Disappointing. This reads like one of Stephenson's pseudonymous efforts, though it isn't quite as good as "Stephen Bury"'s The Cobweb. I found it a little amusing that Stephenson can spend pages writing about the intricacies of a gun collection, but that he refuses to invest more than a vague paragraph on a plot-relevant sexual encounter between two of the main characters.

I think at this point that I have to grudgingly admit that I don't know what I saw in his writing in the first place. It's ambitious, but more and more I think a lot of it is pretty dull.

Thank you, David Mitchell, for restoring my faith in literary fiction. After a terrible experience with Nicholson Baker's House of Holes and a middling reaction to Richard Powers' Generosity, I was a bit afraid that my tastes had shifted away from beautiful prose and toward plot-driven speculative fiction. Though I do greatly enjoy the latter, thankfully I now know that I still have a taste for the former.

Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel set in England in the early 80s. The narrator, Jason Taylor, is the same age as Mitchell, and about two years older than me, and although I grew up in New England rather than the U.K., I recognized enough of Mitchell's music and pop culture references to see and value how real and appropriate they are. I identified strongly with Jason, especially with the distortions the adolescent mind places on the significance of life's minor but formative events.

Mitchell is a versatile writer. You'd have a hard time finding three books in three different genres as uniformly excellent as Mitchell's Black Swan Green (bildungsroman), Cloud Atlas (literary speculative fiction), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (historical fiction). In all cases, the writing craft is meticulous, but in the case of Black Swan Green there are sentences in each chapter that I wish I had conceived and written, metaphors that jump of the page — to the point of being aphorisms.

I'm eager to read Mitchell's earlier novels, though I am tempted to hold off a bit and save them for just the right time and place.

This is by far my least favorite Nicholson Baker book. It is indeed raunchy, but it has a horrific flavor to it (the first "episode" includes a dismembered forearm feeling up a girl), and if there was anything of value to be found in the overall structure, I missed it.

Yuck. The season eight comics were in no way worth the time and money, except for the occasional passing chuckle.

An interesting premise with promising elements, but I was very put off by having multiple viewpoints all told in the second person.

[These notes are very light on spoilers — there's nothing here that would ruin your enjoyment of the novel.]

The long awaited, much anticipated Dance with Dragons has finally arrived, and I finished my re-read of the first four books of the series just in time to dive in. Having now spent the past two and a half weeks reading through it, I have mixed feelings about finishing it.

On the plus side, the early part of the novel advances several plot lines significantly and brings back the great POV characters that were missing from A Feast for Crows, namely Dany, Tyrion, Jon, Arya, and Bran. Bran's adventures advance quickly (with a satisfying twist) but end rather abruptly. Arya's thread is terrific, but there isn't enough of it.

On the down side, Dany sits around and boringly deals with politics for most of the novel (though she does have a couple of great scenes toward the end). Tyrion wanders around a lot, but doesn't really seem to get anywhere, and Jon ends on one of the most contrived cliffhangers I've ever seen.

A few presumed-dead characters turn out to still be alive, which is actually starting to be a problem. Part of what was great about the first three novels in the series were the sometimes unexpected mortal consequences of the plot. Martin has seemingly given up on killing anyone, and he now has too many characters to keep in motion.

A Song of Ice and Fire really needs to start getting into plot-resolution mode. Hopefully the next book won't be half a decade in the making, and hopefully it'll start to bring the many diverse plot threads back together. I'll keep reading this series, but I'm a little bummed out after finishing this chapter.

Flashback is my favorite Dan Simmons novel in more than a decade (since The Crook Factory).

It is set in a dystopic near-future, and the characters blame the U.S.'s fictional collapse on poor policies by Obama. This is a political view I hope I will never share, and I attribute it to the bleak fictional setting rather than to Simmons himself, in contrast to many of the reviewers on Amazon. But really, the interesting gambit here is the invention of a cheap drug called flashback that allows many Americans to live entirely in the past by re-experiencing high-fidelity memories of their choosing. The protagonist is a seemingly hopeless flashback addict, who must overcome his addiction to solve a set of murders and reunite with his son. It turns into a thriller where he gradually realizes that he is a pawn in a larger game and needs to find a way out.

Simmons is always worth reading, and this is the best combination of readable and compelling that he's achieved in a long time.

I liked this better the second time. The POV characters here aren't my favorites, but there's plenty of interesting stuff going on, and A Dance With Dragons is right around the corner.

I'm continuing to quite enjoy rereading this series.

I am continuing my reread of A Song of Ice and Fire in conjunction with the airing of the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones adaptation, and in anticipation of the publishing of A Dance With Dragons.

In the second book of the series, magic begins leaking in around the edges of the narrative, but the prose maintains the gritty realism and character-driven action that make this series great. This time around, I'm enjoying all of the point-of-view characters (including the newly-added POVs of Theon and Davos). I loved Theon's introduction to Asha as well as Tyrion's role leading up to the Battle of the Blackwater. And I'm having fun speculating how they'll cast Melisandre and Asha on HBO next year.

Even if this series is never completed, it's a damn fine creation.