Was excited to read my first Ian Banks book in the culture serie: The player of game. Disapointed. The culture is a cool concept for a book. What we have are an uninspired personnage saying hello and goodbye before and after every conversation. A fist half dealing with the uninspired protagonist and his insipid conversation with personnages who will totally diseapear in second half when the conflict really begin. The conflict is okayish. The alien civilisation feel alien. The dig at autoritative society isnt event too on the nose. -- One cool short James Ellroy novella (he is always cool): Shakedown It is ellroy: misogynist, racist , republican, but he do it with panache. -- Some bad french Sci-fi (my favorite genre tend to do bad book 99% of the time) , and one cool Sci-fi: Salvager of Time (Wesley Chu 2015) Fun premice: human society is in shamble, they only survive by going in the past salvaging ressource. Well written. Unfortunatly nothing is resolved, we are waiting for a scond tome, which didnt come yet. Still a good read. -- The killing Joke (A.Moore) What a deception. I discovered that comics could be epic with Moore (Vandeta, From HEll, Watchmen...) The killing joke, is just a short story, 40 page, where nothing interesting happen. Joker back story is bland. Batman doesnt do anything remarquable. Joker tell him where he is, and batman come and kick his ass, end. -- Next will be 2 James Ellroy (I'm closing on having read all his books now). One of which is in English.. and as I feared, I realized after the 1st few pages , that my english is not good enough for that level of slang.