Reading to Clare: "The Bloodline Feud"

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I've just finished reading this novel to Clare over forty seven evenings, at 30-40 minutes per session.

Miriam is a pretty good ENFJ heroine and Clare was sufficiently engaged to have requested we move on to volume two (The Traders' War)  at some point in the future.

You can listen to my audio recordings here.

Reading a book aloud is not the same as reading to yourself. Everything's slower and the author's longueurs, if present, are more obvious. The Bloodline Feud is not quite a thriller - the pace varies too erratically. Sometimes there's genuine excitement, a lot of the time it's a fairly routine narrative pushing events along, and then there are info dumps explaining points of economics or some other distinctive background element.

Stross gets an A+ for ideas and general intelligence, and a B- for his comic-book characters, most of whom are not that fleshed out or even interesting.

However, the plotting is usually sufficient to keep reading.

Anyway, we're now going to up the pace and the adrenalin with this (which I've just read to myself).

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Ignatius reaches Jack Reacher levels of excitement with more conceptual sophistication. As usual, you'll find the recordings on the resource sidebar to the right (once I get started).