Robert Jackson Bennett caught my attention with the first book in the Divine Cities series: City of Stairs. It was a steam-punk and magic detective story featuring a strong female character and her trusty sidekick, with great world building and character work. City of Blades is kind of the same, but slightly darker.

What surprised me in this book was that the author chose to abandon his hero of the previous volume and bring forth one that was a secondary character in that. It's still a whodunit, it's still a strong female lead fighting divine but malevolent forces. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Only City of Blades is more about the personal pain of people, their sacrifice and service, their (dashed) hopes and dreams, the promise of the afterlife.

Long story short, I was planning to read something else at the end of the book, but instead I've just started immediately with City of Miracles, the third and last book in the trilogy. I love this series!

It wasn't the writing, it is competent, without having any other redeeming quality. It wasn't the story, which is as banal as the book cover and the title, but bearable. It was the main character, a person so ordinary that he freezes whenever he is in danger, loses everything he loves several times from people who threaten him with violence and who for seven chapters, under the guise of thinking like a scientist, attempted in vain to realize what was obvious to the reader from the start. Yeah, OK, how dare he not be a superhero with indomitable courage and magical powers! I accept my part of the responsibility, however I could not for the life of me continue to read Dark Matter past chapter 7.

I am going to go on a limb here, though, and guess that the rest of the book will be just the same: a perfectly ordinary man, thrown into another world, whining about everything and not understanding anything because he clings to his idea of normalcy and refuses to adapt, only to somehow find some strength in the end and reach a partially satisfying ending. It's not really science fiction, it's just one of those "what if you would have made other choices in life" things masquerading as science fiction. I have other things to do that read about the emotional torture of a guy who is just too easily tortured. It's like stealing candy from children. I know the hero's journey starts from a state of pleasant equilibrium then something happens to upend that and the hero must fight to reach another state of equilibrium, but the initial state for this book is a boring guy living with his family and incapable of the basest reasoning skills.

So, yeah, I stopped reading it midway. Sorry, Blake Crouch!

The Invention of Nature is an ode to Alexander von Humboldt, the man who has practically invented our concept of nature, inspired Darwin and Goethe and Bolivar and Jefferson and so many others, created the ideas of ecology, Gaia (although it wouldn't be called that for some time), global connection between volcanic activity. He was among the first to popularize the idea that man's mindless exploitation of nature cannot last and will have dire consequences. The last true polymath, Andrea Wulf calls him, and on paper he seems a god: an avid reader, a great thinker, fluent in many languages, exploring on foot tirelessly until in his seventies, dabbling not only in natural sciences, but also politics, social revolution, physics, drawing, prose and poetry. He had been actively writing and corresponding until well in his eighties. The quintessential 19th century romantic scientist, he was interested in everything and anyone and wrote incessantly. At one time he remained out of money because he was paying for the publication of all his books, being interested in spreading the knowledge, not profit. He was collecting rocks, insects, plants, soil samples, etc. then he would send them to other scientists who were interested, for nothing in return.

His view of nature and the cosmos (term that he coined) permeates the vision of our society even now. So how come so few people know about him? To my shame, that includes me. I vaguely knew the name, but had no idea how grand his influence is. Wulf's explanation is that after the first world war (and I guess the second didn't help, either) an anti-German sentiment spread in Europe and America, leading to burning of books, lynching of German people and an overall erasure of anything Germanic from culture.

Now, half of the book is almost exclusively a Humboldt biography and it is awesome! I was imagining how great it would be if someone were to make a TV series about it (Netflix and National Geographic, I am looking at you!): so many details, so many adventures, so many important people of the age. I think the book would have been more accessible if it would been just that. But then the author also described some other people who were influenced by Humboldt, and while knowing that Darwin venerated the man and did everything he did from the moment he read one of the man's books, the others were less interesting or important.

Even so, the other people cover less than a quarter of the book... the rest is acknowledgements, bibliography, references, etc. Andrea Wulf did a wonderful job researching this and bringing Humboldt to life for me. Even if the ending of the book was not as satisfying as the beginning, it's hard for me to rate this any less than excellent. You need to read this!

I can't decide if Velocity Weapon is brilliant or stupid. What I can say is that I didn't like it. Megan O'Keefe tells a story of three characters: a gunnery sergeant who ejects her pod during a space battle and is picked up by an intelligent spaceship, her brother who is a member of the Prime Protectorate and does everything to find her and a thief on some other planet who stumbles upon a strange lab that changes her entire life.

