Ross
A page-turner from Laymon, even if it feels kind of ridiculous sometimes. It's amazing how everyone in this book is unlikable and you kind of want them to fail, except potentially Judy, but you still find yourself rooting for a character.
It's a fun romp with lots of violence and sex to keep you turning the pages.
Grabbed this from Audible on a lark because I had a 2-for-1 credit deal to take advantage of. I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected I would! Knew basically nothing going into it, and now I'm excited to check out the next book.
It has a lot in common with LitRPG genre things but it's executed slightly differently.
Kuang writes another banger with Katabasis. I really enjoyed this book, the themes of which didn't resonate as hard with me as the themes in Babel did but were explored in fascinating ways by the author. In many ways it felt like a modern day retelling of Dante's Inferno, with scholars instead of poets sent through Hell.
Contains spoilers
Surprisingly readable shlock honestly. Donald Barr is the person who hired Jeffery Epstein, a man with no bachelor's degree, to teach math at the prestigious Dalton School. I'd seen the book characterized in Julie K. Brown's work as "...a science fiction novel, Space Relations, about a planet of wealthy aliens who kidnap humans and force them into sex slavery," which is broadly accurate though the slavery they're forced into isn't strictly sex slavery.
The more troubling theme to me is the main character becoming the personal companion of his lady slaveowner, falling in love with her, and returning to the planet after he escapes captivity to see her again. He saves her from a slave revolt and another landowner high on the drug that makes you think you're God, and then they get married. Slavery on the planet is abolished at the end of the book, but it's full of confusing thoughts from the main character about how he'd have been happy in servitude if he hadn't made the discovery that aliens were real and left behind guns on the slave planet.
I didn't gain any insight into why Donald Barr might have given Epstein's professional life such a boost, but I enjoyed the book far more than I thought I would. It was still pretty underwhelming.
An interesting change of pace from what I expect from Weir, but a good one. We follow a youthful smuggler on a lunar colony, who quickly gets into a job much bigger than she is. Lots of interesting scientific explorations in typical Weir style, though less than you'll find in The Martian and Project Hail Mary due to the nature of the story.
An interesting character, the Swamp Thing. Not having any background with the series at all, I feel like I was sort of thrust into the comic in the middle of the action with Loose Threads tying up a bunch of threads I wasn't aware of at all. That said, once I figured out who was who the book had some very interesting things to say. The art is top notch and there's lots of great horror and general comic book weirdness going on here. I'm excited to read the rest.
An enjoyable collection of sci-fi short stories from some greats and some names I'd never heard of before. I particularly enjoyed Hamilton taking the piss out of himself in his (quite) short story contribution. I think the two standouts for me were The Lives and Deaths of Che Guivera by Lavie Tidhar and How We Came Back from Mars by Ian Watson.
The collection is great. There's no overarching theme but I found myself burning through the stories regardless.
