2.5 stars for this one actually. It was more than just 'ok'. But still didn't have enough juice to keep me reading all the stories. MOD is a collection of short stories set in a situation where a new invention called the 'Machine of Death' is able to tell people exactly how they'll die. Of course the machine being a machine and the prediction taking the form of a few words written on a slip of paper, ambiguity as to exactly how you will die is rife. Enter the guy who got 'old age' written on his and was happy until he got run over by and old guy. Yeah. 
 Anyway the concept struck me as novel. Most of the stories don't deal with the deaths themselves. Most of them deal with how people cope with the knowledge of how they would die, and explore how they'd react to it. They examine how societies change once this knowledge is out there and considered to be normal. Some are interesting social experiments, like the story where several 18 year olds get 'nuclear bomb' in the course of a few weeks and the FBI, in order to prevent a nuclear bomb ever exploding in the US, plans to round up all the teenagers and bomb the hell out of them BEFORE someone else can do it in uncontrolled circumstances. creepy. Or the less expansive worries of a high school girl about to get her 'death certificate' hoping for a painful and violent death like 'burned alive' so that she could fit in with all the cool kids. 
 Some of them are sentimental. Some are short and simple. My favorite was death by 'HIV infection caused my machine of death needle.' 
 But overall, call me a philistine, but i expected a lot more rush, adrenaline and excitement out of this one. Maybe it's because of my own personal attitude towards death, but the many metaphysical quandaries that the characters in many of these stories face seem rather alien to me. Many of them ostensibly think they are immortal, as if the knowledge of their demise, if hidden, would forever postpone it. But death is promised to us from the time of our birth, and it would do all of us good to never forget that. Ultimately this book does make you think along those lines, and for that i would definitely recommend it.