Reviews and Comments

Very Sherlock Holmes! That part worked really well and made for an enjoyable read.

It's set on Jupiter, but the sci-fi part is not making a lot of difference. Public transport is free, but the weather is bad. People are sad because Earth is gone.

Okay, so it's making some difference. The crime is motivated by the sci-fi part and committed using its tools. But I don't understand it! The three guys stole some seed samples to restart the Earth biosphere. They illegally launched a spaceship to deliver them too. But what's up with Bolien? Why did he go around Jupiter on a suspended railcar? Why did they kill the homeless guy?

I was probably supposed to understand that. But I didn't worry about it too much. The relationship between Mossa and Pleiti was more important to me. There are several differences from Holmes and Watson. Our Watson (Pleiti) knows less. What Mossa is thinking and doing is as much a mystery as the crimes are. They are women. The relationship is more romantic. They think they are an autistic genius and a normal person, but actually they are both autistic geniuses. Otherwise it's the same. Gallons of tea.

If there's another Mossa & Pleiti story coming, I'm going to check it out!

What a ride!

I've read a few urban fantasy books, but stopped reading even more. The genre always appealed to me. I grew up reading World of Darkness TTRPG rulebooks. But most novels I read felt too eager to fulfill fantasies without any care for being a good novel.

I'm not saying this is untrue of The Library at Mount Char. It's also mostly focused on hitting a series of fantastic dioramas with little care for what happens in between. But come on! These dioramas are really cool! And there are so many of them! Just non-stop cool scenes! Everything is over the top. And I mean OVER THE TOP!!!

I think a cornerstone of this genre is wacky situations that must be resolved with a perfectly logical explanation hundreds of pages later. "No time to explain! You must stick this banana in the tiger's ear or we all die!" This is taken to the extreme here. Nothing makes sense in the first 100 pages. I love this formula. (I didn't love that the wacky thing was often torture or murder.)

The conclusion of the plot takes this to the next level, with hidden messages in childhood memories providing the "perfectly logical" explanations. I think that's a perfect way to end the book.

An intention to have a meaning and characters you can connect with are important pillars of a good novel. This novel doesn't have them, at least not for me. Yes, we have a wacky cast of more than a dozen characters with well presented, diverse personalities and other traits. A bloody warrior in a pink tutu, a cunning librarian, a kind naked guy who is used to living with animals, etc. Somehow none of them works as an anchor for the reader. They have plenty of curious traits, plenty of scenes, and still I didn't care about anybody. Everybody is either evil or an idiot. Only Carolyn has a goal. Steve getting hyperfocused on saving Naga is out of the blue, but a valuable emotional motor while it lasts!

That said, this novel works fine without meaning or good characters. There's plenty of that stuff in other books. It's okay to just be a fun ride!

A tale as old as time. Boring stuff happens, then two people become best friends on a perilous journey.

I'm being unfairly harsh. It's a 70 year old book. I'm unfair to expect novelty. What was novel at its time, I have already seen rehashed a hundred times since. I'm sorry I haven't read it earlier.

I think the first half is boring because there's nothing to care about. The Foretellers sounded like a hook, but they end up on par with an interesting rock. "They commune spiritually and tell the future? Kinda cool, I guess. Anyway..."

The societal aspect is a lot of coverage for two opposed countries. The message seems to be that a powerless monarchy is preferable to an oppressive communist regime. I never felt the need to rank these options, but okay.

Gender. It's pretty cool! It's cool as a gimmick, and it's also cool as a reflection on real-life gender roles. Imagine if we didn't have gender and if two people have sex one would get pregnant at random. It has some effect on Gethenian society and their worldview. But I don't think the story would be much impacted if you removed this and made them normal humans.

The second half is a perilous journey. Nothing really happens other than becoming best friends. And they were good friends already at the start. But it's well written. I started to care for the characters as I followed their struggle.

The setting is interesting! The galaxy seems to be full of human colonies lost for half a million years. The settlers apparently liked to tinker with their genetics too. And now a space-faring empire is rediscovering these colonies without faster-than-light travel. It's pretty cool. But we basically don't see anything of this. The new empire is said to be super nice. Mostly because it cannot really do anything because space is too big. But at least it feels nice to be a part of a galactic empire.

I don't generally read non-fiction books about money or politics. I figure what is true and interesting will percolate to common knowledge sooner or later. The percolation process protects me from conspiracy theories and boredom.

