If you guessed this image came from Goodreads.com, you’d be right.
How did I read another book inside of a week? This honestly boggled me a bit until I realized the book is a fast and easy read. This isn’t a bad thing, but surprising nonetheless.
So, here we have another superhero book. This one features two people with abilities, neither of them don’t remember anything before waking up in an apartment. They each have a couple of clues, a signed lease for one year’s paid stay at the apartment, and a note. The note indicates they have abilities.
One character, Jamie, uses his mind wiping ability to rob banks. He can rifle through anyone’s memory and remove specific bits. He robs banks because he wants to get away to a warm island somewhere and discovers banks are insured. He figures this crime isn’t hurting anyone and it helps him amass some cash. He’s defined as the villain upon introduction.
The other character, Zoe, can hover/fly, run super fast, has super strength, and can see thermal imagery. She uses her speed to deliver food and occasionally fight crime, if it suits her to do so. She’s labelled as a hero when we’re introduced.
They meet in a memory loss support group where Jamie immediately dives into Zoe’s mind and finds out she’s the one that was chasing him after his last robbery. They become tentative friends, yes, even after he sort of violated her by peeking through her mind, and try to help each other out in figuring out their pasts.
Of course this leads to them discovering a nefarious organization that’s gifting people with abilities. Of course they try to break in and get more information. Of course they’re caught. Of course they try again. Of course they work together to become heroes/saviors.
This plot makes the story easy to read, and the formatting kept my interest. The chapters alternate between each character’s POV, keeping the perspective fresh and interesting. The book did feel messy though, maybe from about two thirds on, as if the author didn’t really know how to explain events. This is reflected in the characters outright saying they had no plan and couldn’t explain something. This isn’t bad, but it felt a bit flippant.
Overall, it’s a light read. If you like superhero stories, this one makes a nice snack for your mind.
I decided to step outside science fiction for a bit and read a gentle mystery. This isn’t a whodunnit kind of mystery, but instead one where the narrator reveals things slowly until the reader has a full picture of the events that took place. There’s probably a name/genre for this type of book. If so, feel free to let me know.
This is a story of the friendship between Jane and Marnie. They were inseparable for over two decades, until things went bad. Jane is the narrator, slowly explaining how things fell apart. She uses seven lies as touchstones. These are lies that she told Marnie, stating that she never ever lied outside of these seven. Not very realistic, but I understood because memory is faulty and sometimes little things get lost in the shuffle. It’s evident that Jane is jealous of Marnie’s husband, Charles though. I thought that jealousy was the ultimate reason for the falling out, but I was wrong.
The story meanders, winds around long curves and wanders through tangents. But at the same time, the author only gives enough information to satisfy. I never felt like I wanted to hurry things along or that the information was irrelevant. Instead I felt like Jane was telling me a story and didn’t want to get to the awful part just yet.
Jane is an unreliable narrator though. She tells the entire story from her point of view, enough so that I felt sympathetic toward her up until the last fifth of the book. Somewhere around there I started to realize that she’s a bit obsessed with Marnie. At first I thought the story was being told as if the reader is the listener, that Jane is explaining things to me. But no, it’s revealed quite late in the book that she’s talking to someone very specific.
The tension picks up very nicely in the last fifth of the book. So much so that I was glued to the pages and ignored other responsibilities just to find out what was going to happen. The end was satisfying. Excellent work by the author for keeping the characters believable throughout, including the epilogue.
This is an excellent story of friendship and how obsession has the potential to destroy even the strongest relationships. I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes descriptive prose, slow reveals, and a bit of horror near the end.
I’m in a writing group and we’ve made an anthology. This is the fourth for the group, although I’ve only participated in this one. My story, SPAWN BOX, can be found on page 165. Tiny review: it’s about a box that spawns in a pawn shop, and the contents send the shop owner on an adventure. Yes, using a map.
The theme of the anthology is maps, so all stories feature one somehow. I won’t review the stories because I don’t feel like that would be fair. I know these people and I can get a bit brutal if I don’t like the story. Having said that, mine’s the best, in my opinion. That’s my bias showing, I’ll tuck it back in. If you’re interested, you can purchase the book here.
Another story I wrote (I did warn you, this post is self promotion) can be found here. This was written for a competition and had to feature specific elements. I didn’t win, but the stories that did are good. My story is called UNCLOCKING THE ILLUSION and features the same pawn shop as the one in the above anthology, although written in a slightly different narrative voice.
