Shawn

Pretty grim read. The personal hook of the author actually personally knowing these folks and getting involved in their attempts to reckon with what the GDR did to them makes it a more engaging read than a straight history would have been. Insightful to the era it's covering.

(really wish Goodreads would allow half stars, ‘cuz this is a 2.5 book if I've ever read one)

I don't want to spend too much time on this one, so here's the short version:

This book feels like if every other multi-volume fantasy series was used to feed an LLM, which was then prompted to output the absolute average of everything it had ingested into a starting volume of a new multi-book series.

It is the Applebee's of fantasy books. Absolutely mid, relentlessly derivative and unambitious, yet industrially competent and blandly satisfying in a way that makes you say “yeah, shouldn't overindulge on this crap but once or twice a year is fine”.

Take that as you will. I might read Book Two someday if I'm overwhelmed in other areas and just want some unexciting but comforting pap that goes down easy. I hope not, though.

I'm sorry, but this book sucks.

There's some interesting ideas on the sci-fi/setting side, kind of, but nothing we haven't really seen before.

What is TERRIBLE and caused me to bail out on the book about 40% through is the simplistic, one-dimensional, downright AWFUL characterizations.

Oh no, a sensitive artsy intellectual child is born to a brutal domineering Hitler of a father! Said father runs the biggest corpo/gov't in the galaxy and GASP might not be totally honest about what his company's been up to! Did they have a project that they promised would bring good things to everyone but is actually comically bad and evil??!?!? oh noooes!

Oh wait; there's a rebel group against the bad empire?!?! And one of their best operatives is now trapped with the artsy sensitive intellectual son of her worst personal enemy via some really contrived “the MacGuffin broke” pseudo sci-fi nonsense on a planet that wants to kill them both?

and... and... they might LIKE EACH OTHER?!?!?!? BWUUUUUUUUHHHH??????

Christ. Every goddamned chapter ends with the two mains realizing that they have a lot in common, actually, and might like each other, only for the rebel to be like “no! this is the second worst person alive behind his father! all of my direct personal experience with him aside, he must be a foul, evil baby-torturer and he's just hiding it! I must and will kill him”.

It's so dumb. It's like every chapter ends with a series of those “We should kiss. Ha ha no I'm kidding. Unless...?” joke tweets.

There were some mildly interesting if derivative and unoriginal concepts around transferring consciousness and enhancing individual abilities, and the political/economic setup of things is what kept me going as long as I did, but these characters are fucking moron teenagers at best and it just got too tiresome. I'm out.

Ferris' career has grown long enough to where he's one of those authors that people either really like or really hate. I haven't read everything he's done, but a lot of it, and I like the dude's whole thing.

And that “whole thing” reaches peak form in A Calling for Charlie Barnes, a... autobiographical tale? Pure fiction? Autofiction?

Hard to know, hard to tell... but that's kind of the point of this rumination on the author's own life and the concept of truth in art.

Ostensibly, this is the story of the “author”'s father's life, an interesting dude who did a lot of shit. About a third of the way through the novel, you start to get the sense that all is not as it seems.

The rest of the ride basically has the reader questioning the nature of truth, as the narrator becomes increasingly unreliable.

The back fifth or so of the book is a real blowout of why the narrative developed as it did, a bit on what the author was trying to accomplish, and enough FUD to make the reader engagingly pissed off in trying to figure out what the real story was.

I think it's a successful experiment, honestly. I enjoyed the ride and the sludge of emotionally brutal denouement that accompanied the ending. And the book is largely set in the Chicago area and its hinterlands in northwest Illinois which, as a huge homer, I personally appreciated.

If you're already a fan of Ferris' whole thing and/or up for “biography of an interesting dude that gets real fuckin' weird”, give A Calling for Charlie Barnes a go.

Man. Probably shouldn't have started 2024 by reading this cheerful tome.

What we've got here is basically a tier above “airport pop history” book (I do not mean that as an insult; pop history books are fine, and this book's scholarship and rigor is a level above the best of that genre) deep dive into a pretty contentious topic: the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allied Air Forces near the end of World War II in Europe.

The books goes deep into the background of the war and how it led to the bombing of Dresden becoming a decision to be made in the first place, and rightly puts some emphasis on the western Allies being somewhat appalled and aggrieved that German resistance, which had seemed to be crumbling in the late summer/early fall of '44, deeply stiffened over the following winter. The Ardennes Offensive and the V1/2 campaigns in particular were signs that the Germans were going to take quite a bit more effort yet to be convinced that they had lost.

We also get a history of Dresden, its culture, its peoples both before, and after the bombing that I enjoyed quite much, as it shows us what was lost not just in the bombing, but also due to Nazism itself (ie, the changes in Dresden were not entirely the fault solely of Allied Bombing or Soviet occupation). Frankly, the impression the book leaves at the end is that Dresden would be a wonderful city to visit, partially because of its inhabitants attitudes towards the bombing and its aftermath.

There is also a good deal of coverage of the impact of the strategic bombing campaign, an extremely novel form of warfare at the time, on the aircrews that performed it.

The bulk of the book, of course, covers the actual raid(s; Dresden was hit in 3 waves, and it is the later waves for a lot of people that elevate this to an atrocity) themselves and the immediate aftermath for the folks on the ground.

It's grim reading.

I think the book gives a decent, unbiased presentation of the post-war controversy over the bombing, which has a range of opinions from “This was so egregious a warcrime, it was literally worse than anything the Nazis themselves did” to “fuck them Kraut cocksuckers, nothing bad enough could be done to them”. It also doesn't really reveal where the author's opinion lies, a wise choice, I think.

I came away from the reading primarily with a sense of “what a fucking loss” which, to be fair, is how I feel after reading almost any history book written about events during war. Did each of the many, many tens of thousands of dead deserve to die because they were citizens of a brutal, exterminationist regime that started the war they were now losing so badly? What about the few Jews who had managed to survive in the city to that point, did they deserve to be murdered by the Allies? Did the tens of thousands of young men who died in airplanes dropping bombs deserve it? Was turning hundreds of years of rich history to ash necessary to the cause of defeating Nazi Germany?

Who the fuck knows, man. The book rightly doesn't try to answer that question, it just presents the facts very well, in a readable fashion, and explains the postwar controversy positions in detail. And I'm very glad the sadly beautiful ending chapter about how Dresden commemorates the bombing every year was included, because it gave a slight bit of cheer to a book that would've otherwise put me in a funk for a week.