But I never saw an explanation for why CEOs get $100 million salaries. Isn't it weird? Couldn't they find anyone willing to do the job for $10 million? How are these salaries negotiated?

I was hoping this book would give me the answer. It does, but it's even better than that! It reveals a critical part of the American economy that I was unaware of.

The rest of the review is a "spoiler" as I will try to summarize my takeaway. Stop reading if you want to enjoy it first hand. But I promise the book is great either way. As in most non-fiction, there is some repetition and some extra details that you could skip depending on your mood. But it cites really good sources and is a fun short read.

So why do the shareholders pay CEOs so much? What I got from the book is that they have no say in it. They are robbed. The CEO pay is determined by the shareholders' representatives, the board of directors. The shareholders have little say in who represents them. The CEO has a lot of say. The board is made up of other CEOs and top executives. It's a whole class of people that exploit the shareholders and parasitize large corporations. They make up 70% of the top 0.1%!

A lot of things I blamed capitalism and shareholders for — it may actually be the fault of the top executive class. What a revelation!

In book 1 you fall in love with Gideon, and in book 2 Gideon is gone. Even deleted from memory. Eventually you fall in love with Harrow, so guess how much Harrow we get in book 3! Once again it's less than none. Is this a pattern? Is this series with non-stop death and skeletons possibly meant to make me think about loss?

Other than Gideon and Harrow, what else was good in the first two books? I guess skeletons, magic, and spaceships were cool. So those are also deleted. Thinking about loss yet?! Hope you like going to school in the projects! Just in case you thought that could be fun, let's delete your capacity to read and write and think complex thoughts. Perfect!

This violent approach to destroying everything the reader loves sounds funny, but it's a huge risk too. It only works if you can again invent a character to fall in love with and a great setting for them. Yep, that happens again. Nona is awesome.

The book is a bit of a slow start. Nothing happens in the first half. (You liked plot? No plot for you!) But Nona & friends are an interesting bunch, so even their everyday lives are pretty cool. The broken-down environment with some magic that nobody cares about and a huge monster looming above the city... Is this [b:Borne|31451186|Borne (Borne, #1)|Jeff VanderMeer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1477487850l/31451186.SX50.jpg|48253660]? The dream sequences start out incomprehensible, but become a pretty exciting infodump very fast.

In all three books the ending was so quick and complex that I forgot them right away. I just finished book 3 and I couldn't tell you what happened beyond that they got to the Locked Tomb. The rest is a dream-like blur. I wonder if this is intended or I just didn't pay enough attention. Anyway, I can't wait for book 4! I hope it comes out this year.


Also on the topic of loss: Gideon is back. She's still talking smack and is kind of funny. But we see her through Nona's eyes now and all the charm is gone. The Gideon we loved is dead! It's her corpse walking. Fantastic work on that. But I'm still rooting for a true resurrection! All I want for book 4 is to just take the 3 characters we love, and put them on stage together! (Nona can be Alecto.)

Everyone opens up Harrow the Ninth after having read Gideon the Ninth and fallen in love with Gideon's character. "Is she okay?" is the only question I wanted to see answered. Does Harrow the Ninth deliver?

No. Gideon is not mentioned for the majority of the book. But it's worse than that. We're actively getting flashbacks to Gideon the Ninth's plot with Gideon erased from it! Fantastic.

The world-building is going strong, there's lot's of drama, bloody action, twists and betrayals. I'm still on board with the series. Every decision on the writer's part is surprising and fun. This book was a typical 2nd book and a bit of a filler. Is the story going anywhere? Probably yes, but I also don't really care. I'm here for lewd necromancers in space, and I don't think this series will run out of those.

PS: Haha, some great quotes:

At this, there was a fractional relaxing of Mercymorn's frowzled brow: not relief, but the germination of the seed of relief.

Old people should be shot.

It was not the way of the Ninth House to pray with such wilful credulousness; yet you prayed all the while knowing Ianthe's facility for tergiversation would have given the whole universe pause.

So I'm shut in here—walled in, really— to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_pizza_with_left_beef)

It was good! The setting is fantastic! There are smaller versions of atoms, and there are smaller humans and rabbits built from these. The smaller humans have the same number of atoms and the same weight as the big ones. They are just small. And fast. And sweat a lot. And hear/see higher frequencies.

This gives the setting a lovely sense of familiarity (gnomes!) and novelty (they can walk through steel walls!).