This concludes my promotion of me. Back to book reviews in the next post.
I received this book from the library terribly fast. I really thought I’d be waiting longer for it to be available. I read the first page to see if I should start this book or another, and ended up reading it at every available moment I had. I loved this book. Absolutely adored it. Let me tell you why as succinctly as I can.
The narrative voice was consistent and delightful. My eyes wanted to eat every word so my brain could have something to munch on. I wanted this book to go on forever, yet also wanted to get to the end of the story. Not because I was eager to finish, but because I desperately wanted to know how the author was going to wrap up the storyline.
The author’s choice of descriptors were vivid, delightful, and innovative. I don’t think there’s any repetition (or if there is, very little) in adjectives, which kept the book fresh from page one right to the end.
The pacing was excellent. Not once did I feel like the book dragged on or skipped anything important. The author had an excellent sense of how much information to give to keep the story moving, but also how little to give to keep my attention hooked.
I loved the main character – Anna – mostly because she felt realistic to me. She was someone I could imagine in real life, ‘warts and all’ as my mom would’ve said. Anna has her faults, she’s vulnerable, but she’s also got a core of toughness that impressed me.
Now I’ll tell you about the story.
Anna is a “hench”. This is someone who works with the villains when asked. Yes, like henchmen but without the gender specification. Anna works for a temp agency that hires out henches. Even Meat – the muscle of the operation, so to speak. She gets a job and is injured by a superhero named Supercollider. The temp agency promptly dismisses her, leaving her out of work and deeply wounded.
While healing, Anna starts checking into the cost of superheroes. How many lifeyears are lost to the supes’ carelessness? How much property damage? That kind of thing. This hooked me immediately. I’ve consumed enough superhero media to ask these questions myself. The supe always saves the day, but at what cost? Anna posts her Injury Report online and gathers a bit of following.
Anna needs a job, and applies everywhere. When on her way to an interview, she’s intercepted by a villain named Leviathan. He wants to hire her for her ability to amass data and parse it in whatever manner is most useful.
This is the story of a budding villain. Anna isn’t necessarily evil, but she does want superheroes to be held accountable for their careless destruction. Her tactics are somewhat evil though, in the sense that she knows how to manipulate people.
All of this is set in a world where people are tested for abilities, then, if they are found to be in great enough quantity, the person is groomed to be a superhero. This world is immersive. I was enveloped in it from the first few pages and only left when I closed the book. Excellent work by the author.
Some other notables: the book felt technically perfect. Every scene had a purpose. Every event had a conclusion. No extra words were used and none were spared. I felt like this is a fine example of constructing a story, one I’d like to remember as I write my own.
I was pleased to read how well the author worked genderfluidity into the narrative. This was done exactly as I’ve experienced it in real life: there are people who prefer they/them, there are trans people, there are people who are not straight. There was no shaming, no shoehorning. The author made this feel remarkably commonplace, and I absolutely loved it. Remarkably refreshing compared to many other books I’ve read.
This book could easily be converted to a ten episode series. More accurately, I want this to be a ten episode series, as long as it’s done well and with the author’s consent and participation.
I heavily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys superheroes, a tongue-in-cheek style of narration, and multifaceted, interesting characters caught in a plot that’s resolved neatly and efficiently.
Image from my favourite website for book covers: Goodreads.com
Once again I’ve managed to put a book on hold at the library that’s about an apocalypse. Yep. Another one. This one created by humans. I read the first page just to get a feel for it and to decide whether I wanted to read another book featuring a pandemic. I ended up reading the whole book.
This is a story about kindness, love, mothering, and connection with a backdrop of human destruction and elimination.
This book’s pandemic was in the form of a nanobot that could rewrite DNA. Things went wrong, because of course they did, and the solution was to create robotic mothers.
These mothers were to gestate and support a child. Originally, 50 of these Mothers were created, but only 22 survived. The children were connected to the Mothers by a chip implanted in their foreheads/brains. This chip allowed the Mothers to talk to their children.
The scientists in charge of creating these Mothers decided to fashion their personalities after actual women, the same women who would provide the eggs for insemination. This way, the personalities of the Mothers would match those of the child. I know from experience that a child can sometimes barely resemble a parent, but for the convenience of the book, I accepted the premise fairly easily.
