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Like Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon (the other two books of his I've read), Fall is a meaty book, with lots of interesting ideas and presumptions to chew on. I look forward to discussing this books with whichever friends I can convince to wade through it.

This was a quick read, and I spent most of it struggling to decide how I felt about a narrator that sounds so HUMAN, yet seemed so disinterested in the notion of being owned -- that is, until I realized that hacking the governor and avoiding humans was very much an act of autonomy, and that much of the struggle for Murderbot isn't "Do I want to be free?", it's "What kind of 'free' could I attain, and which of my options is least repulsive?", at least at the end.

All in all, not bad, but I didn't really find myself caring about the characters or their fates, and that was a big detractor.

There are only a handful of series I can think of that have stayed this good through this many books -- Jordan's Wheel of Time, Butcher's Dresden Files, Pratchett's Discworld, a few others -- and I see no reason to think the next book, whenever it arrives, will be any different than this one. Which was great, by the way. Excellent stuff.

I've long considered Peter S. Beagle one of my favorite authors, based on my unreserved delight with "The Innkeeper's Song", "We Never Talk About My Brother", and "Tamsin". Yet despite my years of loving his work, I've somehow never actually read his most famous work until now.

I wish I hadn't waited, because this was GREAT.

This was easily the prettiest book I've read in a long time, and I spent a lot longer selecting that adjective than I'd planned to, because I don't want to suggest that The Last Unicorn was somehow light or fluffy...except it was also those things. Beagle's work often feels dreamlike and ephemeral at first, but gains weight and reality the longer I'm away from it. I finished The Last Unicorn two days ago, and my appreciation for it keeps growing. This was really, really good.