Sean

Very enjoyable. Written for children in the best way–and therefore completely entertaining and thought-provoking for an adult. Well, for this adult at least. Rushdie adds his thinking about the nature of stories to our long philosophical conversation. If the questions, “What is ‘fiction' anyway?” and “What do stories have to do with real life?” intrigue you, spend a while with Haroun, his father Rashid, and all the friends they meet on the hidden moon.

This book is a novelization of a Athabascan Indian legend.

I have had several friends who romanticize or “spiritualize” Native Americans (and other, non-European peoples) to the point of making them unhuman. I once had a friend who told me about how the virtuous arctic peoples would deal with food shortages in Winter. The eldest would stay behind so they would not be a burden to the rest of the people. This was done, in her telling, voluntarily and with great serenity. I could almost see their halos as she told the tale. BUT, the little voice in my head yelled “BS!” Sure, it might well have happened that way sometimes, but I know human beings (despite being of European descent, I am not totally unfamiliar with the human race.) Humans want to live! Humans abandon other humans and feel like crap for it. Humans sometimes are jerks.

This book shows the tribe abandoning these two old women, and it is not pretty at all. We are allowed to witness slow murder. It feels real. Not romanticized at all, this story is an authentic picture of humans in extremis. Of course, there is a necessary and fitting happy ending, but it did not invalidate what went before.

Keep doing your appointed task, even though you can not know what that task is. Just do it, and all will be well.

I love these books. My gratitude to Donaldson is immense.

I guess that's all I can say. Reviewing the last book of a series is sort of silly. Start at the beginning and enjoy!

A beautiful story. As do these stories about Roland Deschain, this one helps me understand my manhood better. I love Roland, and I am grateful to King for having brought him to light.

A worthy continuation of the story. There are surprises and plot twists as always, of course, but the philosophical underbed continues to be the main draw. The exploration of story, collective unconscious, and myth-making is intriguing, but best of all is how utterly the story itself, not just the discussion of “story,” draws me in. I must keep reading.

I liked it. The art is fetching–old-timey and charming, with nice clear lines. (I am borderline graphically illiterate, and I have a hard time with muddy lines.) Really, it is beautiful to look at. The conceit, that Solitude appears to the loner protagonist as a blue bird, is intriguing and interesting. I enjoyed it for that, and because I could identify with the poor little mouse who just wanted to be left alone to write. Sadly, as a story, it did what many stories in graphic format seem to do–it faded away at the end with no discernible meaning. What started off so strong and clear ended up ... well, if the pictures had done what the story itself did, the colors would have run together and the lines would have gotten all fuzzy. This is not a complaint about the book itself. I see that sort of thing in many recent books and I suspect that much of the problem lies with me.

I enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it to anybody who likes good art serving a good story. Perhaps you will be better adept at finding meaning in the ending that I.

The only Percy Jackson story I have read, and I read it because I wanted to experience a comic/gn on an e-reader. I enjoyed the story, appreciated the art (which was quite striking in places), and especially like the comics mode way of reading this on a device. I would consider reading more of these stories if I had nothing else to read.

Very interesting, insofar as it connects seemingly unconnected things and phenomena.

I read this book for work, a thing that is not regularly a part of my job. I read the first few pages as soon as it arrived for me, just to have a look, and then I did something I have never done before and will likely never do again. I spent the next who-knows-how-many hours of work time reading. I just dumped all the things I needed to finish up before the weekend and just read. After work, I went out to eat and read. I sat in my car in the parking lot and read. I came home and read. I finished the book an hour after bed time and am now feeling a little bit bereft.

Here is all the review I can manage right now: I am glad I was shut away alone in an empty office, or later in my car or at home alone, when the tears flowed. A beautiful book. (And that is saying a lot, since there are some elements I rather don't like; but I can't help loving it anyway.)

It made me happy.

This is a book I would not have read had it not been written by a local author (zombie tales just aren't my thing), so I can not be trusted to write a meaningful review. But I will say this. It is very much fun and a little unnerving to read a zombie apocalypse that takes place literally so close to home. The main character drives past my grocery story, and I am pretty sure I know right where he lives. As for the writing. ... Well, I wish he O'Brien had had a merciless editor to whip the manuscript into shape. Some of the sentences made me want to cry. This is something one expects from self-published books, unfortunately. On the one hand, several times I thought, “OK, I'm done. I'll stop reading now and move on to something else.” But I never stopped. I read through to the end and was glad I had done so. The story is exciting and, considering the action apart from the sentence structures, is well written. It was compelling enough to keep me reading. In real life, I would have no desire to make the protagonist's acquaintance outside an emergency situation, but in the book I cared about him and those whom he loves, so I give the author that praise.

