 3 which makes up the 3rd book of a trilogy and it's basically a 500page introductory section. unfortunately this means that it isn't actually very good. There's minimal plot going on, just lots of introducing characters and having them traipse around the countryside (very similar to Fellowship of the Ring). Hopefully it's serving as a slow introduction to a far more interesting book 2 and 3. (26)

Tom Holt - The Portable Door

Completed: 2004-03-20
Tom Holt appears to be succumbing to the lure of the series in something that's a mix between Banks' The Business and Harry Potter. It's a fun enough concept and amusing to read, but it could really have done with a bit more actual plot to it. Not sure whether it's got enough originality to sustain a series though. (21)

Reginald Hill - Good Morning, Midnight

Completed: 2004-02-25
A return to a more standard format for Dalziel and Pascoe following the more arc-ish set of stories. The story itself is very interestingly formed, as you know what happened from the very start, just not why, or how people will respond to it. As ever it's the characters that are the real delight though, with plenty of references to previous books and events to keep the characters totally consistant and interesting. (24)

Iain M. Banks - Excession

Completed: 2004-02-20
I was recommended this book when I asked which Culture novel I should read first. If this is an easy introduction, then I'm scared. It really does throw you in, with very little explanation what is going on (having finished it, I still have little idea). Multiple strings weave together to form the plot with a huge cast of extras. Utterly bemusing, moderately enjoyable, quite fascinating. (25)

Carl Sagan - Contact

Completed: 2004-01-31
I finally got round to reading this book having enjoyed the film years ago. A good read, very indepth and detailed. I got the impression that I was being ranted at the whole time, but I'm not sure what for... (22)

Iain Banks - The Business

Completed: 2004-01-07
I really enjoyed this book it has a cool central concept and 'universe'. It suffers from a similar problem as many other books I seem to be reading at the moment in that the plot is almost thrown in a (20)

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 2 - Lost in a Good Book

Completed: 2003-06-10
Another enjoyable book from this new author, following the adventures of Thursday Next. The world is comfortingly familiar yet delightfully excentric. Once again the book suffers from a slightly rushed ending and numerous interludes in the general story, but all are thoroughly enjoyable. Most importantly the characters are developing and the situations are changing so there's never a dull moment. (18)

Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next 1 - The Eyre Affair

Completed: 2003-05-05
A very bizarre book, but extremely entertaining. Sort of an alternate history kinda thing with a literary obsession, time travel and genetically engineered dodos. I would probably have got more out of it if I knew more Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen, but even without know details of books and characters they talk about it's still an intriguing and entertaining read. (17)

Harry Harrison - The Transatlantic Tunnel

Completed: 2003-04-19
A good book based on an interesting concept. An alternate history breaking off at some point that on the surface is unimportant but completely changes everything leading to America still being a colony of England in the 60s which leads to a huge engineering project to build a tunnel between the two countries. Slickly written with enough details to keep it interesting without dragging, this book is a classic of the genre. (16)

Steven Brust - To Reign in Hell

Completed: 2003-03-05
Another enjoyable book from Steven Brust with another interesting style. His take on the revolt in heaven is fascinating, you get to watch from both sides and watch the story unfold and landslide to it's inevitable conclusion. The 'universe' and characters are all well thought out and written for and there's some great one liners. (5)

Dave Stern - Star Trek Enterprise - What Price Honor?

Completed: 2003-01-29
A really enjoyable, well written Star Trek novel (shock horror).I actually found this book a lot better written then many of the recent episodes. The characters are believable and actually sensible and there weren't any major plot holes. The bouncing around in the timeline of the story got a little irritating at times, but for the most part was handled quite well. (15)

Jenson Button - My Life on the Formula 1 Rollercoster

Completed: 2003-01-26
There's something fundamental wrong with reading an autobiography of someone younger than I am. Nothing like it for making you feel like an underachiever. Jenson Button' autobiography is a really laid back affair, very blunt and honest about a lot of stuff. You can't help but like the guy, even if he does occasionaly come over as arrogant or a bit of an idiot. He concentrates on racing, in particular F1, so you don't have to plough through a lot of boring stuff when you've picked it up 'cos you're an F1 fan. A lightweight read, hopefully his career will work out like he hopes and overcome some of the recent blips. (11)

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 26 - Night Watch

Completed: 2003-01-16
Another great book from TP, he's definately back on form. The book centres around Vimes, who's always a great character, I did miss the watch members who don't appear (not giving away any spoilers), but the other people are still fun. The whole book is rather darker in plot and tone then some of the other Discworlds, but I think it works. (3)

J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings 3: Return of the King

Completed: 2003-01-10
imho the best of the 3 books. ROTK moves much faster than the other books and there are less 'filler scenes'. If anything the book moves a little too fast and everything comes to a slightly abrupt halt leaving a large amount of the book as more of an epilogue. I actually found the later chapters quite sad as the fellowship broke up, but maybe that was just the effect of having spent the last month and a half reading the damn series. (7)

Murray Walker - Unless I'm Very Much Mistaken

Completed: 2003-01-08
I got this book a while ago, but still haven't got roud to doing more than browsing the photos. Probably 'cos it's so damn thick. (13)

Brian Sibley - The Lord of the Rings: The Making of the Movie Trilogy

Completed: 2003-01-04
A really great book about the making of the entire trilogy, hence it has stuff covering the whole production and photos of things in ROTK that we haven't seen yet. A lot of the content has been covered on the extended Fellowship DVD, but as the book is comprised of personal interviews made during and just after filming, there's lots of interesting anecdotes.
The book focusses on making the films, ie design, manufacture, filming techniques, the score. I think there's a companion book that interviews the actors and looks more at the actual filming. Lots of really great photos. (4)

J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings 2: The Two Towers

Completed: 2002-12-29
This book is really 2 books. The first half I found really interesting, following the large battles and larger scale concerns with the peoples of Middle Earth. The second half deals exclusively with Frodo and Sam taking the ring to Mount Doom and their adventures along the way. Much as I love the hobbits, their sections really do drag. (2)

J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings 1: Fellowship of the Ring

Completed: 2002-12-06
It took me a long time to finally get round to reading this, but I've made it. It goes extremely slowly sometimes and really did require a lot of effort to get through. However the story and the world are absolutely amazing. (1)