The children search for each other. Well, the Mothers do the searching. They find each other in small groups, some remained alone until the Mothers are called to one location. The remaining/surviving scientists figured out how to call all the Mothers to one location to provide the children with shelter, food, and water. This was mostly successful. While there, the Mothers experienced a shutdown where the mental connection to the child was temporarily severed. Also, the Mothers’ programming indicated a threat, so they refused to allow the children to leave the area. One of the children, and the scientists, work together to reprogram the Mothers to re-establish a connection and dismiss the non-existent threat.
So that’s the basic storyline, and it was effective enough to keep me reading. I enjoyed the author’s narrative voice and didn’t find any inaccurate information to make me want to hurl the book at the wall. I felt like the story had been edited well, but I might have liked a bit more filling out.
When the children meet each other, there’s barely any page time about their interactions with each other. One child in particular turns out to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, not believing that there isn’t a threat. It might have been nice to have that interaction explored a bit further, or even at all, really.
The story jumps time around, but only by about a decade. The author does an excellent job in tying the times together, bringing one up to speed after learning about the other. This style helped me to understand the timeline of the creation of the Mothers, their implementation, the development of a child from 6-10 years old, all with the pandemic in the background killing people and rushing the production of the Mothers.
While the book features some difficult language in terms of biology, DNA, and whatnot, I didn’t feel too lost while reading. I didn’t much understand some of it, but my understanding was basic enough to not get frustrated with the rest of the story.
The cast is diverse, with a spotlight on the Hopi. I very much enjoyed the gentle touch of adding First Nations people and weaving the beliefs through the book. This was done subtly enough that I didn’t feel slammed over the head with it but masterfully enough that I felt the author gave honour to their traditions. Having said that, I’m not really qualified to decide that on behalf of the Hopi.
If you’re looking for a science fiction book that’s not too heavy in science, rooted in love, and a cautionary tale of human’s interference with itself, this may be the book for you.
I put this book on hold at the library because I read a review that said it was weird and that there was nothing quite like it out there. I’m looking for comparable titles for my own book, so I thought this might fit. It doesn’t, not quite, but it was an amazing read. So amazing that I’d like to buy a copy just to have on hand.
The story starts out normal enough. A person named Carolyn is walking down the road, covered in blood and barefoot. She had just murdered someone but wasn’t ruffled at all. Very quickly, the reader learns that she’s something called a librarian but didn’t start out as one, and that she had vague memories of being American.
Information is doled out in little packets. We learn that her cul-de-sac was hit by something when she was young, the neighbourhood children survived, and became librarians with specialties known as ‘catalogues’. Her catalogue was languages; past, present, imaginary, and real.
The author weaves in dimensional realities in a way that felt natural and, well, right. Not once did I feel lost, not once did I have to go back and reread something to confirm information. I was instantly engrossed in the story of Carolyn and her quest to search for Father, the entity that trains the children on their catalogues. He’s missing, and Carolyn and her siblings cannot access the library to search for him.
Carolyn does more than search for Father. She sets up a series of events so she may murder Father and take over his reign. I was absolutely thrilled that she wasn’t thwarted at all, that she did succeed, that her brothers and sisters were eradicated in this process. It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine, to read how the protagonist is constantly having to alter the plan and change tactics because of a worthy adversary. Some stories suit this well, but this one had enough going for it that constant threats to her plan would’ve been tiresome. I know that I just gave away the ending, but really, the book is worth reading page by page simply for the experience of existing in this universe.
The author also ensured the reader never forgot the fantastical nature of the world. Carolyn and her siblings never quite dressed according to social norms, their conversational skills were lacking but adequate, and their explanations of events showed how different their world was compared to our world. Really excellent anchoring from the author.
The narrative flow was so excellent, so engrossing for me, that I searched to see if the author has written anything else. Why yes, yes there are other works. Except they’re technical manuals for Linux and whatnot.
Like I said above, the story was revealed in perfect sized bits, and arranged in a manner that made the novel easy to read and follow. I very much want to take each scene apart and reconstruct the book in linear form, but only so I can understand it better and apply it to my own work. The author’s voice makes me want to be a better writer, to make other people read my stuff and feel as electrified and energized as I do from reading this book.
I seriously considered writing fan fiction of this, simply to keep myself engrossed in the world for a little bit longer. I may still do so, but when I have enough energy to focus on more than one thing at a time.
If you’re looking for something different but still realistic enough to keep you grounded, for something so well written that guessing the next step is nigh impossible, read this book. I will be recommending it to everyone whose queries even vaguely apply.
