I always wonder what sort of sign it is when I finish a sci-fi novel and want to go read some quantum physics just to encounter something sensible.
Egan's book was fascinating, if remote. I found the absence of FTL to be a particularly brilliant touch and the way that he seems to push development forward in such a way that it seems natural that we should have arrived there yet completely incomprehensible how it happened s very cool.
In the end, my biggest problem with the book was in its characters. This is very much a stereotypical hard sf work, with the focus on technology and development and characters who exist to move the science forward. And they were surprisingly good...for the genre, which is why I wish they were just a little bit better. It's not that Egan doesn't do a good job, it's that he's talented enough to mesh character and technology, but doesn't get the balance quite perfect.
Though perhaps I'm biased, as a reader who judges books based on character.
In any case, I enjoyed this bewildering trip through speculative science, though I can't decide if it has encouraged me to pick up more of his works or scared me away.

Really good book, told by an author with an excellent grasp of how to create a fairy tale as well as how to retell one - The Princess and the Hound is, for lack of a better term, a retelling of an original fairy tale. Fans of Robin McKinley will find much to love in this book.

You would think that, after finding book after book of YA fantasy focused on the fae to be better than i expected, I would expect better. So much for being rational.
I think much of the problem is that I like these books despite the topic, despite the fairy choices. Wicked Lovely is definitely one of those books - I admire the writing and I think Marr does a better job than most with her teenage girl characters and I especially love that Aislinn almost never acts like an idiot.
Strong female characters are all well and good, but if you hand them the idiot ball every time the plot needs to advance, you are shooting your feminist self in the foot.
But Marr doesn't do that, she lets Aislinn be the kind of girl you, as a reader, want her to be.
I just...find myself missing the fantasy of my youth. I preferred the sword-wielding, dragon slaying Alannas and Aerins I read while growing up, not because of their character, but because I think the worlds they inhabited were better worlds.

This was another book recommended by Robin McKinley, who tends to post YA fantasy that she likes on her blog.

I enjoyed this story, albeit more as a cultural experience than in terms of plot. I found the idea of a fantasy novel that is not indebted to the European middle ages to be a worthwhile endeavor and Pon's portrayal of her mythologies and history as they went into creating this story was the best part for me.

I found the characters to be a bit flat, and also found myself extremely annoyed at the main character for being handed the idiot ball and doing something that appeared to me to be completely out of character in the name of plot tension. But that happens every so often.

Definitely a worthwhile read and I look forward to seeing what else Pon can do with this world she has adopted.

Stephenson is a...polarizing writer. He tends to break what are thought of as the rules of writing (show, don't tell; don't use massive, chapter-long infodumps; focus on character; etc.) and produces literature that is a story wrapped around ideas, rather than ideas that tell a story.
Of course, I think he does it extremely well and I don't read his books for deep character insights, but for the usually absurdly detailed and complex philosophical problems wrapped in several explosions that make up the storyline. It's a matter of expectations.
Anyway, I loved Anathem. I thought the premise was brilliant and I found Erasmas to be a surprisingly compelling character (by Stephenson's standards, of course). But the weirdness of the story and how he weaves in surprisingly complicated Platonic ideals with Derridean take-downs and...
Anyway, if you liked Snow Crash, read Cryptonomicon and if you liked Cryptonomicon, read Anathem. It is well worth your time.

This is, possibly, Pratchett's best work to date and I do not say that lightly. Though it was not written to have the effervescent wit of his Discworld novels, it shines with its own quiet humor and touching brilliance. I loved it and cannot recommend it highly enough.