Travis West
I should have returned this steaming pile to the library at the first mention of the Easy Amnesia trope.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EasyAmnesia
Cardboard characters in an unnamed, generic city going through the motions of a mystery whose only reason for existence is to flatter the intelligence of readers who guess the “twists” about 5 minutes before they are made explicit.
I'll never read this author—though I'm sure it's a pseudonym because he/she is ashamed of their craven ripoff of The Gone Girl—again.
I said once that I'd listen to Offerman read the Newark train schedule. I was wrong. Basically, the premise of this book was for Nick and Megan to sit down with a voice memo app and ramble aimlessly about how wonderful they are together until they hit the 6 hour mark so they could sell it as a book. I really like both of them, but damn, I don't need to ever hear about their personal lives again.
Skip the essays about the elections. Too dated by now. Even Scalzi couldn't predict how vulgar and petty American politics would become in only a decade.
Remember how you felt when you first read 1984 and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle? Don't let that disappear.
I've been frustrated by how toothless Stephen King is in his dotage and by how infrequently King's son, Joe Hill, publishes new books. So I'm excited to discover a writer who is able to alternate between cold dread and heart racing intensity the way Tremblay has in both of the books by him I read recently.
I enjoyed this one more the second time around. I think the first time I waited too long between All Systems Red and this one.
The dynamic between MB and ART was a lot of fun.
I need to just admit that I don't enjoy detective mysteries. I try one or two every year, and they always end up being a slog. I'm sure it's well-written. Just not for me.
I don't know why I keep reading Stephen King. Would have been a good book if it had been edited down to 300 pages.
Five years after reading it, I'm changing my rating from 4 to 5 stars, because I still think about this book so often.
Less a how-to book than a gentle nudge from a sweet Swedish grandmother who's “somewhere between 80 and 100.”
Stoic philosophy with a snappy title. Still, if Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, T Roosevelt, or Heidegger are your jam, you'll enjoy this quick read. Get the audiobook, so you can savor the author's Scottish accent as he tells you to “get over yer feckin' self.”
A fantastic (in the modern sense of fantastic meaning well-crafted, rather than the original sense of being unbelievable) history of American wishful and magical thinking. I wish that American religious and political types would read this, but I'm rational enough to know that won't happen.
4.5 stars. I rounded down because I wish it didn't careen from topic to topic so frequently.
My disdain for this book is proportional to how much I liked Lock In. Head On is just an overly complicated police procedural murder investigation that just happens to have an FBI agent who embodies a robot. No commentary on modern life or projection of what the near future may be like. Just an episode of a bad cop show... with robots.
Literary mashups of public domain stories and characters, like Penny Dreadful, A League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and this book, are like opium to me. The daughters of several gaslight era mad scientists, plus Holmes and Watson, team up to solve a series of murders. A great deal of the book is about the formation and backstory of this group, so having gotten that out of the way, I'm looking forward to the next book and their adventures together.
What I thought would be a lightweight survey of meaningless jobs turned out to be a compelling argument for how corrupt late-stage capitalism has become and for how we accept the status quo whereby those who provide the most value are the least valued.
“Loaded” is the best of the lot by far, but even it suffers from the punchline ending. I love all of Joe Hill's longer novels, so maybe my expectations were too high.
2.5 stars. Started off strong. I thought it was going to make a point about the unresolved traumas in all of the characters' lives, but no. The last 20% dropped my rating a couple of stars.
I doubt I'll read this author again.
2020 review: I gave this book 5 stars the first time around, but this time it really fell in my estimation, and I'm not sure why. Maybe the inherent tension around the “girl dressed as a boy who'll inevitably be discovered” trope has worn smooth from overexposure.
2018 review: As much as l loved THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE, I may actually prefer this sequel. All of the fantastic Russian fairytale elements plus medieval Moscow court intrigue.
I'm not generally a fan of most time travel stuff (except Doctor Who), but I did like Clines' earlier book, 14. Time travel aside, this book is bad. Flat characters, boring plot, and overwrought description. I wish I could go back in time to warn myself to skip it.
I feel like I could belong to “The End of the World Book Club.” This one is better than many post-apocalyptic books I've read. I don't know if it was intentional, but it had a lot of similarities with The Odyssey. Extended journey by a crew to get back to family with episodic adventures (that I won't spoil but that seem very close to the cyclops and Circe tales). Add to that some sprinklings of Norse and Christian mythology, and you have a tale with more layers than your typical The Stand or Walking Dead rehash. Oh, there are some good bits about endurance running, but it's not as prominent as the title would suggest.