Willie
The only other Reacher book I've read is Persuader, so maybe that fast pace spoiled me. Also, I listened to the audiobook of this and Dick Hill's businesslike narration felt more suited to a political thriller, like something by Tom Clancy.
The pace was agonizingly slow until the very end. Internet sleuthing features heavily, replete with long, laborious explanations of how the internet works. Much of the text felt like Child was filling space to hit a particular word count. The ending was lots of fun, but it didn't make up for the tedious slog that led up to it.
The plot synopsis could make this seem like a capital-Q quirky novel, but it's really not. It's an odd premise for sure, but the book is about universal themes of loss, desire to belong, and the clumsy, often self-destructive ways we attempt to escape trauma.
I love Hutson's thoughtful and concise writing style, too. I was highlighting so many passages at first that I had to force myself to knock it off so I could enjoy the book uninterrupted.
I can't wait to re-read this.
As with The Second Coming, Niven's characterization of individual representations of the political spectrum is pretty flat – Democrats just want everyone to be happy, Republicans are seething with hateful bigotry – but that doesn't stop this from being a fun, fast-paced revenge tale, as long as you mostly side with the protagonist's politics.
I would have enjoyed this more in high school. (God smokes weed and swears? Hell yeah, dude!) Even as an atheist, I found the self-congratulatory smirking and tired takedowns of organized religion dully unoriginal. (The Catholic Church shelters pedophilic priests? Who knew?) The characters are box-checking stereotypes: the foul-mouthed black guy who tells it like it is, the soldier with PTSD who still wears his uniform and can only say “frag”, the lovable old drunks, the hooker with a heart of gold, et al.
Niven has written great, hilarious novels – I just finished chortling my way through The Amateurs – but this ain't one of ‘em. Don't pass over him, but do pass over this one.
The journalistic sleuthing necessary to assemble a volume like this is staggering. Aside from conducting his own personal interviews with essential characters from the period, Tudahl examined studio logs, work orders, and over 2000 podcasts, articles, and other interviews to nail down dates and content for each studio session. That raw data is woven with personal recollections from the relevant personnel to form a collage that contained insights and revelations I haven't found in any of the other dozen-or-so books about Prince I've read. This is one of a kind.
I listened to this as an audiobook, but even though Ron Butler narrates it perfectly, I think the print version would be superior for two reasons:
1. There are points at which the lists of venues / studios are not intertwined with story, and, if reading, I would have just skipped to the next section. Instead, I had to spend a couple minutes listening to dry information that didn't interest me.
2. The audiobook seems to be based on the hardcover edition, but the paperback edition is apparently much expanded and improved, to the point that it's almost a different book (according to reviews I've read). For that reason, I'll probably buy that version.
Terrible. Nearly every sycophantic article sounds like it was tossed off by a PR hack. “You may have thought Prince was done but baby he's back!” (Paraphrased.) Keep in mind, he's writing about albums like Emancipation and The Rainbow Children. In fact, Prince so admired his critique-free “reviews” that he hired him to write the liner notes for Emancipation.
The rest is lists of songs or lists of music-award winners, except for one massively creepy “open letter” he wrote after not receiving an invitation to Prince's birthday celebration. The tone is so suddenly, stunningly vicious that it sounds like it was scratched into the side of an ex-lover's car. Then Prince invites Jim to Paisley Park and he loves him again. Yay!
Yuck. Avoid.
What a disappointment. This is barely worthy of a blog post, let alone an entire book. Though it seems to be marketed to vegans, the first 97 (of 141) pages are devoted to explaining why vegans might be depressed by constantly experiencing how invisible their ideals are to most people. Since a vegan would already be thoroughly familiar with the roots of their “anguish,” it serves no purpose but to fill space.
Then she reveals her 10-point solution to “vystopia” and it's exactly the same stuff you've seen a million times already: exercise, good nutrition, meditation, &c. She then spends a few pages explaining how to communicate vegan values clearly. That's it. That's the book.
