Enno Rehling

This was fantastic. It captures so much of how successful tech projects work (at least ones that I've been a part of), the kind of people that work on them, and what motivates them. It also makes me nostalgic for a time in computing that I missed because I was born too late.

So much of this book is repetition, with Zoe explaining the same things about her and her past that she's already told us in the first two books, followed by dead-ends, that it's really only the final third of the book that anything happens. I like the characters and the story, but it seems like the action is being stretched thin across too many books.

This is going to sound like I disliked the book. I promise I didn't hate it, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the Peter Grant novels, because it has Problems.

Things that make the Rivers of London books special:
* Peter, with his nerdy interests and pop culture references
* The interplay between Peter and Nightingale
* The Rivers (especially Bev and Abbigail)
* London, historic and present
* Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's wonderful audiobook narration

All of those elements are missing from this book, the protagonist is not a practitioner, and she's more a victim of events than actively managing them.

Maybe it's going to take a few of these to warm up to Kimberley and the FBI, but for the time being, I'm looking forward for more Peter Grant titles.

Delightful!

This was cute, and a quick read. I didn't know it was part two in a series, but now I want to read the others.

This was the one Tintin book that I owned as a kid, and it ended on a cliffhanger! The book is brilliant, the best of them up to this point, and I had to wait years until I found a copy of Red Rackham's Treasure.

I'm on a re-read of all the Tintin books, and this is where al the characters are fully formed. The Thomsons finding all of their wallets under “T” remains a favorite moment, as are the failed attempts of Nestor (who we'll see more off in later books) to serve the Captain a drink.

We finally meet captain Haddock, and the quality of the series immediately surges.

I didn't like this one as much as For The Wolf or its sequel. The main character didn't have very much agency, and it took her too long to figure out what was going on, which is no surprise, since the twist, turns and shifting allegiances gave me whiplash.

I think of this as the first “modern” Tintin book. One that doesn't rely solely on slapstick for its humor, where Tintin isn't just a travel reporter who gets saved by either sheer luck or his dog, and where the characters and villains have a clearly developed motivation. Still, I can't wait for the Captain to finally join the cast.

A satisfying sequel in this fun series of YA fantasy. Some lengths, especially when describing enclave politics outside the school. One scene of teenagers awkwardly fumbling towards their first sexual encounter that was cringeworthy, and that I could have done without.

I was initially skeptical, because I knew Tchaikovsky for his Science Fiction work, and this book was clearly not that. I'm not a big reader of Jane Austen novels either, which the start of this book resembles more. But the story eventually won me over, if not the heroine. Emily takes much too long to realize that her basic assumptions of the world are wrong, and several times I found myself shouting at her to wake up already. She gets there in the end, but it takes an entire epilogue chapter for that to happen.

It's not this book's fault, it's me. I can tell these poems are good, but I just don't have the patience for poetry.

I especially love seeing the early Lottie in this, already best friends with Shauna, and being influenced by Esther. Shauna's family is all here, too, in the estate, both her Mum and Daz almost fully formed.

Maybe it's because I read it in fits and starts, but I found it difficult to follow the story. The art is great, and I've got the second book lined up already, hoping to read it with more focus.

A side character from the first Goblin Emperor book solves a whodunnit in which an opera singer was murdered, with a number of side quests. It's nice to see more of this world getting filled in, and what is happening away from the royal intrigue. The short story at the end is very sweet, too.

Tells the history of how we made food through the ages, the tools we invented, and how we got to where we are. Fun and packed with trivia. I'll never look at my kitchen the same way again.

Like one of those Trek stories where an observer had to break the prime directive, because being human means you can't be an impartial bystander. Clad in a story that is smaller, but of like quality to the Children of time books.

I love David Graeber, and this was an interesting book, unlike most things I've read of his. It's a shame he couldn't read the audiobook himself, because the narrator manages to make this sound dull.

It's predictable, yes, but I am a sucker for a selkie story, and a difficult romance.

I started this series at the end, didn't I? If I come across the other books, I might read them, too.

Loved it just as much as the previous two books that it builds on.

Notes:

New planets, new forms of alien intelligence.
The corvids were my favorite alien species in a while.
Are they a form of AI? Can AI be sentient? Are any of us? Questions that loom especially large this year.
Second book looking at the simulation hypothesis that I've read this year.
Liff's story is heartbreaking.
Decanting the swarm intelligence from book 2 into a single person named Miranda is a brilliant solution to the problem of how to address the “we”.
The eventual reveal again comes with a twist and a second, even better reveal. How does Tchaikovsky do this?

The extraterrestrials make this feel less like a normal Tackleford story. Onion Lem is a right good laugh once you get to know him.

In early victorian England, foreign translators at Oxford try to take on the empire, which works on a translation-based kind of magic that involves silver bars. Many times, we think it's all over for our protagonists, and they receive a miraculous rescue, it's quite gutting. Until at the end, they don't.

I liked it, the magic is very clever, the parallels to our real world are there, although events have been altered. There's still an opium war, an abolitionist movement, English exceptionalism and disdain for others, all the loathsome things that make up British Empire.

I like this type of book, I'm practically the target audience. Trivia, travel, odd places with a strange history? Sign me up. And yet, there's too little of everything. A single picture and a few paragraphs of text, but most of all, no rhyme or reason to why these places were picked out of the many that there are in the world, and no common thread to connect them all. I managed to get bored towards the end.

Manages to make “We're going on an adventure” the most terrifying thing to hear.
Take the spiders from the previous book, add octopuses, a planet full of strange aliens, and a dangerous swarm intelligence.