The problem with the goodreads is that it leaves you saying things like "This is a high three stars" which is not the same thing as a low three stars. And this is partially three stars because there was a moment of violence that threw me off and disturbed me for more of the book than I expected (yes, I know, I just finished a trilogy focused around blood and sacrifice, this is different). This may be a testament to Lo's abilities that I cared enough to feel along with the character or its a sign of my perennial "innocent-bystander empathy" issues. (I'm the kind of person who'll will spend half a movie wondering about the person who early got run over in the chase scene at the beginning).
Anyway, the problem with Adaptation, for me, is that its not really my kind of novel. I love young adult fantasy and scifi...until its set in the real world and then I find myself suddenly resistant. This would have been a been a four star book in a genre I liked. And, to be fair, the cliffhanger means that I will be reading the sequel as soon as it comes out.
Sometimes it seems unfair to rate books based purely on my predilections but, then, what else is there?

This book was not what I was expecting, which was entirely my own fault because I assumed that everyone interested in the same thing as me is interested in it in the same way that I am. So I was expecting more theory and less story. But, as it turns out, Coleman's ethnography of hackers was so interesting in its own right that, despite not quite getting what I expected out of it, I enjoyed what I got.
There were particular elements that spoke to me, though, especially her focus on the relationship between hacker ideology and 21st century problems of privacy, individuality and the communal. As an introduction to the free/ open source software movement, this book is wonderful and as an exploration of the questions that can be asked in the realm of free (as in speech) software and labor and the politics thereof, I though Coleman did an excellent job.
On an unrelated note, I applaud this new trend of critical thinkers working on issues of freedom and copyleft releasing their ebooks under the Creative Commons license. Not only because it makes it easier for those of us looking to build on their work to afford to, but also because it sets a standard for valuing the work done by the humanities under the same umbrella as open source.

When it comes to physics books, I tend to have one of two problems. Either they are the "for-dummies" and I feel spoken down to or they deal with the complexities of physics and I feel like my brain is about to fall out of my head because I want to conceptually wrap my mind around the ideas presented and the best I can get is bashing my head against them.
I liked Time Reborn precisely because it was this latter kind of book. The ideas are presented as speculative and, frankly, a bit brain-melty and that actually works in the book's favor.
Leaving aside the cosmology, which I am SO not qualified to comment on, I found Smolin's call for a departure from the Newtonian paradigm for experiments and predictions to be one of the best parts of the book. The way he thinks about what science should do and the way that experiments should be able to provide testable predictions and answer the questions we want to ask was both compelling and rhetorically well-handled.
And, make no mistake, this book is a triumph of scientific rhetoric as well as a fascinating tour of the possible Universe. Which is the best part - Smolin focuses on the possibilities of physics and where we might be able to go, if we dare.
(And I think the idea that time is real, but that space is emergence and size is an illusion is one of those things that I will be left chewing on for a while).

One of the things I like about this series is, despite being a collection of three mysteries, the books themselves don't feel like they're rehashing the same plot over again. Acatl grows as a character throughout the series and the challenges he faces, both intellectually and emotionally, reflect that. Ad the mystery elements are also excellently done. De Bodard never resorts to making her detective stupid for the purposes of the investigation and it feels as though Acatl is always one step ahead of the reader. I thoroughly enjoyed this series and will definitely track down Aliette de Bodard's other works.

And now I remember why I wanted to learn R over summer break. This book assumes at least a passing familiarity with Digital Humanities (at least, it assumes that you've heard of it) and is mostly a well-curated and intriguing tour of what the Stanford Literary Lab has been up to over the past five years. Jockers' work is especially useful because he has a very clear idea of why he is doing what he is doing (which does not always come through in the shorter discussions of his work). His focus isn't just on figuring out the tools, but in asking questions about their implementation. What can I do with this and, perhaps, more crucially, how.
I found the defense of DH sections a bit tedious, but I suppose I wasn't the intended audience. My relationship with close reading is not threatened by the advent of Macroanalysis (see the bit about meaning to learn R).
What Jockers has written is, in some ways, a tool for generating interest in macroanalysis. This book is certainly not a how-to guide, but I have a difficult time imagining the kind of person who reads it and does not find herself wanting to try out some of these techniques (and then you get to the last chapter and realize that everything you are interested in is under copyright...).