The writing is competent, nothing inspiring, though, and probably that is why I had difficulty finishing the book. But there are also some features of the story that I didn't like. For example of the three main characters who start the book on equal ground, the thief gets less and less space and, worse, her story never connects to the others. It's like O'Keefe wrote a book and a novella and then merged them into a larger book, even if their only commonality is the same universe. Then there is a part of the story that I got invested in, only to be aborted midway; I can't say more without spoiling the story, but I didn't like that.

The thing that bothered me most, though, is how the plot meanders instead of getting to the point. I used to think that a good story would be less straightforward, but now that I read one that just comes and goes, gives you glimpses of the world, then does nothing with them... it just felt like wasted time. Don't get me wrong, the author builds a world with vast opportunities, a universe of multiple colonized worlds connected by star gates which are controlled by the Primes and their technology originated from an alien artifact. She is just beginning the story. The characters might yet come together, the villains might become clearer, the whole thing felt potentially epic, only one would probably have to read all of the books to understand where O'Keefe is planning to go.

Basically the book is a string of almost random events, driven by forces that are never made clear, then somehow brought together by incredible coincidence, while the characters are barely sketched and hard to relate to, especially the male ones. The world has a lot of potential, but little is built on it so far. It feels like Star Wars, a little: a galaxy far far away where everybody is related or knows each other and everything in a chapter happens on one planet only. And it felt dated, as well.

So I can't decide: is this the start of a wonderful epic universe with immense potential or is it just a stupid space opera book that is not very good? I just didn't like it.

Stranger than we can Imagine feels like a companion book to the 2002 documentary The Century of the Self. Both are really well done and discuss the brusque changes that define the 20th century and they complement each other in content. I recommend them highly to just about everyone except maybe little children.

John Higgs starts the book comparing history to a landscape and the works describing it as maybe roads. There are well trodden paths on this landscape, but also deep forests where few dare enter. He then promises that his book will try to describe the twentieth century by exploring these dark places, avoided by others. I didn't feel that was completely the case, but certainly it was a novel path to take to explain history: Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel, Lorenz, Mandelbrot, Freud, Picasso, Dalí, Joyce, Leary, Stravinsky, Crowley, Thatcher, The Rolling Stones, Miyamoto and so on. Its basic premise is that an abrupt change occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, when the general belief in absolutes (which he generically calls omphaloi) was replaced with relativism and individuality.

How would classical empires survive these changes when at their core stands the belief in a supreme leader, representing and supported by a supreme god, who protects and enforces rules that are culturally accepted by everyone? They would not, therefore the world wars that ended them. What absolute pillar of belief would survive general relativity, the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, the incompleteness theorems, the id and individualism, impressionism, cubism, modernism, postmodernism and finally, the corporation? None of them. Religion not so much dies as it breaks apart in small fragments that then fade away. Morality shakes under the reign of individual desires and psychopathic legal entities. Social norms, economical behavior, even the foundation of money are wiped out and replaced with the new. Art fractures as well, constantly redefining and contradicting itself and everything else. It is the century where value exists only when seen from certain perspectives and nothing has any intrinsic value.

The book ends with a chapter that heralds the coming of a new age, the 21st century: the Internet and the erosion of the last remaining omphalos: truth. If truth also depends on the observer, if there is no one truth, if science if just a belief like any others, what awaits us in the post-truth era?

Overall it is a very interesting and informative book. More than simply stating facts, it is the unexpected connections between things that bring value to the reader, rather fitting considering the subject. Maybe not going into the depths of dark forests, but certainly exploring their edges and the strange beings that live there. Top marks!

Deathcaster is the final book in the Shattered Realms series, or at least it should be, since it kills off the villain and has everybody live happily ever after. It's one of the least satisfying endings I've read in a long time.

Cinda Williams Chima started slowly, by creating a complex world of realms, magic and a multitude of characters and factions. She spent two books on that. The third book, Stormcaster, was about introducing a powerful and mysterious villain and yet more characters, realms and factions. Deathcaster pretty much ends it all in an until then unknown place, at a random time, for a completely random reason. Imagine Luke Skywalker walking around, playing with his sword, thinking on how to defeat the Death Star and accidentally bumping into and killing the emperor and Darth Vader both. This is how this book feels, after wading through a zillion people, with their feelings described in detail while any military or political strategy is explained (poorly) in a paragraph or two, through their relationships with other people, through their random interactions that always seem to bring them together for no apparent reason and then split them apart randomly and then the villain basically stumbling and falling on their sword.

There is nothing interesting that actually happens, no moral in any of the stories and the development of the characters is basically just beefing up and aging a few years.

Bottom line: the ending of this book makes the reading of the three previous books and this one feel like a complete waste of time. How do you rate a book that makes all the previous ones unrateable? Cinda, you're a troll!