I put this book on hold without reading a synopsis because I’d read the author’s work before and enjoyed the narrative flow. While not disappointed, I was surprised by the subject matter. This tale takes place during the 1918 Spanish Flu. So I read a book involving a pandemic while living in a pandemic. Again.
On the surface, this book is about a woman, Nurse Julie Power, who cares for pregnant women in a makeshift ward in an overflowing hospital in Dublin, Ireland. But it’s also a love story, one that unfolds in teeny tiny bits.
Julie doesn’t fall for a handsome doctor or anything, but instead she falls unknowingly in love with a helper girl named Bridie. Julie isn’t aware of how she feels, exactly, but is aware that at thirty she should be married and popping out children of her own. This is the way. Or was the way, back in the day.
The author does, rather brilliantly, give the reader an unflinching gaze at birthing babies at a time where the process left women scarred or dead. Those that survived would keep on having babies because birth control was rather frowned upon back then.
Also, the author paints a vivid picture for the setting. I could feel the drafty little room, smell the stink of the air, and feel the pang of hunger alongside the characters.
No men were featured. There were a couple that had bit appearances, but barely any speaking lines. What a delight! I’m so accustomed to books chock full of men that, for a while, I was overjoyed when a woman had more page time than a man. Books are better now, yes, absolutely, and I love the trend. After all, we aren’t all white men so why should we read stories about white men? That’s enough politics for one post. Let’s move on.
Not once did I feel like I was taken out of the story. The author managed to keep me firmly anchored in Dublin, in the chill of the room, in the dark of the streets at night. This is part of the reason I blew through this book in a couple of days. The main reason is because of the author’s writing style. As I said above, I love it.
My only complaint is that there aren’t any quotation marks around the dialogue. This makes it hard to read for me, as I’m not always sure someone is speaking or just thinking. But the more I fell into the world the more I was able to gloss over it as a minor pebble in an otherwise smooth road.
I would absolutely recommend this book as an immersive read into a topic that causes many to flinch. Especially now, amid our own overflowing hospitals. Stay safe everyone.
This book is little, like only 116 pages of big text and wide margins. The words are unjustified (rag right) which looks somewhat amateurish. I don’t know why the author would’ve chosen this, except as a stylistic choice to make the book resemble a manuscript typed on an electric typewriter from the 80’s. Oh, and it’s written in Hemingway style, which forced me to focus on every word. I read the entire thing in one sitting. When I was done, I didn’t quite know what to think.
The characters didn’t seem to be engaging with each other, only existing as separate entities in the same space. The dialogue was jarring and unnatural, the setting barely filled in, and the apocalypse is only vaguely there.
The story felt empty, like there was so much to work with and the author decided to give the reader the barest of bones. There’s an idea of an apocalypse in that a plane (with two of the characters in it) lands suddenly, and a TV (with three other characters watching) goes dark. There’s talk of what happened – no internet, phone, lights, or data – but scantly. I felt like this book was the prologue to a much larger story.
After reading I hopped over to Goodreads to see what others had to say about it, as I felt like I missed something. Boy, did I ever miss stuff.
One review rivaled the book’s length in words. I skimmed through it and realized this person had a much better understanding of the work. Perhaps if I was a literary major, or had any education past high school, I’d’ve found the same references and deeper meanings to the sentences/phrases as the reviewer. As it was, I didn’t. Instead I realized that this book is aimed toward someone who could recognize all the nuances, indulge in them, and contemplate their importance to the world at large. So, not me.
Wow, it’s been a while since I read anything. I participated in NaNoWriMo and finished (yay me!), but my brain felt like it was melting so I took some time off from reading and writing and indulged in the plethora of movies I had queued up and ready to go.
Just as I started to feel like my brain was ready to absorb the written word again, the library informed me of some books on hold. I picked them up just before my city went into another lockdown phase, so, good timing all around. Normally I’d go through the categories I set up for myself and write up a blurb for each one. Not this time. Oh nay nay. I’m just too overwhelmed with life stuff to adhere to such strict guidelines. Instead, I’m simply going to babble like I know what I’m talking about. You know, trade in ‘perfect’ for ‘done’. More of a blurb review than an itty bitty one.
Side note: how the hell am I going to run an author’s website if I can’t even review books on a regular basis? That’s a topic for another day. For now, let’s jump in…
This book is labelled ‘science fiction’, which is probably the reason I wanted to read it. But there wasn’t much scifi to be found. If I squint really hard I can see the apocalyptic future as the reason for the genre, but that’s it.