Perhaps to add a dose of normalcy, the technology and society is mundane. They make phone calls, hire private detectives, write to the council, and worry about road works. I think that's reasonable. But perhaps a few interesting technologies could have added a dose of cool! One pervasive setting-specific technology is rescalers. But they just make conversations between scales more mundane.

Same with the characters. They are all very sensible. You know how annoying it is when a character in a book does something silly that they could have avoided by thinking for a second? Well somehow the opposite can be annoying too.

The plot is okay. A bit too sensible, haha! Like, the big secret technology is discovered in a laboratory trial stage, far from any world domination-stage trials. (That's okay.) The plot structure is a bit haphazard. Of course we jump between the scales and that's cool. But it's basically a tiny glimpse of Scale 1, a good dose of Scale 4, and then 80% Scale 7. So unfair! I think I'll go protest against those shifty little gnomes!

I had one question throughout the book: Scale 1 is not the same as rootlife, right? It's already half that. So what happened to rootlife humans? I expected to find out the horrible truth at the end, but no. Looks like I will have to make up my own horrible theory!

It's great! Most of the book is great stuff that I was expecting: experiments and findings about bees. What I did not expect is the biographical bits about historical bee researchers. These are very short, so absolutely don't distract from the bee content. But they are also amazing! Never a boring figure. Everybody was a freed slave, fighting the nazis, ending up in an insane asylum, or something else equally gripping.

The bee content is focused on the individual bee and does a good job of reining in the "hivemind" myth a bit. My only issue with the bee content is that it assumed more bee knowledge of me than what I have. On the first pages it explains that bee hives are pitch dark and crazy crowded. That bees only live a few weeks and collect only around 1 gram of honey over their lives. That's amazing and I need more basic information like that. Around the middle of the book I learned that bees only leave the hive after they are already a few weeks old! Tell me more!

I quite enjoyed reading it, but was a bit let down in the end. I like LitRPG. Gaining skills and leveling up is so much fun. But in the end this book is nothing beyond that. I was hoping for more. I could be playing a video game myself instead of reading about someone else playing it, you know?

The book has an intriguing start that foreshadows a much more complex story. But apparently that's saved for book #20 or so. There is no progress at all on that background story in this book! I feel cheated!

Actually I would be fine with that. Two things could save the book easily for me. Good characters. There is a small roster of characters, but no friendships form. Something is wrong with the main character. He's looking at humans as tools to be used. He even tortures a guy. This is never acknowledged as an issue, so maybe the author doesn't recognize it? Anyway, this makes it hard for relationships to form, and so there is no character-driven drama.

The other thing that could save the book is clever use of abilities. If we're all about game mechanics, let's run with that! But that all falls flat. He gets a useful (if cliché) ability. He uses it. It works! Level up. Another ability. It works as well! From page to page this works well, but I'm left waiting for him actually doing something unexpected. It never happens.

The book actually tries in the final battle. But the only improvement over the "get ability — use ability" formula is that it's "get ability — don't mention it for a long time — use ability". Also the final battle is about something that we never cared about through the rest of the book, so I wasn't invested in it at all.

There is one scene that I liked: It's falling in the hole and becoming a Jumplomancer. It's a fun class. It's surprising. It relies on an ability that we knew about, but haven't seen in action yet, and didn't know would work like this. It involves some quick thinking and luck on the part of Joe. Just stuff the book full of that and it would be fine!

To explain where I'm coming from, Sufficiently Advanced Magic has lots of friendships, lots of clever use of mechanics, and fair attempts at humor.

I think the book may have something political to say too, that I'm wary of. "Your quest is to genocide this other people. Don't forget the women and children!" "No problem, boss!" I'm hoping they won't actually do it. (They just get the quest in this book.) But why not devote one sentence to acknowledging that this may not be the right thing to do? Say "Joe raised an eyebrow at that."

Another case is Joe thinking "Equality of outcome was tyrannical." It's absolutely not what the problem is at the mage's college. They have an evil artifact and archmage mind-controlling everyone. Sounds more like a slogan? Yeah, searching for it I get "Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson to decry equality of outcome as a thinly veiled guise for tyranny and oppression." Damnit.

Terra Ignota is now my favorite series! Perhaps the Stars nailed the finish. Everything is fantastically concluded, and it has something cool saved up even for the last pages.

