Liked this book better second time around (although I have a "don't change the ratings for rereads" policy)

I think this is the best of the Glamourist Histories, although that is partially because I prefer the books that range further from England and Austen rather than the ones that hew more closely to what's happening in London.
Also, I think that MRK is getting better at speaking Regency language in her text (although reading this right after [b: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell|823762|Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell|Susanna Clarke|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1396578618s/823762.jpg|3921305] is a study in contrasts and not entirely one that favors MRK). The extensive research works in her favor this time around. I'm glad the series ended on such a positive note for me and I really enjoyed this book.

This book kinda straddled the line between stories I enjoy and those I don't. Overall, it handled itself pretty well and the crime/procedural elements worked. This was a lot of "everything about this book is fine and, for whatever reason, I didn't really connect with it."

I could have done without killing the only named Orthodox character, though. It's not that it didn't make sense in context or anything, it's just that it's not like there are all that many religious Jews in fantasy novels and they tend to be dead, evil, or other. It's not this book, just that there aren't enough exceptions to the rule for me not to get slightly grumpy about meeting a frum character and (being right in) thinking "Yep, he's dead".

Also part of the "last year's Campbell catch up" list.
Really entertaining technothriller that did a great job of thinking about technologies capacities for both great good and evil. Nicely handled narrative with good main characters who felt like fully realized human beings and whose inner emotions made sense.
But the star here was the neuro-tech and Naam's attention to how such things would work, spread, and change the world was definitely the highlight of the book.

I thought I was bored of dystopian futures. I was wrong—Red Rising is excellent and I really enjoyed the way it both dealt in familiar tropes (the decadence, the remaking of the protagonist, the game that is not exactly a game).
The cover says Ender, Katniss, and now Darrow, which covers both the genre and the appeal perfectly.

I love it when all the authors and reviewers I check regularly agree that a book is amazing. Add me to the list; Uprooted is everything my fairy-tale loving heart has ever wanted.

This was an absolutely fascinating book. Shapiro's extensive research (and resources) shows in the sheer quantity of examples he brings and, while he never really writes them into a narrative, the chapter-long vignettes are clearly more important to him and, arguably, to us as readers. The chapters on R. Hirsch and R. Kook were the most interesting to me, although all the examples were just fascinating.
I found it almost strange that Shapiro writes the book as if its role is solely as...hmm, a historical record of tampering with the historical record rather than a subjective evaluation of the relative merits or disadvantages of doing so. There's a simmering sense of disapproval beneath the surface, evidenced as much by Shapiro's other works as by the writing of the book in the first place, but he never actually critiques the process of "changing the immutable" or makes suggestions as to its place in Judaism. I'm not sure what to do with that, other than perhaps mull it over.
I do wonder, though, whether this history in turn can legitimize the shift towards women's participation, friendliness towards LGBTQ, rethinking the way we engage in public ritual. If one can change a 19th century rabbi's opinion using that argument that, had the rabbi known then what we know now, he would had agreed with us...why not make that case for women rabbis (e.g.)?
It's worth thinking about - as so many things are - and might go part of the way towards explaining Shapiro's reticence to condemn a practice that, as an academic, seems inimical to proper research practices. Or I'm just projecting.

I can't figure out if there has been a recent trend towards books about multiple lifetimes or if I've just been reading more books about multiple lifetimes.
Anyway, Claire North's story of a man who relives the same life over and over again, retaining his memories each time, is fascinating perhaps precisely because she almost immediately moves away from exploring questions of Harry's individual life and jumps into questions of whether one can use this knowledge in the world. I was reminded of both David Mitchell and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, though North's narrative has more, I think, in common with the former. What this book lacks--thankfully--is Mitchell's occasionally heavy-handed and morose predictions of the future. This is a book, in the best traditions of science fiction, about averting catastrophe and the narrative leaves plenty of big questions--such as the perils of technology, humanity's capacity for self-destruction, the justification for murder to prevent future crimes--implicitly asked, but unanswered. North is here to tell a story; what we do with the story afterwards is up to us.

I bought this book used, and so I had no concept whatsoever of when it was written. It says something, although I don't know what, that the first thing that clued me in to the book's age (published in 1992) was that I found the homophobia of the future implausible. The second clue was when someone in the latter half of the 21st century looked up a phone number in a book. I found the idea of a Socialist USA to make perfect sense, though.
Right, progress marches on.
None of these are a critique of the narrative - the future that McHugh extrapolates out of the 90s is completely fascinating and her snapshot of a life (or several lives) in the future feel more like a work of contemporary literature rather than science fiction. Which is not to say that the sf elements don't inform the story and shape the possibilities of the narrative, but that the interest is in people navigating the world, rather than in the world as such.

One of the galactic suburbia hosts, I think it was Alex, described this book as cozy sf. There are mysteries and then there are cozy mysteries. This is cozy sf and, like the other of Rowell's novels that I've read, is adorable.