The premise is that winter never left. There’s no indication of Those In Authority discussing the problem or attempting to find a solution. I would’ve thought the reader would be informed of why winter never left, what did humans do? Or was it an external force? We never find out, which turns out to be okay. The story isn’t about how it got cold, but how Wilodyne (Wil) manages in this new environment.
Wil lives in the Appalachian mountains and grows cannabis in a farmhouse. Her mom latched onto a grower who taught Wil everything, and it turns out Wil is exceptional at the task. She has no idea what caused the cold and seems out of the loop in regards to information. In the day and age of cellphones this had to be explained away. The author did so by saying there wasn’t much service on the farmland so Wil remained unaware of how bad things were getting. Her mom and stepdad leave for California before the book begins, Wil elected to stay behind and tend the cannabis crop.
The cold is like a second, but main, character of the book. It’s ever-present and a constant, gentle reminder throughout the novel. I could feel the cold leeching through the pages and settling into my bones as I read the words. My fingers ached as if I’d been outside shovelling or scraping my car. Excellent work by the author, keeping the theme of cold consistent and never allowing the reader to glance away from it.
The story is about how Wil decides, rather abruptly, to leave the farm and seek out her mom and stepdad in California. She hitches her tiny mobile home to the back of a truck and sets off. By this point she’s already got one tagalong, Grayson, who helps her out a bit. They pick up a couple more people and encounter a few camps, all while the reader learns that Wil might be gay and believes that men frequently pose a threat of some kind.
Overall I enjoyed the book, but it ends open and that bugged me a bit. Wil is headed for California and ends up in a greenhouse – one that’s functioning – somewhere not too far from where she started. It appears to be a nice oasis, finally: a warm and functioning greenhouse, but we don’t get to meet the people running it because the damn book ends. I suppose it can be inferred that Wil flourishes here, as she’s a grower, and will make a suitable home in the snow.
Well, that’s it. Not a bad book, not a great one either. The cold feeling will stay with me for a while, but that might be because of the snow outside my window.
I tried to read two books before Quarantine and had to put them both down. One because it was labelled as ‘hard science fiction’ but was actually ‘slavefic barely removed from the fan fiction universe with the tiniest hint of science fiction’. It featured a drug that made people acquiescent and I wanted to know more about the development of it and what made the drug necessary in the world. Instead the book revolved around the romance of two people, one who bought the other. Yeah, bought. Not a good concept in today’s social climate.
The other book was one I’d been looking forward to because I enjoyed the author’s first book. But it featured a pandemic. While the subject wasn’t a problem for me, I couldn’t get past how the characters continued shaking hands. I mean, the book was written before covid entered our lives, and the handshaking is a minor point, but it bugged me enough to close the book.
So when I was notified that the library had Quarantine ready for me, I jumped on it. I’d put it on hold after stumbling over recommendation after recommendation to read it, so I was wondering what all the fuss was about. Plus, it features quantum physics which is a topic I’ve been looking to read.
There are a lot of complex ideas in the book, complex enough for me to have a hard time grasping them. The author presented the information well, I just think my brain filled up too quickly and felt stuffed early on. Nevertheless, I persevered.
To Start: The starting concept of the book is a near-future detective hired to solve a locked room mystery. By the middle, the story evolves into dealing with collapsing the quantum wave into one single reality. The learning curve felt steep but manageable.
The book was written in 1992, so before the Internet. This is usually a big red flag for me because technology has changed so much since then and become integral to daily lives. Most fiction doesn’t represent the near future well as it’s remarkably hard to predict. This one though, this one did a good job on showing what life would be like with mods installed in the brain. Nowadays that mod would include a connection to the Internet, but in this book the mods are nanomachines and I believe information is kept on ROMs. Oh my.
While it’s only 220 pages, it packs a wallop.
The Gloss: The cover image is a representation of the double slit experiment. In this image, the slits are the words of the title and the white is the wave pattern of unobserved particles. Excellent representation of the book.
The font was slightly squared and easy to read. Nice for my eyes.
The Characters: One main character: Nick Stavrianos, a private investigator or detective. He’s well rounded and likable. He talks to his dead wife a lot, in the form of a hallucination/hologram created by a mod in his brain. This image of her is realistic to him, but also a bit of an embarrassment that he’d even have that mod. He’s a logical thinker and pretty much accepts whatever life throws at him.
