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“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen”

Dulcinea: Name a way to be nice to others.
Gideon: Don't kill them.
Dulcinea: Setting the bar a little low, but I'll allow it.

I am loving this so much! As Rebecca Roanhorse says, it's the Gothic space adventure I didn't know I needed.

When you're wearing slasher goggles, everything can look like a slasher.

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”

The colonialist bourgeoisie is aided and abetted in the pacification of the colonized by the inescapable powers of religion. All the saints who turned the other cheek, who forgave those who trespassed against them, who, without flinching, were spat upon and insulted, are championed and shown as an example.

“It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.”

It's getting downright ridiculous. I mean, overreacting to a simple misunderstanding, and making a constant fuss over a totally ordinary basement? It all comes down to one thing: our unwise decision to buy an apartment in the middle of a graveyard.

"If it weren't for the proximity to a graveyard, there's no way the price would be so low nowadays."

Truthfully I don’t understand this story at all. I mean, I know the words and what's happening, but where are we going with this? Mary Shelley get her name dropped every ten paragraphs - all in all, this feels very like a Mira Grant book, and not very like a Seanan McGuire book at all.

Okay, I finished trawling through that miserable and apparently endless and constantly gross story by Fedmahn Kassad, so it's just a matter of getting through the rest of it, which is just pure legwork. Should be done by the end of the week.

This is just awful. I thought it was just bad, but it's just awful. How trash like this won the Hugo Award is a mystery to me.

Struggling to get into it. Characters are blurred (characters in the narrative, not letters on the page, to be clear), seems too much like a mashup of other scifi concepts.

Honestly, this is a struggle to get through. Still can't work out what's happening. Betrays the author's background writing short stories (i.e., not novels).

is the book I've been waiting for. Unfortunately I have to take it back to the library now, since they are also waiting for it.

"Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge became big idols. But now I know there is one thing you all have overlooked. Mind and education, not combined with human love, nothing. (Charlie) "

"Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge became big idols. But now I know there is one thing you all have overlooked. Mind and education, not combined with human love, nothing. (Charlie) "

Not in a racist way, but there's something special about Italian Americans, and Ursula Hegi, who as far as I know is an Italian American, gets it, and shows us how it is.

A good story, if I can call a factual account a story, just not told terribly well. Too many parentheses and inverted commas.

A well-drawn novel so far. Like the blurb says, impressive.

Not since I discovered Daniel Dennett last summer have I been so excited about a writer's work. Like Terry Pratchett on speed, VanderMeer has created a world more real than the real world (a dilemma he deals with in the final story in this anthology, 'The Strange Case of X'. My only concern is, like X, I too may forget which is more real, and succumb to Ambergris' ambiguous charms.)

I gotta to be honest - not loving this book. There was a Doctor Who episode, a special, I think, where the Cybermen have taken over London and are kidnapping children and absorbing them into their consciousness. This book feels like a ripoff of that, which was already a ripoff of Dickens anyway. (note: episode is 'The Next Doctor', December 2008)