Avery

To start: despite the title making me nervous enough that I nearly didn't read it, this book is remarkably fair (and quite no-nonsense) to both parents.

Having a couple of young kids, there was a bunch in here that resonated. A few chapters in, I recommend it to my wife, and she finished it before I did. We have yet to work through all the advice and ideas together, but it feels like there's a lot of useful content there.

I'd recommend this book to anyone planning to have a family.

With the dead gods premise, I had to give this one a read. And while there is some cool world-building by the end, I was frustrated by the pacing of the first two thirds of the book. I felt it dragged quite a bit, between navigating politics and doling out chunks of backstory, a lot of which were already clear from the setting.

I didn't connect with many of the characters, with the exception of Sigrud, who is immediately likable and becomes more and more interesting the more we learn about him.

I nearly gave up on finishing several times. In the end, I'm glad I stuck with it, as there's a pretty creative and exciting ending. It looks like a few people preferred the later books in the series, so I might give them a try. Maybe now that the stage has been set, it will be easier to focus on a story.

While the previous book felt like it dragged a bit, this one started off strong and kept going. My favorite book in the series so far, the references to SCP are fun and there are a few unexpected twists.

Sad that this is the last available in audiobook at the time of reviewing, will probably take a break to see if we get any more in that format.

I'm still enjoying the books enough to want to finish the "last one" (I'm consuming these as audiobooks so actually there's another 4 books-worth but they haven't been recorded yet).

There were some uniquely cool aspects to this one, but it did feel like a big lull in the action. We've cooled down a lot on the skilling up, discovering new abilities/items, and tackling new enemies. All replaced by a fair bit of literal waiting around.

The relationship conversations continue to be the least interesting parts and given a lot of time spent on interpersonal stuff in this book, there was more of it than usual.

I picked this back up after reading and enjoying The Lifecycle of Software Objects last year. There were a few more interesting stories in here, though none that jumped out at me specifically. They vary a fair bit, and I don't know that I was smart enough to "get" all of them, but I didn't regret reading.

Still good! Unique scenarios, interesting choices, meaningful stakes.

One point off because of my low tolerance for spending time reading about the love lives of young adults. I get that having all basically the companions be potential love interests is probably an intentional joke but it doesn't feel funny enough to be worth the drama.

Good stuff! The world is interesting and subverts a few tropes, so it's a little less predictable than usual. The abilities, monsters, items, decisions are all meaningfully varied. There are not many decisions with obvious answers. The style of LitRPG is more D&D than MMO, which I also welcomed.

The characters and their relationships are decidedly less painful to read than is usually the case, I'm invested in their growth and they make relatively reasonable decisions without agonizing over them.

The audiobook has some tedious stat enumeration but that's common. Hopefully it improves going forward.

This book had so much potential! Everything I could ask for -- a magic system based on formal logic, descent into mythological hell, creative justification for the use of chalk in drawing pentagrams... the first few chapters had me very excited.

Unfortunately, it wasn't only the characters that experienced a descent into hell -- everything got worse from there. The pacing felt pretty inconsistent, there's lots of time spent on early relationship anxiety, and a number of times where an impossible situation was solved by a random stroke of fate. I won't say much about the ending other than it felt cliched and not worth the effort to finish.

The cool magic system didn't end up getting used to the degree that I had hoped either. The paradox-based spells are kind of all one-off paradox name dropping, rather than really feeling integrated into the story, or having much continuity. Feels like there was a lot of unexplored potential here, especially given the author's willingness to explain everything.

The book's concept of hell is ..really.. cerebral, there's not much in the way of horror at all. This kind of makes sense in context but might not be what people are expecting going in.

Katabasis basically ends up being a long love/hate rant about higher academia that felt a bit raw, like reading someone's diary. The characters seem to provide an avenue to explore some strange ideas around work ethic, women in academia, abuse of power, etc.

I wish I could read another book in this universe with a less self referential plot. Like, have things that actually happen, and the characters just happen to be "analytical magicians".

My first Vonnegut read, it was quite enjoyable! I picked it up because I loved the quote that I read in Everything Is Tuberculosis: "Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."

Turns out, the book is full of little nuggets like this one, and in fact the story in general ended up being a collection of fascinatingly quotable nuggets. I think I can put Vonnegut on my list with Bradbury as authors who I'd enjoy reading, no matter what they decided to write about. My idea of a book to read on the beach.

Promising start! Feels like I could end up liking it as much as Cradle, so that makes it worth continuing. The premise of trying to make the best of some bad luck feels new too, when many other main characters have weirdly good luck.