The Flight of Morpho Girl is a short story set in the Wild Cards universe. If you haven't read the books until now, you won't know who the characters are. Even so, this story is so basic that it feels like "The Unsuccessful Mugging of Batman" or "Murder of Crows v Superman": predictable and stakeless.

That doesn't mean that the authors didn't do a good job, it's just that it is a short that brings nothing to the table other than the introduction of Morpho Girl's (Adesina, the teenager daughter of Amazing Bubbles) post cocoon form: a teenage girl with very tough butterfly wings. For me it's like a collectible item in the Wild Cards set, nothing more.

I have to admit that my expectations for this book were so high that it was probably doomed to not satisfy me. I was expecting something deeply Asian, with fantastic elements and fresh ideas and characters. What I got is something that is almost accidentally fantastical and has few cultural elements to make it fresh. Yet it does have interesting characters and, if it weren't for the plot, which meanders whichever way the author needs to further her agenda, it would have been a good book.

Joan He is American of Chinese descent (hence the name of the book?) and the culture described in Descendant of the Crane is based on an American's understanding of Chinese culture. That makes it both relatable and less Asian than I would have liked. What do I know, though? My feeling was that the author was exploring her own understanding of her origins instead of sharing something solid with the reader. There were some very intriguing ideas in the book, but they rode the story and the characters too strongly, making them inconsistent and irrational. This is an almost maybe book for me.

Bottom line: even without getting a lot of satisfaction out of it, I feel two stars out of five is too little, yet I am certain three is too much.

It was one of the few Brandon Sanderson books that I hadn't read and it is, at least at this moment, a standalone book. I know that title says that The Rithmatist is part of a series, but what successful book isn't? In truth, Sanderson started this book while working (and failing) on another and it took years to rethink and rewrite it into a finished story. It's best you take it as one of those wonderful accidents that successfully reach the reader despite the publishing industry.

Back to the book, it's almost classic Sanderson: the main character is young, passionate and intelligent, yet lacking power. Everybody else has it, though, and he is fascinated by it, while learning at a prestigious school that also teaches the techniques of power. In this gearpunk like novel, the power is magical and involves drawing lines with chalk and imbuing them with personal will. The lines then become defenses, attacks, weapons and even magical minions. When the school is attacked and his friends are in danger, it is up to him to solve the mystery.

It's obvious that the story has issues, and that is probably why Sanderson worked so much at it to make it publishable, but one can get past it quickly. The characters are not as funny or punny as his others or even very complex, being satisfied to have one or two goals in life and go for them (kind of like magical chalk drawings themselves, hmmm). The plot, involving the awesome power of carrying a piece of chalk with you and going through amazing duels that resemble tower defense games, it also not the most captivating. Yet the story kind of works.

Bottom line: a pleasant Brandon Sanderson classic, without being exceptional in any way.

I thought long and hard how to start this review and I think the best place is the ending. In July 2015 the Internet and even the classic media exploded with the news of the American space probe named New Horizons reaching the last unexplored classical planet of the solar system: Pluto. Long thought to be a frozen piece of rock floating too far from the Sun to be of any interest, it has been ignored by NASA and every other space agency out there, only to be revealed to be one of the most intriguing and beautiful gem of our system. New Horizons had been launched in 2006 and it took one more year to get all the Pluto data back to Earth. As far as the general population was concerned and even most of the people passionate about space, this was an axis in time with three major events: launch, flyby and end of data download. As far as the media was concerned, it was a great discovery because it produced memeable pictures (the Pluto heart is one, for example).

Chasing New Horizons starts in 1989, when Alan Stern deciding he would work for a NASA mission to Pluto, it takes us through the Herculean job of creating interest, gathering people, drafting a project, finding support and funding, fighting competing teams, bureaucracy and political apathy and even bad will, the ups and downs, the almost-theres, the Sisyphean and thankless work to get something up the Hill only to see it fall because of a change in administration, or a cut in the budget, or some hidden agenda and even people petty enough to demote Pluto's status as a planet as a personal grudge against the person who discovered it.

I liked how the book was written, even if at start I had to move over the usual platitudes meant to garner interest for space from the average reader and had to cope with the American units of measurement: feet, miles, Fahrenheit and, of course, the bus-size. However, no matter the small faults in the writing, the subject is so important than I can't rate the book lower than maximum. This is a must read, even if it skirts the technical aspects and mostly discusses the 25 year work from a managerial standpoint.

