Jonathan
Not as hard hitting as a review suggested, and while the daily grind and attitudes of some of the cops are lamentable, there's nothing particularly surprising here. The end was disappointing - no reaction to his subterfuge, no fallout...
As another reviewer has said, the English language version has a lot of typos in it. Towards the end there are a couple of sentences that make no sense at all.
It's good, but it's no Down and Out in Paris and London,
I really enjoyed this book - I thought it was a murder mystery at the start but it soon wanders off in different directions with a cast of characters, who all have the kind of connections you can get in cities. An overheard conversation on a train sees us leaving the character we thought we were following as if we decided to leave them and wander after the stranger we just saw...
It's not a fun book - there's little humour here and the bleakness sets in. On occasion it wanders into fantasy (or does it? That's the question) and the conclusion of one character's story is disatisfyingly unreal.
The book ends where it started and I think I'd have preferred the central mystery unsolved, it risks becoming an info dump that doesn't add anything. There are times too when the dialogue is clunky (the opening chapter, for example) and I wonder (as I often do nowadays) where the editor was on this.
But despite the niggles, it was a book that kept me engaged and an introduction to an author I don't know.
Less confusing than the first book but there are still too many characters and, confusingly, they're referred to by their forename and surname at different times, meaning you have to remember who's who. Additionally the author sometimes refers to a character by their race, meaning you have to remember who's an ithorian, who's a Sullustan etc. if the author needed notes to keep track of who was who and what, so does the reader.
An editor needed to step in here.
All that said, the main sequence was compelling and unlike another reviewer, I found the switching between scenes to be cinematic and compelling.
But bring a notebook- you'll need it.
I'm not familiar with the St Mary's books (you don't have to be but I suspect it would help) so o came to this with no expectations.
I enjoyed it but was often frustrated by aspects such as its length (there's a lot of editing potential here) and the sudden change in plot direction that wasn't particularly well foreshadowed.
There's a lot of confusion here - characters are referred to by their forename and surname interchangeably which meant I missed a few important details, particularly if the author assumed you'd read previous books.
The author's use of imperial measurements is also irritating. We've been metric for 50 years - is the suggestion that the UK reverts to feet and inches in the future?
There's also a significant plot hole in that time travel is ignored at important points. For example, why do the time police arrive after the crime has been committed instead of before it? Wouldn't that be more useful?
At times I felt I was reading substandard Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. That said, overall it was enjoyable and I'm tempted to read the next books or delve in to St Mary's.
The author thinks he's Douglas Adams. He isn't.
This is stylistically all over the place and badly edited - there's a whole scene missing where Davros is supposed to learn about the Movellan virus. Instead one minute he's being defrosted and the next he's working on an antidote.
There's a sequence about the interior of the Tardis that gets in the way of the narrative. And being novelised brings out some of the story's less sensible ideas (the ‘bombs' in London 1984 to attract a bomb squad to protect them? The use of duplicates?)
It's a pretty straight retelling of the TV story but with an added coda that, er, well I'll let you read that for yourself.
Still, it helps complete the Target range and it's no worse than some of the lesser Terrance Dicks (praise be his name) efforts. I wasn't expecting Charles Dickens.
On the whole I enjoyed this but as others have said, it suffers from too much happening - and nothing happening - and far too many characters who I can't name, can't remember, and don't care enough about that when (spoilers) one of them dies, it really doesn't matter to me.
The opening chapters are quite exciting, but then the pace drops significantly. It picks up at the end with a space battle but again, characters are named, then killed or promoted or saved and I don't know who's who.
This is the fate of a novel that's supposed to start a series but it needn't be like that - I remember when the original Thrawn trilogy came out. One ‘bad guy' there versus several here.
So, not badly written, just badly conceived.
Something ironic about rating a book that argues persuasively against such things but there you go.
It's a good book that starts very well but peters out towards the end as it turns from analysis to manifesto with several of its demands being non sequiturs from the main thesis. And some of it is just wrong - lumping Apple in with the data driven organisations like Amazon and Google when Apple doesn't trade in user data. And interesting case studies fade away in favour of anecdotes that border on the sort of anti health and safety nonsense you see in local newspaper letters pages. A good editor would have kept the thesis on track.
The section on universities could have gone further with discussion of NSS and TEF which are far more relevant to most readers that REF and have a bigger impact on ‘real life'.
Those criticisms aside, I enjoyed the book and have been recommending it to others. As someone who is constantly battling against tick boxes in academia, it's a useful book to point people to, and save my blood pressure a little by not having to make the same points myself.
I gave this only three stars because, while it's a great book, compared with what comes later it's nowhere near the heights the series reaches. If you're new to Discworld, I'd suggest not starting here (other reviewers offer their suggestions) but coming back to it later to see how it all started.
I reread it as I'm trying to reread the series in order, just as I did originally beginning in around 1990. I can't recommend the Discworld novels highly enough, even the least good (like this first entry) are very funny but the best are philosophical masterpieces and comically brilliant. The Colour of Magic suffers from trying to cram too many ideas into a short book - later efforts would have taken just one or two and developed them. It's also more a clear parody of a certain genre of novel, with gods and heroes at the periphery while minor-ish characters like Death would later go on to dominate.
Rereading it now, it feels odd that it was ever published but as you progress through the series you'll be glad it was.
Exciting, but of its time
I've been meaning to read this book for years, having sat through the film versions on several occasions and wondering what the original source was like. It turns out it's very different.
