Sean

I love it!! I am not in the right place to review this book now, and I think reviewing the last book of a long series is a bit silly (if you have already read the first six, you don't need my review to help you decide whether or not to read the last one). But I will make this one comment now and perhaps will come back later to flesh it out. When the book ends, stop reading. If you choose to read the tacked-on endings (the Epilogue especially but also the Coda) do so realizing that you have already finished the book. What follows is fanfic (which was written by the author, yeah, but still not part of the actual story). If you choose to go on to the Epilogue, make sure you settle within yourself that you are done with the book. Then proceed.

Lo leí en español que no intiendo bien, pero a mí este libro es casi hipnótico, las palabras y los dibujos.

Very enjoyable. The ligne claire style of art is nice and easy to read, and the drawings are often quite delightful. The comparisons with Tintin are obvious, but Julius Chancer is in no way a knock-off of Tintin, as I have read in a few reviews, but simply another fine representative of the same genre.

Fun story with (most important to me) easy to follow art. Almost better than Tintin because it has a bit more “serious” tone. I like the humor and silliness of Tintin, but Rainbow Orchid is perhaps more engrossing without as much.

The review I wrote for my library's weekly Facebook book review.

You may or may not be familiar with the hit podcast “Welcome to Night Vale” (WTNV). You may or may not know who Cecil and Carlos are, and you may or may not understand the picture that accompanies this review. You may or may not have read the first WTNV novel, which is conveniently titled “Welcome to Night Vale.” But none of that matters. If you like the surreal and the bizarre, if you have a dark and wry sense of humor, if you don't mind being baffled just a little bit, and if (and this is the big one) if you care about the contentious issues of our day like the relationship (conflict?) between religion and science, then have I got a book for you!

When Nilanjana Sikdar is given an assignment by her boss, Night Vale's top scientist Carlos (the one with perfect hair), to find out what mysterious force is interfering with his attempts to discover what is going on with the house that doesn't exist, her investigation takes her to the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God, where she meets Daryl. Sweet, weird, very religious Daryl. Nilanjana is not particularly sweet, not weird (except for being an outsider in Night Vale), and definitely not religious. As they learn to deal with each other as people, lovers, even friends, they are forced radically to alter their attitudes toward the other's world views. And they are forced to work together to save the world from being devoured.

Although authors Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have not written the perfect exploration of the intersection of religion and science, they have made a good faith effort, and have produced an engrossing, entertaining, and thought-provoking book. Their main sympathies seem pretty obviously in the Science camp, but they look with clear eyes at the role each mode of thought plays in human life, considering the strength and weakness of each. But forget all that; really, this is just a fun, creepy, and exciting book that will make you think and just might make you glad you are alive.

The CCB is an easy-to-read translation that disappeared before my eyes. What I mean is this: with most Bible translations, I am frequently noticing their word choices and translation decisions, but with this, I didn't. Except for a very few spots, I was able to read it without being reminded that I was reading a translation at all. I appreciated that smoothness very much. It is also one the very few Bibles with commentary where I found the comments to be actually helpful and interesting. I recommend this for anybody who loves the Bible or who wants to see what it is all about.

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!

I was a bit reluctant to read it, since the term “centering prayer” leaves a bit of a taste in my mouth, but I am very glad I opened this book. It is actually one of the better presentations of what the Good News is all about. I want to give a copy to all my friends, Christian or otherwise. Keating understands the mind-blowing bigness of God's mercy.

A fun read. It was better because I had seen the movie and fallen in love with the magnificence of the visuals and thereby developed a caring for the characters, but I would have enjoyed the book on its own.

I highly recommend this book to people like me: curious and interested, intelligent (somewhat) and reasonably well-educated, but not an astrophysicist or anything like one. My only gripe is that other reviews had me expecting something more marvelous; this is good but not marvelous.

Also, I find Tyson's philosophy to be sweet but naïve. The whole, “The universe is so big, we must be nice to each other,” as much as I agree with it, is unmoving. Since according to the materialist philosophy the author and non-theists in general espouse, there is no ultimate meaning to existence itself, no purpose to life, the universe, or anything, there is no authority or reason for choosing a way of going through life (being nice or nasty, for instance) other than what one happens to prefer. So Tyson prefers a nice approach. I am very glad he does. But I don't know why, if he is right about the meaninglessness of everything, anybody else should care.

Anyway, I'm being a philosophical grouch. Don't let my grouchiness spoil a good book for you. Read it. Enjoy it. Learn from it. See the world with bigger eyes, or see a bigger world with the same old eyes.

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 started reading this book by accident, and I am so glad I did. I had no idea Levithan could write such beautiful prose, but there are passages in Two Boys Kissing that are just poetry. (I do not have a copy of the book with me right now, so I can not quote any, but I would love to.)

