Service Model has an amusing premise: what would robots do in a world that has slowly lost all humans? And in the beginning it's interesting, with a service robot accidentally killing its master during shaving and all the mechanisms of society trying to find out who did it and punish them, going through all of the rituals and all of the rules, regardless of the culprit admitting he did it and a recording of the fact being available.

  Adrian Tchaikovsky has a subtle subversiveness in his writing, usually describing something, but hinting at something else. In this story, the rigid standards of society are examined and found wanting. One can easily imagine the same story, but less extreme, happening in any environment bureaucratic enough.

  Alas, this is about robots, and after about 40 pages (10% of the book), the same amusing premise is still being presented and run with the robots going around in circles of pointless ritual. I am sure the story evolves into something better, but I didn't have the energy to grind to the very bland and boring beginning. I could have skipped ahead, but instead I've decided I would read something else.

  The Rook starts intriguingly with an amnesiac woman with strange powers who receives information in the form of letters from herself written before she lost her memory. And I've read that part, which was decently written, until I realized that I knew the story. They made a TV show out of it, which I did not enjoy.

  You see, from the great start it veers rapidly into a "secret paranormal government organization" thing, which is one of the most boring fantasy genres ever. But it's worse, since the woman is an agent of this organization and she has to hide that she lost her memory. So we're inside the organization in all of its pompous bureaucratic splendor instead of the more appealing side of the genre where the protagonist is trying to evade them without knowing too much of the group.

  Therefore, I stopped reading. I can't comment on the quality of the book or on Daniel O'Malley's writing after only a chapter, so I will leave it at that.

  The Lemon is another DNF for me, but this time it wasn't because the book was bad. It was just too focused when I wanted to be entertained. It explores the world of famous people and the others who want to leech off of them, only the book starts with the death of the single character that I gave a damn about. Good writing, not what I needed now.

  S.E. Boyd writes (or rather write, since it's a virtual author manufactured by three Irish journalists) really well and it made me want to like the book, but after a while of just trying and failing to connect and care, I've decided to abandon the book.

  A famously iconic person dies, which makes friends, acquaintances and perfects strangers scramble to fight for the void. There are a lot of characters and sometimes it's hard to keep track of them unless you're paying attention. And most of them are really unpleasant or uninteresting. The only interesting guy in the book seems to be - intentionally so - the dead one, and no one of the vultures picking on the corpse of his fame realizes who he was, what he inspired in people and why he was so respected and liked. A book about hungry greedy blind people.

  Bottom line: reading this book probably requires some passing interest in the psychology of fame obsessed assholes, which I didn't have. But the Goodreads rating this has is much lower than what it deserves.

  The Witch and the Tsar started intriguing, with Baba Yaga being the protagonist of the story, but within one chapter it became obvious it was some kind of weird misandrist fantasy instead of a well rounded story. I won't read this.

  The Loop has almost everything that is good about young adult books, but also all of the bad.

  Ben Oliver starts with a somewhat silly idea, derivative from The Matrix, where people can be used as batteries, describes an endless prison of death row inmates that get to delay their sentence every now and then by accepting being guinea pigs for an extension of their life and controlled by a combination of heartless psychopaths and undefeatable technology. So far so good.

  Then he presents cardboard shallow characters that are inconsistent, dimwitted and bland and asks us to care about anything that happens to them. And of course this crap is part of a trilogy! He leaves literal (Chekov's?) weapons lying around and people too dumb to remember they were there to begin with. Ugh!

  As for the author, the only contact for a Ben Oliver I could find was a twitter account that has since been closed.

  When you dump every cliché of YA novels, then refuse to follow up with any of reason, adventure or empathetic characters, all you have is a flashy Apple TV like story, with a lot of form and no substance. I tried and tried to finish it reading it, but I gave up halfway. DNF this thing!

  I can't say anything really bad about The World That We Knew. The writing is very good, the characters interesting, but I couldn't find the will to continue reading the book. I may be retrying later, when the zeitgeist is different.

  One problem with the book is that is another story about Jews being oppressed by the evil German Nazis, and at this time I found difficult to separate that idea from the things happening right now. Rather than try to avoid resolving that internal conflict, I've decided to postpone.

  A rather more relevant problem is that... other than the presence of a golem, the story is hardly fantasy, at least up to the point where I stopped reading. One could just as well not make it fantasy and just write a regular historical fiction set in WWII.

  Bottom line: slight chance to try again much later.

  I couldn't even get through the beginning. If you like the servant girl who becomes magically amazing while caught in some kind of love triangle trope, you're in luck: it's a pentagon! I however, don't like this kind of stuff and I really didn't like the writing style either.

