I enjoyed Mary Hooper's evocative view of London during the Victorian era. She does a wonderful job conveying the grandeur, the excess and the wonder of the society to readers who are not fully aware of it without compromising much in the way of Victorian sensibilities.
I had two basic problems with the book. My first was that the viewpoint of the main character, Grace, struck me as somewhat discordant given the backdrop. This is always a problem when writing historical fiction, but I particularly felt that Grace was translating her experiences across 150 years rather than experiencing them - as if she knew she was telling the story to someone who didn't live the way she did. That kept me from falling totally into the story.
My other problem was that, overall, the scenery and setting were far more memorable than the characters. It almost seemed that Mary Hooper was more interested in the Victorian obsession with death (which, to be fair, is fascinating) than with the life of her own character.
So while yes, this was quite a good book and I found it to be a nice read and well written, it never really grabbed me.

Pratchett is an incredibly fun author and, as far as I can tell, will continue to be so until DEATH comes for him. He's funny, inventive, has a great sense of the absurd and if his subtext has rapidly become text (racism bad! beer foamy!) well, we can forgive the sheer anviliciousness of it because it's not as though it's a bad moral and the story is still good.

I love Stephen Briggs as a reader and have started buying the Discworld books in audiobook solely to listen to him. THe Nac Mac Feegle will always be read in his voice.

I really enjoyed Kahneman's take on how the brain functions; it's always a good sign when I find myself metacogitizing after a book and being able to think about how I think.
Kahneman has a great style, he's very readable but never feels like he's dumbing things down and the way he presents the book, as a method for restructuring gossip at work as much as a theoretical exploration of the mind made me appreciate his skills even more. A very worthwhile read for those of us who like books about psychology somewhere between the pop and the academic.

This book kept not being the book I expected it to be. It has, apparently, been a long time since I read sweeping epic fantasy and I'd forgotten its tendency to wander through settings and the world as the story of the hero tells itself as needed. It was a bit jarring at first, until I gave up trying to pigeonhole it.
And then I realized what was throwing me off--I haven't read enough MASSIVE EPIC FANTASY where the hero is a girl. I'd learned to expect that stories with women as leads were...two inches of ivory kinds of stories. To see an author remind us that women deserve epics as well is wonderful.
It helps that the book itself, for all its wild shifting, is a good book. The world Elliott creates is fascinating; I keep wanting to pull apart all the references even though my educational background has only given me access to some. And, as I may have mentioned once or a hundred times, thoughtful world-building is one of those things that drags me into a book immediately.
In terms of character, for all that Cat feels innovative, as a female epic heroine given an epic world to work in (Robin McKinley's Damar books have epic heroines, but the books themselves are not epics, or I don't read them as such. They're a kind of fairy tale.), she still has a few of the traditional male hero's annoying traits--the je ne sais quoi that makes me want to punch them in the face at least twice in the course of the book for being...it's usually stubborn or stupid. But I take that as a given of the genre and, in some ways, it's a mark of Elliott's success.
And we need more writers like her.

Given my rocky relationship with steampunk (it's a genre I really want to like, but seldom do), I was pleased to discover that this was one of those times when I truly enjoyed a steampunk novel.
Hodder's book is so patently absurb, so incredibly fun and yet so well researched, that it's hard not to fall in love with. Those who are meticulous about their science will be less than impressed with much of the silliness Hodder introduces, but once one accepts his obvious premise (Steampunk is already absurd, let's run with it), the story unwinds wonderfully and is enhanced by things like genetically modified giant swans as a form of air travel. By not confining himself to the possible, Hodder has opened up a world of possibilities.
Of course, it helps that his research into the characters and time period was so well detailed. He does an impressive job, given how few main characters he invents. And, of course, the story is a mad and mysterious read.
My one complaint is that Hodder's ear for dialogue is not always spot-on and people will occasionally speak in a way that leaves me thinking "but no one really sounds like that".
All in all, a good read and one that reminded me why I seek out steampunk novels even after finding myself disappointed with many of them.

Next up in my "reading it for the award" list was Ian McDonald's "The Dervish House". Overall, I really enjoyed this book, despite finding it difficult to read for an extended length of time for the first half. (This is not the same as slow or uninteresting - but it was very much the kind of book I could pick up on a subway and then stop reading when I got where I wanted to go. Until suddenly, it wasn't.)
There were two aspects of the book that made it so enjoyable and, in my opinion, up for the 2010 Locus and (I think) Hugo. The first was the setting. McDonald does a fantastic job of integrating the history of the city with the story of the characters, creating a panoramic view of people, culture and a beautiful city that comes through his words naturally.
The second was that he actually had a story to tell. THis wasn't just an exploration of nano tech or a foray into non-western sf (though it has elements of both), but a fully realized, well-developed story with real people populating it. I only wish that the threads of the story had begun to wind together a bit sooner, as it really did take this book a long time to become a story. But once it did, it was lovely.

Well, this was certainly an entertaining jaunt into the muddy waters of what an author can do with a story, with a book and with a text.
I enjoyed the thriller/horror aspects of the story, which I felt were just enough to evoke the genre without any of the voyeuristic attitudes that horror sometimes seems to possess. And I thought the shark was a brilliant move.
The characters seemed flat sometimes, though whether that was a deliberate homage to the genre remains impossible to tell, since so much in this book is a deliberate homage.
And the ending, which I know has its detractors, I found to be pith perfect.

There's a thoughtful, well-articulated response to this book sitting somewhere in my brain, but for now I'll just say that I really enjoyed the scholarship and evenhandedness of this book; how it never shied away from the topic, but never devolved into a jeremiad (as it undoubtedly would have in the hands of may other authors).
Topically, the book was fascinating, but I can't imagine it has a particularly broad appeal - either you hear what it's about and immediately want to read ir, or you're uninterested in the topic and the book won't change your mind.
One note - I was very pleased to find that, despite being a profoundly academic book, this work was mostly free of jargon. It's much harder to write an academic text in a coherent manner than it is to just fling a post-modern word salad at the page and see what sticks, so my hat is off to Rav Finkelman (though, you know, not in public) for managing to write so clearly.