It's hard to describe how awesome these people are. Can you imagine working for a quarter century for something that can fail abruptly and with no positive outcome at literally any moment? I thought I had it bad when a project I was working on for six months was cancelled - imagine having to go through something like this several times, at the exact moment when you thought it will all sail smoothly from then on, when you had the funding, the assurances and even the construction of the probe nearly finished. Four days before one critical moment, the flyby, when New Horizons was supposed to do almost all of its work, the on board computer rebooted and lost all previously uploaded programming. In those four days, people had to scramble to recreate the entire software package they had worked for incrementally for the last 9 years and upload it to a machine that was 9 light hours away from Earth. One of the most critical moments of the mission (after 16 years of ground work to make it happen) was the launch, for example. The mission planners had no control over the mechanism of the launch vehicle. It could have blown on the pad or in the air.

There would be no redos. First, no way the project would have been approved again after a failure so senseless. Second, Pluto would have moved in a region of its 248 year long orbit where its atmosphere would freeze, making any other future probe return much less interesting data than at that exact moment. If it failed, it would have been the first and probably last APL planetary exploration mission, after they fought tooth and nail to be the ones doing it, rather than the usual and entrenched JPL. People had lived their entire lives working on this thing and it could have failed in so many different ways.

Bottom line: you have to be insane to do what Stern did. A wonderful flavor of insanity that is both admirable and terrifying. The system behind NASA should value and support these people even if, especially if, they are insanely driven enough that they don't actually need it. I would say that New Horizons succeeded despite the American space industry and political system, not because of them. It really shouldn't be that hard. This is a book for all space fans, but also people who had difficulties in their projects. While it might help with specific insights, this book will make almost any hardship you ever endured seem insignificant.

The Blood Mirror felt like the weakest book in the series, but really, if I think about it, it's the pattern that unfolded through the entire Lightbringer saga that feels wrong. The first book was amazing, with interesting characters, great world building, an intriguing story, but then came the second book - and I didn't see it then - which upended much of the concepts in the first and added many more. It was not a continuation, per se, but a reframing of the story with other parameters. Instead of closing story arcs, Brent Weeks was transforming them, kept them open and added many more. The third book made this pattern obvious and in this book it became annoying.

Forget that everybody is the relative of everybody or in the extreme the member of an organization that we didn't know existed or cared about in previous books. Forget that after we follow a character as something, we have to follow them as something completely different in the next book, because of reasons that we didn't know (or cared) about. Forget even that threatening someone's loved ones seems to control everything with maximum efficiency in this universe, while actually harming them is a forgivable offense. Nothing. Ever. Ends. It just piles on. And since there is limited space in the book, important things - like the war or what the people are actually doing when the entire establishment blows in their faces and destroys their lives - get sidelined or completely eliminated in favor of whatever insecurity Kip feels while discussing hot sex with his friends or amazingly beautiful (and totally inconsistent) wife. And of course, the book ends in another cliffhanger.

In chess, when you are overwhelmed by the complexity of the position, you simplify it. You exchange pieces until the board is clearer. In Lightbringer, enemies just enjoy threatening each other and never following up while they work together for some completely pointless goal. Just like in TV soap operas, they all hate and love each other at the same time while things that could never have been predicted by the reader happen as chaotically as possible around them.

So, the fifth book will be published this year and I will read it, but my rating on the entire series just plunged dramatically. I don't expect things to really come to any conclusion, I don't expect characters to evolve in any meaningful way anymore or the lore behind it all to ever be explained. We started with seven colors and a god, now we have 11 colors and about 200 gods, for example. The chances that all of this mess will become clear in the future are remote.

The Broken Eye continues right after the shocking finale of The Blinding Knife! And that pretty much sucks, because the ending was the type of cliffhanger that just felt added on in order to make people quickly buy the next volume. Unfortunately, this book is no different. After a zillion story arcs that meet improbably and a lot of agitation one way or the other, Brent Weeks ends Broken Eye with an even shockier (is that a word?) ending.

And I will bite, I will read the fourth book in the series, The Blood Mirror, but only because I find the characters intriguing. Yet I definitely lost that feeling of respect for the story, the careful attention to detail that I enjoyed so much in the first volume. Weeks is a good writer, maybe even a great one, but instead of the series getting better, it just gets bloated until it needs over the top twists and abrupt cliffhangers. One of the most pervasive feelings when reading this volume was frustration that the stories of characters that I wanted to follow were interrupted by all of the others and how each and every one of even the secondary heroes needed their own grand achievement until it got claustrophobic. OK, you're the good guy, but when you see someone hurting everyone you know, you just kill them. You don't one up them, you don't talk to them, you don't strategize or play games. OK, you're a powerful psycho, but it doesn't mean everything needs to be a power show. I mean, does Andross Guile even go to the bathroom or just wills his bowels into submission? OK, you are young and inexperienced so you don't know what to do when you love someone, but doing the exact opposite? And how come in this universe there are at most two degrees of separation? More like one and a half. And how come everyone knows what they need to do when they need it, regardless if they ever learned it before?

