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I realize this guy is a sci-fi legend, and a I read a bunch of his stuff as a kid (I think The Dueling Machine doesn't get enough credit inspiring a bunch of movies I saw later), but as with beer, my taste for prose has refined over the years, and this book reads like early Bond, telling the spunky female jet pilot to get her little butt out of there, and I had to stop at "oriental inscrutability." I guess that counted for DEI at the time to just have a female and Asian character, and I actually flipped back to the copyright page expecting it to be sometime in the 50s but actually it was published in 1988. So the eighties weren't that great. I give the eighties two and a half stars.

@technicat@bookwyrm.social This is a great cookbook.

I almost wanted to DNF at the beginning but I am very glad I did not DNF. Be patient with this book. It is worth it. I cried. I laughed. It's the coming of age story that is needed because we all can't just read The Bell Jar and stop there as if that is the definitive young woman at college story. No this book has added much to this genre or legacy. There should be more books like this. Being the only poor person in a room full of people who do not get your socioeconomic background and would rather pretend you don't exist is a terrible time.

Really gobsmacked that SFPL is doing a book on hallucination machines ("AI") for One City One Book this year. (This is now added to the One City One Book list.)

About to hit the final chapter and calling it a night. I'll maybe finish tomorrow. I'm really rooting for the author, but I don't think he's going to pull this thing off.

Cordelia and Aral attempt to settle down, but their wedded bliss is soon shattered because politics.

I liked this more than “Shards of Honor”, but I'm still not a member of the McMaster Bujold fan club. I still find her writing style a bit… strange, and again the questionable language pops up. Certain plot elements, which I understand are integral to future novels, just didn't interest me, and it was hard to care. But some chapters and passages really caught my attention, and I suspect I might enjoy the later novels more.

A father-daughter duo of “food detectives” sleuth their way to recreating beloved lost meals.

Felt more like tableaus flowing into one another than a novel. Nagare, is almost Holmesian in his ability to infer what clients desire from the interviews conducted by Koishi. Relentlessly cosy, but readers have zero chance at solving any of the “mysteries”. I found it unsatisfying as it’s short on detecting, focusing more on patrons’ often bittersweet stories. Not the book I thought I was getting, and I prefer something with more “meat” on its bones.

I used my time listening to the Mariners v. the Tigers in the ALDS (yay for streaming radio!) to add all the Philip K. Dick award winners to a list. That's an award for distinguished science fiction first published in paperback. Most of these, including Time's Agent, seem like stuff right up my alley.

As always, if you are on SFBA.club, all the entries have descriptions and hi-res covers. The list on other servers depends on what rando first added each edition.

An unfolding lighthearted mystery but with heavy themes of despair and unlikable ensemble, the intentional misdirection of each preceding chapter makes for a shaky start that settles into a reliable pacing for uplifting comic humanity.

An utterly excellent look behind the scenes of one of the 20th century's most intriguing poets. True, it is not for everyone as these are indeed, her journals. Never intended for publication, they are a hodgepodge of topics, styles, and times that are maddeningly inconsistent. That said there is no finer way to catch a glimpse of the woman behind the poetry.

The single most frustrating aspect of the Journals is what is glaringly missing. Her final two journals were destroyed after her death and it is these that cover the time when she was crafting the poems that made up the collection contained in 'Ariel'. How wonderful it would have been to see how she created and polished those! Alas, we will never know.