Question: is everything set in a far-flung future where we've managed to do horrible things to the world considered a dystopia? Or do I just need "post-apocalyptic" as a shelf?

This reminded me (for obvious reasons) of [a:China Mieville]'s recent book, except that the authors were telling very different kinds of stories. This was far less of an homage to anything and more an interesting, bloody, clever and ultimately unsatisfying story.

My biggest issue with it was not the number of people who died along the narrative way, but the way that so many people died without acknowledgement from the book that these deaths were important while other people got the full appreciation for what loss of life meant. I could have dealt with either, I could even have handled some kind of logic of proximity to the main characters dictating meaningful deaths or even a couple of lines about why we could not dwell on everyone. For a book that was, overall, perspicacious in its explanation of people and emotions, this part really fell flat for me and make me like the book less.

But the idea of large, lumbering cities engages in "Municipal Darwinism" is delightful and I cannot fault Reeve's ingenuity. Still, this is a first book and I would like to know what happens next.

When I become a grown-up academic, this is exactly the kind of book I want to write - personal experiences blended with narrative historiography in a way that doesn't talk down to the reader and clearly wants her to be entertained not just enlightened.

This book is basically - "I love reading...you do too? That's wonderful, let's talk about it!"

This one gets a solid meh.
The descriptions of psychology are interesting and the narrative he creates out of our intellectual movement from a kind of behavioralist rigid idea of the brain to our contemporary understanding both of neuroplasticity and the mind are compelling.
At the same time, I found the idea of using quantum physics to be productive, though not in the way Schwartz intended. He makes a good argument for a non-deterministic view of the brain (contrary to, say, Daniel Dennett) based on the simple nondeterministic view of the universe. But then he shifts into a kind of "dualism post the discovery of Buddhism in the West" that never properly explains, for example, WHY the idea of the mind as emergent is impossible. His insistence on the mind as such and on keeping the Cartesian boundaries he claims to knock down was just unsatisfying, more so because the idea of quantum indeterminacy as the answer to free Will was actually really cool.
Long story short, he mistakes the ideology with which he makes sense of the phenomenological world as an accurate explanation for those experiences, but fails to provide enough evidence for this reader, at least, to believe that said ideology is a response to the data rather than to the author's own theology. The individual claims are fascinating right up to the end, but the overall thesis needs work.

I really enjoyed this foray into flintlock fantasy and, despite my early worries, I liked the fact that this was basically epic fantasy as told through the description of a military campaign. Part of the appeal is certainly character-based; Wexler chooses two main characters and sticks with them, telling the story from their perspective with pretty tight third person narrative and it works. The combination of commanding officer and (extra)ordinary soldier means that its difficult to forget the stakes and that no one really knows what is going on. And Wexler also has a knack for complicated an ambiguous characters and keeps the reader guessing who is trustworthy and who is not. You have to be able to stomach a long military narrative and occasional mentions of gore, but I really enjoyed the intricacies of the battle and the way that Wexler managed to tell such big story by focusing so narrowly.

...So I have no idea what I would have rated this if it hadn't, well, been the fault in our stars with all the attention and expectations around it.
As far as books go, this one was good. Green gets teenagers right without being either patronizing or de-teenagering them. And while it was...formulaic in the way that so much realist fiction is, it was a very good and moving entry into the genre.
I think I will refrain from talking about the place people have erroneously assigned John Green in the history of YA literature. This book does not need to be groundbreaking (it isn't). It just needs to be good, and it is, and that's enough.

This book was a very clever conceit and reasonable well executed, but it always somehow felt as though it remained on the level of conceit rather than fully executed story with people at the heart of it.
The other comparison that came to mind is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with low stakes and fewer people. As a puzzle box, it was intriguing, but I still found that the characters themselves failed to truly grab me.

So Mitchell, as an author, has always worked for me. The conceits in his books more or less rise to the level of a style and its nice to see the nested narratives of Cloud Atlas in a slightly more manageable form. Which is not to say that the story itself is not complex or that it takes a while to get into. I'm not sure if I would go so far as to say that Mitchell blends realism and fantasy seamlessly - you do still get the sense of a book in search of a genre - and he can't quite write believably stupid characters but those are, overall, minor flaws in a book that combines the joy of solving an interlocking puzzle and the pleasure of a finely constructed narrative.

Is it mean to rate a book down a bit for having less fantasy or sic-fi than I expect for a Hugo nominee? I enjoyed this story - the narratives of a family in a space are usually good and Duncan makes each generation brilliant in their own fashion. While parts of the story were predictable, the overall narrative was deeply satisfying and engaging. It just did not strike me as very...sff-y.

I swear, my next audio book is something under 10 hours. No exceptions.
Which, of course, is not to say that this wasn't a wonderful book. Rothfuss, as a writer, adopts a written voice and narrative style that is meant to make you, as a reader, feel like you are being told a story. The writing is often expansive, excessive and elaborate and you will love him for it or hate him. I love it. I think the audio actually works in this book's favor, the story sounds even better when told (as Kvothe would know) and there's something just genuinely fun about Rothfuss's approach to the epic. There are no prophecies, no real heroes, no earth wide cataclysms and yet the story is obviously of that genre. And while I spent at least half of the book wanting to punch Kvothe in the face, I got the impression that I was not the only one and that the book rather endorsed that feeling.