Kavinay

My only wish is that Chomsky would tell more jokes.

Okay enough. Doesn't really add much context besides Rachel being ingorant of the game.

Extremely sad that this is Thurston's last book in the universe. He has such a great way of communicating how clan culture is psychotic and pragmatic at the same time.

Segregation and Anti-Rascism are relatively straightforward, but what Kendi does for the majority of this book is demonstrate how a third narrative in racism, Assimilation, has been interwoven into the fabric of the discourse. It's his handling of calls for assimilation and how they've historically been used to deepen racist agendas that is profound.

Joanna is such a lovable jerk.

My hands are warm, I hold my mouse tight, my eyes squint at the Goodreads form.

Argh. I wanted to love this book. I love Thrawn and Zahn and still think the original Thrawn series is the best Star Wars prose we've had to date. While there is nothing wrong with this book, Zahn remains an able writer, there just isn't any real development of titular character. It's a weird sort of origin story in that Thrawn does not change over the course of the book. Sure, his human apprentice goes full circle, but I really couldn't care at all about that. We don't really get to know Thrawn as anything more or less than what we already got in the previous EU or Rebels. Ironically, the most well-developed character in the book is Governor Price!

This is not a bad book, but it's also not a particularly impressive one either. Thrawn is a novel that seems more like a necessary work to establish the credentials of the Grand Admiral in the new canon, rather than a truly engrossing take on the character. Why Zahn could not be unshackled to do both is what puzzles me.

Bit of an odd way to pace the resolution to Operation Bulldog and Taskforce Serpent. Basically, the second half of the novel could easily have been it's own book.

I just did not care about a single character in Task Force Serpent.

Started great, fizzled out by last issue.

A tough read. Started using it as a night-time book to put myself to sleep thanks to all the military pedantry.

Horse vs Colonel Klink.

Mr Bones, Mr Bones,
Calling Mr Bones
Mr Bones, Mr Bones...

Sigh.

For a series that started out well, the second book underwhelmed and this conclusion is just drawn out and disappointing.

The only reason I gave two stars was due to one wonderful interlude with Lando and Lobot.

This is a frustrating book. It's not even the author's fault. The premise of the whole novel is a bit of a bore: Operation Serpent's trip into CSJ space. There's an interesting surprise at the end, but really, Gressman's given the thankless task of making something interesting happen during an exercise in logistics.

No Clan interaction of merit, the Marik Knight Paul Masters is portrayed as a chivalrous buffoon and the rest of the Inner Sphere members of the task force are respectively true to stereotype. There's just not much to like besides a single chapter our of nowhere about a quick-thinking Clan bondsman.

The novel comes after a good start to the series and a serviceable “great game” plot for book 2, so it's a really tough slog in comparison when the plot is non-existent and the characters are basically having meetings and planning sessions for the duration of the book.

The un-essential Neil Gaiman.

I'm not trying to be mean; this is by the author's own admission a collection of odds and ends. The problem is really that there are few essays or critiques and most of the works therein are the intros to other people's books. Okay, but not particularly engaging. An interesting read for fans, but I doubt you'll take it cover to cover.

A good first act, but you get the sense that this was a short story or novella that was dragged out a bit. I didn't really care about the murder plot.

Also, the interesting bit with Cheung–I could swear it was an homage to Baxter and Clarke's The Light of Other Days, but Sawyer's novel actually came out a year before that.

The Emperor is a bit of a dick.

Custodians and mechanicus make up the majority of this book. A few rare close up dialogues with the Emperor are pretty cool–but they leave you with a sense of him as a complete utilitarian monster.

Argh. Good ending, but most of the Imperial Fist narrative is completely mind-numbing.
As always, Alpha Legion > than anything else. Eliminate Dorn's boring Legion and the Alpha Legion alone would make this an engaging story.

Clunky.

Gets you off you butt to clean, but ultimately there's really nothing magical here besides the 20:10 rule.

I really wanted to like this book more. The good part of the novel is that there are asides into the lives of common folk that are quite interesting. The bad part is that these asides are sometimes more interesting than the main cast of characters.
It's never a good sign when an author spends a lot of prose on exploring meta-narrative. It becomes a bit of a navel-gazing exercise. Still Guy Kay is otherwise quite adept at setting and telling a tale that is relatively small in scale compared to his previous highlights.

An interesting way to set the table for the 4th succession war.
Like a lot of Battletech fiction though, the handling of culture and race in the 80s hasn't aged well. It's a thousand years in the future and race relations in the Inner Sphere are so silly that you're left practically welcoming the eventual clan invasion to wipe the slate clean of racially segregated interstellar empires. Argh.
Still the plotting is interesting enough and Stackpole is at worst a bit corny and at best a great weaver of wide-ranging cast.

Changed my mind in respect to various number crunching instances, especially in cases where bias is baked into the institution developing the algorithms.

I keep being surprised by the quality of the new Marvel comics, especially when the stories seem so stereotypical. Sure, Han & Chewie enter a race and so on, but so much happens in terms of redefining postEp4 Han to himself that it's surprising that Liu successfully squeezed it all into 5 issues.

The Erso's are pretty boring. It would have been a more interesting read if there was more of a focus on the Imperials.

A bit of a rosy look at Gygax's life and career. Not a bad book, but the interesting bits are details about Gary's non D&D life, like the fact he loved chess and the Chicago Bears. The issues with Dave Arneson and even the conflicts within TSR aren't covered that deeply, in large part because we get mostly Gary's point of view.