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I greatly enjoy Brandon Sanderson's fantasy novels. His world-building and magic systems always have an interesting logic - balancing a power's advantages against its limitations or disadvantages. I always feel that those rules would translate directly into a well-tuned RPG.

"Skyward" is the first Sanderson science fiction I've read, but it won't be the last. It's a hard sci-fi YA adventure with a teenage girl protagonist who makes mistakes and embarrasses herself but has you cheering her on every step of the way.

The technology and action scenes are convincing, and I enjoyed the way Sanderson went into some detail about how the spacecraft and their weapons worked.

Overall the plot was a little predictable but didn't detract from the fun of the story, and the final revelation was a good surprise and set-up for the sequel.

Perhaps my favourite interchange between Ponder and the Archchancellor.

I'm currently re-reading the whole of the Discworld collection on Kindle. I used to have, that rare thing, a complete collection of Discworld titles on dead tree unscathed by a single Pratchett signature. But household space limits dictated a move to bits rather than books.

When I finished "Thief of Time", I found that the next tome was unavailable on Kindle as a real ebook. Instead, it was PDF which was inadequate on eInk and pretty hostile on a tablet.

So I've had to switch back to traditional media to fully appreciate Paul Kidby's artwork.

I've finished my first read through of "Four Thousand Weeks". It was an interesting read but most of the conclusions would be familiar to anyone who has read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Though it was surprising that there appears to be no mention of Stoic philosophy anywhere in the book.

Although this is a prequel to "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy it is written in a different style - putting it more in a traditional Chinese military sci-fi genre. I enjoyed the story but military sci-fi is not really my taste, and I found my suspension of disbelief breaking down on some of the quantum aspects of the plot... but given real quantum effects are hard to believe anyway perhaps that shouldn't be a criticism.

This book very much aligns with the Stoic views on the present moment, the flow of time, and death, but perhaps presenting a more relaxed view of our purpose in life. But it is curious that there appears to be no reference to Stoicism in the book.