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.

Obvious, but it's Tolstoy so it's good.

I enjoyed and benefited from this book very much, and I think you would, too. Unfortunately, I managed to lose my notes and the full review, and now I just can't re-create it. Sorry. But read the book; give it to your friends. America and the world will be a better place if you do.

I gave four stars rather than five because of the easiness with which all possible emotional problems were solved (coming out should always go that smoothly!), but I can forgive than in such a short story. I enjoyed it very much, and the art fit perfectly.

Walton's writing is as stunning in this as in its predecessor. She is amazingly adept at expanding the original text, adding a modern concern with psychology, while never giving the feeling that she is doing violence to the feel of the ancient text.

Her neo-pagan and anti-Christian intrusions are annoying at time (does it simply never occur to her that my Celtic pagan ancestors gave up their old gods so easily and willingly for a reason?), but that annoyance is easily forgiven for the sake of the beauty of her writing and the majesterial authority of her vision. (Yes, I just wrote “the majesterial authority of her vision” and I mean it.) Her insights into the inner thoughts and feelings of the people she writes about make me willing to cut her some slack for her comment about the old gods' supposed “charity.” “Charity” is precisely the last word that would come to mind for me.

I love Walton's retelling of the Mabinogion and recommend it for anybody who loves old stories, human psychology, the real ancient Celts as well as the misty and mystical “Celtic twilight,” beauty, the Matter of Britain, or a haunting and engaging tale.

Strangely, I have never actually read these four books from beginning to end. I have owned them, given them, lent them, recommended them, discussed them, but never just read them. So now I am beginning to rectify that mistake.

This first book of the tetralogy is every bit as wonderful as I knew it to be. A great story, beautifully told, it is faithful enough to the original to be deeply satisfying. Walton does add a pronounced anti-Christian message which is not found in the original, and the addition is annoying, but not enough to be more than a passing nuisance. Otherwise, I love this book. I appreciate that Walton did not emasculate the story, the character, or the culture. The Masculine energy is represented well, even though her preference seems to be for the Feminine. She is to be commended for balancing the two so very well.

I loved it. A magical book done pretty much right. Beagle deserves his status as best-fantasy-author-that-you-think-everybody-should-know-about-and-love-but-really-it-seems-nobody-has-ever-heard-of-him-and-how-weird-is-that-?.

I do object to the attempt to materialize and de-mystify the whole thing (one deity says to another “Remember, we aren't real.”). But stories don't matter if they aren't true, if we are always distancing ourselves from them to remind ourselves, “This isn't true, don't forget.” Adam and Eve is meaningful only if it is taken to be true. King Arthur is relevant only if true. Yes, it is quite possible to understand–with the part of my brain that drives a car and goes shopping–that dragons aren't real, and I know that if I went back in a time machine 6000 years I would not see a man named Adam and a woman named Eve anywhere, but if the story isn't real in a meaningful way, it is just meaningless. I feel that way about the deities and especially the deity who is a main character in this book. When Beagle reminded me, via dialogue, that they were not real, it made the whole book harder to enter into.

But other than that, which is a complaint I make against many other authors–especially writers about myth and Bible criticism–I loved this book.

This book, the first by Miéville that I have read, reached into my mind and my guts and grabbed me in a way few books have. I have found myself driving and walking around my own city and suddenly seized by a frisson of vertigo, of uncertainty as to where I was. While trying to turn left at a rather odd intersection, in a lane which (you would have to see it to know what I mean) has always felt neither here nor there, I had a brief moment of panic. All because of The City and the City.

I don't mind; I'm not complaining. It is quite marvelous to find myself thrust into such an amazing and mind-bending book. And besides, when the fireworks are over, I am still left looking at my own city in a wholly new way, seeing it divided–we don't see them, they don't see us–as indeed it is and has always been.

Very funny (if you catch it) and surreal, this book demanded my attention and would not let go. The author weaves together “real” fiction, Native American mythology (a quiltwork of borrowed ideas), movie tropes, and an ideosynchratic world-view which is charming and fun, and and which hints at hidden wisdom.

