Most of the fiction I read is either scifi or some kind of mystery/thriller, it was refreshing to read a vevry good book about none of those topics. Less is an affable 50 year old gay man. The guy he was with longterm is marrying someone else. He hurls himself into a large number of work type obligations in order to forget. And does not forget. This book is mildly funny. and overall sort of heartwarming but not in a glurgy way. Nearly every character is a man. I’ll seek out other books Greer has written.

I usually love Cory’s books so I was excited for this one. The premise is great, people get fed up with society and they set up their own society. Cool, how do they do it. Cory explains and it’s all really interesting philosophical ideas about building self-reliant stuff. Cool. But then it goes on. Any time two characters are together there’s often a long exposition about this or that philosophical idea. Which is sort of great but it gets deadly dull after a while. Cory writes great characters and their interactions are fun and interesting. But them expounding on the nature of wealthy people is just not that great. I kept skimming wanting to gt back to the STORY. I read to the end, and it was a nice/interesting wrap-up but I was just sort of bummed that it wasn’t better. A little too didactic and I am someone who is On Board with a lot of these philosophies which, come to think about it, may be why I didn’t feel I needed to read them again.

A very nice book where not much happens but it;s about small towns and books and reading and so I liked it. A good book for recovering from a toothache or when you’ve maybe had too much of the yammering nonsense out there. Formulaic? Sure. But sometimes that’s what you want out of a book.

Woooo, Lock In finally had a sequel and this one was pretty good. I am someone who really enjoys getting to read works by authors who can write good disabled characters and Scalzi has created a world where 10% of everyone has a Parkinsonian type of disability where they can think fine but can’t move their bodies. There’s an aftermarket business making robots that they can inhabit using sophisticated neural network stuff. And, of course, resultant interesting stuff that comes out of all of it. I like the subtle disability politics that is also part of the larger “what happened?” mystery that is the primary thrust. This book occasionally gets bogged down in a little bit of overexplaining but it’s minor stuff and I was so happy to get to read this.

For some reason I always forget how much I love Scalzi’s novels. I saw this one at the library and was stoked to have found a newish novel by him that I hadn’t read yet. And it was funny... the general central plot is all blabla trade war and blabla diplomacy. But it’s told with a bunch of interesting and totally relate=able characters so you really want to find out how the whole thing winds up. And I had a little trouble with the ending, not that I didn’t like it but that I sort of feel I maybe didn’t understand it? So now I have to read about the book in addition to reading the book. And hopefully remember to read more Scalzi before I forget how much I like his writing.