Reviews and Comments

On paper, I should really enjoy Scalzi novels. In practice, not so much. Every character feels like an extension of Scalzi's social media presence. Fir the first book of this series, I could put up with it because the premise and plot were interesting.

There's nothing interesting in this second installment. it's just court intrigue with a bunch of wise cracking nobles. Scalzi can't seem to write a normal conversation, or plot intrigue that isn't over the top mustache-twirling.

Unfortunately for me, i want to know the end of the saga now. i will read the third book. then please, talk me out of reading any other of his books.

(He seems like a decent guy, but his fiction is just oil to my water.)

Ugh. The first book was ok. This is a drag, but now I'm invested in knowing what happens. And there's one more book in the series.

A prequel set just before book 1, The Affair tells how Reacher gets pushed out of the Army. The Army sends him to Carter Crossing Mississippi, where a young woman has been murdered and the town thinks the perpetrator must've been a soldier from the nearby Kelham Army Base.

This episode takes us back to early Reacher novels, where he can't put a foot wrong at all.

Including the sex scenes. Reacher can't do wrong, but Lee Child certainly does. These should have been whittled down a lot.

Second Son goes back to Reacher's childhood, specifically age 13 when his family is newly stationed on Okinawa. Local bullies threaten the new to town Reacher brothers. Reacher kisses a girl on the beach. Reacher acts and, worse, talks like adult Reacher. He gets to solve crimes like adult Reacher, including explaining to military investigators exactly where his father's missing code book has ended up. At age 13. Just scan right.

Reacher stumbles into a rural Nebraska county while hitchhiking away from the events in 61 Hours. While drinking coffee at a rural motel bar, he overhears an alcoholic doctor turn down visiting a woman who is experiencing a nosebleed. Reacher keeps his nose out of lots of other people's business, but he suspects the woman is a domestic violence victim and badgers the doctor into visiting, with Reacher along for the ride.

The woman turns out to be the wife of a local county heavy, so Reacher is off on another adventure battling local crime bosses, much like a one man A-Team. Before the end of the book, Reacher aims to end their control, at least the terrorizing people into silence part.

Competence porn at its most ok.

Voss premise is that negotiating is an emotional exercise rather than an intellectual one. so he presents a bunch of techniques that he says are designed to subtly play on people's emotional processing. I assume they work well if skillfully wielded, though i can't be sure. but he never puts it all together into a coherent method. the techniques remain a grab bag. lastly, the book does not present any way for the reader to practice the techniques, though he talks about such practice in classes he teaches. consequently all except type a personalities are likely to find it intimidating.

Michael is a male escort catering to women. Stella is an autistic woman who lacks confidence. She hires Michael to teach her how to be better at sex, then to he better at relationships. Of course it turns into more.

But the conflict relies on characters that hear one thing said and assume it means another. lots and lots of that. And each character blows those meanings up into all sorts of drama that could have been avoided by asking what they meant.

Orson Card flipped his lid at criticism that his Ender series was a Hitler apologetic, so he followed it up with a book explicitly subtitled "The Redemption of Christopher Columbus".

Back in the days of video stores, I often found myself perusing aisles other than "New Release". Either everything good was out, or I'd already seen it in the theater. Finding a decent VHS in the other aisles was hard. This book tried to rectify that, and did a solid job.

14½ hours of facts about salt and salt-adjacent things. Iodized salt. Potassium chloride. Mahatma Gandhi's Salt Campaign. Soy sauce. Catsup. Cheshire. San Francisco Bay. Oil exploration. The Dead Sea. The book never dwells too long, and everything is surprisingly, for me at least, interesting.