Greatly enriched my "to-read" list! ( )

Reading this was exactly like sitting down with old friends to talk about books. You argue, you wave your hands, you pour yourself another cup of tea. You say “oh, YES, this book!” and “oh, no, my list of books to read just got longer, did you have to...” and “hmm, this doesn’t sound like my kind of book.” I think I will happily re-visit these essays in the future - for the sheer pleasure of a conversation with a fellow book lover. ( )

I really enjoyed this. Learned a lot about books and reading. ( )

Each of the chapters, originally blog posts, takes up a book that Walton has just re-read, and suggests an idea about it. The idea, often as not, has little to do with what makes the book great. Many of the books are not great. And these aren't essays, just notes: Walton takes no trouble to examine her ideas from various directions, or put them in context. She makes her point, either at the beginning of the post or at the end, and lets it sit there without examination. Sometimes, when I haven't read the book myself, it's impossible to discern exactly what she's talking about. She mentions many times in the early chapters how the Singularity has taken over science fiction to its detriment, but she never defines what the Singularity is. Those who know are probably better served by this book than I am.

So this collection serves poorly as an introduction to books, and series of books, that the reader hasn't read. It certainly doesn't match its title. All this said, if you're willing to put up with some frustration, there are many interesting points on offer. I loved the chapter on James Blish's Catholicism-themed A Case of Conscience, in which she yields her forum to an actual Jesuit to explode the book's surprisingly unorthodox theology. And in a collection of posts this big, there are exceptions to all the complaints I've made. A few of the chapters, such as one about the mental toolkit that SF fans develop for reading SF, do qualify as essays, and a few others, such as most of the chapters on Delany, really do explain what makes the books so great. I respect Walton's mind; I just wish she'd written an actual book instead of gathering a loose collection of online columns and putting them together under a title that misrepresents them. ( )

Got some great recommendations for SF from this book, and, as a re-reader myself, I loved the ruminations about the joys of re-reading. However, I suspect these short essays work better as blog posts than a book— which, to be fair, is how Jo Walton wrote them. ( )