Book 2 of the Jackpot Trilogy. There are things about this series I'm liking less as I go, and some I'm liking more. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the balance is in my favor between those as we head into the third, closing book (which, of course, ain't out yet).

Much like The Peripheral, the first book in the series, there's basically two plots going on: a local, close to our time one taking place in some flavor of an alt-history of the OTHER plot, which is generally set in a further-future London. Basically, the rich fucks who survived The Jackpot (read: general climate collapse and increasing war and violence due to that that lasts for decades) have found a way to reach back into their own pasts and, from the moment they make contact, those pasts spin off into their own quantum existences and now the people from Future London can fuck with the future of these past worlds of theirs and change outcomes.

Yeah, writing about multiple differing futures where one is also the past of one but not all of those futures is... challenging, tense-ly speaking.

Anywho. You've basically got 2080/2090 or so London folk fucking with our own more immediate future. In the first book, the fucked-with were basically a small county in the American south circa the 2030's and Our Heroes were workaday shmucks, young military vets who had been damaged by their deployments, their gig-worker siblings, etc. Regular folks.

I liked that much more than this book's collection of West Coast Silicon Valley rich tech dorks and LA celebrities and its setting in our 2017 or so. It's been a month or so since I finished and I seriously had to hit Goodreads to even remember who the earlier future folks WERE in this one.

Worse, Gibson decides to spend a lot of time around the conceit that the London folk made contact in our 2015 and tilted the election to Hillary Clinton over Trump (neither named, but it's obvious to the point of annoying that they're NOT named) and that this somehow was leading directly to nuclear war.
So, half the fun of The Peripheral (his rural southern America 15 years from now was actually really well done and compelling,IMO) is out the window in favor of thinly veiled shots at our recent politics and Amazon/Facebook/Google and just... yawn. He doesn't say much interesting about this, the nuclear threat thing is somehow BORING, the takes on our current tech overlords are not novel or interesting, and it just does fuckall to move the needle for me in any sense.

The London folk and plot I have found more interesting in both books, but Gibson doesn't seem to want to spend a ton of time developing what's going on in that further, more dystopian future, although how things end in this volume make me hopeful that we'll focus more on them for the finale?
The London folk are either the oligarchs who rule that future, having violently taken things over and monopolized under their own control the various technological advancements that allowed some 20%-ish of overall humanity to survive climate collapse, the wars, pandemics, etc., or their management class like Lowbeer, who I find by far the most compelling character in these books so far. Is she a gov't cop, an oligarchy enforcer, both, neither...?

This book moves her motivation along a bit; she hates the world she lives in and wants to modify a “stub” (what her world calls these quantum spin-off past Earths their contact creates) to where the Jackpot is avoided or mitigated if possible but, if not, that it at least doesn't end up with the Oligarchs in charge at the end.

To this end, she proves to a rogue oligarch who doesn't like her meddling just how far her power extends. It's a neat scene.

Overall, as you can probably tell, I did not care at all about the main plot of this book, the alt-2016 tech/celeb dorks trying to avoid a thinly-sketched nuclear threat that only exists in that universe because Hillary Clinton beat Trump (it's all... very dumb).

But I do care about future London; he doesn't spend much time in that world, but it's very interesting to me. I feel like the ending of this book sets up spending more time there in the finale, addressing the bigger picture of the world post-Jackpot and the ethics of doing ANYTHING with the “stubs” that, quantum freakouts or not, contain billions of real lives (increasingly less billions as time goes on, but still).

I really hope that's what the third book deals with, because the stub stories have gone from “pretty compelling” in the first one to “who gives a shit” in this one, and this entire series could just be set in the post-Jackpot world without the stubs at all and I would probably enjoy it more. We'll see.

Man. Gibson.

Thanks to a favorite grandma who handed me a copy of Neuromancer when I was 9 (read: not at ALL prepared for what that book was throwing down), I have always been a huge fan of Gibson, but hadn't read anything by him since Idoru. With the hubbub around the Amazon adaptation of this book, I figured I should finally knock it out.

And I liked it, but it had some issues.

Like most of his stuff, it tosses you right into the midst of a world with terms and phrases and things happening that range from “I get it” to “I can guess at what this might be by using my future-guessing brain” to “no idea the fuck is going on here”. I felt like this book kept the reader in the “wtf?” phase longer than his usual, but eventually it sorts out reasonably well.

Not a super-original premise but a lot of well-thought out twists on common near-future sci-fi concepts here. The idea of the rich riding out a slow, long, and thorough collapse of the common weal thanks to technology sort of keeping up with multi-variant catastrophes but not soon enough to save the regular people of the world isn't new, but I always love to get red-assed reading a new take on it, and Gibson's description of this new world here is evocative.

The near-future American “buttholeville” is... probably scary accurate to what it's actually going to be in a few decades outside of our major urban cores. The line about how traffic wrecks just stay on the road or the side of it because the state and the county don't have the money to deal with them anymore... I feel like Texas is like 3 years from that today.

I think that's where this book succeeds most; it REALLY defines a time and place that is wholly realized in its fictional fabric. “Hefty”, the corporation that just owns and leases absolutely everything out to everyone, is clearly a thinly-veiled Amazon and also a highly-plausible future Amazon growing to control everything's physical, retail presence as much as they do online shopping today.

Where I think this book is weakest is in the actual plot event we're supposed to care very much about. Given the capabilities of both the “good” and the “bad” guys in this book, the contrivances made to actually put people at specific risk are... well, they're a bit much.

For a book where the events at hand are possibly world-shaking, the book almost feels a bit too intimate for that scale of risk. It takes place almost entirely in a weird future heavily depopulated London, and one hillbilly county vaguely placed somewhere in the American south. Tying these small handfuls of, at least on the American side, utterly unremarkable folk to the fate of billions is a lot to ask of the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief.

Also, sorry, but the final Big Bad is comically underdeveloped and one-dimensional. That character was the one absolute “bleaugh” I felt reading this otherwise-enjoyable yarn.

That said... I also didn't care. The people and place feel true, even if the plot macguffin sometimes doesn't, and it was more than enough to keep me turning pages.

I know there are two more books in this series, and I hope he fleshes the larger universe out some, because, as with most Gibson works, it's those ideas and concepts that tend to be the most interesting part of the work.

