Who doesn't love a book about a redhead chap with Irish heritage? Although Atticus is actually Irish, not like me with just family. Actually, he's more Irish than basically anyone has ever, ever been; two-thousand-year-old Druid and all that. What's interesting about this is that Atticus is convincingly quite a bit more powerful than most book heroes, but manages it well. There's no chapters of build-up for how he finally manages to overcome his doubts and pull off a complex magic thing to stop the bad guy; he can just march in and kick everyone's arse if he wants, because he's actually got the skills (and the nous to use them in some clever ways, I admit). Makes for a different sort of story than most. 

Atticus is pretty funny, I must admit. Still shruggingly pulling off feats between paragraphs that would be the climax of most other books, and he doesn't get too angsty about it either. It's a bit hard to see how the Druids got wiped out if they were all this nails, but a lot of what makes O'Sullivan as undefeatable as he is is having spent two millennia binding iron to his aura and crafting charms and so on, which others didn't and don't have.

Atticus actually changes things. Most urban fantasy stories stick semi-closely to the... "canon", I suppose you'd call it, the world of gods and monsters that mythology contains, and then make up their own bits. (This series is another example of All Myths Are True, of course.) But in this, Atticus kills a bunch of famous entities who aren't just made up for this book. This made me go: huh, this is new. Atticus's myth world doesn't look like ours does, now. This is an interesting new idea that I've hardly seen anyone do before.

Atticus vs the skinwalkers. These are different from the naagloshii in the Dresden Files. And Coyote is a total dick. Also I think I have actually successfully started reading Siodhachan as shee-ya-han as I'm supposed to, finally.

Sci-fi and fantasy short stories, but against the backdrop of the Middle East and Islam rather than Europe and Christianity. I really enjoyed some of these; they aren't tracts. The characters are Islamic in the same way that mediaeval knights are Christian; it's just a standard part of their worldview but not actually hugely important to them. A bit like Despoilers of the Golden Empire by Randall Garrett. I hope more people buy Saladin Ahmed's stuff. Reading his Twitter stories about how he's hanging on the edge of financial viability is really depressing.

Detailed review at http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2016/01/11/book-review-adaptive-web-design-by-aaron-gustafson/.

Got for the Butcher and Lynch, obviously, both of which were good. Scott Lynch clearly has a head full of excellent ideas for stories which don't fit into existing worlds and so casually throws together a new world for a story and makes it feel real. This is an unusual talent and one that I wish more people had.

Holds up well, much as Dilvish the Damned does. You'd hardly know this book is older than I am.

Never actually read this until my friend Andy battered me into submission about how I should. It holds up surprisingly well and is surprisingly fun. Zelazny really was good.

Sandford does sci-fi. Or, more accurately I think, Sandford does a story and Ctein goes back over all the sentences and replaces "(description of how spaceships manoeuvre)" with an actual description in laborious detail. Although I might be being unfair to JS there. This is the second book recently (after Neal Stephenson's Seveneves) to try to make me care about orbital mechanics; is this a response to humanity's lack of space travel recently? Anyway, the story's pretty compelling, and I very much like the idea of what the Space Thingy turns out to be. However... there's a weird "America! Fuck yeah!" feeling about that. Descending into spoiler territory a little, you've got an American craft and an enemy-du-jour craft (in this book it's the Chinese) racing to get to the Space Thingy. The American President, back on earth, is quite a horrible bastard, but she's well characterised. Anyway, the Yanks beat the Chinese to the thing, and basically stitch them up so the Chinese don't get as much cool stuff. And it feels like we're basically meant to think that that's OK and that the Chinese are bloodthirsty pirates for being annoyed about this. And I can't help but think, blimey, if it had been the other way around, would the story have taken the same view? Still, the Space Thingy anticipated this fairly well, which is good. All in all, a good Sandford book, even if your eyes glaze over a bit at all the parts explaining about deceleration curves in the sun's gravity field and whatnot; the mix of Sandford excellence plus Ctein accuracy probably does help, here.

Johannes Cabal short story, in which I was fooled too, so no blame, JC.

Marvellous story of long-con artists in fantasy Venice with lots of alchemy and a little magic. Locke is perhaps the most realistically-speaking character in non-urban fantasy; he actually sounds like a real person. If you haven't read this, what are you waiting for?

The return of Locke Lamora! I got terribly bored by all the sailing and pirate stuff. All the parts with the Sinspire were super excellent, though.

More Lamora, including (finally) an on-screen Sabetha Belacoros! Loved all the bits in Karthain; didn't like all the bits about the play, in much the same way that I didn't like all the boat bits in RSURS. I just wanna read about long cons in fantasy Venice, I suppose. Hustle but with alchemy. Sorry.

First Forsyth book in a while where he hasn't cut and pasted a whole entire chapter from a previous book. Actually surprisingly good; I mean, it's pretty standard FF material, and he still just does not understand computer technology and needs to spend ten minutes running all the internet bits in his books past the nearest developer person, but it's a diverting read for as long as it lasts.

