A bit disappointing. Some solid musing on the social repercussions of a lifespan-extending drug, but most of it’s done as hypothetical upper-middle-class soliloquys, and a lot of the tangents are dismissively sidestepped. The weakest Wyndham I’ve read.

Excellent spots of life and of detail, but there’s a feeling of the stories being thrown together for the sake of it, of them being cut off at arbitrary start and end points. As good to read as any Murakami, though.

Heavy-handed and often far too facetious (without actually being that funny), but a fairly solid and worthwhile blow to the head all the same.

A pub on the run, in a Chestertonian England being overrun by a (rather facetious) Christian/Islamic religious merger. Some great songs in there.

Individual accounts of the sarin attack on the Tokyo underground – very humble and vivid stuff, the points of interconnection (people mentioning passers-by who in turn give their own viewpoint a few pages later) making for a very real and human structure. The follow-up interviews with Aum cultists are as mundane as they are chilling.

Dramatic social deterioration in an arcological high-rise building. A fantastic amount of symmetry and structure in both the book and the building’s design; metaphors through simple gravity and distance.

A fine if lesser piece of Vonnegut – reminiscence from a beautifully verdant post-apocalypse Manhattan, playing with the nature of solitude, and some persuasive social rearrangements.

A nicely-woven tale of time and people, the background insignificance of the larger picture, every day of every aging character’s life being November the 1st 1993.

Dreamlike, gently-surreal wanderings through a strange and endless patch of Irish countryside. Absorbingly good, with a great ending.

Oddly linear for Vonnegut, but explaining 70s America as if to a far future generation with no cultural context is quite glorious.