A magnificently conceived novel which almost always manages to avoid being tedious and pretentious. The characters, especially Olvido, however, do not.

I am not certain how to write about this. It is a translation I read, so should perhaps comment about that. Well, D. D. R. Owen did, I believe, a fine job. Of course, not having read the original, I can't say for sure, but I enjoyed reading his English and did not find it distracting in the least. As for Chrétien himself, he is a great story-teller. I enjoyed these five tales very much, and stayed up late reading them.

Enjoy these stories as I do, I can not pretend that I wish I had been born 1000 years ago. I am a product of my age and glad to be so.

I include the status updates I wrote after finishing each tale.

“[The Queen] was so high above herself [with happiness] that you could have used her for hawking.”

I have finished “Erec and Enide,” the first of the five books contained herein. I have never read Chrtien before and am delighted with him. I enjoyed the book very much. Sadly, I do not like Erec the knight near so much as I like the story about him. That stunt he pulls with leaving court and dragging his wife along to (it seems) punish her for stating fact while he was presumed asleep is a thing fit for a child-man.

Finished Cligés. I certainly like him much better than I did Erec. Chrtien continues to be a good storyteller, and I continue to be amazed that I waited so long to read these stories.

Finished Lancelot. My favorite so far. I really admire his impassiveness at getting on the cart, and his silence in the face of criticism for it. he seems not even to take notice of his critics. His willingness to obey his lady love is impressive–I do not like Guenevire at all, since she does not deserve to be liked. Chrétien's writing, or the translation, is different here; it has more immediacy and humanity to it.

Finished Yvain. Definitely my favorite so far. Yvain is a right noble knight, worthy of the title.

Finished Perceval. Definitely the best of the bunch. I think he might be autistic, and when I googled “Perceval autistic” it turns out I am not the first person to think that.

I had not gotten very far into The Vicar of Wakefield before I realized I was not sure whether it is best described as quite serious and sincere or rather sarcastic and comic. It was only after wrestling with this question for a while that I looked to see what others had to say. Imagine my delight on finding that the entire literary world since Goldsmith first published it seems to have asked the same questions and never to have reached a conclusion. Now having finished the book, and with long and hard thought, after much prayer, I can conclusively and definitively provide the answer: Yes, it is.

There should be more books like this one. I don't remember much at all of the fluffy sweetness-and-light junk I read as a child, but the dark, and the darkly funny, has stayed with me for years.

Beautiful illustrations, and a beautifully produced physical book (the edition I read is hardcover with textured paper) made this a delight to read. The colors and art were genuinely entrancing. As for the words, I suspect the adaptation and simplification of the original long poem leaves much to be desired. What is left worked well enough as an accompaniment (almost captions) to the great art, but felt philosophically trite.

I really appreciate Katz's insistence that fermenting is not difficult. It is (almost) the most natural thing in the world. I have been making sauerkraut since before I ever heard if Katz's book, but was a bit nervous about branching out. He gave me permission to try anything and everything. Couple that brave example with some great information and interesting recipes/suggestions, and it makes for a worthwhile book.

It's been a while since I read it, so I will not attempt a fuller review, but I will say that the plan of the book blew me away. I felt a teeny bit of awe at what the author had done.

An ancient story and still a good one, quite well told and BEAUTIFULLY illustrated. I picked it up off the floor at work and immediately was enchanted by the cover. Inside, the pictures were even better. And the words did not disappoint. The language is sometimes quite beautiful. “And near this tree on the rocks on the ground was the nest of the terrible Anzu bird.” That sentence is even better in situ at the end of its glorious paragraph.

I really like Calvino, but I think I'm not quite bright enough to really understand what he's doing. – No, really, I'm plenty smart, but his writing just isn't what I'm looking for. But I really do like him and respect his ability to do very well something I don't quite get.

Unbelievably beautiful art and a rich, poignant tale. I love it.

As he did with The invention of Hugo Cabret, Selznick masterfully combines words and pictures (beautiful pictures) to tell his story. Two stories, actually, with one being told only by the drawings, whcih intermingles and plays with the verbal story.

Wonderstruck is a tale of wonders, about two children who take matters into their own hands. With some help from unexpected friends, and the wonders of a wonder-ful museum, each finds a place in the world to call home.