Rate the last book you just read

[BilLumberg]

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet  Becky Chambers - 9/10

Book one of the "Wayfarers" series. Science fiction about the crew of a tunneling ship that creates wormholes for space travel. You are introduced to a world that feels lived in and real.
 
I never been very good at describing this kind of stuff, but I really enjoyed this book and will be starting the sequel soon. It's one of those books that was fun and easy to read.

[superdave]

Semiosis by Sue Burke  5/10   REfugees from Earth land on a planet where there is less division between plants and animals than there is on Earth.  The book starts off interesting as humans struggle to survive on an alien world that is similar but crucially different from Earth.  The problem is that this book is trying to be hard sci-fi but the science stretches too far.  About halfway through the book we meet a character that is just godlike in scope and the rest of the story is one Deus Ex Machina after another, to the point of tedium.

[Swagomatic]

I finished the final book in the Hyperion Cantos series (The Rise of Endymion) by Dan Simmons.  I really enjoyed this series and the final book is a nice wind-up.


I am now listening to the audiobook of Fall, Or Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson.  So far this is very good. It is a sort-of sequel to Reamde, and includes references (and at least one character) to/from Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle, also by Stephenson.  So far it's been excellent.

[Sawyer]

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges - 5/10

Top notch content about Turing's contributions to cryptography, computers, and the understanding of the human mind, but WAAAAAY too long.  I remember being annoyed a few years ago when the movie The Imitation Game did not properly explain how the Enigma was effectively decrypted, and I wanted to go to the source material for more details.  Well, they are in here, along with a hundred other musings from Turing about information theory, voice encoding, Godel, the atomic bomb, morphogenesis, incentive structures in education, the Riemann-Zeta function ....    There's no single subject that I think could have easily been axed from the book, it's just that the implications of what Turing was doing are so wide-ranging that there's no way to cover them all without overwhelming the reader.  Probably could have dropped most of the hundred pages about life at English public schools and universities, although then you couldn't fully appreciate how Turing's homosexuality and social aloofness clashed with those around him.  Also probably could have ended the book when he, SPOILER ALERT, kills himself, instead of trying to reflect for another entire chapter about the psychology of the entire Western world after World War II.

Just read The Code Book by Simon Singh or maybe the David Kahn book about the Enigma if that's all you want to know about.  If you want the complete Turing this is probably where to look, but be prepared to power through certain sections.  (I tried taking a break halfway through with Alan Moore's From Hell, but a month and a half of exposure to brooding, philosophical Londoners is not good for the soul.)

[superdave]

Next by Michael Crichton
5/10  It brings up some interesting and valid ethical concerns about gene therapy and biotech and it was interesting to see that some of them have come true while others have fizzled out in the 10 years since the book was published.  But the story itself is pretty ludicrous. 

[Sawyer]

Bad news everyone - Terry Pratchett is#CANCELLED.



From Soul Music.  Didn't really care that much about the previous Death novels but this one is a step up.

Also I try to get away from reading about the invention of computers, and lo and behold, one of the wizards has ants running through punchcard boards to do math.