I'm torn between 🤷‍♂️ and ⭐️. It was an enjoyable enough read but just not the sort of thing I enjoy reading. It's basically a spec fiction whodunnit on a spaceship going to another planet. And it's enjoyable at all of those things; just not what I was expecting.

I feel like there's something going on here that I don't fully get. This is the top of quite a lot of people's lists and I don't see why. I enjoyed it, I like the concept and the structure, and I like the meaning behind a roadside picnic; I just don't see how it's at the top of anyone's list.

I do think it's something I'm going to have in the back of my mind for some time, so maybe it'll brew into something more as I think about it.

This was hard work but worth it. I found the first, maybe, fifth of it just incomprehensible but apparently it was all world-building because I just started to get what everyone was talking about and what was going on, after what felt like a very long time of neither.

As such, any specifics I talk about on this, including a loose synopsis, would spoil something. If you like sci-fi, and a difficult read (certainly compared with what I've been reading lately!) I emphatically recommend The Peripheral. Stick with it though!

Well that didn't take very long! Another page-turner from Blake Crouch. Some more questionable prose and unconfortable intimacy scenes, but the underlying story is excellent, concise and moves briskly.

I need more books like this to read in between more challenging ones. Purposefully wanted to read this before watching the Apple TV show, as I loved Recursion, and I'm glad I did.

She's done it again! The pacing of these books is almost identical. First half is world-building and not a lot of story, and the second half is an action-packed journey. This one took me ages as I think I've had enough Earthsea for a little while. Or rather, I've had enough of that story structure. Will definitely finish it at some point, but a break will be nice.

Fell off this, for whatever reason. I think it took too long to get around to Ged still being part of the whole thing and I was a bit like "oh I thought Ged would be in everything" then he wasn't. But it turns around very well and I'm just going to get straight into The Farthest Shore now.

I know that reading fantasy as a break from science fiction isn't exactly much of a leap but we saw this at The British Library and I wanted to read it. I loved The Dispossessed and I want to read more of her books. Definitely moving onto the next one right away; this was lovely.

I'm torn between a star and a shrug on this one. I don't love the style it's written in; it reads to me like half journal entry, half recalled anecdote and it just doesn't really do it for me.

The story is fun; engaging characters and vivid scenes, and moves along at a good pace. Lots of things happen, which is always welcome in a book like this. I'm essentially using it as a palate cleanser as I've done a lot of sci-fi lately and it's worked well as that!

If you can read this without picturing the Unbroken Spine as The Society of the Blind Eye, I'm going to have to assume that's because you've never seen Gravity Falls, and that is pretty inexcusable in this house.

Perfect science fiction. It's pretty tough in places but never at the expense of the story. The whole thing is surprisingly coherent, and I did find myself right at the edge of understanding it at times, but always managed to find my way back to a narrative that at least made sense to me.

If you have even a slight interest in civilisation, technology, space-faring sci-fi then I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this.

I am looking forward to some not-sci-fi though. I loved this but it's a lot and I can do without looking 18bn years into the future for a while.

Letting you know I exist, and letting you continue to exist, are both dangerous to me

What a wonderful sequel to The Three Body Problem. A coherent, plausible, and utterly desperate future imagined through the lens of totally assured destruction of our species.

Probably the best ending to a second-in-a-trilogy that I've ever read. The reader is Luo Ji's Wallbreaker and it's perfect (that's not a spoiler - if you're interested in sci-fi, this trilogy is essential, in my opinion).

Super intriguing story throughout, and I'll immediately move onto the next one.

The only criticism I have is that the prose feels very clinical and cold, and I can't tell if it's the translation, the author, or just how books are written in China.

The perfect end that I wish wasn't.

No, I give up. I can't stand it any more. Maybe I'll come back later but this was making me actively angry by the time I put it down.

Still a great story, still really annoyed by how it's written.

Another incredibly frustrating book/series. The philosophy, sci-fi, characters, and lore in general in this book are amazing and when I started out I could absolutely see how this spans seven books.

But, after a very short amount of time, I got really tired of the constant and unnecessary erotic undertones, and the obsession with all the characters having loads of honorifics that must be written absolutely every single time a character is addressed. I think, in a way, that it was the point that all these silly titles people give themselves are meaningless and largely completely conceited, but it just made this book really annoying for me to read.

I loved the underlying story so much in spite of how much the rest of it annoyed me, though, that I persevere...

I feel like this could be a 100 book saga, with the amount of ideas here, and how they're all coherently stitched together.

I wish I could live for 2,000 years.

This was supposed to be the second book of a trilogy, but ended up being the final book of a duology, and it really felt rushed and lacking in solid ideas and direction.

The premise of this book is so weird that every time something happened in it, I had to think about whether it actually made any sense to me in the context of this new world that had been created. The fantasy side of it is so fun, and it reminds me a lot of games like Astral Chain and Gravity Rush, where some secret parallel dimension keeps leaking into ours (that sort of thing is very much for me), but the side of it brimming with New York stereotypes got old for me quite quickly. This didn't need to be a trilogy, in my opinion.

Blake Crouch is basically Andy Weir, if Andy Weir didn't know how to string a sentence together and didn't have an editor. Some of the prose in this book is absolutely awful, and completely ruins what would've otherwise been a solid story.

This book ruined my life. It's one of the most upsetting, bleak, and realistic things I've ever read. The fact that it was written in 1985 just makes it more upsetting.

An Andy Weir book, but a really enjoyable one.

Andy Weir writes sci-fi for fans of action movies. The same people would like The DaVinci Code, Comic Sans, and Coldplay if someone else hadn't already told them to hate it.

It's enjoyable, but it's nothing more than a shallow page-turner in a spacesuit.

All the tone and energy of Narnia without any of the religious idolatry.

So forgettable I read it twice by accident.

Another that I still think about a lot. A beautiful study of friendships, relationships, and what it is to be human.

Enjoyable read, but so bleak it took me ages to get through it. I had around a two year break in the middle.

Wasn't bad but not really my sort of thing. It did indirectly teach me a lot about how World War One started, though, which was unexpected.

This is an absolutely wonderful trilogy of future fantasy/dystopia novels that I would strongly recommend to anyone with a passing interest in race issues, magic, imbalances of power.

This is a brilliant sci-fi opera that I'm genuinely surprised isn't more popular.

This is a brilliant sci-fi opera that I'm genuinely surprised isn't more popular.

This is a brilliant sci-fi opera that I'm genuinely surprised isn't more popular.

I absolutely loved this book, and I still think about it often. I will accept no other version of a VR future than the one in Snow Crash.