Call it 3.5 Mirrorshades out of 5

Always a fan of this universe and Kay's writing in it.If you don't know Kay's “thing”, a lot of his novels are set in an alt-Earth that very, very closely hews to the history and stories of our real Earth, often copping historical personages lightly if at all altered for his needs. This allows him to tell interesting stories in a familiar-ish setting (you'd be surprised how much one's own mind fills in the details from real history when reading these books) without having to worry about the nitpickers coming at him over small stuff.Some of the books take place during his analog of Reconquista Spain ([b:The Lions of Al-Rassan 104101 The Lions of Al-Rassan Guy Gavriel Kay https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1659900897l/104101.SY75.jpg 955081], possibly my favorite of these books), some in the China of the Three Kingdoms era ([b:River of Stars 15808474 River of Stars (Under Heaven, #2) Guy Gavriel Kay https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356089847l/15808474.SY75.jpg 21451403]), some during the Justinian Era of the Byzantine Empire ([b:Sailing to Sarantium 104097 Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1) Guy Gavriel Kay https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328000207l/104097.SX50.jpg 1336666]), etc... they range over millennia of history, but threads bind them all together, if sometimes quite lightly.This particular entry takes shortly after the Fall of Sarantium to the Asharites (read: the taking of Constantinople by the Ottomans). The western Jaddite/Christian world is in upheaval, Batiara/Italy is suffering under the weight of mercenary wars every summer between her various fractious small city states, the Pope/Western Patriarch in Rhodias/Rome is screaming for vengeance... things are messy. Into this morass of doubt and violence step a pair of merchants; one, a Batiaran Jaddite woman who was taken by Asharites as a slave as a child, freed herself as an adult, and now wants some revenge. The other, a Kindath (Jew) whose family was expelled from Esperaña (figure it out), some burnt at the stake for trying to hide their Kindathness, the rest of whom resettled across various parts of both the Jaddite and Asharite worlds, worlds in which Rafel, this trader, now makes his living.They decide to augment that living by offering to assassinate a local Khalif in one of the Asharite kingdoms in what is supposed to be North Africa (christ almighty, this would be was easier to write about if I just used our words for all of his fake stuff). From this event, many others spin out, including our plot. That's about all I'll say here about said plot other than to note that it's a) good b) moves along briskly and c) if you know anything about our real history you can figure out where a lot of things are going early, but the individual stories remain compelling and make it more than just historical fiction. Kay seems very interested in how one's legacies are formed, where our stories end, in this entry. He's always been a bit of a romantic, I believe, dropping bits of poetry (he actually was/is a poet before becoming a novelist) throughout his novels, and injecting a bit of a magical element into things on the regular. In a pure historical fiction novel, I'd probably find that offputting, but since it's not purporting to any kind of realism, it ends up working quite well.That said, the magical elements and, to be honest, the humor that lightened up the often violent vibe of his other works are both at low ebb in this entry. The acknowledgment at the end of this book states that this book was written during the isolation of the early COVID pandemic, and I think it shows. It's not The Road or anything, but it's pretty dark by Kay's own previous standards.I don't think it suffers for that, though. Kay has always managed to portray this earth-analog's medieval past as ours was: rather violent, for almost everybody, yet without succumbing to the full-on grimdark turbo-violence of a George RR Martin or Joe Abercrombie bent. As entertaining as I can find those authors' books, I think Kay's books, including this one, succeed better as literature, if I can make that judgment without sounding like a total prick. He gets at human emotions and motivations and reactions better than most in the genre, I believe. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but suffered a bit of melancholy at the end of it. It's a world full of characters all searching for more permanence out of their homes, families, and faiths, with many (though not all) failing to find it. I hope Mr. Kay returns to this world to let us know how it's getting on again in the future.

This is the first of a trilogy, a fact I stupidly didn't cotton to before I finished this not-short book in one goddamned night and wanted to immediately start on the second book. Which doesn't come out until April. Much less the third/concluding volume :(

Anywho, my idiocy aside... this series is basically Winslow retelling the Illiad from the perspective of a put-upon Irish mobster in Providence, RI in the 1980's.

No, really.

And it's... damned good. Got its hooks into me and, like I said, plowed through it in a couple of hours when I really, REALLY should have been sleeping.

Don't want to get into the plot much, the ride is the fun with these books, not the prose itself. Suffice to say that, unlike Winslow's cop books, his mob guys are oddly way more sympathetic protagonists, so even though those books are enjoyable in a schadenfreude kind of way, you can actually root for the main guy in this one, our hard-luck working class mob champion, Danny Ryan.

While a lot of the characters AROUND Danny are irredeemable shitheads (fuck you, Liam), Danny himself comes off as a pretty solid dude. Yeah, he's a criminal, but he's presented as one of the “good” mob guys; doesn't try to pretend he's something he's not, advocates (before shit just goes completely sideways) for the least-violent path in most every event, doesn't involve civilians, and has a sense of ethics/honor that he adheres to that is basically morally good.

It's easy to deal with if you subscribe to the theory, as I do, that the cops, the mob, the feds, and small-biz owners as a group are just each different gangs that operate the same way as each other, but one or two of them have the Mandate of Heaven for some fuckin' reason and we're supposed to think they're the good guys. Whatever.

Anywho... Winslow has always been good at showing how power corrupts, and there's no bs hero cops here to root against Danny confusing the reader.

The dialog is snappy and period-appropriate (including some racism/homophobia that clangs hard off the modern ear but no book about a New England mob in the mid-80's would be believable without it; consider yourself warned if that sort of thing bugs you), the action is essentially non-stop, and I really, really want the next book to have come out, like, yesterday.

Five outta five Puzos from this guy.

I like Winslow books; a bunch of shitheads, often with badges, live the FAFO lifestyle and generally have to watch everything and everybody they care about at all get absolutely wrecked, including themselves.

This book doesn't deviate from that norm. Danny Malone, NYPD God-Hero who thinks the rules don't apply to him, gets in over his head because he's not as smart as he thinks he is and absolutely destroys his own life and a large chunk of New York City in the process.

It's not much deeper than that, basically “The Shield” turned into book form. The entire system, from the cops to the mayor to the criminals themselves, basically EVERYBODY is a bad guy in this worldview, and... he's probably not wrong? It makes for a somewhat depressing read, even as one enjoys the violent ride.