First, how does this volume compare to the previous three? It's a bit different. Or maybe I'm different — a few years passed between.

We have a new narrator, who I think is intentionally bland. So we ache for Mycroft Canner's voice even more. The first 100 pages are like the boring parts of Iliad. But it doesn't stay like that. In fact, the prose grows ever more epic as we get closer to the end. An example:

Just as the hour came when shadows lengthen into fingers, and the weary ploughman smiles knowing labor’s end approaches with the goldening of the light, a force of Cousins broke through the barricades around the palace shell. Quick as a flock of gulls that race along the churning, white-maned surf, they arced their way up to the largest gleaming central face of the man-made mountain range of conjoined pyramids that form great Caesar’s home.

I just really enjoyed the poetry. But also the style is more tightly bound to the plot than in previous books. The Iliad and Odyssey are not just referenced, they kick down the doors and burst into the story.

And all that weirdness works perfectly together. The theological part is breathtaking. The sci-fi part is cool. The Homeric part is surprising but justified and welcome. The plotting and scheming is still strong. The societal part lends itself most to discussions with friends. (Which Hive would you be?) And the ending is amazing. Even if you were hoping for a happy ending, there is no way you were hoping for an ending this happy. Who can even conjure this?

It's great! I love a setting where everything is so weird that you know it will take several books to even start seeing the big picture. The structure is perfect for this: The "empire" is one faction in a complex universe, fighting some enemies we don't know anything about. The eight houses seem to be the back country of the empire, only hearing tales from the front. The Ninth House is a pariah among the houses, not communicating with anyone. That's the Ninth House normally, but in present day it's worse: almost everyone is dead and the leader is just pretending. Harrow's great at pretending. From the point of view of Gideon it's as if Harrow knew everything. And compared to Gideon she really knows a lot! Gideon knows so little, there's a scene where she's befuddled by a bathroom.

I'm a sucker for these crazy alien universes. My favorite is how the Ninth House is all black and doom and gloom and skeletons and necromancers. Then we get to the First House and it's sunshine and glamour and skeletons and necromancers.

There's a lot of characters and a lot of stuff happens. I think there are different ways to enjoy it. You could read it with a fresh mind and just remember stuff, so when someone smiles at "the cavalier with the radiant topaz eyes" (not an actual quote), you know who that is. Or you could take notes, so when they turn right at the end of the dark corridor, then left on the stairs and up through the opening, you could look up on your map where you are. Or do like my sleep-deprive self did and just not worry about this stuff. She extruded some thanergy from a phalange? Good on her, whatever all that means.

There's a lot of action and world-building, but the bones of the book are in drama. Everyone is 200% full of emotions all the time. It's fun. I've started [b:Harrow the Ninth|39325105|Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)|Tamsyn Muir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1602323622l/39325105.SY75.jpg|60943273] already.

I liked it and I'm excited for the next book.

I gave it 3 stars, because I find myself disappointed with Brandon Sanderson's "alien dimensions". It's the same as in Stormlight Archive. There is a mysterious alien dimension! (The Nowhere here, Shadesmar in Stormlight Archive.) It serves as the basis of all magic! Mystical creatures dwell there! Ancient portals let our heroes eventually enter the alien dimension!

It all sounds so exciting and in both cases I was so hyped! And when we see the alien dimensions they are kind of interesting. I'm kind of happy with them. But what happens there is surprisingly boring. They travel a lot? They meet mystical creatures and those just help/hinder their travels in mundane ways. They entered these fantastic alien worlds, and just do the exact same stuff as they do on any other weekday. To make things worse, what they do in the alien dimension is to a degree detached from the real world. Spensa even laments this a lot.

Plus the Path of Ancients is a massive infodump. It helps break up the boredom of traveling, but there's not a lot of drama you can build on travels and infodumps. For characters we only have Spensa, M-Bot and a new cast. Just like in Starsight. I think the new cast was great in Starsight. But I didn't find it memorable in Cytonic. Chet is a cartoon character. Peg's character is hard to follow. She becomes best friends with Spensa after she wrecks her knee because she's a good pilot? The new alien species are flat. A humanoid with big teeth that plants a tree. A birdman. And some crystals. Only the crystals are functionally different from humans, and they can't do anything.

With all those complaints, the book still does its job for worldbuilding. Maybe we just have to chalk this one up as one huge infodump. We learn everything about the history and mysterious workings of this universe. I'm on board with all that, it's a cool universe!