  Bottom line: I DNFed Power of Five, by Alex Lidell. Couldn't find a website or wiki entry for her, either, which I assume means it was probably a good decision.

  You know when you are trying to finish a book and you don't really enjoy it, but you feel you own it to the author to at least finish it before you review it? That's what Station Eternity was to me. And because of that feeling, I stopped reading anything for a few months. Which is a lot. Finally, I've decided it wasn't worth it and DNFed it.

  The premise is intriguing: a human apparently cursed to cause murders to happen around her and then be the one to solve the murder. Like an involuntary Jane Marple. So she just has to get away from people on an alien space station, home to all kinds of weird and interesting species. So what happens when a shuttle full of humans is approaching the station?

  The execution was terrible, for me at least. It's not that Mur Lafferty's style is bad, it's just that she focuses on ideas and details that I find absolutely uninteresting. There are some other books that gave me a similar vibe, where things happen in space during some major crisis, but the focus is not on the science or the conflict, but on the romantic interests and random feelings of the characters. This is not quite like as bad, but it's close.

  Bottom line:  I couldn't hate the book, but I couldn't like it either, so I just decided to read other stuff.

  P.S. I am a fan (although not a frequent consumer) of Escape Pod, Pseudopod and PodCastle, with which the author is/was affiliated. If that connection would have been relevant, I would have praised the book more, but obviously, that's not the case. Those podcasts are cool, though, and completely free!

  Eden is a stupid book. I won't discuss the writing acumen of Tim Lebbon, because it is irrelevant to this. The story is dumb, the characters are stupid, the pretext of an eco thriller is weak as water. There is almost nothing redeemable about this.

  Let me summarize this for you: dumb liberal hippies go into an area they shouldn't have gone, completely unequipped for what they planned to do, illegally, but completely convinced they had all the right to do it, and die. Or at least I think they do, because there is no way they survive after what happens 50% of the book, unless a Deus ex Machina is employed. Wait, what? They employed one? Ugh!

  None of the characters is more than cardboard, but even so it's annoying cardboard! Entitled, emo, incompetent cardboard. There is even a former Israeli soldier who left because he saw a Palestinian parent and his children being gunned down by snipers in his army. And it makes sense, it's horrible, but even so I couldn't empathize and saw him as ridiculous because of all the people he was in the group with.

  Now, there are supernatural or body horror elements in the book, but they are like someone took them from somewhere else and slapped them over this ridiculous story of bleeding heart idiots going into a forbidden zone for no conceivably good reason. The world is a mess, people have polluted it and fouled it close to extinction, but do you know where I know this from? Exposition at the start of the book. There are "evil" guardians of the zones created to preserve biological diversity who kill randomly people who go there. Even without the supernatural element, that would still be quite OK, think of African reservations and poachers. But no, our American friends believe that anyone doing harm to nature is bad, except them. And do you know where I know this? From fictional excerpts of random sources from the beginning of each chapter.

  I could go on and on. As a basis for a number of scathing reviews, this book is perfect. Right now I am making efforts to limit the scope of mine. What would be the point of writing pages and pages of vitriolic hate about something that is the exact opposite of literature? So I stop here. This is a book written by a person inside a bubble which itself is in a bubble, hidden in an enigma of how someone could write then publish this and not realize how bad it is.

  I tried. I really tried. I was even going to finish the book, since I've abandoned a few in the last few weeks, but I just couldn't go on. It was clear that none of the major story arcs were going to have any closure by the end of Elvenbane and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. It was trope after trope after trope, a female lead who seems to have no flaws and always falls on her feet - mostly because of innate attributes or luck, mustache-twirling villains, everybody is oppressing women and young ones in particular, dragons, elves, human mages, even a brother-sister infatuation, to just catch every single cliché. The world building was shallow and the focus of the book was instead on ideas on how the world should be, what is fair, who is attractive and who is not and so on, their feelings.

  Basically, this is a young adult fantasy from the '90s: too old to face Internet scorn and too new to be actual fantasy and not derivative corporate bookstore slop.

  Not even sure who wrote what. The book I have says it's written by Mercedes Lackey. The online says it's Andre Norton, sometimes with Mercedes Lackey, both women, only Norton was 80 when the book was published. Honestly, I don't care.

  The problem I have most is that the plot is inconsistent. I don't want to get into details, but there are many jarring events that just contradict whatever happened before. Simple example: the magical Mary Sue teleports with her mind a big deer for food. Apparently you can do that, but the result is instant death for the animal. At no point in the book does she do that with any of her enemies. But there are bits where she smugly teaches people what they could do with the little magic they know. 

  Bottom line: the occasional bright spots were not worth slogging to finish this book. It's derivative, tropey, amateurish and could have been edited to half the length. Feels like a publishing house money scheme.

