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I always enjoy little anthologies like this, and it was well worth acquiring via interlibrary loan. If you enjoy Lovecraft and Doyle, you will like the stories. The authors run in interesting directions with the content, with some preferring Holmes to Lovecraft and vice-versa, but not one of the stories dragged or was unenjoyable.

A very enjoyable bit of sci-fi, with likeable and yet alien aliens.

I re-read this on a whim when my brother mentioned he was teaching it to his class; I'd read this when I was a child. It's still a fun little story, worth the 30 or 40 minutes it took to read.

A bit funnier than the first book, which I appreciated - and manages to not feel too much like merely more of the same. I read it on a whim, but I don't regret the hour or so it took.

A good end to an enjoyable series (though I think there's now a fourth entry on Audible?). Just enough pathos to allow a bit of catharsis and give the story some extra punch.

A good second entry; quality is about the same, though this book was definitely a bit more melancholy. Much like Lord of the Rings, this feels like one bigger book split into 3 than 3 books separated – but that's not a bad thing.

I always enjoy Reynold's Revelation Space stories, and this one is good even if it rehashes a lot of the plot skeleton from another story.

Good read in an enjoyable series. Now that Stross has fully dropped the pastiche angle, it's nice to read in his own voice too. If you liked the earlier novels, you'll enjoy this one too.

The main problem with this book is that it tends to look at evil, and rather than eradicating the evil, seeks to feed it in such a way that they hope it will be less awful. The immigration system is fraught with inefficiencies? Allow any person to import an immigrant labour and pay them less than the minimum wage as an indentured servant - it's ethical(TM) because this is already a thing under au pair visas in the US and the Arab world. Data logging by companies is intrusive and makes them powerful enough to manipulate democracies? Make them pay you in exchange for even greater intrusions. I think the most damning illustration of this is how often variations of this phrase show up in the book: “[the thing we just proposed] might be compared to slavery, wrongly in our opinion”.

The authors are fundamentally unwilling to accept what their own data is showing them. That said, they do offer an occasional interesting idea, and while many of these are unachievable (weighted per-issue voting in a participatory mass-democracy with a sort of tradeable 'voting credits' budget per voter), some of them do have promise (i.e. forbidding a company from owning interests in more than one area of a vertical market, but allowing them to own things in many markets).

All in all, the book might be worth it as a look at “problem areas”, even if it tends to get the problem itself wrong.

I actually really enjoyed this one. I'd put it in the same category as something like “A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet”: a quick, nice read. Nothing too challenging idea-wise, and it's not going to win any awards for innovation in the genre, but I don't regret reading it. A great book for a vacation read, I think, and the different Bobs let it sample a couple of different genres in a neat enough way.

I really enjoyed this one, from the pacing to the atmosphere to the characters. I was worried that this was going to hew too closely to the And Then There Were None formula, but was delighted that it simultaneously did and did not. It's great when in hindsight you can see the clues you noticed and the ones you did not. The great shame was finding out that this book is part of a series with ten others...only one of which has been translated, though a second one is coming out in May.

An enjoyable read. Nothing amazing, but he paints a decent picture of his setting. At times it got a bit melodramatic, but then so did Columbo, and Kosuke Kindaichi is basically Japanese Columbo by the author's own admission, so I can't really call that a fault.

A very entertaining narrative about attempts by Libertarians to “do their thing” in a small New Hampshire town and the effects it had, both big and small. Definitely worth a read.

It was nice of the author to put this up for free when it fell out of print, and I'd say that if you are interested in the history of IT/computing in the 80s and early 90s, it's a worthwhile read. The PDF is a brisk 115 pages, and while he's not a great author, Willard ‘Pete' Peterson doesn't write badly enough that it's a slog to get through. I also appreciate that he does admit – in several places – that a good amount of his good fortune arose from the luck of being in the right place at the right time, something most rich people ignore even though the main cause of wealth is being born into it, be that Tucker Carlson's being born into the Swanson dinner fortune, Bill Gates coming from millionaire lawyers, or Warren Buffet being the child of a 4-term Congressman.

That said, if the other reviews haven't clued you in, Pete is...not a nice man. I don't exactly think he's arrogant like some other reviewers said, but rather he comes off as a pretty big hypocrite without ever quite realizing he is one. Everything he claims to stand for, his actions never actually reflect, and hilariously he never puts two and two together meaningfully even when his own daughter calls him out on it. He's very much the worst sort of capitalist: autocratic, without real ethics, and convinced that profit is the sole good and sole factor in running a company. He talks a lot about his belief in flat corporate structures, and it gets a bit grating when everything he actually did makes it very clear he saw himself as king and high priest alongside the two other owners of the company that eventually ousted him. To give him some credit, a few of his biggest blunders – including the classic “if I leave, they'll come crawling” bluff – he does admit were mistakes.

An enjoyable, quick read. The conceit isn't particularly interesting, but the story is engaging nevertheless. In that regard, reading this felt rather like watching an episode of Poirot or something.

Another gem from the late, great Terry Pratchett.

A good read. I don't find Joe's stuff engaging in the way that a truly amazing book is, where you sit there enraptured until you absolutely have to go to bed or do something else, powering through page after page, but it's enjoyable and nags at me to keep at it. The story is quite grim in an unpleasantly realistic way, and sometimes it can be tiring, but the story he's telling is engaging and every paragraph serves to build up to a climax you can feel coming a long way off. I also appreciate that Joe's characters genuinely feel fleshed out - they grow and backslide, and have some dimensionality to them. All in all, not a bad read.

Enjoyable vignettes!

It's hard to write good fantasy that manages to be deeply cynical in a way that feels realistic rather than grimdark; this book hits the mark with aplomb. Interesting characters, and the writing manages to communicate their POV and worldview not just by describing their thoughts, but through what they say and do. A very enjoyable read.

Delightful, funny, and full of heart - typical Pratchett, and I mean that in the best possible way.

A very enjoyable Stephen King - Richard Chizmar collaboration that feels like it belongs in the same universe with the first novella. Not quite as good as the first one IMO, but it feels like a neat little vignette in Gwendy's life and I still enjoyed it. As horror goes, it's a very light touch.

Note: Spoilered section contains spoilers for Wind Through the Keyhole as well as the Gwendy series.
I really enjoy how King seems to be making a lot of his villains more interesting - between Maerlyn in the Wind Through the Keyhole and perennial badguy Walter/RF in the Gwendy series, it's kind of neat to see King continuing to build on these time-honoured characters.

Featured on an episode of the delightful if at times very smugly snotty podcast “I Don't Even Own a Television”, Slow Bullets is a nice little soft sci-fi novella about a prison ship in a very dire situation. Alistair Reynolds enjoys his grimdark stories and this is no exception, but it's a short and enjoyable little glimpse into a world in great peril. There's a bit of a smug anti-religiousness that some people might find grating, but I felt it was tempered by having characters observe that there were positive things brought to the table by the "believer" faction as well. On the whole, if you enjoyed Revelation Space this is worth a quick read. If you've never read anything by Reynolds though, I'd suggest starting with something else.

I find Charles Stross' works to either be very good, enjoyable and thoughtful (Eschaton #1, the Laundry series, etc), or very much not my thing (Accelerando.) This work falls, fortunately, into the former category. Stross spins up a believable, well-fleshed out post-human world ruled by a very believable form of future capitalism run amok, and takes the reader on a journey that contains some genuinely enjoyable twists and turns. All in all, a very enjoyable read.

Thoughtful and engaging as well as funny - textbook Terry.

Interesting attempt at something high concept, just not for me.