Reviews and Comments

Soon after "The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents" was first published, I read it to my daughter. She so much enjoyed the characters that she dressed up as Sardines (one of the ensemble cast of rats) for her school's World Book Day celebration. She emailed Terry Pratchett to tell him how much she had enjoyed the book and was thrilled to get a lovely reply.

Re-reading "The Amazing Maurice", I'm surprised by just how dark a book it is, given the nine-year-old plus demographic. For example, there are no holds barred when it comes to the short and uncomfortable lives that rodents sometimes lead, and a couple of plot points rely on how cruel humans can be to their squeaky neighbours.

The book includes a thought-provoking exploration of different kinds of consciousness and self-awareness, and there is much pleasure to be gained from the large cast of characters - rodent, feline, and the occasional human.

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.

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.

I'm re-reading all the Discworld books in order, including "The Last Continent" - one of the few books I have ever given up on half way through. I'm sure that I must have read "Carpe Jugulum" before but I've no memory of the plot at all and as it is the Witches it has to be good!

I've just started to read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which was recommended to me by a couple of people on micro.blog. I'm intrigued by some reviews mentioning parallels between Stoicism and the philosophy described in this book, so it has leap-frogged its way to the top of my reading list.

The last few years have been tough with pressure of work, despite being great fun, forcing my life balance far out of kilter. Perhaps "Four Thousand Weeks" will give me a new perspective on the, maybe, 750 weeks I have left.