Ben Saufley

Entertaining. Felt a bit more “standard mystery/thriller” than The Girl on the Train, but it was well told and had me wondering through most of the book.

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates's [b:Between the World and Me 25489625 Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451435027s/25489625.jpg 44848425] last year, a book that obviously draws a lot of inspiration from this one (including, I think, its title?). I'd recommend this book to anyone. It's a very short read, and it's very insightful. On top of that, while it's always worth noting that the abused have no obligation to consider the feelings of their abuser, Baldwin's words here are sympathetic and perhaps forgiving. I want to say more but everything I write just sounds dumb. Just read it, it's short.

3.5 if I could. Definitely not as good as the first. It dragged a lot through the middle. Still a lot of interesting stuff and it was fun both to revisit the characters and to see what happened after the events of the first book. But the story arc didn't have the same pull as the first, and it had the disadvantage of lacking the thrill of discovery from the first book. Can't rediscover Rakhat. It's worth reading, especially if you enjoyed the first, but it's definitely not on the level of the first book, in terms of characters, plot, storytelling, and introspection.

I don't have much to say about this other than that I really enjoyed it. At times Grossman's style of writing and especially the way he discusses magic, its effects, and the various denizens of the magical world reminded me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is (in my eyes) a very positive comparison.

It was a lot of fun to read, but also... I'm not an expert on books or literature, but it wasn't beach reading. It wasn't a challenge to get through like so much esteemed “literature,” but it is all the same very well-written and thought-provoking. I'm pretty excited to pick up The Magician King.

I would never have read this book if it had been presented in what is apparently the American branding which is renamed “Midnight Riot” and features a low-pixel explosion and a silhouetted figure who looks like Vinnie Jones (the protagonist is mixed race and presents as black) and looks just all-around terrible. But I came across the paperback, with the intriguing map illustration and the “Rivers of London” name, and that made me seek out the audiobook (presented as Midnight Riot by Audible US).

It's a fun story, combining elements of American Gods and other magic stories in a detective/crime structure. I'll probably read the next one at some point. So I'm glad I saw the paperback, and not that terrible American cover, first.

Fun. I think this one was ruined a bit by listening to it rather than reading it – the reader wasn't bad, but was very much present in my mind, meaning I couldn't entirely lose myself in the story. It took a weird turn in the middle, not so much plot-wise but storytelling-wise. But it's interesting enough that I may try to pick up the next at some point.

It is one more YA novel where I didn't get a very good feel for the world – the author was too caught up in a few (pretty standard) characters and telling the general plot. I'd like to know more about the world, the way it feels, looks, operates. I think authors can get lost in worldbuilding and that's never good, but YA novels too often forego setting the stage, establishing the setting. This is one of those novels. Maybe now that we've established some characters etc, she'll build out the world a bit more in the next one?

Intriguing premise kind of fizzled at the end. Lots of weird over-emphasis of unimportant stuff (the detective's family, the counselor's handsomeness) that led me to believe something would come of it but really just filled space. Without spoiling anything, I'd say I'm kind of fuzzy about how the detective reached the conclusions she reached. I can't tell if some of the details that were revealed as the book progressed were red herrings or things that were supposed to provoke thought, or even imply things that I just didn't end up inferring about the protagonist.

Entertaining enough. Structured like a Poirot kind of “bottle” mystery but Spoilernot solveable with the clues presented—the eventual culprit was revealed to have motives etc that were not presented to the reader in any way ahead of time

I really liked Station Eleven. This one, I found interesting, but I'm not sure I got it. I feel like I might be too dumb to understand the subtext or the ... point? of the story. Or even why it's named The Glass Hotel.

Really enjoyed it. I think the claims of sexism were unfounded. But I am a man, so, who knows. The main female character, Julia, does go through a lot (a lot), but if anything that serves to highlight some of the worst of what women can experience in a male-dominated world. I think the same goes for some of Quentin's naïve misogyny – that's part of the story. Just because it's there doesn't mean it's being endorsed. Quentin is kind of a dick, we know this.

Anyway. Great adventure, great personality, great imagination, I really enjoyed this. Very readable as well.

A thought about the end contains vague spoilers:




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I guess I should've expected that sinking feeling as I read the ending – it'd been foreshadowed the whole time, and the last book was almost as bad, but the last book wasn't quite as bad (he still got to have a lot of what he wanted; really, the sacrifice was on Alice, not him) and I found myself swept up in the heroic adventure so when the ending came, I was disappointed. At the very least, I wanted (still want) to know what happens next. And (probably like Quentin) I'm still trying to figure out if there are any loopholes or ways to get to Fillory or the new world.