I am already hooked into the story and Brent Weeks creates a complex and compelling one, however the experience of reading the books is only diminishing with stupid techniques like cliffhangers and hidden information and mindless expansions into new territories that absolutely did not need to be there. Too bad that now everything will need to at least maintain this insane level of tension and complexity, for fear of turning boring.

Bottom line: not bad, certainly not boring, but pointlessly exhausting.

The Blinding Knife continues the story of Kip the bastard, Gavin/Dazen Guile the genius god-like Prism and just about every other person alive a mere mortal. It is just as entertaining as the first book, although more focused on action than lore. A lot of new concepts are explored here, like colors that are not on the spectrum but can be drafted, other gods, other chromatic skills, but, as fantasy focused on little boys taught us, always unexplained, mysterious, too young to understand, people dying before they can finish their sentence, etc. I hate that cliché and I really hope people would stop using it so much. I am talking to you, Brent Weeks!

Anyway, I can't say anything more about the story or the style or the author than I did when I read the first book in the Lightbringer series. It's a continuous story, split in book sized volumes. I will start reading the next book in the saga momentarily. I recommend the writing style and I like the attention to detail and the lore, although after a while the boy genius recipe feels more and more like a Japanese manga and less than a real story.

It seems there is a dedicated fan base for the Riyria series that so enjoy the setup that they ignore the quality (or lack thereof) of the writing. The writing style is amateurish at best, the characters are not fleshed out, yet the little building they get is contradicted with impunity whenever the plot requires it, the point of the story of the book has not been revealed after more than half of it, while the plot doesn't make any sense most of the time.

I am sorry, Michael J. Sullivan, but I could only read 60% of The Crown Tower before deciding I will not continue and I will not try any of the other books in the series. For the readers, imagine a story about implausibly competent youngsters that are forced to work together by a kindly old professor for no good reason other than they have to work together. Imagine a prostitute who decides to fight the world and open her own brothel, right across the street from her former pimp and king of the street, but the only concerns she has is how to bribe city officials to give her a business permit. After half of the book in which the characters have barely begun to do any of the activities listed above, nothing really happened, while hints have been placed to imply this is a world where magic exists, goblins, elves, dwarves, gods, yet none of them made an appearance.

I don't understand how stuff like that gets any awards. Is it just because they sell? Toilet paper sells and doesn't win anything! Just... ugh!

You remember when you had to write a paper for college and you had the thing that you wanted to say, but then your coordinator told you to make it a chapter, and then add others that are related for context? This book kind of feels like that. In English it is called The Fear Factor, but the Romanian edition calls it "Altruist or being good without reward" (my direct translation, as Good for Nothing didn't feel right, even if it is the title of the book in the UK), showing that even editors didn't really agree with the author on the right way to label it.

Overall, what Abigal Marsh tries to say is simple: our capacity to do good to others without expecting a reward stems from an ancient mammalian mechanism designed to bond mothers to children and it is triggered by our ability to empathize with the fear other feel, while regulated by a network of brain centers, mainly our amygdala and hippocampus using the oxytocin hormone. This takes the book through eight chapters, each kind of separate and which I liked in different measures. The ones describing carefully crafted experiments and their outcomes I liked best, the ones that felt like fillers or the ones affirming that correlation doesn't imply causation then proceeding in describing a lot of correlation less so.

Marsh goes out of her way to portray a positive image of humanity, where most people are generous, empathetic and altruistic. She describes people who aren't capable of it - psychopaths and their amygdala dysfunction, people on the other side of the curve - superaltruists who don't care to whom they do good, they just do it, goes to very interesting experiments and comes with theories about how and why altruism, fear and empathy work. Her conclusion is that our focus on negative things makes us falsely believe things are getting worse, people less trustworthy, when the actual opposite if overwhelmingly true.

Bottom line: I liked the book, but some of the chapters felt forced. I didn't really need the exposition of her beach trip to save the turtles or how much she feared and then appreciated the help of a random guy who looked like a hood thug. Most of the information interesting to me was concentrated in the first chapters, while the last, explaining what to do to become more altruistic and how that improves our well being and filled with international statistical charts on altruism I could have done without entirely. It's not that it wasn't correct or well written, it just felt like an add on that had little to do with the book or, worse, was there just to fill up space.

If you search on TED Talks, you will see the author have a talk there titled Abigail Marsh: Why some people are more altruistic than others.