My 2016 - books read

In 2016, I decided to keep a record of what media I consumed, with a short record of my thoughts about each (one or two sentences only).

First up is the shortest list, all the books I read in the past year.

This is part two of my 2016 retrospective. The other parts:

Eva Luna (Isabel Allende)
I came out of this satisfied, but not much affected. The nature of the storytelling makes everything feel inconsequential: terrible things keep happening but they’re never dwelled on.

Tender Morsels (Margo Lanagan)
Intriguing and surprising, despite the presence of magic these characters feel “real”.

Branches on the Tree of Time (Alexander Wales, Terminator x LessWrong fanfic)
(The “I can’t believe I’m admitting to reading this” entry in this year’s proceedings)
Found while reading about the AI-box experiment, after watching Ex Machina. Not very well written, but the exploration of concepts is decent.

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (James Finn Garner)
Some nice jokes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’s more interested in mocking social justice ideas than promoting them.

Kushiel’s Dart (Jacqueline Carey)
Narrator just drowns you in lore/foreshadowing, which I didn’t particularly enjoy. At the halfway point this seemed to lessen up, but I didn’t come away with an overwhelming desire to read any other books in the series.

The Light Between Oceans (M. L. Stedman)
Kinda draining.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
Not much happens for a very long time except two snooty people looking down on others.

Malafrena (Ursula K. Le Guin)
I found this really hard to get into. Interestingly though, when I was 90% through the book I saw this essay she wrote linked on Twitter, and reading that actually made me understand slightly better the reasons why I was finding it unapproachable.

The Magicians’ Guild (Trudi Canavan)
I don’t think the writing is particularly good, and the plot is pretty slow, but it’s not terrible or anything.

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