Ooh boy it gets very heavy-handed at the end. But I do appreciate how Pullman refuses to pigeonhole his characters and to wrap most things up with a tidy bow—characters who were antagonists early on show some goodness, perhaps even redeeming goodness, and not everybody gets what they want in the end. The wrap-up is full of messaging that I liked but which I suppose I wish were a bit more subtle.

Having looked through some of the other Amulet books, I feel like this series gets much better. I like this one, but it's clearly just a start, just getting its footing. It seems a little simple right now. It starts out beautifully (and tragically), but then moves to the pretty clichéd, “We have to move into this broken-down house in the middle of nowhere, kids,” thing (à la Spiderwick, Coraline, um ... lots of horror movies), and then just as it starts to pick up again, it ends.

I was also disappointed because I love Kibuishi's environments - his cities and backgrounds and such - and this book was almost entirely devoid of them. I felt like the characters were interacting in a vacuum too often.

The house robot at the end, though, is just more proof that my faith in Kibuishi is justified, and I'm going to buy book 2 very, very soon.

I guess there are no real spoilers in this but it certainly could give one expectations so I'm marking this as having spoilers.

I was hesitant after the second book, which I enjoyed but which seemed to lean a bit heavily on the conventions of the first. Also, the second and the third books are far more dark and violent than the first. As I approached the ending of Mockingjay, I became more and more curious (not just as an invested reader, but as a creative person, someone who is interested in telling stories ... wow, that all sounds silly) about how Collins was going to end the trilogy. With everything that had happened, it would take a lot to justify the whole thing.

She very, very much did it.

I'm very fascinated by this whole series being aimed at young adults, but I think there was a lot that happened in this series, a lot was said, and it ended exactly how it had to. With everything that had happened, it couldn't be a happy ending, but it would be far too easy to end the series with a simple, tragic ending. I thought she might go for a meaningless end, by simply killing Katniss and maybe everybody else. Just because of all of the preceding events. It might have been interesting, and I was preparing myself for something like that. I was not prepared for what actually happened and I'm glad, because it was perfect and not obvious.

The way Collins wrapped up this series validated everything that happened in it without trivializing any of it, and it proved that she knew what she was doing. I love Harry Potter (and yes, I know they're very different things), and I liked how Rowling ended that series but she left a lot of things that didn't set quite right. This ending seemed to fit together perfectly, partially because it had little to tie up. There was some deus ex machina, some stuff that might have seemed contrived, if there weren't precedent for it throughout the series. And all of this has elevated this series to one of my favorites of all time. We'll see if I'm just coming down from the experience of the series, or if this opinion endures. But I loved it.

Even books I'm enjoying don't often pull me in as much as I'd like these days - I find myself setting them down and not picking them up for weeks, even. But I found this in paperback recently and remembered being curious about it when I saw it in hardcover so I bought it. There are so many ways this book could have failed, building on the clichés it uses, but it didn't. I found myself engaged constantly, wondering what happened next, worrying about characters, and desperately needing to pick the book up again when I'd put it down.

I don't know. I don't really feel like analyzing it much beyond that, but I really enjoyed it. I'm going to find the second book as soon as I possibly can. And the third just came out! The final book! That's exciting

Pretty timely, obviously. Pandemic, white supremacist demagogue, etc. I enjoyed it.

Took a little while to get started. Dwelled maybe a bit too long on the politics of being a parent in an upper class community – I see why those bits were there but I feel like there was too much of it before the book established its pace and intent. But once it got going it was surprisingly interesting and well-told.

I think I only understood about 30% of this book. That's not a criticism of the book, more a caveat of my review. But it was interesting how much time was spent emphasizing how nobody could understand CODs, credit default swaps etc, and then assuming I understood it.

The overarching plot was interesting and I liked the writing style but I kept waiting for it all to click and the Big Short to be laid bare ... and then it was over. I was left with the understanding that yeah, everything they'd bet on had I guess come true and that was bad and also I must be pretty dense to have made it all the way through this book without really understanding some of the key issues.

I'd probably look them up if I were on my kindle but I listened to this on Audible. I should probably go back and fill in the gaps.

Tl;dr - probably a good book that deserved a more informed audience than me.

