Reading List

This was great fun to read, and dealt with some really interesting subjects. I got slightly side tracked trying to make sense of the time travel (like, is it consistent). To be honest - it is a really unique take on the paradox problem. It did a great job of hinting at a wider fuller world around the story too. I found the ending a bit "neat" given the whole book had been around the complexities of real life. 

 A mixed book - the mindfulness description (Ch 4) I thought was really good, as was the conclusion - a strong passionate case for why we all need to take more care of our thoughts. However, the books "jokes" are too frequent, and not funny. More often than not they are fat-phobic or racist.

I was really looking forward to this. It deals with some really interesting ideas - most notably the battle between rationality and missing out on the magic of life. However, it also deals with a bunch of modern real issues (such as the refugee crisis, and the turmoil in parts of the middle east) without a huge amount of sensitivity. It also ends in quite an unsatisfactory manner.

A fun dumb sci-fi novel. It was a little uncomfortable the way one lead character (2?M) talks about the (17F) other lead. The tropes were rife. But it was a well paced, easy read.

In the end, I enjoyed Green Mars.  It took a long time to get going, with a lot of detail that it could have frankly done without, but the revolution that happens in the back 8th of the book, was fascinating and felt very timely.

I enjoyed this even more than I remembered enjoying it. I got a lot more out of it than the first time through, and I still find the wheeled people just so fantastic.

This book ended up being even better than I remember it! I could hardly put it down. There's a lot more subtly than I can remember (unsurprisingly). I am very glad I chose to re-read this before diving into the Book of Dust. I will definitely be reading the Amber Spyglass next. It also served as welcome escape from Covid, that is currently infecting everything (as well as everyone) in our lifes.

A weird book. Quite unpleasant, but the words were very visceral.

This is a really enjoyable, sexy queer book, with a somewhat flat ending. It felt like the whole book was building to a big gradual reveal, that came about two chapters before the end of the book. Then it just carries on, without really having anything more to say.

I really enjoyed this. It was particularly enjoyable being able to recognise places from around Oxford. It made me want to reread Northern Lights now I live in Oxford. Found some of the fantasy stuff a bit jarring and surprising, but it was hard to put down from beginning to end.

Absolutely brilliant. Hard to put down, fascinating world and story.

This felt a bit "teenage fiction" in the end. It was trying very hard to be serious within the context of a super-power romp. Nonetheless, it was very well written and the conceit was very clever.

A nice easy read. The characters were fun, diverse and the action was intense. The plot was a bit formulaic with a fairly predictable arc.

Absolutely fantastic - impossible to put down. This book is packed with righteous anger and pulls no punches. The book was published in 1975 and ends with a meta-reference to the book within the book. The characters predict that their children will not understand what this book is talking about - but that's OK - that would mean they've won. Sadly, we are their children, and the book is all too relevant today.

This book is quite the journey. The story is interesting for the first couple of hundred pages, but clearly that is where the editor gave up, as most of the remainder plods around taking a long time to get anywhere. It is certainly cool that it essentially predicts crypto currencies (though as David points out, slightly absurd to back it with gold - something most major currencies have long since abandoned!). However, the books politics - essentially "if only nerds ran the world we'd all be OK" - are past their best. We now live in that world, and Bitcoin, FB and the rest have not saved us from authoritarian government, they practically ushered it in. The book also betrays it's pre-gamer gate origins with its unapologetic gendered nonsense: nerds are men, women are for fucking, women can't get laser focused on subjects, men lack social grace. All of the women in this book serve as targets for men's affection. Despite one of the characters, America, being d...

Not sure when I finished this - certainly a while ago, but must have missed updating this blog.  I reference this book in conversations practically daily. It completely revolutionised my thinking and understanding of the carbon cost of things. I think this should be mandatory reading for everyone. I think if people had read this, we wouldn't be wasting our time trying to eliminate straws and instead working how we make a sustainable international transport system. I really want to read MBL's new book - "There is no Planet B".

This was a scary, powerful read for me, frequently inducing a feeling not dissimilar to that of walking across a glass ceiling at the top of a very tall building, unsure if you're about to plummet to your death. This was no doubt helped by reading it at a time where I have just dropped down to a four day week to focus on things besides my work. It is essentially a philosophical argument for having a less "productive" life. This easily feels like the most radical idea I've ever heard. I've spent (& still spend) most of my life trying to "do" things. While I am pretty good at not giving my all to my employer, I instead find other things to work towards: political activism, personal projects etc. This book encourages rejecting even this, and instead following your idiorrhythm and do what it feels like you want to do in that moment, rather than what you feel like you should do. I recognise the value in the arguments made, but it is hard for me. Even ...

It was good enough, but not one I would recommend. The books backdrop - a changing Iran - provided an interesting setting for the book. The two lead characters had lots of depth, and there were a couple of unexpectedly emotional bits that felt very real. Ironically, it was the technology - normally the most interesting aspect of Egan's books - that was lacking. The premise was "side loading" a specific humans behaviour into a template of a human brain. It was interesting to see this intermediate technology explored (i.e. on the way to, but not yet at, uploading human consciousness into a computer - a frequent occurrence in Egan's books). However, the story wanders around before simply stopping without really saying very much about it.

Loved it - a beautiful melancholic wander through a human mind. It perfectly captured the tangential trains of though and the irrelevant details that regular thought does. It also had moments of spiralling cyclic thoughts which was interesting seen put into words. Hard to put down.