I would have given it two stars because maybe someone who doesn't have internet access could find it vaguely helpful, but on page 92 she attempts to draw an implicit parallel between veganism and belief in chemtrails. Grouping vegans with fringe-dwelling conspiracy theorists is not doing the animals any favors.
Garbage.
What a slog. Who would imagine international terrorism, rampant hard drug use, and a seven-page bisexual fuckfest could be so bland? The first third of the book is about our insipid lead, Victor Ward, organizing the opening of a club. Nothing else.
When the explosions finally kick in, so do Victor's incessant screaming, crying, panicking, pleading, and whimpering, along with his total confusion about every single event that occurs. Since he's our narrator, that deep haze of befuddlement is especially taxing. Ellis tries to use Victor's stupidity and limited vocabulary to comic effect a few times, but it always falls flat.
The novel attempts to satirize the superficiality and consumerism of celebrity culture the same way American Psycho did for Wall Street culture's latent sociopathy. It uses the same recurrent insertion of decade-specific brand names throughout every page, along with constant celebrity name-dropping. Glamorama retains the gruesomeness, drugs, and graphic sex of American Psycho, but none of the inventiveness, humor, or fascinating characterization.
Strayed's ego manages to outsize even the magnificent Pacific Crest Trail. She's a self-absorbed asshole who manages to use her mom's death as an excuse to spread her selfishness over everyone she knows. She survives her partial hike of the PCT only due to the amazing generosity of fellow hikers who are actually competent.
Are you wondering if she's pretty? Oh my, yes! Never mind that on the back flap she looks like someone's daffy aunt. Strayed never tires of relating the unending river of compliments she receives about her beauty and sexiness. Her appearance is a constant concern, even when she's on the verge of reaching her goal.
Maybe it shouldn't bother me so much that at one point she mentions snorting tar heroin, a task that is impossible due to tar heroin's, well, tarriness. It comes up when she tells of her brief trist with the drug while shacked up with a fellow florid-tongued dipshit in Portland, Oregon – another situation from which she ends up requiring rescue, this time by her generous ex-husband. That obvious lie makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of her tale (except her stunning beauty, of course).
She appears to think she's somehow developed spiritually or emotionally by the book's close, but it's unclear how. She seems like just as much of a thoughtless ass as she did on page one.
She writes eloquently and there must some truth throughout, for why would someone fabricate a story that makes herself look like such a dick?
Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself
A handy guide to the products and services offered by a California entertainment lawyer.
If you like paying for a book that tells a little bit of story and a whole lot about all the other great things you can buy from the same author, you'll love Rich Roll. From the shoehorned chapter about his marvelous PlantPower – “vegan” to the rest of the world – diet, to the appendix jam-packed with his Jai sports drinks and Jai eCookbook and Jai cleansing program and Jai meditation program and his wife's debut music album(?), you'll be drooling at all the money you can soon give Rich Roll.
The shame is that there's a lot of solid nutritional and training advice, but it's so thoroughly interwoven with his sales pitch that it's difficult to separate the advice from the marketing. The incessant 12-step sloganeering gets tiresome, too.
For a good memoir about ultraendurance and veganism without all the self-promotion, read Scott Jurek's Eat & Run.
I thought the weirdness of fungi would be more intriguing. More than anything, the book illustrates our vast lack of knowledge about fungi. Not for me.
I don't understand why this book exists. A man loses a book then adopts a baby and loves the baby and develops a crush on someone. I assume more occurs but I've already spent three hours on this and it's so emotionally overwrought about the dullest, most mundane occurrences – like the little girl taking dance classes and not being too great but not that bad, either – that it's unbearable to continue pretending that anything is actually happening. Scott Brick's weepy narration doesn't help, either.
I'm not familiar with the author but this reads like YA fiction. The protagonist is dully “different” in such a generic way, she's just annoying. I was so bored, I couldn't make it through the first chapter.
This was my second time reading these stories and I was so bored by the time I started the fourth one that I decided to quit.