I am reading Japanese SF in translation from Haikasoru, Viz's new imprint. (The name is Japanese for "High Castle" which is a pretty great meta-joke.)
All You Need is KillLike a B+ ... an A premise with an A- first half and B- conclusion. It's Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day. I don't really need to say anymore. If that sounds like something you'll like, you'll enjoy the book, but you'll probably be disappointed with the conclusion as well. Like most horror novels, this one really falls apart once we move from the "mystery" phase to the "answer" phase.
The Stories of IbisThis one, on the other hand, is blowing me away. About half done so far. This is Clifford Simak's
City with robots instead of dogs. A robot-dominated future where the few remnant humans don't even remember how things ended up the way they are, and a benevolent AI (Ibis, or "AIBISU" in Japanese) who finds one of the remaining humans and tells him a series of chronological short stories that explain how things ended up the way they did. But, like
City, it does this not by detailing wars or conflicts, but by highlighting emotional turning points in ordinary people that the reader can use to understand how things continued moving in this direction.
Once I finish Ibis I want to read something big, meaty and European. Debating between
2666 and
Shadow of the Wind.