This is pretty bleak but really cleverly changes the narrator's register as her circumstances change.

The new President is probably the worst one yet.

My experience of this book was one of simultaneous boredom and hysteria, punctuated with moments of laughing out loud. It is an ode to escalators and shoe laces; it revels in the mundane. It's Seinfeld if Seinfeld wasn't asking for the laugh. Very quick read. Don't touch if you are annoyed by footnotes.

Can you take seriously a person's theory of language when you know he was delighted by ... cowboy movies?

"I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development."

I didn't feel the same sorrowful-delight that I got from The Vintner's Luck but Xas's alien complexity and attempts to exist in the world and survive time are transfixing in a quiet sort of way.

"History is the monster in their stories."

"If I did not often need to shelter in a word"

"A light in your sovereign darkness."

Apollo and Pallas Athene have a go at creating Plato's Republic as a thought experiment. Just the best kind of unlikely fun.

"There's a definition of tragedy as a story where you know the end".

Heart-wrenching intergenerational story about the cultural revolution in China. Beautiful prose. Mediates on music, loss and identity. I cried a lot.

Cordelia could mean

The one who plays too slowly will be swallowed by time.

I wanted to know why infinity consisted of water and sheep.

"Their incompatible love made her feel hollow".

"It just comes over you like an urban sandstorm "

Great post-apocalyptic fiction. Oddly gentle and hopeful. Beautifully structured.

"Born, each, in a sense with memories on loan"

Honestly fabulous. Buy it for everyone you know who likes science.

At once didactic and life affirming. The cover does not represent the book but it does represent how I felt reading it.

Jane Yolen's blurb pretty much sums it up. It's an Austen comedy of manners with dragons. Really satisfying romance but also, they eat each other and mistreat their servants.

"Most dragons regard writing as a feminine accomplishment. "

"Venus is a terrible place."

The book places layer upon layer of fun, sci-fi-satire and characters with a lilting cadence and imaginative flourish.

"as mutually indistinguishable as peas in a pod or days in prison. "

This was disturbing in a compelling way. I liked the first novel/part the best but the book turns in on itself in a structurally superb way so it is best as a whole. It contains child abuse and rape. It's characters operate by a rigid and brutal moral code. Not something to read if you are feeling vulnerable.

"he who writes nothing is lost"

This was underwhelming, considering how much I have enjoyed his other books. I couldn't work out if the crossovers from other books were meant to carry it or not.

"The word love is not a definite word." - Agota Kristof, The Notebook Trilogy

"It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles at hurricanes. " - Randall Munroe

"Joke is secret language inside words".

This book, while drawing characters that are just a little too quirky, is ultimately joyful and worth reading if you can forgive a big logical flaw and want everything tied up in a bow. It has genuine heart.