Roger N. > Recent Status Updates

Chapter 13: Oh, hell yes.

I can't believe that surprised me. Put another way, I'm very happy that surprised me.

goddammit why is this book so good

This book is unreasonably exciting.

Just where is this book going? I am not complaining -- no, not by a long shot -- but 220 pages in, I have no idea of the shape of the rest of it.

Deliberate whimsy can be difficult to get right. So far, this book gets it.

I am loving this book as it twists and spirals away from me, slippery, presenting one amazing thing after another.

I don't even know how to talk about this book. It's... amazing.

Why, hello, book that I wanted to read and is on sale at Amazon for $3. Nice to make your acquaintance.

So this book runs along, doing it's thing, with small references to Oryx and Crake and then bam! The books fucking collide.

Cool.

This is good -- really good. Tense and scary, at first for reasons unrelated to the title, but then...

Good god, that's where it ends?

I loved An Instance of the Fingerpost, but haven't read another by Pears. This is the first of the Christmas books to get read. Interesting so far...

I loved An Instance of the Fingerpost, but haven't read another by Pears. This is the first of the Christmas books to get read. Interesting so far...

I [b]loved[/b] [i]An Instance of the Fingerpost[/i], but haven't read another by Pears. This is the first of the Christmas books to get read. Interesting so far...

So here, on page 150 or so, we catch up to the start of the videogame...

Finally starting The State of the Art, which I somehow never realized was a Culture-meets-Earth story, featuring Diziet Sma. Oh, I'm going to enjoy this.

Read the first three shorts here over a breakfast waffle at the local diner, and they almost perfectly encapsulate my issues with short stories: they tend to be either mere sketches of an idea, throw-away jokes, or well-developed ideas that would be much better as the start of something. I got frustrated with Mieville's "Three Moments of an Explosion" for the same reason. Looking forward to the novella.

I don't normally get along well with short story collections, for one reason or another. They just don't generally fit how I read. Well, we'll see how this goes.

After Iain Banks died I started reading through all of his books in chronological order. I read up through Player of Games and then got distracted -- to be honest, I was more than a little willing to be distracted because it was sad to think that once I'd worked my way through them, there'd never be a new one.

Two years later, I've picked up the thread. At least for the rest of othe year, this is what I'll focus on.

This book is making me feel so bittersweetly melancholic...

I thought I had just forgotten what this was about -- but I actually think I haven't read it. I got the sequel for my birthday, so I suppose I'll read them back-to-back. So far -- I've fallen in, just as usual.

I forgot the glorious opening of this book, written in first-person omniscient snark. Glad to be reading it again.

I bounced off of this book once before, for no real reason that I can remember. Trying again.

Oh, for fuck's sake, Quentin -- haven't you learned yet that this kind of thing isn't ever smart?