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At first, I was listening to it a bit carelessly thinking that it's a nice adventure space opera type thingy but the longer it went the more I fell in awe of the world. And the characters have character which is always a plus. Honestly, Idris feels very relatable. I think I have a bit of a scale problem with this book in that the events are supposed to take place among such vastness yet all we get to see are a few perspectives so in the end I'm left feeling unsure I understood how grand the world where the events took place is. On the other hand, I'm not sure if it matters too much because despite all the political maneuvering and potential existential threats it's the human characters that influence events.

Compared to first book felt like nothing much happened in this one. I guess it's a bit more personal story, and I enjoyed where it went. In the first book it bothered me that it's such a given that every person ever just wants to pair up and make babies, but by this book my disbelief was already suspended enough that it didn't bother me as much.

This was like what I learned about stress from [b:Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life|22609341|Come as You Are The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life|Emily Nagoski|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421037685l/22609341.SY75.jpg|42099345] but without the fun sex parts. Still, I'm glad it exists, as when reading about the stress parts inside the fun sex book, I wished for them to be more expanded and explained. But I need to take a break from books that have "this exercise" or "that list" in the "accompanying pdf" for a while. I doubt I will though.

I feel like the book would have had a more significant impact on me if I had known more about the xenos that are in this book. Regardless, lovely story of two factions I think I enjoy most, and wonderfully human characters.

I had seen a review saying this book differed from the first two, and from that perspective, the book seemed to be incredibly in line with the first two. I guess, it's also the overall feeling about it. Pretty cool that once again a similar-ish idea is made to feel fresh and interesting. Once again, cool to flirt with the idea of an intelligence sufficiently different from ours to be challenging to recognize yet familiar enough to be recognizable. Though the first book in the series is still the one with the most impact, the whole trilogy is wonderful and pretty much best books I've read.

Honestly picked the books at the wrong time. My news-feeds are full of people struggling to overcome great adversaries, the outcomes of which battles will have impact for the entire World, so turns out in fiction that's not what I want at the moment. There was nothing that I would love as an idea, no characters that I would find interesting. Felt like a really solid trilogy, but one that I picked up at the wrong time.

In short - meh. Somehow despite all the research cited I feel like I didn't learn anything new. Except for maybe the Klein Sexual Attraction Grid. Nor do I feel like I have solidified my knowledge on these topics. Strangely, I kept feeling like I disagree with the authors interpretation, and I kept having to remind myself that my experience of being bi is just anecdotal experience. Still, my experience did not identify with what's described in this book.

I think this is my first erotica book that's not a collection of short stories that I read. The book so reliably got me horny that I figured I needed to "save it for when I need to get horny" after a first few chapters until I realized that that's silly, I don't have problems becoming horny and I'm making the book look bad by keeping it in my "reading" shelf instead of devouring it. So I devoured it. Thoroughly enjoyable. Feels satisfying in terms of having some fantasy-adventure plot too, and for sure satisfying as BDSM erotica.

Completely different from the first book. If the first one sounded like it's basis is a prompt "who would win in a battle", then in this one I imagined the author reading something like "if the human brain was laid out flat, its surface would span this much", though I don't know for sure such estimations exist and how big they would be. I liked this one much, much more than the first. I liked the cast of pretty diverse characters, I like that a lot of the physics involved sounds plausible. I'm curious, how can this be concluded. The setup seems pretty fantastical.

I feel a little bit less lost as to what's the plot than in book one. I still don't quite understand some stuff, but I understand enough stuff that it doesn't feel like just pleasant babble in the background. Mechanicus characters though have the problem that they're pretty impossible to write. Either they'd be impossible to relate to by human readers, or they are pretty human characters with caveats like "he wasn't feeling as human an emotion as rage, he just calculated that he had been done wrong" which sound kind of disingenuous. (Example completely made up by me and more clumsy than anything actually in the book.) I can see why the W40k world overall gets so many fans though. It's pretty cool.