This book should be subtitled "Thinking yourself into a box in 8 easy chapters".
It's not that I didn't enjoy it; this book tends rather towards the repetitive and while one chapter about how difficult it is to accurately and reliably describe our own introspective experience (what does the world look like to us? Do we dream in color? Do we notice what we perceive when we're not paying attention to it?) is fascinating, eight begin to feel like the author is running around asking :How do we brain? Nobody knows..."
Which is, perhaps, another way of saying that I want more direction in my science books. I want more speculation, rather than just somewhat blasé suggestions at the end, about how we can get past this problem.
I also want a bit more "get over it and move on" - yes, we're lousy phenomenologists. But Schwitzgebel seems almost devastated by that state of affairs and I suppose I find myself wondering why. The history of psychology has been a long story of people showing us how we don't know what we think we know. Is this SO very different?
The most intriguing part, by far, was the way that he ends by turning around and arguing for a study of the world as such rather than our experience for it. That was well done. Still, the bits in between had a tendency to put me to sleep.

Diana Wynne Jones is compulsively rereadable and I somehow end up returning to at least some of her mind-bogglingly wonderful work once a year. Usually after my brain has decided that it would like to stop either reading non-fiction or taking chances on new books.
The former was at fault this time - it has been weeks since I read a book that I wasn't either a) teaching or b) interested in for research reasons. So this Friday night, my brain had enough.
Hexwood is brilliant and part of why I love rereading it is that the plot is so perfectly intricate that, even when I remember most of the book, I'm still startled and amused and pleased by how it manages to work itself out in the end. I've read it several times now and you would think I would remember all the puzzle pieces by now, but Jones is so fiendishly clever that she still manages to surprise me.
I also wonder just how she managed to come up with her blend of fantasy, science-fiction, silliness that is both fantastically new and reassuringly familiar in every book. I'm not sure if this book is the ideal introduction to her, but it's everything a DWJ book should be.

I'm always leery of reviewing audiobooks as books, not because I think they don't count, but because I suddenly feel as though I don't know whether I liked the story or the reader.
This is a problem with science-fiction in particular, a genre where the books not marketed towards children are--with many exceptions--crappy at character. The people don't always feel like...people.
Having a narrator impersonating them (so to speak) often mitigates the worst of the offenses, but it leaves me wondering whether I liked the work done by the author or the narrator.
Anyway, Spin itself was an absolutely fascinating book--the best part by far was the exploration of the science and the way that the possibilities and ideas came together. So, the Jason Lawton sections. The worst part, also by far, were the Diane Lawton sections. I got the impression that Wilson still wasn't entirely sure how to handle her story and went for something of a hands-off approach in terms of exploring motivations and really thinking through her brain.
But its worth reading for the science.

This book reminded me of Robin McKinley's Damar series, which is one of the highest compliments I can give. Carson shows both an intricate knowledge of the more meta rules of the genre along with an equally excellent intuition of where to break with them in order to move the plot along. Her world and the characters within it are rich and vibrant and I would like to spend more time on this review, but I have to go and see if I can get my hands on the second book right now.

EDIT: And, because the Gods love fools who love procrastinating, The [b:The Crown of Embers|10816908|The Crown of Embers (Fire and Thorns, #2)|Rae Carson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1335241091s/10816908.jpg|15730581] is currently $1.99 for Kindle.

One of these days, I really need a t shirt saying ”Books Happen".
At least its late enough that I can't track down the third book and finish it without falling asleep.
Carson's trilogy remains almost compulsively readable and her characters and world, as before, just become more interesting with every page. This one definitely goes onto the list of YA books worth reading.