Winslow verges up to but doesn't quite get all the way there in regards to critiquing capitalism itself as the main agency of the misery, which I'd personally love to see. When everybody involved in a system is miserable and corrupt, maybe take a swing at the system that produces those conditions in the first place instead of going with Everybody is a Bad Actor In an Otherwise Correct System? Because that falls apart when your entire book is a textbook about how it's impossible to operate in the world AT ALL without compromising yourself.

But I Marxistly digress... Winslow isn't a politician, he's an author, and it's an entertaining read about a bad cop. That's what I wanted, that's what this book gave me. 4/5 stars.

Yet another multi-book fantasy trilogy where the first book was pretty rad and then all downhill from there.

A thinly-veiled retelling of Chinese history from the Opium Wars through the Boxer Rebellion, Japanese invasions, WWII, Civil War and beyond, the series does best at revealing how kind of absolutely insanely miraculous it was that Mao accomplished even half of what he did in real life.

In the context of the book, protagonist Runin Fang's journey outdoes Mao's which, even given that fact that she can call forth the power of a god (unlike the Chairman), is still pretty crazy implausible, even within the boundaries of the universe the series sets up.

And that's why it didn't land with me as much as I wanted it to; her journeys ups and downs were too repetitive, too closely hewing to Mao's own journey in a way that her powers should've made... less troublesome. The weird gimping of technologies (is the tech in this book 16th Century analog? 18th? 20th? I still don't know) to allow Run's god-powers to be not-unstoppable some of the time, but game-changing at other times, just... ruined the already-massive suspension of disbelief one needs going into any fantasy novel. I can do that suspension of disbelief, so long as the fantasy world is internally consistent about what's possible/not. I don't think this series achieved that necessary balance.

Our protagonist also whiplashes from useless, drug-addled failure who doubts herself entirely to evil, vindictive hyper badass who can't even spell “doubt”, much less feel any... the mood swings were constantly jarring. I even went back at one point of ice cold evil pragmatism to find an earlier situation where she agonized over much less stakes... it wasn't due to character development, it was more “this is who she needs to be to advance the plot this way” and it didn't jibe.

What really broke me was the New Cike; the old Cike were rather rapidly killed off after being presented as mostly unstoppable forces of god-focused powers (until they... weren't), but the process of turning each of them, Fang included, INTO Cike was always presented as a long, arduous process, full of potential failures, needing careful shepherds, etc.... then some new ones are dredged up and almost omni-powerful in, like, a few days? Blah. Didn't land for me.

I like the overall ambition of the series, but too many of its parts' jagged edges didn't quite slide into their neighbors, and the inconsistencies pile up pretty bad by the end of the tale, which left me more relieved that I was finally done than sad that a fun journey had concluded.

Going to miss this series

Not much to say. A wonderfully coherent, epic, human story from start to finish. Glad I was around for the whole ride.

A world-spanning empire that has lasted for centuries is falling to a singular barbarian invasion, and only a lowly engineer from the visibly-wrong race stands in their way. Will he work with the people who enslaved him against the wild barbarians he originally hails from? Can he win?

While I was taken in by that kind of summary, I've got mixed feelings on this one now that I've read it.

To start with, the biggest beef a lot of folks have with this book is the ending; the book doesn't conclude so much as it just stops. Recognizing that Parker is trying to recreate the unreliable narrator common to the few histories we have from the real medieval era, many of which cut off before the to-us epochal events they were writing about actually wrapped up, I kinda... enjoyed the conceit.

The book is basically a riff on a siege of fake Constantinople where everything goes right for the besiegers and very little goes right for the besieged, except it always does, but at the very last minute. Make sense? Lotta deus ex machinas abounding, but they're explained via the agency of the main guy, so it's somehow not grossly egregious.

That's what the book is about; effectively, an EXTREMELY thin scrum of fiction is overlaid a bunch of vastly-simplified Byzantine history and told via the viewpoint of this foreign defender of The City. Various examples from real history of specific military advances and surprises are woven into the story of the siege. A loose and ill-defined gathering of secondary characters help the protagonist, Orhan, move the plot along. There are a few musings about love and the nature of prejudice that aren't worth interrogating at any length. The story doesn't conclude so much as it just stops. I stopped reading a few times on my way through, because, while I'm a sucker for Byzantine(-ish) historical tales, it's such a THINLY-drawn book. There's no depth to anything.

And yet... I grabbed the loose sequel, which I'm taking is supposed to be somewhat like Procopius' Secret History of Justinian? IE, the same series of events but told through a wildly different perspective? Not sure, but that seems to be the take from the jacket.

Honestly, I think folks familiar with Procopius' thing will get the most out of this book; if you go in expecting a straight low-fantasy tale, you will probably be disappointed. If you take it as a modern-language early medieval history, with all the myth-making and twisting of facts to serve an image those chronicles entailed, I'm guessing you'll like it more. Like I said, it never grabbed me fully like really good books do and I'll probably never go back to it, but I did finish it, was engaged at the end, and am genuinely curious what Book Two's take is going to be.

I'll keep this short... I loved this book, as does most anyone who appreciates good historical writing. She won the Pulitzer twice for a reason (if not specifically for this book).

Starting with the idea that a book based around the century that contained:

- The Black Death wiping out 1/3rd to 1/2 of the entire population of Europe

- The bulk of The Hundred Year's War between France and England

- A series of peasant rebellions that gave voice to the lowest members of society for effectively the first time ever (Narrator Voice: they did not end well for the peasants, but still)

- etc., and so on, through all of the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse...

might make for an interesting read, Tuchman then goes further by finding the one French aristocrat who somehow managed to be present for almost every important event that occurred during this time AND who left a thick enough documentary record to base a credible history on, AND THEN tops it all off by just writing the shit out of a book covering all of this in great but never-boring detail.

It's a really great read that touches on all aspects of life for both the Royal Knight at the focus of it all, up to his lieges, Kings of France and England, the Popes of the era, all the way down to the roughest village peasant. She provides SUCH a wonderful sense of the era, rich in detail on how people lived, were fed, worked, worshiped, etc...

It's a fuckin' triumph, and anybody who's interested in the slightest in medieval European history probably already has read this book. If you haven't, get on it.

The Last Day was a pretty fun ride marred by a pretty unbelievable and unsatisfying ending. A fun setup: in the VERY near future, the Earth's spin starts to slow down, eventually settling, after quite a number of years, into no spin at all, locking the planet into a permanent lighted side and a permanent dark side. Both are mostly entirely uninhabitable, leaving humanity to try and survive on the few dry lands that are riiiight on the margins of the terminator. The English Isles, for plot purposes, happen to lie right in that habitable band.

