Reviews and Comments

Koven Smith

5easypieces@book.dansmonorage.blue

Joined 3 years, 2 months ago

Arts grantmaker living in Austin, TX. Jazz, museums, pre-Kurtzman Star Trek, so forth and such as. Also in the fediverse at @5easypieces@social.coop.

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Jer Thorp: Living in Data (2021, MCD)

To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified …

Review of 'Living in Data' on 'Goodreads'

Utterly fantastic. A poetic, approachable guide to how to think about data from multiple viewpoints. The book for our present moment. I loved it.

Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War (Hardcover, 2019, Simon and Schuster)

Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange …

Review of 'This Is How You Lose the Time War' on 'Goodreads'

This was absolutely lovely, one of the most beautiful sci-fi novels I’ve read in a long time. It’s a bit of a slow start, but really draws you in and sweeps you up.

Frank Herbert(duplicate): Children of Dune (Paperback, 2019, Ace)

Review of 'Children of Dune' on 'Goodreads'

So...I'm gradually working through the Dune books, and this was the first one that really felt like a slog. All of the books require a certain amount of faith, that this prophecy you've never heard of until now will somehow become important later, or that these six characters referenced in this conversation will make an appearance later, or whatever, but this was the first one where it just felt like chapters and chapters went by in which I had little sense of what anyone's actual aims or motivations were. Leto II refers to the "Golden Path" throughout the book as his primary driving motivation, but exactly what that was remained unclear until the closing pages. The book retains the incredible scope and mythology of the previous installments, but that scope feels like it's starting to weigh the whole enterprise down.