Sean

A beautiful and magnificent story. Rølvaag does an amazing job of dealing with the stereotype of Norwegians: good folk, down to earth, solid, dependable, clinically depressed, and emotionally clueless. He takes these standardized views of a complex population and shows them for what they are: the absolute truth. And he should know. Joking aside, he shows us a side of our humanity that is easily stereotyped in literature and makes it real and beautiful (though very, very sad).

Also, I want to grow up to be the minister. He did his job so very well.

As with all anthologies of the sort, this is a mixed bag, but they were all at least tolerable, and some quite good. I have enjoyed the editor's books enough that I decided to read this one for his short story set in the same world as the series I have read.

I genuinely and unironically enjoyed this book, so don't misunderstand when I say IT WAS A LITTLE TOO SUBLTLE SOMETIMES!!!!!!!!! Since anybody reading this review will not need me to spell it out for them, I will not say anything at all about how the author made sure that nobody's blind CATATONIC GOAT would miss any of the exposition or veiled realities going on under the surface of the storyline. It was all handled with such FINESSE AND DELICACY!!!!!! But other than the equisite subtleness, I enjoyed it. I like getting hit on the head with frying pans, too. The art is very nice and the loony protagonist was fun to watch.

I can't review this book meaningfully. Sometimes I am reminded that my literary tastes are not all that sophisticated. I enjoyed this collection of stories, some of them more than others, and am glad I read it, even though several times I scratched my head and wondered if I had actually missed something, or if there was maybe nothing to miss.

Wangerin succeeded in creating an almost entirely despicable character who, by repentance and God's grace, allowed himself to be redeemed. Beautiful in spots and worth reading, if you want to know that there is hope even for the likes of you.

My new favorite book. I've learned something important about myself and other people from reading it and various reviews. When someone says “Maia, yuck! He's just too nice. I hate him.” That person – don't trust them one inch. Maia is the person I want to be. Addison does an amazing job of revealing the personal struggles of a real person who intends to be good and do the right thing. It is not an easy attempt, not dull and static, but a fluid and difficult grind.

I listened to the audiobook read by Kyle McCarley, and I will never know if I love the book more for the writing or for his perfect voice. I do not normally listen to books, but I am so glad I did this time.

Yudkowsky has written one of the best possible fan fics. In fact, his handling of Harry Potter is so good that his book has actually replaced the real thing in my head as my idea of who Potter and all the other characters are. What started out as a devise for conveying instruction on the methods of rationality rather quickly turned into a ripping good story that hung together in a most satisfying way.

I took four years to read it, which I do not recommend. Get to the ending with the middle of the book still fresh in mind – that will serve the reader much better.

It gets five stars, of course it does, but I am discovering, the older I get, that I really dislike the knights in the Norman influenced stories. Running around playing games with each other when there are very real problems that need solving. They aren't men at all, but big children playing at tourney.

A very important subject, sadly marred by having been written by a sociologist.

I read the book because I knew that I am the target audience, a white, middle-class American who holds many progressive social values dear. I know I need some help sorting out my thinking on race, so I turned to DiAngelo for that help. Unfortunately, she is an academician, and so her ability to connect with me as an actual human being is severely limited.

Here is why I hate academic writing, using the subject of this book as an example. They took the word “racism,” which everybody has been using forever, with a commonly understood meaning. They redefined it so they could use it to talk about a social phenomenon they wanted to study. Then they say, “No, you're using the word wrong. We changed the meaning; get on board.” They use the power of their position to commit acts of intellectual violence against speakers of the language.

These people literally get paid to study things like racism and talk about them. It's their job to come up with ways to talk about the fact that our entire system is built from the ground up to favor whites and disfavor blacks. It is literally what they do for a living. And yet the best they can do is redefine “racism” so that, perfectly predictably, hoards of people will protest, rightly, “But I'm not a racist. I've been using that word my whole life and I know what it means, and it doesn't mean me.” And then the conversation–the very important conversation which must happen–gets shut down. All because the incompetent academicians can't do their job and come up with a new word or whatever it would take (don't ask me; it's not my job) to have that conversation.

I wish they would do it right, because we can't not talk about this; we can't not make huge changes as individuals and as a society. We have to end racism (in both the normal and academic definitions) and white supremacy. We have to talk about it without putting people off because of badly defined words. Please, sociologists, help us out!

Having said all that, and with reservations put aside, DiAngelo has written a good book and raised many good points and I am glad I read it, difficult though it was.

I am not normally interested in military science fiction, but Shaw's books are fascinating and even delightful. I appreciate his way of dealing with the emergence of artificial sentiences.

Just as good as the first in the series.

Beautiful and dreadfully pertinent.

Good story, and a great cautionary tale about becoming too interested in things that really don't matter. Best of all is the great art by Les McClaine, one of my favorite cartoonists.

I never really know what to say about graphic-intensive books, especially books without words. I love them, even though I am borderline illiterate when it comes to pictures. The art is great; what I could follow of the story was interesting; but my own deficiencies (I believe it to be my problem, not the author-artist's) left large gaps in the plot. So take a look at it for some cool art, and if you are better at pictures than I, you will probably enjoy a cool story, too.

I love almost everything LeGuin every wrote, and this book is full of things I fully love. Especially “Paradises Lost,” which I had never read before. Four thousand people on a ship, making a six generation journey to a possibly habitable planet. One group, the “Angels,” get all religiousy and doesn't belief in the mission or the world outside the ship. All of existence is just being on the ship, doing what they are doing, seeking “bliss.” The rest of the folk are more sane than that. But what struck me as interesting is how the “religious” group more accurately mirror real world materialists who do not believe in anything outside the closed system of the material world, while the group that might be called the nonreligious are aware that their existence on the ship has its meaning from a larger unseen context that includes before the mission, after the mission, and outside the ship on a planet no one has ever seen.

I doubt that this is what LeGuin intended, but who cares? The text now exists apart from her, and that is how I read it. She frequently upends our expectations, so this flip is perfectly normal for her.

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.

I simply do not understand those reviewers who complain about wooden characters. I find the characters human, rich, and as fully developed as is reasonable to expect.

Everybody hates the ending? Why? It is a perfectly cromulent ending.

Beautiful, thought-provoking, and evocative.

Poetic enough for an adult, direct enough for a child. And I shed maybe one tear.

Difficult to rate or review, this book is very dated. I rather liked it, and I think its depiction of Diane to be more realistic than other reviewers. I might write more later; maybe not. I would not recommend it, really, except for historical interest.

The only Stephen King I have read before (and the only books by him I have ever wanted to read) are the Dark Tower books, which I absolutely love. Elevation was quite a different experience for me. It is an interesting story and I enjoyed it, but Man! it feels just like a cozy mystery.

Lohfink's Is this all there is deserves much more of a review than I can or will give it now. I am kicking myself for not having taken notes while reading, but now I just get to read it a second time! I am looking forward to that. If you are concerned with death, life, eternity, eternal life, the integrity of the Christian theological vision in the modern thought climate, and the proper care we should give to our dead (that chapter was by far the most delightful), then I highly recommend this book.

I am enjoying Shaw's world-building and character development. The central conceit, of AI systems becoming sentient, is interesting and well-done.

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.