Matilda tells the story of a precocious 5-year-old girl with horrible parents. She tortures her parents (they deserve it), befriends her schoolteacher, stands down her evil headmistress, and lives happily ever after. It's very engaging and entertaining, and has just enough outlandish bits to make it really fun. I found it a little strange that Dahl spends most of the novel describing Matilda and her environment, and it's only in the last quarter that the real story arc takes place, but that didn't bother me.

I read Matilda aloud to Kevin (age 6) over the course of a dozen nights' bed-times, and he loved it (especially the "beams-out-of-the-eyes" parts) and wasn't put off by the many British-isms in the language. It was one of the best reading experiences we've had together.

This was a quick-and-dirty vacation read. I enjoyed the fast-paced plot and didn't mind suspending my disbelief for most of the outlandish sci-fi premise, which involves a government conspiracy, a symbiotic alien species, and a bunch of run-away-from-the-bad-guys action. The writing is in an awkward first-person viewpoint, and the prose is fairly dull. I can't recommend it, but I didn't hate it.

Timescape won the 1980 Nebula Award, and it is viewed as a very successful example of blending hard sci-fi with detailed character development. The setting is split between California in the early 1960s and England in 1998. Scientists in the latter setting are attempting to use faster-than-light particles (tachyons) to send a message to scientists in the earlier setting, so that an ongoing global climate disaster can be averted.

Benford's protagonists are much more nuanced than typical sci-fi characters, and for most of the novel, I thought that his handling of time-travel paradoxes was brilliant. The climate problems ring amazingly true today, especially for a novel that was written 30 years ago. Unfortunately, the ending didn't quite work for me. I'm reluctant to say much for fear of spoilers, but I will say that JFK's assassination isn't quite the same singularity for my generation as it was for Benford's.

Water Music is a playful re-imagining of the adventures of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who attempted to chart the course of the Niger River in Africa. His story is interwoven with the stories of Ned Rise (a British scalawag with great talent for nearly getting killed) and a handful of other colorful characters. T.C. Boyle's prose is inventive and anachronistic, and he has a knack for crafting one or two sentences that jump off of each page.

I wanted to like Water Music a lot more than I actually did. The plot is surprisingly tedious, and the regular bits of clever wordplay weren't enough to save it. I quite liked the Ned Rise character, and would have enjoyed a novel about him alone, but the frequent changes of viewpoint gave the novel a start/stop rhythm that was hard to get into.

I'd like to try another of Boyle's novels because this one was almost in my sweet spot.

Starship Troopers is a lot better than I expected it to be. I haven't seen the movie, but from what I'm told, it couldn't be more different from the book. I was expecting a lot of fighting action and high-tech gadgetry, but this novel is actually about military psychology, philosophy, and politics. There are cool gadgets and alien "bugs", but they are peripheral to the story of how the protagonist, Juan Rico, progresses from clueless high-school student to an officer in the Mobile Infantry (an Army Airborne-like fighting unit that drops from spaceships instead of helicopters). Along the way, there is a lot of fairly deep discussion of how and why the military works the way it does. It reinforced much of my scant knowledge of the military and gave me new respect for the command structure and the way that the armed forces manufacture "brotherhood".

Heinlein has been criticized by many for the way he seemingly glorifies the military (the Wikipedia entry is extensive and worth reading). I choose to think of the world of Starship Troopers as a possible end result of a particular line of thinking rather than any kind of ideal.

This book is very relevant to the war in Iraq as well. It brings harsh criticism to "chickenhawk" leaders like Bush and Cheney who eagerly rushed into armed conflict sacrificing many thousands of lives without ever having served in the military themselves.

So it turns out that this novel has almost exactly the same plot as Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, except it works much better (this one won the Hugo). It's a much tighter story arc (and more plausible from my limited physics background). It tells the story of Private William Mandella, a conscript in the war against the Taurans. The war takes place deep in space, and the relativistic travel speeds cause time-dilation for the soldiers. When they return home, they have aged little, but most of the people they knew have grown old and died. Each time Mandella returns from the front, Earth society has changed tremendously.

Like each of the other Haldeman novels I've read, this one becomes a love story, but here the ending is "believable" as a consequence of the story and feels more satisfying.

My sci-fi reading background is haphazard and skews pretty far away from space opera, but I'm interested in going back and reading some of the other Hugo and Nebula award winners that are regarded as classics. I think Starship Troopers will be next.

This is one of the most frustrating books I have read. I'm very interested in personal information management, and I've spent a substantial amount of time building tools that allow me to keep project details and other information out of my head so that I can focus wholly on the task at hand (this was the most important lesson I learned from Getting Things Done). The reviews and blurbs on this book led me to believe that the author has some insights and solutions in this area.

Boy was I wrong. This book is little more than bloated, wordy, warmed-over common sense. It has a lovely graphic design, but every point is articulated at least three times (this is what I'm gonna tell you; this is me telling you; this is what I just told you...if I wanted that, I'd go watch some corporate powerpoint presentations). There are no solutions here, just a framing of the problem that some imaginary designers could perhaps use to design an iPhone or something.

I want my money and my time back.

I liked this a lot more than Red Thunder, but it still doesn't live up to Varley's more imaginative short stories. This is a fairly standard time-travel confection with a couple of nice touches in the way the "time machine" works, but Varley happily lives with some of the obvious paradoxes of time travel, and for that reason the novel frustrated me.

This novel takes the standard sci-fi conceit of body-snatching aliens and turns it into a complicated love-triangle with more consciousnesses than bodies. The pace is annoyingly slow but tolerable. At the same time, it seems designed to be made into a movie. I believe this is the author's first adult fiction novel, and having read it, I'm not that interested in trying her very popular young-adult work.

This is another book I would never have read if not for my book club. It is also the third (that I'm aware of) annual book chosen by the Hopedale library as a book for the whole town to read (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and To Kill a Mockingbird were the much superior first two).

I did not enjoy this book. I'm interested in the underground railroad and the history of the United States leading up to the Civil War, but this book is ridiculously melodramatic. The bits about quilting in the modern era are contrived, and the way the protagonist suspensefully reads in short bursts the memoir she finds is ridiculous. The memoir itself doesn't sound very authentic, and the big twist ending is telegraphed halfway through.

It doesn't help that I'm annoyed by people who are proud of the accomplishments of their dead ancestors. I'm descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, but you won't catch me talking about it at parties. No one has a right to be proud of anything but their own accomplishments. Get out and do something to make your country greater instead of bragging about how great it is. Wave your flag somewhere else, and shove your family history up your ass. Be a good person now instead of talking about how great your grandpappy was then.