Stylistically, it's similar to several similar books I've read from the same period, most closely to Rogue Male which also deals with someone hiding from those hunting for him. Rogue Male is better - Steps is more at the pulpy end of the spectrum. The character of Hannay is not entirely likeable, possessing a view of Jews and foreigners that grates but is characteristic of the period. As with other books of this vintage the dialogue is a bit overblown, and there are some remarkable coincidences (he meets an old acquaintance in the wilds of Scotland and then again later in London).
But it's a ripping yarn, a quick read, and a taste of a period where these tales were lapped up.
I really didn't enjoy this, which is why it took so long for me to finish - nowhere near as good as The City of Death, it tries to hard to be funny and falls far short. The last quarter of the book is better than the rest, but it's a low bar.
The end of the book contains some interesting information about the Douglas Adams archive in Cambridge, though, and the bits that weren't in the TV version show Adams's creative process in an interesting light.
Some good tips but a lot of it is quite basic and even irrelevant (if you find the section on referencing styles insightful, how did you get to PhD stage?) There are some odd bits, like where we are confidently told that women think very differently from men (no endnotes to support that assertion).
The section on structure was the most useful, the rest was a bit low level for me and at times very algorithmic to the point of specifying how many chapters, how many sections in each chapter, and how many words in each section...
The main value of the book is to remind you that a PhD is a piece of writing, not a record of a research process. It should be engaging and readable.
Took most of a day to read it and it was a good reintroduction to my work after a short enforced break and subsequent ‘what the hell am I doing' crisis...
Started off well but descended into generalisations based on anecdotes, with some pretty broad conclusions, all with the usual caveat of ‘of course this isn't true of all introverts'. The chapter on group working makes some dreadful errors of logic and it worries me that people will start quoting this as an excuse not to collaborate with others.
Very funny book - highly recommended. Also educational - the things I learned about loft insulation and the motorway network in the south East of England, as well as Alan's ratings of the several London airports, will stay with me for a long time.
Contains spoilers for the movie Alpha Papa though, so watch that first. It's also very funny.
I found this book rather dull. I suspect I missed the point of it and, if I'd understood what it was about I could have enjoyed it more. But I didn't, so I didn't.
The central character is the author of romantic fiction who, ironically, is unable to find any romance herself. She's trapped in an affair with a married man, ends up being effectively exiled to this hotel on the lake by friends because of an event (spoilers - you'll find out), meets another man (he hardly figures at all really) and then something else happens... And then it's over.
It's probably a very, very clever book. It won the Booker Prize in 1984 or something. But it just went over my head, I'm afraid. However, given the number of glowing reviews it's one of those that you should probably try yourself. Maybe you'll love it. I'm glad I read it and gave it a go. But it's not quite my cup of tea.
A very good overview of key theories about creativity and motivation, engagingly written.
My only real beef is that a significant section of the book is ‘filler' with suggestions for applying the book's lessons to the worlds of work and education - I didn't find these to be particularly insightful and a bit shallow in places.
But the substantial first two thirds of the book are very good and I've been recommending it to lots of colleagues as it addresses many of the issues that keep coming up in our teaching.
A slim volume, part of what looks like an impressive series from Penguin, well presented in hardback with an attractive slip cover. There is a good collection of colour illustrations in the middle of the book.
The book itself is brief but full of detail and Morris tells a compelling tale that includes a significant overlap with the life of Harold who (according to William) took the throne that had been promised to him, therefore initiating the chain of events that led to the invasion of 1066.
If you're a Game of Thrones fan, a lot of this will be familiar - the difference is this really happened. It's nice to see my home town of York getting a lot of mentions, though it seems to have been a bit of a football, being occupied by Vikings, Normans, English, Vikings and then Normans again (if I followed correctly).
The book is well researched and there's a full list of sources at the back of you want them. I read this in a couple of days and found it difficult to put down. I'll be looking at others in this series and updating my knowledge of English history.
I enjoyed this book - but it would be difficult to write a book about Seinfeld that wasn't enjoyable. Difficult, but not impossible.
It's an entertaining read that collects interviews from many sources and adds in some (but not a lot, I don't think) original content to produce a highly readable history of the series.
The opening chapters are the best in which the genesis of the series is laid out, lots of which I didn't know (the stars' various pasts, for example), and subsequent chapters give us details of what it was like to write on the show.
But as the book progresses it loses focus and each chapter tends to wander off the point a bit.
It's not particularly insightful - for example the ‘curse of Seinfeld' chapter relies too heavily on snippets from interviews when this would have been a great opportunity to interview people about why some of the actors' subsequent efforts didn't work out, or more about Michael Richards' racist outburst.
There are some inaccuracies in the book (Seinfeld doesn't own all the cars in Comedians With Cars Getting Coffee, as anyone who watches it would know) and strange omissions - nothing on Seinfeld's short-lived series The Marriage Ref. A few things get repeated too - Terry Hatcher and Courtney Cox were in the show, we get told twice. Also, a few things get repeated too - Terry Hatcher and Courtney Cox were in the show, we get told twice...
The concept of “Seinfeldia' doesn't really hold up to scrutiny and apart from the first and last chapters it gets called up in ways that suggests it's a thesis without much solidity.
So, short on analysis but a good light history of the show. I'm being overly critical only because it's being pitched as something more than it is, but it is enjoyable and recommended to fans and students of TV/comedy history.
A good summary of the process and main steps but very slight when it comes to detail. It isn't a ‘how to' so much as a primer. A good book to read before deciding this is something you want to do. The text makes many references to other sources of more detailed information on things like coding interviews or analysing quantitative data, but doesn't attempt to do anything more than say ‘this is something you'll need to do'.
I used it to get going again after a short break between phases. Very useful memory jogger!
The book does make doing an EdD achievable - so does exactly what it says on the cover. A good intro, a quick and easy read, but not the final word.