Sean
Colfer is to be commended for attempting the impossible and pulling it off so well. He wrote a book which, by its style, certainly fits in with Adams's corpus, but which never gives the impression of trying to counterfeit him. Not quite as funny or heart-moving as some of the original Hitchhiker's books, it was nevertheless an enjoyable read.
I think if I had read this before Salmon of Doubt I might have been disappointed that it was not Adams himself. But Salmon, with its incompleteness and sudden ending, saddened me greatly and drove home that Adams is no more, so I was not expecting his exact voice in Another Thing.
I can't review this. Right as the father laid himself down on the ground and realized he would not be getting up again--this patch of ground was to be his death bed--my cat died. This whole depressing book ended for me personally on the worst possible note and so – my great sadness is just too big right now to talk about the book. But the book is good, but don't read it if you aren't up to it.
Donaldson continues to speak to my heart and spirit, and to amaze me. The Thomas Covenant books are some of the most clear-eyed and accurate descriptions of the the human condition I have read. It seems silly to review book # 9 out of 10, so I won't, but I will say this. The wisest man I have known, my late Bishop Dwain Houser (may he rest in peace and may his memory be eternal!) frequently taught that one of the implications of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is this: one can never know for certain, one can never be entirely sure what is best to do, but one must act anyway. I resisted this teaching and argued with him, but the older I become the more I understand how much wiser than I he was. Certainly my life as a human and particularly as a Christian human makes sense only in light of that idea. Anyway, the Covenant books are all about that, and Against all things ending brings this truth out more clearly than the previous volumes.
Donaldson is amazing; his books are a gift; my life is better because of him.
I read this and ... whatever it is that comes next. I almost enjoyed them. Unfortunately, there were two problems. One, the curious incident of the full moon rising at midnight. I actually stopped reading at that point. But worse, far far far worse, is the brutality-porn chapter in each. Goodkind just enjoyed that horror too much, and I didn't. I almost enjoyed them, but instead they wound up being on my “worst books I've ever read” list, and that is a very short list.
Weird and wonderful. Also: beautiful. I am completely in favor of giving children books that aren't neat and tidy and pretty. In other words, this book.
My new favorite book. I am, apparently, a fish with a mustache, since my co-workers, after I showed them this book and read them the page that made me fall out of my chair with laughter, all agreed that I was the fish. So I guess I'm the fish. Better than being the moose. Or the chicken.
The best compliment I can pay to this book is this: I finished it.
I was seriously tempted to close it and get on with something better by the third page. The author's decision to write the whole thing as a series of over-long run-on sentences was so annoying I felt personally insulted that he expected me to read it. And yet, as I see others have said about other books by Hamid, it was a compelling read that I eventually decided to continue with. And I'm glad I did.
The lack of conventional sentence structure, coupled with the lack of personal names (there are two names in the book, two more than there are semicolons), give the whole narrative a hazy feel, almost drugged. I don't really know if there was a reason for that decision; it was annoying, and as far as I can tell added nothing. But it was a mildly interesting experience to read it, so ... here I am. Alive in spite of the annoyance.
Since each paragraph has exactly one period, at the end, it creates a rough rhythm, the sentences go on and on, with little tiny pauses for all the commas, commas, commas, commas, all the commas, and there are lots of commas in the book, they make it feel a little choppy, and you have to keep going to find a period, it's at the end of the paragraph, and when you get there you're just tired from reading on and on past all the commas, the many commas, and even though it actually was easy enough to keep the sense of the sentence, it did become tiring to slog through it all, usually there are periods to give your mind a small break in which to regroup for the next idea snippet, but Hamid doesn't believe in periods, I think he got bit by one when he was a small child, and he's seriously terrified of semicolons, I can't even begin to imagine the trauma one must have caused him, or maybe his mother got pushed down the stairs by a semicolon when she was pregnant with him, that would explain it.
But I actually did like the book quite a bit. It was worth reading. I give it only three stars because abusive authors don't deserve more than that.
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.
I've read all four currently available volumes even though Oseman is so very intent on being all inclusive at every turn (Look! This picture has one of everything in it! There's a gay boy and a lesbian and a trans girl and .....) But the story is delightful and well told and well worth reading.
Very nice art and a confusingly-told story. It was fun enough while it lasted but I won't be reading the next volume. I just couldn't keep track of it, and I never was sure that I cared.
Beautiful and worth reading (it was written by Tolstoy, after all!) even though there was no decision to love at the end, only a resignation. Their marriage could have become a thing of beauty if they had only chosen to find a new way to love each other. This flaw was a disappointment. But I still recommend it highly to anybody who wants to peer into the human soul and see what's there.
Sweet and fun, without making me gag. I liked it, even though it is certainly not something I would likely read much of.
[I received an electronic Advance Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest review.]
You could be excused for thinking that a book about preparing for the Corona virus pandemic is perhaps a bit out of date, but back in March you might have been excused for thinking that everything would be back to normal in two weeks. Tsipursky makes a convincing case that the COVID-19 plague will be effecting us in meaningful ways for at least five more years. And even with all the disruption it has caused so far, few of us (from what I can tell) have given much serious thought to how things will continue to be different next month, let alone next year. So a book about preparing about what is yet to come is not so ridiculous as it may at first appear.
Tsipursky offers advise for individual and families on the one hand and for companies and organizations on the other. The counsels he offers will prove to be helpful not only for the current situation, but for all the long-term crises that the future will bring. He begins with what I consider the most important subject: the maladaptive ways our minds mis-process information and cause us to do dumb things that just don't help us or anybody. He goes on to talk about specific approaches that families and companies can take to make sure that they are planning for reality, not for an optimistic misguided fantasy future.
