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Definitely a product of its time -- a bunch of short stories, where the protagonists are physics and general left-brain approach to problems. The writing is bare-bones, the characters are paper-thin, the politics are facepalmingly dated. My three stars are because I like physics in my sci-fi, but it's more like 2.5 stars really.

Picking up the first Isaiah Coleridge book, I could never have guessed stuff would escalate to this. But it's all good. Think I'm becoming a Laird Barron fan.

Occasionally I get the feeling I might like to do martial arts again. Then I remember everything I disliked about doing martial arts, and stick to my climbing.

Angry White Pyjamas is evertything I disliked about doing martial arts, taken to absurd extremes. The narrator decides to enroll in a SRS XTRM aikido class in Tokyo, while making observations about Japan and the Japanese. The narrator is English. The observations are uncomfortable to read, the class is worse.

The whole book is a treatise on how people turn themselves into tools for the powerful in search of machismo. I have no idea if it was intended, but that was how it read to me. It wasn't a bad book in itself, I was never bored, only somewhat repulsed.

I never even knew there was a genre like epic urban fantasy, but apparently there is, and House of Earth and Blood makes it work.

There's angels, demons, werewolves, fairies, merfolk & everything else imaginable, but also sort-of-familiar yet different world and a twisty romance / action / detective plot that I expected to be completely rote yet managed to surprise me a couple of times. Sure, it was over the top at times and somewhat heavy-handed, but damn if I wasn't consistently entertained and never bored.

Even if the main characters were a bit grating in their macho posturing, they were dynamic and consistently took charge of things instead of being meek and whiny. No meek and whiny here, only sexy and badass.