Is it any good?

I used to perplex one of my old flatmates who, whenever I was reading a book, had a habit of asking "is it any good?" My reply, that vexed him so, was usually the same "I don't know, I haven't finished it yet." It wasn't purely out of malice on my part, since for me endings can make or break a book. There are books I've thoroughly enjoyed reading until practically the very last page at which point everything falls apart quite horribly.

My favourite example of this remains David Brin's Brightness Reef. It's not that it wasn't an entertaining book, merely that at the end it turned out to be first part in a trilogy. More acurately it was the first part of a second trilogy. And, unfortunately, the remaining books didn't quite live up to the promise of the first (and I still can't forgive Brin for taking up most of the third book with the tales of a talking monkey who was involved in the plot in only the most flimsy and tangential of ways. It was almost like really bad misdirection in a magic act: "Hey readers, here's a talking monkey. Pay attention to it whilst I destroy the galaxy in the background").

Anyway, the reason why this is weighing on my mind today, is because I've just finished reading a book I've been enjoying very much. And now that I've finished it I'm attempting to decide whether it was any good.

So is it any good?

Um... I don't know. It might be. It might even be superb (it was certainly beautifully written). But at this moment I'm not sure.

I'm going to go sleep on it. I'll try and do a full review (and I might even tell you what the book is) tomorrow.