The book takes place in the 2059, a generation into this new, shitty reality. Traversing the few parts of England that are actually under the control of its wonderfully English military dictatorship that tries to not appear as such, a disillusioned researcher who doesn't have much hope left in anything gets a glimmer of it from an old mentor who betrayed her when she needed him most. From there, it's mostly a McGuffin hunt, but I enjoyed how the setting was described: the weird, nuclear but almost entirely-off-page American exiles as a lurking menace/savior in the background, the descriptions of how the pasty, grey, cold and rainy English have adapted to being in a permanent high noon of 90 degrees and humid... a lot of books I enjoy are heavy on the world-building, light on a particularly believable plot, and this book fits right onto that shelf. Ask me about it in six months and I'll struggle to recall it in any detail, but I enjoyed the quick two nights it took to get through it.

I generally like this dude's sci-fi, and enjoyed, more or less, the breezy ease of the first two books in this series, but the closing volume didn't do it for me. Has a general vibe of “I want to be done writing this book/this series”, he pushed the unpleasant bitchiness of fan-favorite Kiva Lagos just over the edge to “no way nobody would've just killed this asshole by now” levels, I felt some of the major characters were sorted out with big-time deus ex machinas... I just didn't care for it. And there's a general aura of (and this may entirely be due to my own political radicalization over the last few years) Clinton-esque neoliberal positivism over the whole thing that I just found off-putting given the stakes everyone was facing here. Just a big “meh” from me on this book.

First up, a warning: gonna be spoilers abounding in this one, both for this specific book and the series to date. Don't really have a way to discuss Book 5 out of a currently-planned 6 without spoiling some shit.

So... I loved the first few books in this, Pierce Brown's Red Rising series. I enjoyed the first book of the second trilogy as well, as it greatly expanded the viewpoint of the series. But after reading this absolutely fucking bloated fifth entry... man.

Clocking in at seven hundred and eighty-fucking-four pages, there were no less than three explicit moments while reading this book (I leave all progress indicators off on my Kindles; I like surprises, but the side-effect is that I have no fuckin' idea how much of the book I'm reading is left) where I thought to myself, “well, this has GOTTA be the final Big Showdown Scene, right? It's Prologue and out now!” and NOPE.

SO MUCH goddamned ground is covered in this entry, and, at some point, the reader just becomes numb to all of the PLOT TWISTS!!!! and TURNS OUTS!!!!

There's little I like less, that I find cheaper, than bringing back a character after they were clearly indicated as Capital-D Dead earlier. They did this shit with Sevro in the previous book, and now they're doing it with Cassius. I don't like it, and this series is verging on becoming a Marvel movie in the way death has to be assumed to be meaningless.

Which is a shame, because otherwise this series treats death rather... properly? A solar system-rending civil war would probably be extremely bloody, and the death toll is appropriately in the millions here. Grim? Ghoulish? Yes, but I like my apocalyptic sci-fi to be truly, well, apocalyptic. And it is that, here.

Brown has done some outstanding world building throughout this series, it's part of what drew me in originally. But he's hitting that George RR Martin wall of having a gigantic, well-drawn universe and just too much shit to resolve cleanly in any reasonable number of books. Unlike, for example, The Expanse, which has used time jumps and just a clean, efficient writing style to move the various plots along, Brown has let the cast of characters get way too big, to the point that I have to reference the character list at the front way too often to remember who many of the B and C cast even are. And that means I don't much care about most of them.

I don't want to be extremely negative here, but in a world setting that was already stretching even the bounds of its self-defined reality, Dark Age often snaps those bounds. Take the Obsidians, for example (giant, genetically-modified warrior cast who have multiple space-faring empires now that they're mostly liberated from The Society even though they have spent the last half-thousand years being held down to a completely primitive faux-Viking level of belief, learning and technology. Yeah, I know. It's a lot). They were barely acceptable, even by the rules of this world, when they were entirely used as rigorously-controlled military forces with little of their own leadership allowed to survive outside of their force-regressed, completely isolated polar reservations throughout the Solar System. It's very hard to buy the pretense that they could rebel, conquer, and hold their own polities in both deep dark space and on one of the most populous and powerful planets in the system at the same time. Sorry, just not buying that whole plotline, and I'm also not seeing it as particularly relevant or interesting. The liberation of the Obsidians isn't even really needed as a plot element since you already have the fuckin' downtrodden Reds to serve as the proletariat element the plot demands. And my gods are a LOT of pages spent on this.

Another element that failed for me... Brown repeatedly brings up the fact that Mercury's loss to The Republic would be fatal. Millions of people are slaughtered in the campaign, entire continents and the many populous cities within are razed, flooded, nuked, to prevent (The Republic) or achieve (The Society) this end. The entire goddamned book is essentially about the Battle of Mercury... and then, near the end, we hear that the entire Earth has been conquered by the Golds and it literally occupies two sentences. I had to reread that little part like three times to have it sink in. One planet? Life or death, worth billions of lives to retain for the cause. Worth possibly betraying what the entire Rising is about to keep Mercury. But Earth? Eh, fuck it. Whoops, it's gone? Oh well. Back to whatever the fuck else we were doing.

It made me pause in my reading and question: what, exactly are the fucking stakes here? I don't understand what gets weight in this universe and what doesn't.

I just... ugh. I basically want Book Six to come out and Wrap. This. Shit. Up. Brown's strengths as a world-builder have grown throughout this series, but he's losing the ability to focus on the main story and keep it going. He's basically made it impossible for any one faction to realistically “win”, which seems to be controlling the entire solar system for some reason, rather than living in some kind of Cold War-esque balance with the constant threat of mutually-assured destruction hanging over everyone's head (I can picture a lot of fun tales to be told in that kind of universe). I'd read smaller stories that just explore in greater depth one or more of the various aspects of this universe that are interesting. Make it like Bank's The Culture, where it's just the universe that these stories exist in.

But I'm getting pretty tired of the main event, and the increasingly-ludicrous plot twists Brown is resorting to to keep the putative main story interesting. It's getting harder to believe, in the face of millions of casualties and a clear sense that logistics is the driving factor of this war, to keep pinning its outcome on a small handful of individuals who keep bouncing off of each other in more and more eye-rollingly fantastical ways.

