Romance

** Exposition Ascendant ** With a lower overall rating than previous and subsequent entries, Rising Thunder seemed like a throwaway installment. It isn’t. By this point in the Honorverse, exposition is currency with which we pay for space battles. The focus shifts from space battles to political economy, and the main conflict ends through non-military means—a choice that frustrates tacticians but fits the logic of the world. As one Army strategist told me: when you dominate the battle via conventional means, your enemies will go unconventional. Weber understands that, even if it costs readers their customary naval fix. ...

Re-org-er Want to see how power al-Sharaa drove in victory to Damascus, or how a CEO reclaims a stalled culture transformation? Skip the nonfiction. Read Pretender! (But certainly don’t read this if you haven’t read the proceeding 7 novels) This is the second leg of Bren Cameron’s long logistics return. Destroyer was apex tech: shuttles, starships, and Skyfall. This one drops to trains, buses, biplanes. 1917. ...

For the first few chapters, I thought the gaps in character and world building were intentional. But after the romance went from clumsy to 21st century teenage hormonal awkward, and the challenge course was ripped straight out of Ninja Warrior I doubted whether there was anything holding the gaps together. After a few GR reviews and plot summaries, it seems there isn’t. So thank you goodreads community for saving me from the other, banal, 80%.

** Inner Fictional Game of Tennis ** It’s hard to exist on Goodreads without seeing Taylor Jenkins Reid. Reid takes the pacing of a blockbuster, and substitutes Grand Slam tournaments for action scenes. Modern sensibilities about media expectations and gender imbalances creep into a narrative that that explores the will to victory. Sure the ending is nearly inevitable, some of the plot events deserved an eyeroll, such as mother dying when she was young, father dying before the last tournament in the book, but the literary production values make it a tennis thriller I’ve already recommended to others. ...

Snackable ‘misfits in space’ book with a more modern take on gender and sex but the rest of sci-fi tropes intact. I’ve just read this story one too many times to get too excited.

** Leviathan Deflates ** She was reaching for supernatural answers, when memory and mundanity were enough. * Frankly disappointing. Tiamat’s Wrath had managed to take what was good about the series and use the massive shared context with readers to satisfyingly increase complexity. Along with Winds of Winter, this was one of the books I was looking forward to taking time off work to inhale in a day. Unfortunately Leviathan Falls pairs back to the plot to a few main characters and a pseudo-science arc. ...

**18th book of 2021: How the world ends. ** It’s not difficult to envision childhood trauma and sexual frustration as the shaper of global catastrophe. After all, men with childhood trauma and issues with women are the ones who already nearly ended the world. (see: One Minute to Midnight ) Once the wrong fires are lit, * “[t]he whole world now, one vast uncontrolled experiment . . . and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate” * ...

Yes I read this book - don’t judge me. OK judge me. I read it 6 months ago and I’m really having a hard time remembering anything interesting or worthwhile. Guy tries to hide superpowers, fails, fights bad people, has high school problems. It’s like anamorphs but worse.

This book will make you smarter. Regardless of evolution’s implications in biology, its implications for politics and economics make this book worth reading, even if Darwin never details his thoughts. Truly a glimpse of genius.

I couldn’t help be reminded of the Animorphs series that I read in elementary school. Too many aspects were the same, if only expanded to fill the 600 page hardcover. The narrative was straightforward peppered with lonely SAT words and inconsistent use of italics. But the novel wasn’t bad. Meyer seems to be trying to explore the rift between mind and body, and even if I didn’t feel much force in the events she described, at least I was entertained to think about it.