The book is structured interestingly, being narrated in a first person plural omniscient voice, “We” being a cloud of men who died of AIDS before the disease was really studied and workable treatments were found. I am old enough that I know some of those men in the “We” who narrate. One of them is my friend and house mate Kent, who committed suicide by starvation when his HIV diagnosis was changed to full-blown AIDS. He didn't want to endure the misery of it, and he didn't want to deal with the humiliation of the health care system he would have been subjected to as a poor person. Other friends of mine who are part of that voice are persons I lost track of briefly (really not long at all), and on calling or hunting them up, found out they had sickened suddenly and died.

Although my story is not like any of the characters in the book, Levithan makes them so immediate and so real that I can identify with each. Some reviewers complain that the characters were not fully developed, but I think maybe they just wanted a different book than the one the author actually wrote. He's not giving us action or adventure, or even much character development, but rather a series of extended vignettes in which we may see ourselves, or perhaps not.

I am grateful for the beauty of the words and for the chance to hear my own generation speaking to a younger one, the kids on whose behalf I have been as quietly vocal as I have been, so that they would be born and grow up in a different environment than I did, than did the men who died and who went on to narrate this book.

Be strong, pink-haired boys and kissing boys. I hope you won't need quite as much strength just to stay alive as some of us did, so you can use your strength to flourish. It's still not all the way good, as this book testifies, but IT GETS BETTER, so hang in there, don't jump, have hope. I'm rooting for you.

Does just what it should.

I enjoyed the story enough to keep reading. The difficulty levels of all these books by Ardit are carefully set; they do their job precisely.

I really like the art and the narrative, and the double narration. I just about wanted to cry a few times, and especially in the illustrated story, there were times when I could not put the book down. I'm not at all sure how I feel about the ending, so I will leave this with three stars while I puzzle it out. But no matter how many stars I give it, I highly recommend this book to anybody who might like this sort of thing.

I know very little about this time and place, but the little I have thought about it has been from the Christian martyrs' perspective. This was an interesting look at it through other eyes.

This book was a lot of fun, and I only almost solved the mystery before Dick did. I'll be reading the next Hardesty mystery. There is some “language” and sex, but not shocking.

An amazing confluence of words and wordlessness, print and pictures, truth and fiction and meta-fiction. I love this book. – Perhaps a real review will follow later, but for now, I leave it at this.

One can never be sure, one can never be certain, but one must decide and act anyway.

It is hard to imagine a writer of fiction who struggles more authentically and helpfully with the crises of being human better than Donaldson. I am so glad I decided to continue reading the Last Chronicles. I was nervous, thinking “How can he improve upon perfection?” but he has not disappointed.

Utterly delightful. I often don't like retellings of classic children's stories, because it is the adults who are bored of the real thing, not the children. But this is different. Witty and fun, it would have appealed to me enormously when I was the target age. And it still does.

I have my own personal Vonnegut story. When I was in high school, for most of those four years I spent lunch period alone in the library (the school had a very nice library indeed). It was easier than any of the other options. One year, while there, I read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Every book he had published. I hated each one. I would finish a book, think to myself, “Thank God that's over,” return it to the shelf, and take the next one in line. I hated every one. I read every one.

I do not remember having read Cat's Cradle, but I know I did. I know I hated it.

HOW could I have hated this book? It makes no sense to me at all that I could ever have hated it. Cat's Cradle was written just for me. Strange and bizarre without being gratuitously perverse, it walks the fine line between comedy (I didn't laugh one time yet I would still call it hilarious) and satire and surrealism and science fiction. Don't tell me that line is a geometric impossibility; the book walks it anyway.

Also, if I weren't committed to being a Christian, I would become a Bokononist. Maybe I already am one and just don't quite know it.

I'm glad I read Beneath and Above. They were a lot of fun and suspenseful without over-doing it. I cared about the characters, and I think I would like to meet Coop. Yes, I am sure I would.

I already love Mark Twain (of course), but this collection of his speeches before various groups makes him even more interesting than his writings do. I'm not sure I would want to pay him to speak to my group – he would likely insult us, as he did the well-bred New England descendants of Mayflower pilgrims. “Scathing” is a fun word, unless you are in the audience when it is being pointed at you. Clemens is amazing; read this and you will realize that even more than you already do.

I think that when I was the target audience for these books I would have liked but not loved them. I would happily recommend them to a child of the appropriate age.

Very much like Tintin, as was obvious just from the cover, but quite enjoyable for its own sake. I like the art style (I am almost visually illiterate, and the ligne claire style is easy for me to read) and the story, so far, is interesting. I will definitely be reading parts 2 and 3.

I am shelving this as “historical fiction,” but Quicksilver oddly satisfies me in the same way an epic fantasy or science fiction book would. It took me out of myself and enchanted me.

I appreciate Stephenson's ability to put the reader into the word of long ago without making it feel strained and pretentious, either with archaisms or painful modernisms. The anachronistic touches did not feel out of place, but rather like a “dynamic equivalence” translation from one language into another.