The first three books of Red Rising were very satisfying; the fourth book shifted a lot of things about the series, but introduced enough to keep me interested. This fifth entry really piles on new narrative debt and pays little of the already-large pile of existing debt off. I struggle to see how this can all be wrapped up in a sixth book (and am dreading what I assume is an inevitable bloating of size to Stephensonian girth for that entry). Likewise, I don't see how much more plausible drama can be further wrung out of the main characters enough to keep it going into a seventh book. I really don't know how he wraps this all up, and fear this series ending with a “Season 8 of Game of Thrones” unsatisfying thud of a conclusion.

Let's hope, much like this series has done to date, that Brown can pull one more miraculous saving throw and bring it all home in a way that satisfies rather than disappoints. Unfortunately, Dark Age worries me as to whether or not that can still happen.

A beautiful, if occasionally hard to follow, book.

Sci-Fi is just there to provide a loose conceit to a classic tale of forbidden love in this wonderful little read that unfolds almost like romantic poetry more than it does genre prose.

How would you love someone on the opposite side of a war from you? How would you do it if your commanders could literally read your thoughts and know if you were consorting or even thinking about consorting with the enemy?

Well, this book doesn't fully answer that question, but it does show the reader that “if you have the ability to easily manipulate time, sense, and physics, it'll help”.

I realize that description sucks, but that's the gist of it. It's a short book, just fuckin' read it and you'll see that I'm right and it is worth it.

Just okay... not my favorite of the novellas by far but a good view into the other side of Laconia's assumed authoritarian power when their gunships are actually unavailable.

I just didn't believe in either Biryar or Mona as characters. The Old Man was fine, he made sense. The Auberons made sense. But, even with what we know about Laconian conditioning, it's like some, but JUST some of them, are completely inhuman caricatures of “someone dedicated to duty”. Whereas Mona got over her objections to acting non-Laconian almost immediately and with barely any thought. Didn't really ring as realistic, even for pulpy sci-fi.

But... for 66 pages, I can get by. Another nice little bit of fill-in detail for the massive Expanse universe as we await the final big novel.

A pretty stellar, detail-driven overview of the history of human trade marred slightly by the author insisting on inserting not-quite-relevant personal asides here and there.

That's the gist of it, really. The book works best when it's describing in detail how trade has functionally worked at various points in human history. Deep-dive details on the minutiae of, say, Spanish barbers in 1650's Mexico getting pissed off at immigrant Chinese barbers undercutting them... that's where this book shines. And that makes up the bulk of the book, thankfully.

The pre-modern section of the book focuses quite heavily on trade via the Indian Ocean, which will seem odd to the standard reader as gasp what about Europe!?!?!? but that is where the bulk of Europe's and frankly the world's long-range trade occurred prior to the full-bore colonization of the Western Hemisphere so, in a book like this where each era has a representative, not comprehensive, focus, it's an absolutely fine choice. And, frankly, fascinating, and Bernstein does a very good job of showing the reader why.

If there's a ding I have to give this book, it's with the author sticking weird, current-events-based (well, at least “current” as in “the mid-aughts”, as that's when the book was first published) bon mots here and there, that are quite snarky and almost never relevant to the text at hand, even if I agree with some of them. These are going to age very poorly in a book like this that shouldn't really otherwise lose utility anytime soon.

The shitty little asides are mostly front-loaded, though, and I'm straight-up impressed by the even-handed appraisal of globalization and it's impact on all sides of the associated trade, good and bad. Given that the implosion of the global economy of 2008 happened after this book was written, that an author who seems to otherwise come from a very centrist POV was already looking askance at many aspects of modern global trade in the capitalist era is noteworthy.

For as much as I've read a ton of the usual military/political histories that dominate the field, I increasingly find myself more drawn to books like these that focus on something other than Kings and Generals as the main theme through which history is viewed. Trade is a dominating impulse of humanity, right up there with religion and power, and this book is a very good entry into seeing history in that particular light.

After the glorious triumph that was Julia Lovell's The Opium Wars, I was in the mood to keep reading about this period of Chinese history, and knew that the Boxer Rebellion was the next epochal event, so I went looking for a book that covered that. Silbey's tome here is what seemed to be the most recommended, so I went with it.

It was... fine. I finished it like two months ago and am already struggling to remember it in any great detail, unlike Ms Lovell's masterpiece, which should tell you something.

It covers the details well, even if it focuses too strongly on the Western and Japanese perspectives instead of the Chinese. It also spends too much time in the military weeds and not enough giving a perspective on the greater impact of events.

Starting off with a pretty thin grounding of how the Boxer Rebellion started and its initial path (which, unfortunately, focuses too much on its impact on the Western communities in China rather than, say, its own inherent goals or impact on the Chinese people themselves), it then goes into great, nay, exhaustive detail on the Western military response to the Boxer Rebellion.

EXHAUSTIVE detail.

And that's the problem; this is more a ground-level history of a specific military campaign than it is an exploration of a collision between two major civilizations that has had direct repurcussions into two World Wars and relations between the two biggest powers on Earth to this day. And I feel like the jacket sells it as more of the latter than the former.

If you just want a military history of the Western campaign, such as it was, to rescue the westerners trapped in Beijing, it tells that story very well. But it's quite uninterested in telling the wider story of how it ties into the wider scope of Chinese history, or even the more-specific story of Western Imperialism in China and that impact on current Sino-Western relations. The Lovell book about the immediately preceding Opium Wars discusses all of that quite well, which makes The Boxer Rebellion disappointing.

So maybe it was just a matter of my expectations, but those derived from the back copy and press around the book to begin with, but it didn't quite do the job I wanted it to. Again, if you want a pretty tightly-scoped history of the actual interactions between the Boxers and the Western armies that fought them, this book will be your jam. I, however, am going to continue to look for something that gives this event a more widely-scoped treatment.

The modal American knows fuck-all about The Opium Wars. Maybe one in a hundred could tell you they involved China, maybe? One in a thousand could possibly identify the other participant, Great Britain. The number who could go into any amount of detail on the war beyond the phrase “treaty ports” would surely not tax the capacity of a minor-minor league ballpark in one of those flyover states whose borders were drawn by a government bureaucrat having only a ruler and a time limit.

Point being, a book like this, in English, is a massive undertaking. The author basically cannot assume any level of background knowledge on behalf of her reader; you have to cover EVERYTHING. Which probably leads to my one, quite thin, complaint with the book; I'd love to have seen it cover the Second Opium War in as much detail as the first, which is the actual topic of this book. It's a thin complaint because a) the book quite specifically states that it is primarily about the first war and b) it still manages to cover the second in decent detail anyways.

