Not Ready to Leave the Tea Table It is a shame this is where the audiobooks end. Nineteen books in, this series has managed a rare shift. At the start, I suspect many readers were hanging on to see what would happen with the kyo. By the time we return fully to atevi politics, that thread matters less. The court, the family ties, the rituals, and the slow movements around the throne have become the real draw. ...
Don’t spill your Tea over the Action If it took a whole book for Bren to descend from the space station to the planet, I expected a whole book for the return journey. And I wasn’t disappointed. Tracker, the sixteenth book in C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner sequence, continues the series’ unusual sense of pacing: logistics, deliberation, and court politics that stretches across volumes the way other series compress them into chapters. ...
** No Cake, Still Interesting ** I remember my birthday upon turning felicitous 9, and I can tell you it was a big deal. Protector spends much of its time orbiting a similar milestone, with less of a payoff. The book is almost a day-in-the-life entry: one Atevi, a few human youngsters, conversations, errands, and politics branching into more obscure and ancient obligations. Cherryh’s Atevi plots and manchi break down fractally into endless subplots of protocol and maneuver. That’s what we need to support the thousands of pages of prose! ...
In 2025, AI became impossible to ignore. I submitted to the siren song, and returned to industry, this time with headquarters in Redmond. The SF-Redmond commute brought transit time, more reading time, and twice as many books as last year (109 vs. 54). My focus reverted back to English, though AI translated Chinese is creeping into short-form content. Books settled into three foci: AI (mostly disappointing), 20th-century presidents (useful grounding), and escape—fiction, with a few deliberate turns toward print and poetry. ...
** End of the Solarian (and Honorific) Line ** Uncompromising Honor closes the Honor Harrington saga for now more with spectacle than substance. What should have been revelation feels like maintenance. The final battle plays more like a parade of invincibility than a fight. Weber trades tension for certainty, leaving little doubt or danger. Even Honor’s moral fury—her brief flirtation with vengeance—never quite lands. A Herbert might have let her descend; Weber never would. The result is tidy, but emotionally inert. ...
Succeeds where Jack Campbell fails, providing some military scifi to fall asleep to without too many eye-rolls. The villains are cookie cutter, and Honor’s dueling abilities with any weapon seem a bit unfair, but after accepting that the rest of the story rolls out easily.
Echos Underground I’ve been on a Russian sci-fi kick this year, so Metro 2033 is a natural stop on this subway line. If this is Lovecraftian horror, sign me up—sensory deprivation and phenomena beyond human understanding create an experience that literature seems best to exploit. Much like Silo, the claustrophobic and dark environment feels both alien and familiar at the same time. The tunnels of the metro system become an oppressive force, heightening the tension and paranoia that define the experience. I experienced at least one sleep deprived night because of the adrenaline brought on by supernatural horrors, and that’s rare. ...
With a few graceful red lights flickering into the waves, Vo sucks the reader into a world that is familiar to readers of Asian history (or fantasy ), but tinged with a velvet sheen of magic that only Vo brings. Far too short for my liking, but that’s just another way of saying that I’ll definitely read through the novella series.
Some of the most jarring pacing you’ll find in a fantasy novel. Not sure the plot survives the transition from a self-contained school to the wider world well, and plot twists were an odd distribution of either heavily proselytized or deus-ex-machina. Not actively bad, but I might recommend that fans of the series stop at #2.
a bit journalistic, but good context on the pisa test