1. Author is a woman: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey 04/01 Review

6. Title has a color word in it: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 04/04 Review

27. Set during WWI or WWII: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer  10/04  Review     

38. Newest release by a favorite author: Golden in Death by J.D. Robb  11/04 Review

41. Characters involved in politics: Yeah, no. Read Vendetta in Death by J.D. Robb 14/04 Review and roll 1 die.

47. Snake - go back to 19

19. Set in the UK: The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories by Angela Carter 18/04 Review

28. Written between 1900 and 1999: The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer 23/04 Review

36. Set in Central or South America: Too scattered for Amado, I read a short Bodoc for children and call it. Review

37. Has won an award: Started Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie  05/01 Review

45. A book that has been on your tbr for more than one year: I counted so wrong before, but I was listening The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin  while cleaning and cooking this weekend and still works. Will post review in a bit. Meanwhile

54. Is more than 400 pages long: Huh... well... I've got Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens on the dock. And Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Either ought to go over that...

Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson

Well, China has colonised the Moon and the rest of the world is playing catch-up, making the dusty, cratered lump of rock a giant political football. Shenanigans start up there, involving internal Chinese politics, but things turn international when a murder is committed and blamed on an American...an odd series of chases and attempts to hide follow, as "global" revolution looms.

"Global" in quotation marks, becuase KSR argues that only the USA and China matter any more and that they have become economically co-dependent. I personally think one Vladimir Putin would dispute the first part of that analysis. It smacks of the over-simplification prevalent in the Cold War era USA that Europe was nothing but a potential battle field to be fought over by the binary Superpowers.

It was amusing to find charcters from KSR's novel, Antarctica, playing key roles, thus linking this book to that but also, by extention, to the Science in the Capital sequence. Additionally, strong reference is made to events in the USA that are the material of the novel, New York, 2140 - but that's ~100 years in the future of this book, so he's just recycling those ideas.

I struggled to connect with the protagonists here and felt distanced by a fair amount of apparent Luggage Syndrome, which was disappointing. Neither the best nor the worst by Robinson.

Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson

So far, feng shui and physics. Oh, and murder - but more feng shui and physics than murder.

Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson

The KSR exclamatory sense of wonder is all present and correct! Unfortunately it makes all his view-point characters seem a little same-ish.

DNF

I made it almost halfway before throwing in the towel.

There is nothing happening in the first part of this book.  Nothing interesting at least - it's just a bunch of daily vignettes of what are actually very interesting characters when they're not being mired in unnecessary narrative over and over and over again. 

This man obviously does not like to show.  He's a teller.  A big boring teller.  Treatises on finance and the 'stock market' in 2140, essays on real estate values after the flood, nonsense after nonsense. 

I was very disappointed, but when I realised that I'd been working on this book for almost 2 weeks and wasn't enjoying much of it at all, well... it was time to give up.  I'd have liked to know more about the story of the girl with the airship who was flying polar bears from up north to Antarctica to preserve them. Sadly, I've not the patience to wade through the rest of the stuff.