Having read and loved the Imperial Radch trilogy, this is a huge disappointment and utterly boring. I couldn´t care less about political intrigue in outer space, especially when uninteresting characters such as these are involved.    

DNF on page 250.

"Well, excellency," said Captain Uisine after a few moments, "I suggest we open the pod and ask em. We can always put em back in if e prefers that."

I completely forgot that the people in this society are genderless. I was thinking: "Boy, there are a LOT of typing errors in this book." 

Edit: After having read a little bit more, I remembered that the people aren´t exactly genderless. Instead the language of the Radchaai society hasn´t specific pronouns for gender and the society in itself treats everyone as being genderless.

However, the female main character in this book is from the Hwaen culture, which do distinguish between different gender and are using specific pronouns to clarify if someone is male or female, if a person has declared to be of a certain gender. I´m still a bit fuzzy about the details, though.

I like Ann Leckie´s books, her writing style is right up my alley. But this whole gender/language thing can be a bit disorienting in the beginning, tbh.

I can´t be bothered to pick out ten new books from my shelves, so it´s essentially the same list as the last time in another order and Theodor Fontane´s travelogue about Scottland as a new addition.

1. Provenance

2. The Remedy

3. The Poisened Chocolates Case

4. China Mountain Zhang

5. Jenseit des Tweed

6. The Silence of the Girls

7. A Woman of No Importance

8. Becoming

9. Abanddon´s Gate

10. Isaac´s Storm

And the random number generator says:

The winner this time is:

The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of The Iliad told from the perspective of the women in the war (and especially Briseis´ point of view). In the past I struggled with retelling of greek myths, so I´m curious if this book is going to work for me. 

Okay! So I have two piles of books lying beside me, five fiction novels and five non-fiction books. The contestants are:

1. Isaac´s Storm

2. Abaddon´s Gate

3. The Remedy

4. The Poisoned Chocolate Case

5. A Woman of No Importance

6. China Mountain Zhang

7. Becoming

8. The Silence of the Girls

9. The Hotel on Place Vendome

10. Provenance

And I´m going to read .... drum roll, please....

Gosh, that book has been on my TBR forever. It´s about time that I read it.

On a side note: I changed this ugly cover of China Mountain Zhang to the actual cover (the wrong cover is truly hideous and I just cannot stand it). I would be super grateful, if a helpful librarian would confirm the change. Thanks :)

This was more of a light and quick read than I expected. Diving into a new sci-fi author, I always worry that the story will get bogged down in explanations of technology and inter-worlds/inter-species politics, but that's not the case with this book. Leckie provides a good story and interesting characters that carried me along atop the politics, allowing me to understand just what I needed to for the story and not worry too deeply about the rest. Thankfully, there is very little detail on the technology, so I didn't need to apply any of my very rusty (and rudimentary) science/physics/etc. skills here.

I picked this one up on recommendation of a friend, particularly for the narrator, but didn't realize until the end that this is the 4th book in a series, although supposedly it works as a standalone, as only the universe, rather than any major characters, carries over from the prior 3 books. I think this story might have been easier to follow, if I had read the others in the series, but I picked up enough to still enjoy it very much. I've put the first book of the series on hold at the library.

Audiobook, with an excellent performance by Adjoa Andoh, so the unfamilar names and pronouns made this story a little difficult to follow, but the excellent audio performance helped make it a smooth journey.