I like how there seem to be many different paths to power, each of which has a fair bit of depth and interaction with the others. The characters are ok too -- usually I'd be reluctant to read something set in a school, since all the characters end up being too angsty, but that's not an issue here.

Some funny moments in there too with references to other fiction.

Most of the book revolves around a concept that doesn't really make sense. The idea is, undead can't reproduce, so they can't grow their armies for an incoming attack. Except... the attack is probably weeks away, not years. Babies don't make for a very good army. The solution ends up the same, it's just weird that this is seen as a limitation, especially since raising your dead enemies isn't usually an option.

Some of the dialog/characterization is pretty uninspired -- the psychopathic antagonist and the robotic AI come to mind. The AI is especially strange, particularly the sequences where people are considering whether it could pass a Turing test, while it's busy simulating thousands of NPCs that are indistinguishable from players. Zero time is put into explaining why the AI takes a dumb pill every time it's not speaking through an NPC.

In general, the characters are not super likable and the relationships are still a little rough, but not so bad that I couldn't see coming back after a little break from the series. It's still decent VRMMO litrpg content - strategy, abilities, some loot, etc. I appreciate that they manage to not just make the main character feel super lucky or overpowered.

I'd never read anything by John Green but had this recommended by a few people and was glad I took a look. I enjoyed many of the anecdotes and quotes that were used as analogies and motifs throughout the book.

It's a relatively quick and easy read, apart from a few emotional stories -- the author focuses on some specific people in an attempt to humanize the sufferers of TB. This becomes a fairly central theme, pushing to neither romanticize nor stigmatize the disease, both of which have happened plenty in its very long (I learned) history.

I recently read Abundance by Klein & Thompson, another popular non-fiction book this year, and found Everything Is Tuberculosis to be an interesting complement to it. Important to remember that achieving the vision of abundance in the "developed" world doesn't automatically mean those problems get solved everywhere.

Decent start, the main character was less angsty than I was expecting, which is nice. Meaningful choices, a little OP sometimes but not too much. The stat blocks are done in a way that's not painful in audiobook format.

I was looking for a readable VRMMO litrpg and so far this is satisfying the requirements.

A new one for the favorites list!

This book ended up being way better than I hoped. I've been disappointed a few times in my search for a certain brand of horror sci-fi, but this nailed it. It ended up being more technical/sci-fi than I thought it would be, given the crime/thriller FBI angle.

But wow, lots to dig into here. By the end, I wasn't following 100%, but that's basically a positive in this genre. It's somehow firmly grounded while also having a couple mindblowing twists. It's gory and dark but with a depth (that I miss from some Blake Crouch scifi thrillers)

It has such an iconic and distinct, somehow very visual, branding that it has the potential to be a great movie or mini series. Lets blow some crime-thriller-lovers' minds

I really wanted to like this one.

I've been searching for a VRMMO story that can replace the hole that finishing The Ripple System left in my life.

This one is not it, unfortunately.

It started off strong with the audiobook cast + production (with the possible exception of the way that Xan is read, though I think the way she's written is as much at fault there).

Unfortunately it suffers from several issues. There are frequent time skips, which are immediately followed by heavy handed ("As you know...") exposition, frequently as awkward dialogue, about what happened during the skip. The magic abilities are super same-y.. everyone starts off with the same gun ability and many subsequent spells are just.. better guns? Any deviation from this is either fire/ice blasts or some flavor of game breaking super-magic. There's very little in the way of interesting game mechanics. The fact that the characters are explicitly unable to grow and develop unsurprising results in.. very little character development (not to mention weird interactions between characters of vastly different ages, though thankfully this is largely glossed over).

Open to suggestions for a better VRMMO!

Continuing to enjoy this author!

The narration by Sophie Aldred was also great -- really expressive dialogue without feeling exaggerated. I'll have to find more read by her.

I feel like Shroud is story that lies on a spectrum between The Martian and Blindsight -- more interesting than the former and more readable than the latter (I'd still recommend them all, maybe the Martian a little less).

There was a bit in the middle that felt a little slow and the end kind of fizzled out for me, but worthwhile overall still, I think.

My favorite books (so far) by this author are Permutation City and Quarantine, which, along with this one, make up the fake "Subjective Cosmology" series (Egan has explained that this being considered a series was a misunderstanding).

Unfortunately this one didn't strike me the same as the others. I had a hard time getting drawn in to both the physics theorizing and the geopolitical conflicts. There was some interesting exploration of more biological, near future transhumanism around gender, perception, and relationships that I liked. Still glad I read it, just doesn't make it into the favourites list!

I wasn't sure what things would be like going into this one, but there ended up being more going on than I expected, which was nice.