The rest of the cast was diverse enough for me to be pleased, considering it was written almost thirty years ago. None of the other characters had much of an arc, but that’s okay. The book is written in first person so I only expected to be able to follow one character’s arc.
Nick falls apart, slowly and surely, as the book progresses. He is someone who’s in control of his life and the discovery he makes about a company named The Ensemble (who he ends up working for, pretty much against his will) causes his mind to collapse in on itself. It’s subtle, how he goes from confident to questioning.
The Plot: Nick is hired to find a woman, Laura, with severe mental disabilities. She’s escaped from a locked ward at a psychiatric facility. In his investigation he shows up on the radar of the people studying her, and they ‘recruit’ him to work for them. In this world he’s drugged and wakes up with a new mod: loyalty. Because of this mod he works for The Ensemble without question. He ends up unravelling a much bigger mystery of how The Ensemble was using Laura’s disability to learn to exist without collapsing the quantum wave.
The Story: As indicated above, Nick gradually loses his mind. He begins as a fairly normal guy who’s good at his job and doesn’t question the world around him too much. During his investigation he’s recruited to join The Ensemble and is guarding someone who’s using a mod to choose the direction of silver atoms. This person is testing the mod to eventually be able to exist without collapsing the quantum wave. Steep learning curve here.
Nick’s mods falter and he learns he can ‘borrow’ her mind to move through reality without collapsing the wave, thereby ensuring that out of the millions of possible outcomes for any scenario, he will always have the most desired one. This is tested by him performing increasingly difficult tasks – like breaking into a building across town – as his confidence wavers. He ends up questioning everything and unable to simply accept the world at face value.
I believe Nick is also part of the testing program, not just a bodyguard. His mods interact with the person he’s guarding, and The Ensemble put mods in his head, so it’s likely that he’s a volunteer participant in this study as well. Although he’s told he’s just a bodyguard and he believes that.
A background story item is The Bubble. Thirty years prior, this Bubble surrounded the solar system and blocked out the stars. No reason was given for this Bubble, but late in the book it’s revealed as a parallel to the wave function collapse storyline. Somehow, aliens knew humans were collapsing the wave and so our solar system was sectioned off from the rest of the galaxy.
The World: The worldbuilding was wonderfully integrated into the story. The reader is immediately alerted to the mods (which are helpfully bolded) and their basic function. Nick explains the mods to the reader in a way that’s natural. Kudos to the author on that one.
In addition, nanomachines are mentioned as something commonplace. These machines assist the mods in mapping the brain for compatibility, which makes sense, and also regulate the body’s needs, like suppressing hunger and whatnot. This is logical.
One aspect I enjoyed was how Nick thought of his mods. He understood he had a loyalty mod which made him loyal to The Ensemble, and he knew this thinking was out of line for a person without the mod. Just like the sentinel mod made him able to sit for hours and remain alert without getting bored. He knew his thinking was altered, and that knowledge made it easier for him to accept his behaviour.
Excellent bit of worldbuilding there, the idea that the mods work with the brain’s systems, not to change anything, but to enhance specific areas to produce the desired result. Need to be on a stakeout? This mod will allow you to remain alert without ever getting bored or hungry. Nick was a cop and “primed” by priming mods that made him less human but more capable of reacting unemotionally to any situation as it rose. Sudden bomb going off? Primed mods directed Nick’s behaviour to survive and assess the situation calmly.
Nitpicks: The conclusions Nick drew were accurate, but not probable. I’ve read many mysteries and although I know that books are contrived because they have to be, Nick’s conclusions felt too pat, too easy for them to be correct, and yet they were correct. Minor point, I know. The book was about collapsing the wave function and the mystery part was the secondary aspect, but it still bugged me.
Overall: Holy cats I enjoyed this book. It was hard and rewarding. I think I’d need to reread it to fully understand some of the quantum stuff presented, but I still understood enough of what was written to enjoy the story. Although perhaps not enough to be able to give a coherent review about some of the more difficult ideas.
The author’s writing style was easy for me to read and the info dumps were acceptable. Luckily, those dumps were short and compact, which helped.
The book held up well considering it’s thirty years old. I don’t have much faith in older books when viewed in today’s light, but this one passed easily.
I think I need to buy this book so I have a copy of my own. Maybe read it again when my brain feels less full.
Should Be Writing 