But I get ahead of myself... The Opium War is a magnum opus, the finest history of the event available in English. It is more than just a history of the rather brief conflict that ran from 1839-1842 between a Britain that was essentially bullied into the conflict by her own merchant class and a Chinese Empire so vast, so decadent, and so dismissive of foreigners in every possible way that its court was, for most of the conflict, not even aware that it was at war.

The conflict itself is covered extremely well and in great detail. More importantly, though, is the back third of the book, which covers how the various Chinese governments since the war have viewed the war and presented it to their governed populace. If the phrase “Century of Humiliation” means nothing to you, this book might be a good place to start, and it's something you should want to understand because undoing it undergirds the entirety of the Chinese government's foreign policy.

The bad reviews I've seen of this book tend to come from, well, Chinese nationalists... they dislike some of the lightness with which Lovell occasionally treats the topic, but let's be honest: some of the happenings in these events WERE comically absurd, period. She doesn't stint on mentioning the awful, hypocritical nature of British rapaciousness in their conduct of the war, nor does she try to short-sell the deaths that resulted on the Chinese side. I feel it's a balanced look at the causes and blame all around.

For a pretty obscure (in the West) topic, I think that this is a great book to pick up if you're at all interested in rendering it not obscure for yourself, personally. A fascinating read on a frankly fascinating event.

Fun read, this. Classic sci-fi that takes a small group of plucky humans fleeing an increasingly ravaged and warred-over Earth to try again but better on an earth-ish planet elsewhere.
This new planet, which the colonists dub “Pax” (didn't love that; a little on-the-nose), is juuuust-barely able to provide for the newcomers, at least under their original plan. Life is downright hostile, for the most part.

So, things therefore get weird when the younger generation of native-Pacifists (what the colonists refer to themselves as, in case the planetary name wasn't clear enough for you that these folks are rejecting the violence of ol' Earth and doing things differently) realize that their parents have set them up for suffering and are actively refusing to take steps that would make their lives materially easier to deal with on Pax. And, oh irony, are willing to use violence to enforce that suffering.
That may sound like spoilers but it's not really, it's effectively set-up and a good dose of world-building to get us situated in the environment and its unique properties that differ it from Earth (since it is alike in most ways). The actual Earth-born humans and their concerns are not the point of this book as Burke uses the enjoyable tactic of time jumps quite often to get us past the whole “struggling colony on the edge of disaster” thing that isn't really the story she wants to tell. So, we quickly move along through a number of generations of the original Pacifists' descendants, with each generation getting a star turn and a protagonist, though there's plenty of overlap between chapters as well.

Books using this trope tend to suffer from the lack of a single protagonist for the reader to identify with, but that's not a problem here. There IS one character who travels through the entire book with the reader, but I won't spoil that... entirely.

I will spoil it enough to note that it's not an omniscient computer, a trope that exists in far too many books of this nature. Refreshingly, Burke acknowledges that, in the absence of the ability to bring along the entire industrial fabric that makes spaceflight from Earth possible in the first place, all of their computing and machining power will eventually, and not in TOO long a time, fail and become useless. This happens here, after a brief and expected period of cannibalizing dying tools to keep other ones going.

I genuinely enjoyed this aspect of the story; the original settlement mission doesn't happen TOO far from now, so there aren't deus ex machina-style self-healing, self-replicating nanofactories or any of the usual suspects authors bring along when they want their tiny precarious space colonies to generally resemble future Earth as much as possible. In effect, the Pacifist society, for the bulk of the story, is at about a late medieval-level of technological advancement. They have their forebears' modern knowledge, which certainly puts them above the level of actual medieval societies, but, lacking modern infrastructure, they can rarely act on that information, which to me is almost worse. Things are not helped by the great scarcity of mineable ores on Pax.

This is what provides the tension in the tale; the original colonists barely have enough folks to provide the basement level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and for all of their knowledge and still-working computers, they're still dealing with a very alien ecology that seems actively engaged in killing them.

This tension then turns, in later generations, to the Pacifists figuring out how to make accomodations with at least parts of their environment and to start to thrive, if never to the point of what the reader would understand as modern levels of physical comfort and material satisfaction. This culture seems to be pleasant to live in, but everybody works hard, and the random death of young, healthy people is a much more common event than it is for ours.

After setting all of this up, the book moves into essentially two primary conflicts, both of which are very enjoyable and which introduce concepts that aren't entirely new to sci-fi, but whose extrapolations at the hands of this author are very fun to read. I don't want to spoil those, but suffice to say that I'm greatly looking forward to the sequel.

That said, Semiosis stands as a complete story on its own as well, so don't be put off by the fact that a sequel is coming. It ends at a good point, having wrapped the major points up but leaving the reader able to easily speculate any number of possible options to start new stories with in a sequel. It's a solid basis for a universe of stories, but also a cohesive novel of its own.

I did have a few gripes, all of them pretty minor; characterization is mostly excellent, but a few characters were a bit one-note. The cast is large, given the time period covered, so of course not everybody can get a full fleshing-out, but some folks were pretty one-dimensional in a way that strongly hinted “I need someone like this to move this part of the plot forward, so here she is”. Again, though, most of the major characters were quite believable given the time available to spend on them.

Certain happenings also happened in time frames that just seemed entirely too short, but said shortness was obviously necessary for plot tension purposes. Explanations are given, but they don't always land as completely believable. Also a minor issue, but one that had me swallowing some suspension of disbelief here and there.

Overall, though, this is a stellar debut novel and I eagerly await the sequel and what else Ms Burke has in store for us.

This one was recommended to me by a buddy who shares my fascination with Central Europe's experience in the 20th Century. I consume a lot of fiction and non-fiction on this topic.

As I've gotten older, I find myself less interested in the march of armies or the words of politicians in this era; that story is exhaustively documented, and I've ingested enough of it to where I think I'm solid on that front. Now, I find myself much more interested in how regular folks got on (or, more often, didn't) during these cataclysmic upheavals and their aftermaths. And All for Nothing falls squarely into that wheelhouse.

The book traces the story of a fading aristocratic estate in Eastern Prussia that is in the direct path of the final Soviet offensive that ended up ending the Third Reich entirely. Starting in January 1945 and carrying through into the summer, with tons of flashbacks as well, we follow the story primarily through the eyes of the 12 year old protagonist, Peter, who is apparently loosely-based on the author himself, though the book is fiction.

