The Dailight War by Peter Brett (third volume of his Demon Cycle) was really good fantasy – and yet disappointing. The start of the series seems to have raised a bar the other books can't quite meet. While my criticism of the second volume (too little character development) is met and answered beautifully on all counts, the story drags along a lot. While showing known scenes from a second viewpoint was cute in the second volume, it grew tedious here, and I felt that the pacing between story development and flashbacks was uneven. There was a lot I liked – we get to delve deeper into Krasian culture, for instance (which, to me, is still the most tiresome part of that worldbuilding). But all things considered, not that much happens when measured by the first volume, even if the book fares pretty well compared to regular fantasy novels.
Inversions by Iain Banks is a non-Culture Culture novel – unexpected and refreshing. The story is told in Banks' usual masterful style, and all of pacing, characters, depth, and content are without significant annoyances. I think this is as much Fantasy as Banks will ever get, and I enjoyed the never-quite-touching storylines, and the connections you really had to look out for (and that were never explicitly explained). The fact that I knew that this was a Culture novel added another fun layer, too, because I was constantly considering who was part of the Culture and what their goals were.
The story grows darker towards the end, and while Banks always writes with unprotected people and minorities in mind, I was a bit speechless at how well he first portrayed two cultures filled with class entitlement and elitism, and then contrasted them with torture and a horrifyingly vivid recollection of rape, involving a discussion about the responsibility and reactions of men as a whole. Wow.
We Who Will Destroy the Future is a nice little time travel short story, available at https://resonanceaudiodistro.org/we-who-will-destroy-the-future/. Good story, good setting, very good narrator voice.
A heart-breaking short story about belonging, and families, and a tiny bit of magic. But mostly heartbreak.
Fandom for Robots is a charming humorous story about the only existing sentient robot (bulky out-of-date thing from the 50s) finds anime and fanfiction. Fluffy, funny, but sadly a bit inconsequential.
I felt like The Martian Obelisk by Linda Nagata only built despair to alleviate it, and that was about it. I think the reason is that I don't buy an Earth with reduced but still significant population levels and significant infrastructure mixed with sentences like "surgery became a lost art" and the debilitating despair that seemed to stop everybody from doing anything actually useful.
Feynman's autobiography was a bit too far on the stream-of-consciousness side for my tastes, but at least this way the reader gets a very direct feeling for what Feynman was like. Not always the best person, and with his share of faults and stupid/bad behaviour, but at the same time very engaging and open. Some parts dragged on, but most were interesting in at least some respect. An enjoyable read in the end.
I like Ann Leckie a lot, but Night's Slow Poison didn't work for me – the story was either too short or too aimless for me to appreciate.
While I liked Greg Egan's other novels, Diaspora didn't grip me at all and was very hard to get through. The fact that it revolves around an advanced species that can change itself to any degree it wants to made it hard to feel sypathy with any of the characters. The beginning was really strong, describing how their civilizations and personalities are formed. But after that, to my feeling the book consisted only of excalating physicsbabble and arbitrary personality changes, and this escalation continued right upon the not quite satisfying end.
Patternmaster was very enjoyable, and presented great characters (ever Octavia Butler's strength). There was decent worldbuilding, and I'd love to learn more about this world that is a distant decendant of ours – but sadly, the book ends way too early, at a point where I felt there hadn't been all that much plot yet.
I liked Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes – even though the ending in itself felt predictable, it was very clear that the journey to that ending was the core of the book. It's not an easy question: How much does intelligence determine who we are, and what would happen if our intelligence were to rapidly in- or decrease? While I liked the concept of the book, I can't say that I enjoyed it though … it felt too stressfull with a hint of the kafkaesque for that.