The chapter on thought fallacies is instructive and wise. I had to stop reading and hit myself when he explained about Anchoring, which is our tendency to treat the first things we learn as of permanent truth and importance, and not notice when new information comes out. I realized how I had done that very thing with the news of the novel corona virus; several weeks after the news began I realized that my thinking on the subject was already severely out of date, as I had been quietly and unintentionally ignoring news that significantly expanded or contradicted something I had already accepted as truth.
[The realization of my own fallacious thinking made me wish there were a service that would, for example, send you an email after something important has been in the news for a while and tell you about a particular fallacy you may be committing yourself. For example, “Weeks ago you heard that this disease is isolated. Have you really noticed that that is no longer true? Are you keeping up with reality or are you anchoring?”]
His advise for business is not of any particular interest to me and I will not comment on it, but his suggestions for persons and families is crucial for everybody. He gives brief but important counsel about the need to prepare adequate for such human needs as safety (ignore that wimpy “two weeks” advise you heard at the beginning of this particular crisis), connection, and exploration. I was especially impress that he mentions the need for love, which he defines as doing good for others during a pandemic or other long-term emergency.
I am glad I read this book. It will help me prepare better for the next year of this crisis, and for whatever else my future holds.
I might write a review later, but for now I will just say that I love VanderMeer's ability to write a clear and gripping story in a way that also unbalances and confuses the reader.
I cried. After that, the book got a teeny bit saccharine and “happy ending,” but that did not outweigh the honesty that brought me to tears.
I wound up very invested in Roland and Sairis, and I have high hopes for their future together, so I have to give it high marks for being engaging and riveting.
Before I review what I believe to be a useful and insightful book, I must make it clear that I have never been an Evangelical Christian. I was raised Broad- to High- Church Episcopalean, and have been a Celtic Catholic (with emphasis on the “Catholic”) for forty years. I am not Gushee's target audience, and I have spent my life looking at Evangelicals from outside, not always liking what I saw of their theology and politics. So I write this as a fellow Christian but definitely an outsider.
The author, on the other hand, is most definitely writing as an insider, to people like himself. He is not writing, “Please don't go!”, but rather “Welcome to the big world outside the Evangelical tent! Where can you do now that you are out here?”
Rather than just jumping into the here-and-now, Gushee provides the outsider (and, I suppose, most lifelong Evangelicals) with a necessary tour of the history of the movement, starting way back before it was a department of the Republican party (!), back when it was not unusual for Evangelicals to be what would now be called progressive on social issues. In line with his general attitude toward Tradition and history—it matters a lot, but the future matters even more—he does not stop there, but he spends the rest of the book offering practical ways forward by helping the reader think differently about what authentic Christianity can be and can look like.
He offers Christian Humanism as a framework upon which to build a vibrant post-Evangelical Christianity in which the Christian can feel at home by maintaining core moral values. It is these moral values, which are often at odds with the limited morality taught by Evangelicalism, which Gushee sees as the impelling force driving intelligent, loving people out of their former church hones. Values like belief in Truth as represented by science (i.e., the real world), compassion for LGBTQ+ people, hatred of systemic racism, and others.
Gushee elevates compassion and real-world concerns over rigid traditions of biblical interpretation. As the keystone of this, he suggest that no theological statement should be made which could not be made in the presence of a child being burned to death at Auschwitz. I would add: or a black man being lynched by a white mob, or a gay teen dying on the street after his Christian parents disowned him.
Gushee spends the third and final part of his book dealing with specific theological issues relating to sex, politics, and race. These discussions are, it seems to me, perhaps an addendum to the book. Having talked about his own experience and that of others, and having offered the outlines of a way forward with new ways of thinking about the meaning of the Bible and the Christian Faith, he has actually ended his thesis. “But wait! There's more!”
As a gift to the reader he offers the detailed discussions of sex, politics, and race. To the poor ex-Evangelical who has an inkling of right from wrong but no idea of how to process that idea within a Christian context—to this sad person who has fled what he or she now sees as a repressive and unrealistic, even immoral, system of thought—he says: “Look! It is possible to think about and act on these issues from a genuinely Christian perspective without rigidity, moralism, superiority, or fear of the real world.” I think his handling of these touchy matters works well. I think he would convince me, were I the one to whom he writes. I hope it is as convincing for those who need this book.
If you are an ex-Evangelical, I highly recommend After Evangelicalism, especially if you are willing to read through a bit of academic writing (the author is a professor of Christian ethics, and, sadly, it shows.) Not having been in your shoes I can not vouch for the helpfulness of his arguments, but I hope they will prove useful.
When I was the target age for this book I would have loved it. As an adult, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm glad I read it. The slightly alternative version of modern reality (with just a little bit of “small magic” thrown in) was interesting, and the adventure was believable and fun.
My appreciation of poetry is mostly theoretical. I hate to admit it, but my brain just doesn't seem to work that way. But the illustrations on this book – so beautiful! – certainly have me the ability to appreciate these poems in a deeper and more appreciative way than normal.
I loved this book as I have loved everything else I have read by the author.
I have read all the Sherlock Holmes stories, some of them twice, but that was years ago and I don't remember the details. As a person who is familiar with the source material but not that clearly, this book with its constant riffing on Doyle's work was a lot of fun. I understand that people who remember the details better than I find this book to be more annoying than delightful. I understand that, but do not share their judgment.