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The rather detailed blurb says far more about the plot of this self-consciously odd little book, than the actual text does. I'm not sure exactly what to do with this book, or what I think of it.

It's short, almost a long short story, and made up of short, almost entirely under one page, "STATEMENT"s, with a very few other things to set up the frame.

It's about a starship, probably, about mortal humans and the perhaps-immortal AI humanoids they've created, about what humanness is, what longing is, and how we might relate to enigmatic alien objects.

And it approaches all of these things mostly obliquely, indirectly, through hints and implications. Which can, I think, be either fascinating, or unsatisfying. Or both!

A solid selection of fourteen British mystery short stories, chronologically arranged from 1887 to 1955. Fun, unchallenging, escapist reading.

I feel like this is a beautiful and evocative book, for someone whose life experiences are rather different from mine.

It's all about loss and love and memory, grief and acceptance and other deep themes, and it treats them in lovely skillful ways. But while I have of course experienced these things, being a person and all, the ways that the book deals with them is from a subtly and perhaps mysteriously different perspective than mine. Maybe the ideal reader is a woman, or from Japan, or just has a different relationship with the world than I do, in some subtler way.

Having said that, though, I don't begrudge the time that I spent reading it, and I certainly came away with some striking new images, if not any specific insights or resolution.

lol. It was not trivial to even find this book in Goodreads in order to record it!

This is a fun little book, extremely meta, and if you've never encountered a work before that exposes and questions our assumptions about what books are, what an author is, what a reader is, and so on, this would be a neat first one to run across I think.

It doesn't raise these questions in any especially novel or creative ways, really, beyond the admittedly cute title, cover blurbs, and author bio. But still, that it does it at all is praiseworthy.

A lovely rich retelling of the Circe story, keeping to the original (more than once I thought "well THAT didn't happen in the old myths!" only to discover on looking it up that it did), but also adding layers of its own.

I particularly enjoyed when another woman started out as antagonist, but gradually came to be seen as someone in similar circumstances, or even an ally.

Good classic Christie, with twists and deceptions and coincidences (OR ARE THEY) and everything else we expect. Better than run-of-the-mill, but not a brilliant standout either.

Very fun anime space opera

A fine example of the genre; reasonably hard reasonably far-future SF with various "ready for anime" features. (catgirls! Many Japanese cultural references! Catgirls kissing! More mention of fashion and breast size than strictly necessary for the plot!) An interesting take on superhuman AIs and the challenges thereof. And brief interesting appendices on the technologies.

Very gratifying to follow Alice as she slowly grows up and discovers her unique heritage.

Very much enjoyed it and hope to notice when the sequel comes out.

Solid and fun, if rather generic, 30's pulp murder mystery. Amusing footnotes referring to perhaps-fictional events and facts of the day, that do not turn out to have anything at all to do with the plot.

An amusing little bibliophile mystery novella.

Or maybe a longish short story. Fun and worth the brief time it will take to read. Slight twist ending helps with what might otherwise feel sort of pointless.

(And interestingly, the lost Chaucer work for which the story is named, actually exists! Or, you know, actually doesn't.)

Pretty good, if ultimately rather dark, sf opera

I enjoyed reading this. It's a vast span of time, and a lot happens, although mostly to only the main characters; one wonders a bit if the rest of the Galaxy is really so passive. The quasi-Buddhist and quasi-Greek and quasi-so-on terms were a bit odd and sometimes off-putting. And I have to admit with some shame that I couldn't always keep straight exactly who was who and whose wife or parent or whatever.

The background universe and technology and philosophy are rather rich and interesting. There's too much exposition at times.

And then (semi-spoiler) at the end in some sense none of it matters. Which is maybe sort of the point, but still...

Excellent funny non-technical intro to AI and its weirdnesses.

Anyone who already has some technical knowledge of AI probably won't find much new here in the way of math or specific algorithms, but they will still laugh at the descriptions of silly things that AIs have done when they were asked the wrong question or given imperfect data, or found a bug that let them speed across a simulation at light speed.

And as a good math-free introduction to some of the basic techniques of modern AI, and some of its features that as humans and citizens we might want to worry about, it's also good and quite accessible.