Reviews and Comments

bamy

jamy@books.babb.no

Joined 10 months, 2 weeks ago

🏳️‍🌈 Originally from Cape Town 🇿🇦 but now living in Oslo 🇳🇴

I typically enjoy speculative fiction, fantasy, sci-fi and programming books 📚

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N. K. Jemisin: The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky (2018, Orbit)

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Among other things, I liked the world world-building, really full and interesting characters and the complex systemic issues in the fictional world. I didn't quit get into the narration style.

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 …

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The authors have a solid command of the English language and show it throughout the entire book.

This type of heavily abstract and poetry like writing made it difficult for me to get into at first; I may have spent 10 minutes on a single page at some point. By the end I felt like my mind was was being weaved through time, place, space and emotion.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on …

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Meh.

All characters are 1 dimensional and completely interchangeable. Emotion is never explored at all, somehow Mark makes jokes and is logical no matter the circumstance.

The author feels like a new author to me; Weird writing style mixtures. The book starts out with mark getting wounded and isn’t ever mentioned again even though he’s permanently doing physical labour. Plot suspension is built over some time and after things are avoided, it’s never mentioned again by anyone, not even the fact that things were avoided.
It feels like it was based on the movie, but somehow with less emotion than cinema.

The book ruined the movie for me, and also the book.

The science was really cool though!

2.5 stars

David M. Higgins: Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (2022, Springer International Publishing AG)

NB! This is not Ancilliary Justice, but a crititical companion.

This book argues that …

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I liked it!

I found it difficult to follow the first 15% of the book and only really got into it at about 25% which is pretty far compared to what I'm used to. I'm sure it was intentional but I was doubting my understanding and comprehension initially. This made it feel like I was forcefully trudging through until a point I would hopefully understand.

Once I got into it the book kept on getting more interesting and exciting as it progressed.

I enjoyed the way the book played with concept of self, culture and gender concepts.

In the astonishing finale to the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra and Will are in …

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While reading this it felt like the author had decided on an ending to the series after the second book and then tried to make everything that previously happened work in the context of the new direction.

The story felt forced and the character development of Lyra felt like it come from an unintentionally sexist place. The story was going from point to point and the reasoning for the story progressing that way wasn’t strong enough for me.

2.5 stars.

reviewed The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (Three-Body Trilogy, #1)

Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem (Hardcover, 2014, Tor Books)

Within the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a military project sends messages to alien …

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A psychics/mathematical/cosmological hard sci-fi which tends to focus heavily on technical details making it feel very grounded in reality. I liked it a lot!

Note: Try to read the book without reading the summary.