I wasn't a huge fan of the constant family drama though. Made it feel like things took a long time to progress. The stakes really feel lower right now.

The way that abilities are described has improved a lot from the previous books, far fewer repetitive stat blocks (still reading the audio book so it makes a big difference).

I think some of the economics stuff has improved. Still enjoying many of the characters.

Some complaints are probably a result of listening to this as an audiobook. I like Heath Miller's narration. The voices are differentiated but not over the top, and it's generally very easy to listen to. I also appreciate that full character-sheet level stat readouts are very uncommon.

Unfortunately, every time anyone uses any ability, the entire description of the ability gets read out. This gets a little painful, as the clearly tabular style doesn't read very well while being pretty repetitive, especially where there are like 4 levels of nested effects being defined. Of course, the fact that abilities (especially Jason's) have pretty vague names means that I frequently DO end up needing to listen to the description.

That said, I don't think all the blame lies with the format. Jason's ability set causes to his fights to be super predictable so far. 1) Give afflictions (yes, even a scratch is enough), 2) do damage scaling with afflictions, 3) absorb the afflictions to deal more damage and set up 4) execute. Like, I get and that's fine, but you don't need to explain it to me every time.

The fight predictability gets a little better near the end, and thankfully they start to be described in a little less detail. We'll see if it continues to improve in book 4 (which I guess I'll be reading next)

Still entertaining, and I've just started the third.

That said, there are a few annoying things.

Everyone keeps talking about how Jason just is who he is, and some people like it and some people don't. That's true, but it feels convenient that most of the ones that like Jason tend to be more powerful and influential than the ones who don't. It would be nice if there was some meaningful interaction where his attitude results in a bad outcome, otherwise it starts to feel rigged.

I also don't really get the deal with the awakening stones. Who cares that it's a high rarity stone if you don't know what it gives? It's not like it will be more powerful, as is often repeated. It ends up feeling like a meaningless choice that conveniently works out well in cases, but there's a lot of talk of which one to pick.

Related to the relatively unexplainable purchase of expensive stones, the economy feels super broken. It feels like the main characters can buy just about anything without saving up or making tough choices. Jason's gold coin looting seems way too powerful, considering it basically lets him buy the best gear he can use. Hopefully this will stop being the case if they move on to a larger town.

Some really cool ideas grounded in (as far as I can tell) real biology. I wasn't expecting it to focus so much on the political angles involved in an important scientific discovery, but that was neat too.

I did feel like it dragged at times and could have maybe been a bit shorter -- apart from the cool ideas, not much important happened plot-wise.

Definitely preferred the first, though I probably won't abandon the series. Felt like not much happened and what did was somewhat convenient or meaningless.

I'm a fan of Travis Baldree's narration but the constant French(?) accent on this world was painful. I sure hope there's less of that going forward.

> I felt detached, untethered.

This statement by the main character is also how I felt about most of this book. I don't think it was particularly bad, but for some reason, I found it hard to care about most of the plot beats. Maybe because it felt like the protagonist didn't either.

One explored concept is the potential impact of hardware backdoors and our reliance on a relatively brittle supply chain. To me, this mostly felt too real to be entertaining fiction, yet not explored deeply enough to be informative.

What I wasn't expecting is for this tech-y spy thriller to start giving "This Is How You Lose the Time War" vibes (to be fair, I didn't expect it from that book either). The writing style is less overtly poetic but somehow still had similar energy at times, hidden inside a more grounded narrative style. Maybe as if El-Mohtar's book was crossed with one of Kim Stanley Robinson's half-essay near-future sci-fi explorations (while thankfully staying closer to the first in verbosity).

The afterword by the author made me feel like even though this book might not have been the best fit for me, it might still be worth trying another.

This installment continues to ramp up the stakes satisfyingly, similar to the last book. It's pretty impressive how much mileage Stross is getting out of the general setting/premise while keeping each book feeling fresh.

I feel like either the constant re-explanations that frustrated me with the previous books have gotten less common (or I've learned to tune them out).

What's kinda neat about this one is that its political commentary moves beyond "civil service is clunky and inefficient" to "but it's probably better than the alternative", while remaining true to itself. Definitely some ideas in this one that can still be useful in a world without (mathematical) eldritch horrors.

The book is much less dark than the synopsis made it seem. The reader is reminded a few times how much the protagonist is a dark and twisted hero, which seems.. really not to come through in his dialog and behavior?

That said, the friendly vibes don't bother me either.

I love the idea of grounding the cultivation/soul concepts within a very concrete (literal) structure. It makes the mental "work" and decisions they're making easy to visualize and provides a great framework to (again, literally) build upon.

Solid intro, interested to see where the series goes next.