Critiques et Commentaires

I was pleasantly surprised.

My takeaway from Legends & Lattes was that it was a cozy fantasy adaptation of a modern concept àla Pratchett, but I didn't get a particular feeling of depth.

With Bookshops & Bonedust, it's the converse - I felt like it was mainly a story about Viv and her forced journey of self-discovery, while all the rest of it was just set dressing.

The #SFFBookClub January pick is How High We Go In The Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu.  Thank you to all who voted and/or suggested books.

weirder.earth/@eldang/111665173533494437

I enjoyed the setting, and some of the substories were compelling, but as a whole it was too rambling and incohesive for me.

I feel like it would have worked better as a series of stories about different people from the same village or whatever instead of repeatedly being like "despite being in the middle of this incredibly urgent life crisis, the main character decides to spend six months teaching an older woman to fold laundry" or "despite having a very bad outcome two chapters ago, the main character decides to engage in exactly the same dangerous behavior with no additional precautions"

#SFFBookClub

Let's see if I finish this one in time for #SFFBookClub

The #SFFBookClub selection for December 2023

Very much in the same vein as the first one, but it doesn't quite have the same punch now that the setting has already been introduced and explored

I didn't know what to expect from a novella about a convent of space nuns wandering the vacuum inside a gigantic sea slug, and that's what I got

An adequate whodunit set in alternate contemporary Lisbon where a minority of people are gifted with telepathic or telekinetic powers.

There were some oddities - for example, the protagonist talks about the ambient temperature in every scene. I was expecting it to become a plot point, but apparently it's just there. The story revolves around two investigators doing their thing, but they're oddly timid - they're perfectly content with people just refusing to talk to them about the investigation, and they act like getting a warrant for some piece of evidence that all their other evidence points at is an impossible obstacle.

It was enjoyable despite these details, and I'll probably read the subsequent entries eventually.

www.humblebundle.com/books/john-scalzis-interdependency-old-mans-war-and-more-tor-books