The story is intimate, and goes into obsessive, almost repetitive detail on what the family does to sustain and entertain itself during this period. Nursery rhymes are repeated in the text over and over, lists of possessions and foodstuffs appear on the regular, in great detail... the overall effect is to hammer home what was being consumed, destroyed, never to return in the all-encompassing fire of the Reich's Gotterdammerung, all of the family and friend connections and rich material history that would be rendered into ash.

As the story proceeds, it is not just the family that is affected. Refugees fleeing the Red Army steamroller just east of the manor start appearing, and either choose themselves to ask for shelter, increasingly, are imposed upon Peter's family by the Nazi potentate who is in charge of this district. We get to see how various classes of lives are affected by this calamity; these characters weave in and out of the story, first spending some time at the Manor and then being met again under even worse circumstances as the family itself finally flees home and joins the massive, hopeless exodus clogging the roads of East Prussia in search of an escape that is no longer open to most of them.

In the background but important are the various foreigners who didn't exactly choose to be at the manor; from the Ukrainian domestic workers who were basically enslaved by Peter's father as he performed his duties of brutal resource extraction for the Reich's war machine and sent to do labor at his home, to the Polish POW who tends to the manor's small farm and its animals, to the variety of POWs and forced laborers from all over occupied Europe who are stabled up the road in a former hotel and who become an increasingly (and understandably) menacing presence.

As should be needless to say, it's not a pleasant story, there is no happy ending, and, by the later chapters, the tempo of Bad Shit Happening increases to the point that this reader was actually somewhat depressed upon finishing the book.

Kempowski is apparently a big deal in Germany. After surviving the war, the Soviets accused him of being an American spy and tossed him into prison for eight years before releasing and deporting him to the west. He spent the rest of his life writing novels set in this lost era, and embarking upon a project to collect the diaries and writings of East Prussians and their war experiences, which he did to the point of having to put an addition onto his house to store the collected materials.

This novel shows why he and his work is important. For very understandable reasons, the rest of the world isn't inclined to get weepy over the fate of Germans in 1945. Large swaths of the planet was ash and rubble due to wars started by Germany and her allies, tens of millions were dead all over, and if a few of those millions were freshly-killed Germans, well, Jesus, wasn't that just the bare beginnings of justice anyways?

Maybe yes. The point of this book isn't to judge the suffering, it is simply to record it; it's up to the reader to decide if any individual act of suffering or pain requires any further analysis beyond “this person is suffering”; the strength of this work and others like it is in forcing the reader to examine their own feelings on the nature of suffering; can it ever be deserved? Should it always be alleviated? The author here isn't going to tell you one way or the other; his job is just to document that suffering happened.

Given that, I think the essential question this book asks of the reader is: is suffering quantfiable beyond “survived it or not”? Is a moment of extreme pain more or less worthy of a witness' sympathy if we know that the sufferer themself caused great pain to others earlier on? If so, how far out do the circles of complicty range?

It's a tough question with no clear answer; sure, it's easy to say “fuck that guy” when “that guy” is a brutal Nazi functionary who has spent the entire war out of harm's way behind the front ruthlessly stripping conquered peasants of their very sustenance if not killing them outright and he's finally getting his just desserts; less so when it's a 12 year old child caught in the gears of two insanely violent war machines meshing into each other.

The writing doesn't demand that the reader come up with an answer either way; the prose is dry, matter-of-fact, and laden with description. While scenes of the characters experiencing sentiment are common, these are presented unemotionally, relying instead on a factual “these are things that happened” recitation that eventually becomes numbing. The first death of a major character (I don't think it's a spoiler in THIS kind of book to mention that death occurs) is presented so dryly that I had to reread it a few times to make sure that what was being described was what actually had happened.

There's a weight to this kind of presentation; all of the dry retelling of individually unremakable happenings slowly turning into life-changing, usually for the worse, events, ends up creating a slowly-building atmosphere of just complete, oppressive dread in the reader. It's clear that the other shoe, that ALL of the other shoes, are going to drop at some point, and by the time it does, ending the book in a basically non-stop parade of increasingly-worse horrors, you're almost relieved to be getting on with it.

I liked this book a lot, but don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone I care about and presumably would prefer to be happy than sad. It's a sad book about a massive human disaster almost entirely brought upon the victims by their own complicitly in equally horrific, but different, disasters. And the book doesn't even try to impute a moral or lesson to all of this suffering; it's just a chronicle of it. At best, one comes away with a strong feeling of “we should do everything in our power to prevent anything like this from ever happening again”, but that is clearly a lesson lost to our current times so there is no solace to be found even in that.

The fourth of five (so far) volumes in Ackroyd's “History of England” series, Revolution covers, well... a lot of revolt.

Starting from the end of the Glorious Revolution that wiped the Cromwellian grimness out of power, continuing through the American Revolution, and ending with the English reaction to the French Revolution and its Napoleonic successor, Revolution stays on-topic with its title throughout. Oh, and let us not forget what was arguably the most important revolution of them all: the Industrial Revolution. Ackroyd presents the latter as more of a process than a singular event, but its impact reverberates throughout every other event in the book. 

I've liked the way Ackroyd writes since I first read his London: The Biography (a book I can't recommend enough if you have any interest in any aspect of that city at all). While the scholarly rigor is fully present in the facts presented and sourcing and all that, Ackroyd is anything but dry. Broad-sweep views of the politics or background events of the day are interspersed with tight, personal vignettes drawn from the people being impacted by those politics and events. More academic chapters covering the government and wars and such alternate with chapters focused on the economics of regular people trying to get by, or on the arts of the era. It's a well-rounded read that moves along quickly given how much it has to cover.

If there is a fault to be had with Revolutions, it's in the conscious choice of the author to focus it tightly on England; you're not going to get much discussion of the slave trade or India save as to how they directly impacted on the English in England itself. It's emphatically NOT a history of the Empire. But, he's clear about that in the very first volume, so it's not so much an issue as it is just something to be aware of. 

Ackroyd also doesn't cast much of a critical voice into the narrative, either; you won't get much sense of how the author feels about any of the events he's retelling. The lack of easily-discernible bias is honestly somewhat refreshing, but some sense of point of view would be appreciated by some readers, I'm sure.

That said, I like his approach and recommend this book and series to anyone who wants a deeper dive into English history than any single-volume book could do justice to.