The writing style and the depth of the characters were about as expected, but I actually really enjoyed the story and its concepts – more than I expected. It was intriguing and didn't have me rolling my eyes nearly as often as I was afraid I might. Maybe I'm giving it four stars because my expectations began so low? Which isn't to say I expected it to be terrible – I expected to enjoy it, but more in the way one enjoys “bad television,” or similar media: largely in spite of itself. I expected it to be mindless fun, and while it certainly wasn't high-brow, it was interesting and entertaining from start to finish. I'd read another one of Child's books before I read another Dan Brown (whose books purport to be intellectually compelling).

Really middle of the road for me. Decently-written, moderately interesting/original world while still being familiar enough to hit that fantasy itch, but never really hooked me. Kind of curious to see how the stuff set up in this book plays out, so I may pick up the next one, but not right away.

There's something very Lovecraftian about the style of description of the foreign organisms, the idea that there are concepts that English has no word for, which I appreciated for a while until it was clear that I was really going to be left with no greater understanding of what the protagonist was trying to describe. The premise was intriguing, but by the end of the book nothing really seemed to have been revealed. I ended the book with almost exactly as much information as I had one third of the way in. And the style was simultaneously too robotic and too flowery? Like, robotically poetic. I dunno. I'd be curious to know more about what's going on here, but probably not enough to read two more books—I might just look on Wikipedia. And I'll probably check out the movie.

I contemplated giving this two stars, but I feel like I want to give it an extra star for effort, even if I didn't really like the result. I liked what VanderMeer was going for, but I felt like it didn't land, for me, in the end.

When I was in high school, a catholic school, I asked my religion teacher (social justice, I think, which is interesting in retrospect because of how so many Christians currently treat the concept as demonic) a question about hell: “if Satan was cast out of heaven for wanting to be greater than God, why would he make Hell a horrible place—wouldn't he want to make it the best place he could?” And the answer I got has stuck with me for twenty years, despite my agnosticism bordering on atheism: “God is the source of all goodness. No matter how good Satan would want to make Hell, Hell would remain a place out of God's light and thus devoid of any goodness.” It's compelling and, frankly, terrifying. And honestly I've never heard it discussed like that again, until one of the stories in this book. The story notes at the end also add some really interesting context to that story.

Arrival was one of my favorite movies in years, so I had to pick up this book, which features the short story it was based on. That story is very different in literary form, but just as good, and the other stories approach that same level of excellence. I especially love the last story, about a scientific advance that allows people not to see beauty and ugliness in faces. Really thought provoking. I'd definitely give it a go.

Highly recommend this collection to anyone and everyone.

In just under the wire, probably my favorite read of the year. The framing at the beginning and end of the novel may be heavy-handed but I love it and it justifies itself with all the stuff in the middle. The characters are engaging, the world Alderman builds is fascinating, and the storyline pays off—it's not just an interesting idea that fizzles out in the final pages. It never drags. It's definitely dark in places, but it wasn't totally depressing. I would highly recommend this book.

I would expect that I'd have enjoyed this more than I did. It was fun enough and relatively novel, magic and sci-fi in an interesting blend, but I found myself regularly losing interest.

The audiobook is frustrating because at least one character is clearly written as British (or whatever fantasy world equates to British here), with obvious Britishism regularly injected into the dialog—at one point they even pointedly express confusion about “the can” before realizing it means “the loo”—and yet the reader read every character with the same bland and indistinguishable American accent. For such a dynamic and colorful world, the reading was pretty blah. It may have contributed to my disinterest. It wasn't outright BAD reading but it wasn't very good either and ignoring obvious speech pattern cues is annoying.

Rowling (as Galbraith) is really a fantastic storyteller. This book is pure genre fiction, no doubt, but it's also very well executed. I particularly enjoyed this installment, in which Rowling's own convictions (many of which I share) shone through without ever seeming heavy-handed or detracting from the story.

I still really like the world Weeks has built, but I had several issues with this book:

The most glaring is that there was no real overarching plot – it's just a book to, presumably, get you from book three to the final conflict in book five. A lot of stuff happened, but as a book on its own it had no real arc. I don't hate just spending some time in this world, but when it was all over, I was left feeling a bit disappointed.

The other thing that bugged me was the overwhelming horniness of the first two thirds. You'd get a chapter of plot and then a chapter of male desire. I understand that some of this stuff served the plot to a limited extent, but the amount of breasts discussed, and the volume of women throwing themselves at men just became tiresome. It made me think of that meme about “men writing female characters” (Google it). And it was disappointing because much of the rest of the book was really fun and interesting.

The plot has still got me hooked, though, and there's one book left. I'll definitely pick it up when it drops.