  I seem to be on a Did Not Finish spree, hope it's not me. Am I getting too picky? Am I turning into a snob? Will I start explaining how to read James Joyce in my blog? Hope not.

  A Darkling Sea felt so puerile that I didn't get to 10% of it. The whole idea is that three alien races (of varying technological prowess) meet on a deep ocean planet. Nothing in the book indicates James L. Cambias knows what the challenges of deep sea (or space) exploration are, or how to create characters, how to build worlds or how to generate interest. It reminded me of how I was writing in high school: all grand ideas, but without anything backing them up.

  And it's strange, I must have heard some really good things about this guy, I've got two books from him. I doubt I will try to read the other one.

  Sangu Mandanna's amateurish writing style put me completely off, this book is like written by a child. I am not going to continue reading this. The story is as shallow as the characters, the worldbuilding is terrible, I couldn't care less about anything. How A Spark of White Fire got to a four star trilogy starter on Goodreads is beyond me.

  This is a Young Adult book, featuring a young servant girl, who is secretly also a queen and protected by a god in a science-fantasy world of space ship wars and galactic empires. Only the secret is out in about a chapter and then it's all just... talking and people acting in ridiculously implausible ways. But at least it didn't offend me in any way, it wasn't a bait and switch, it wasn't agenda driven much, it was just a regular book that sucked.

  I've read Nature's Nether Regions, a book about penises, a while ago. It was funny, well documented and, most of all, entirely about male reproductive organs. So I thought I would read a book about butts and have just as much fun, right?

  Wrong. Butts, A Backstory is written by Heather Radke, a feminist writer using the idea of the butt, in her mind specifically the buttocks of the human female, as a pretext to explore the gender and racial context of history and her book has almost nothing to do with asses.

  Not only was I not interested in the subject, but the bait and switch angered me. How come all of these brilliant liberal writers who write just one book in their whole career need to trick readers to even start consuming their work? Is it maybe that their uncreative over serious surfing of the outrage zeitgeist is ultimately unfulfilling? That when the five minutes of "OMG, I can't believe they got away with that!" end, most people realize they either won't do anything about it, thus becoming part of the problem, or that their rage is just as impotent as any other of their emotions? Because I hate these overhyped books that say nothing and even when they do, they do it badly, yet no one seems to do anything about it, because how can you go against social agendas, regardless of how badly written?

  There, you've got my outrage! DNF!

  I occasionally try to add to my list books that have won literary awards, so that maybe I start to get what writing masterpieces are about. Unfortunately, most of the time I get to read obtuse and pompous works which have reached the top due to some alignment of agenda or talking about something fashionable. I guess this is somewhere in between.

  The Essex Serpent is certainly not a bad book, but it is boring as fuck. Imagine a gothic novel set in the 19th century where the focus is a giant serpent somewhere in Essex. A science leaning recent widow (coming from an abusive relationship, no less) is fascinated by the possibility of this creature. Around her orbit a socialist maid and good friend, a handsome priest dedicated to his terminally ill wife and a talented but unattractive surgeon who has a crush on the widow. Women kind of win, men sort of lose, but with some dignity. That's it in a nutshell.

  Now imagine that at every turn of phrase, EVERYTHING is being taken into focus: what people have eaten, eating and what they thought about it, what people have said, felt, felt that someone else feels or thinks or about what they said, colors, smells, sounds, social norms, romantic tension, you name it, it's there.

  I cannot believe many writers would have the talent to write like Sarah Perry, but I feel there are even more who wouldn't ever want to. You have to dedicate attention and effort to dig out the meaning of every sentence and then have the memory and fortitude to weave that meaning into the story that you think the author is trying to tell. There is a saying you shouldn't walk faster than what is needed to look around, but there is a difference between looking around and combing the plane of experience for every single thing. 

  Personally, I gave up after a quarter of the book, when I realized I didn't care about the characters, the world, the time or even the giant creature. This is categorized as fiction, but it's just a slightly dramatic historical tale that just happens to not be about people who have actually existed, although it is inspired by true events.

  It's not that Titanium Noir is a bad book, but it's the same tired cliché of the cynical private investigator trying to unravel a simple murder that turns out to be a global conspiracy that makes the reader think of social issues. The sci-fi is almost incidental, so I kind of listened to a third of the book, then fell asleep and woke up close to the end and I didn't find anything exciting in it. A disappointment from something that has such a cool title and intriguing cover.

  Nick Harkaway is the son of John le Carré and he mostly writes fantasy, apparently, but in this he went a bit, just a tiny bit, towards science fiction. Not enough to induce me to finish the book, unfortunately.