José does an amazing job of depicting, realistically and wide-encompassing, Istak's struggles with his Christian Faith. It would have been so easy for the author to have simplified the struggle, most likely in favor or a facile and expected rejection. That he did not speaks highly of his experience as a human observing himself and other humans. And that is all I ask for from an author.

I like the uncertainties and ambiguities Reid allows in her book, apparently not feeling the need to force the reader into absolute judgments. The event that serves as the fulcrum of the story, the night in the store, is not a clear-cut only-one-thing-you-can-say-about-it case of racism. The white characters are pretty sad, but not monsters. The black characters are presented much more favorably, as is to be expected, but are not without their flaws and ... well, Emira is rather sad herself. Such a Fun Age is an important picture of the kind of interaction that happens every day in this country. I hope I can learn from it.

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.

The whole series made me cry. In a good way.

Hitchens is to atheist science-ists what C. S. Lewis is to American Evangelical Christians.

There; I got it out of my system. I've been wanting to write that sentence for a long time, but never had an excuse.

I read this book and pretty much hated it. As I have done so often in the past, I tried reading one of the “new atheists” in the hopes of finding calm, dispassionate, unemotional discourse. Instead, I find petulance and nastiness take over, just like when I read any kind of fundamentalist, whether it be Christian, Islamic, liberal, feminist, American exceptionalist, or whatever. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, and Hitchens is as fundamentalist as they come.

Here is the biggest problem: Given the author and subject, the book practically writes itself. I don't think he is capable of putting himself into another person's mind and seeing the world from any perspective but his own narrow fundamentalism. If I had made up some details, I could have written a near word-for-word parody of the book without having even read it.

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.

The author does not disappoint. (I don't think she would even know how to disappoint me.) Addison does a very good job of crafting a story in a world I love, without making it a sequel to a story about a character I love even more, and drawing me in to this part of the world and this character as much as she did the first time round in “The Goblin Emperor.” Most impressive was the way she graciously refused to provide "fan service" at the end. If I had gotten the ending I really wanted -- at least a kiss with hopes of many more to come -- I would have felt cheated and cheapened. “Goblin Emperor” became my new favorite book as soon as I read it, and this one fits very happily with it.

I recommend this book to relatively open-minded people who simply have no point of contact with the idea of being transgender. Like me. I don't identify in any way at all, and so it is good to see the world through someone else's eyes. And though fictional, George's experiences sound like the snippets I have heard from adults talking about themselves as children.

I enjoyed this book very much. Often, when a book promises the sort of adventure this one promises, the results turn out thin and disappointing. But Andrews did not let me down. He delivered. There was a message to it, of course, but I never felt hit over the head by that message. Mostly I was dragged along, willingly and happily, on an amazing adventure.

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.

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 decided to give this four stars because it somehow managed to interest me and keep me reading in spite of being the dullest book I have read in a year, so the author deserves kudos. Purporting by its frame of introduction and appendix to be a lightly disguised work of nonfiction, The Riddle of the Sands is a plea for England to be more careful to guard her North Sea shores from a possible naval invasion by Germany. I really liked the main character's change from whiny and useless socialite to tough and capable sailor and spy. I did not enjoy the endless wandering and wondering, nor do I care much for military tactics. But Childers did such a great job of putting me in the boat with Caruthers and Davies that I could smell the ocean and feel the waves. I could see the tide going out and the sand emerging from under the waves. I felt the storms and got a tiny bit sea sick at one point. The plot was dull and the point outdated and meaningless, but what a great job of telling the story! I enjoyed it in spite of everything it had going against it.

Beautiful art work in the service of a fun but overly serious hit-you-over-the-head allegory. I prefer my morals to serve the story rather than the other way around.

Sadly, I was planning my review entirely around certain quotations from the book. Unfortunately I have turned the book in and can no longer follow my plan. And woe is me–the drop-down menu with the bookshelf selection won't go away so I can't see what I am typing, as that box occludes much of the review-entry box. Anyway, I will simply write this one quotation to sum up what would have been my review:

“Happiness is death.”

Beautiful and dreadfully pertinent.

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.