User Profile

This is more of a pamphlet (180-some pages) than a full-length book. The first half summarizes the situation described in lengthier books, like Evicted (his other one), Scarcity, and Random Family, while the second half is more prescriptive. I wasn't entirely buying the latter part but I appreciated the survey in the first half, and I would recommend further reading on those topics, starting with the above books.

I could not decide if he was being repetitive or simply circling back well on his main examples, but I definitely was ready for the book to end despite its brevity and insights

While I appreciate the ambition of his what-if scenarios and their imagined social implications, this one felt thinly sketched to me, and the complete absence of religious takes on the phenomenon at the center of the story was a little jarring, considering its miraculous and clearly non-scientific nature.

I really enjoyed this one, despite my visceral hatred of second-person narration, because Leckie is really good at using omniscient beings as omniscient narrators.

I like this corner of her galaxy much better than the Radch.

A very ambitious idea that is skillfully executed although I was somewhat underwhelmed by the twist/reveal that comes in the final pages. I most liked the first novel-within-the-novel best of all the sections, so when I read in the reviews that people thought it read like warmed-over Edith Wharton, I realized I had never read her and added The Age of Innocence to my queue.

Although I struggled initially with the format I quickly fell into its rhythm and came to appreciate it

I kept waiting for something terrible to happen to the characters but nothing ever did, what a relief that was

The sensation of loss was pervasive throughout my read, and broken only once, by the appearance on the Kindle store page of the book of a banner ad for blue plastic sandals from Amazon. Reader, I could not stop laughing.

Hidden figures of cryptography

A very brisk and engaging read, the wholesomeness of which was slightly punctured by the epilogue detailing the careers of the ones who stayed in the field after the war and helped found the NSA.