Customer Comments

This is a good book, but I didn't enjoy it as wildly as I did the first two in the series. Nonetheless, a book by the amazingly imaginative Martha Wells is not to be missed. This book brings back characters from the first two, and it dives deep into the insecurities of the protagonist in a way I found slightly unconvincing. Perhaps my slight disappointment is the emphasis on two aspects of fantasy I've never enjoyed: (a) politics, and (b) a big mystical ending.

King gets her groove back! A new lead character and terrific atmosphere in a very well-written book are enough to make me forget the disappointment of her recent books (the Mary Russell stories, which had turned into bad Indiana Jones adventures). Time and place are a major character here: 1929 Paris was crammed with hectic partying by Americans who were Johnny-come-lately to the arts and literature scene. And there were plenty of Europeans who would never recover from the wounds of the Great War and more recent anarchist unrest. Surrealist artists, willing to use horror effects, confuse the trail of a killer. Our damaged hero, a tough guy who still has streaks of romanticism, stubbornly fights to get answers. Probably the first tough guy detective I've every cared so much about!

Delightful to read. It has both characters to care about and meta-commentary on the world of creating speculative fiction. Not just for Star Trek fans (I never liked its statism) but it helps if you've experienced some SF stories in some media.

This book is a very conventional thriller, and really disappointing for those of us who liked some of Stephenson's recent and highly original books. Those books had a new idea on every page, where this one has an old cliche on every page. Like an 80s cold war thriller by Alistair MacLean, "Reamde" has British Intelligence, people from the KGB, trained assassins, survivalists, millionaires in armed retreats, planes and boats and lots of guns. It does have a few plot devices that depend on terrorism, the net, and lots of kinds of data storage (but no new ways of thinking about those things). And it's a slow read, taking about twice as many pages to tell its story than are needed. "Reamde" has one good idea: exploiting gold farming in a MMPRPG. Maddeningly, the idea completely disappears after being used to launch the central hostage taking. There are NO consequences (legal, practical, moral) for the character Reamde, who blackmails thousands for real money via the online game. He simply joins all the others running around, chased by baddies. I hate to see an imaginative writer wasting his time on this crap. If you want to read a ripping good yarn with gold farming, better developed characters characters, and a much better sense of the global village right now, go read "For the Win" by Cory Doctorow.

This is not another collection of puns, but a discussion of wordplay's history and philosophy. "The Pun Also Rises" goes down easy, with light yet thoughtful writing. The author defines "pun" more broadly than I would, which is all to the good in this case. Touching on cognitive psychology, rhetoric, competition, hip-hop and more, this book makes a great read for any thoughtful lover of wordplay.

Have the people who praise this book been reading anything else about neuroscience in the last several years? The book is a complete rehash of material that has been described better in other non-academic work. I never need to read another chapter about the evolution of reading, Plato, Gutenberg, yada, yada... I've certainly read ones with livelier writing. When he finally gets to his thesis about half-way through the book, he talks as though everyone who spends time online has lost the ability for deep reading. I've been a web designer for 15 years, and I still read several books -- cover-to-cover -- every week. And let's hope that he's not right about common behaviors with his anecdotal evidence of scholars who cherry-pick search results and never read the context. On the other hand, all the kudos for this book are perhaps support for his notion of shallows!

Jay Lake creates an amazing world and populates it with extreme characters.

Who knew that a book with a theme of religion (in a completely made-up and believable culture) would be fascinating to someone who has never had a religion?

It was hard to decide whether to read this book headlong or with particular care. I wanted to read it headlong, because it's so full of events and I didn't want to lose track of the interweaving scenarios. On the other hand, I wanted to pause and absorb ideas, because Stephenson can effortlessly include more ideas on a page than most writers can in a chapter. It's educational about what was going on during WWII, and I know the crypto included is good because it was provided by Bruce Schneier, who writes the afterward.