Realised I never actually got around to finding out how the whole Wheel of Time ended, and I should have done. I got really quite tired of the Aes Sedai in the earlier books and so I stopped about halfway through, but reading the WOTFAQ was always interesting -- I like the storylines, just not Jordan's way of delivering them, or any of the characters. Sanderson seems to have improved that a bit, although his strengths are more to my mind in worldbuilding, and this world was already built. Anyway, now I know what happens at the end. Reasonably convincing, too; there were costs, there was heroism, there were discoveries made in the heat of the moment because they needed to be. 14 books later, this probably goes into the "all time classic fantasy stories" list alongside the Belgariad and Thomas Covenant and the Feist stuff and Shannara and so on, and it feels rather like that; everyone's read them, hardly anyone has them as favourites. It would have been good to see what Jordan did next, and now we can't.

Odd but extremely good story about cavemen discovering fire and hunting and whatnot, but all the characters have completely modern voices (and are a bit aware of the fourth wall, too). Fascinating. I assume this got a huge resurgence for people getting it for the same reason I did; that Pratchett recommended it in an essay. Highly recommended.

I could probably quote half of this from memory, but I didn't have an electronic copy, and Project Gutenberg provided, as ever. The best Chesterton thing in long form (the essays are better, but shorter), and I'd almost forgotten just how mad it goes at the end. Worth it alone for the discussion between Syme and Gregory before the anarchists arrive, including the base assumption that both will do what's honourable.

More from Shay and Twist and the gang. Reading it, I felt again that this is not YA at all; it's just a Sandford story where the protagonist happens to be 16. But on taking a step back, the underlying story is a bit cliched -- evil corporation experimenting on humans, stopped by plucky young heroine on a quest to save her brother -- and characterising that as "YA" is probably terribly unfair, but I do. Still excellent and worth your time, though.

I fear I am going off the Laundry Files books. I think I liked them more when they were amusing light tales and not super-serious.

I didn't like Neverwhere on first reading, and I only recently went back to it. It's a lot better; I don't know what I didn't like. Anyway, a standard Joe Everyman character discovers London Below, a typical Gaimanian version of London existing coincident with the normal one but full of weird urban fantasy characters, half of whom are tied by name into London history -- there are characters named Old Bailey and Islington (an angel), Shepherd's Bush has actual shepherds in it, etc. Slightly surprisingly, Richard really is Joe Everyman and doesn't turn out to have mystical powers or whatever. Croup and Vandemar fit the fairly standard "two bad guys, the thin ratty clever one and the big tough one" archetype played to by Mr Wint and Mr Kidd, Hale and Pace, Mr Pin and Mr Tulip, and so on, but they're also genuinely worrying in places, and the final denoument was surprising to me at least and well executed. 

Harry Potter, Scientist edition. I liked all the starting stuff which is basically Harry pointing at the whole Rowlingverse and saying "this is stupid and shouldn't work". And it ends well; all plot threads pulled together, satisfyingly and interestingly. It palls rather a lot in the middle; I felt a bit guilty about having so enthusiastically recommended it to friends when I got bored with the middle bit, but the end redeems it, mostly. No desire whatsoever to go read Yudkowsky's rationalist writings, so if this is secretly a first-hit-is-free seduction attempt then it didn't do a very good job. 

Conveniently available for free PDF download. A compelling idea, here -- a machine is invented which can from a blood sample predict accurately how you'll die, but does so ambiguously, so that OLD AGE might mean you getting old or you being stabbed by an old guy -- which was then riffed on by a whole bunch of people who wrote short stories. The best are collected here. Some names that are known -- Yahtzee Croshaw, Randall Munroe -- and a few good stories in here, but overall the quality is pretty patchy. Still, you can get it for free, so go get it for the good ones.

Typical (typically excellent) Sandford. I don't know what's "young adult" about this, other than that the protagonist is 16 rather than 35. Twist is a bit of a caricature, but not too much; LA sounds like a really dreadful place, which was my experience when I went there but not this much; Shay is red-haired and pretty, which are Mary Sue traits, but not much is made of her attractiveness other than her finding a few things easier than actual people might, not that she notices. Not sure if "Sean" is supposed to be a real actual actor person or just a character. If you like Sandford, you'll like this.

Mentioned in a Derek Lowe column. This is hard to find but nonetheless interesting; tales from the golden age of chemistry, when men were men and safety was a dirty word. If you know anything about chemistry, some of these anecdotes will cause your eyebrows to raise so much that they lift clear off your head and into the sky. Entertaining to read about, at a long remove; glad the world is no longer quite so blasé about this sort of thing.

Started to read based on a recommendation from a friend. Bounced off the first few chapters and found something else to read instead. I should persevere.

I started off not liking this all that much. It felt like a long slog through most of the book, but I kept at it. It is worth it for the ending. It really, really is.

Wow. Sudden huge downturn in this series, at least for me. This is not about clever plans; it's about politics. And Gen comes off as rather a dick. I didn't enjoy this hardly at all. Except the bit with the gun, obviously.

I remembered reading this from the library in the town I grew up in, years and years ago, and so sought it out again. Most of the stories stand up pretty well, still; I don't really like Steele's longer works, but I've always enjoyed short stories. The alternate history stuff in here about Goddard and whatever is excellent; I don't think I actually realised the first time around that it _was_ alternate history.

Evil neo-Nazis attempt to conquer the world while being classy about it. Dirk Pitt stops them, as usual. Minor credit for the line one of the family gives about not venerating Hitler, though.