Barry Cunningham

Quite the first novel from Zola!
I've been reading early novels from many authors complete collections of their works. Frequently the early works of famous authors are a struggle. I was pleased to find that this was engrossing from the start.
The story is perhaps a bit tawdry, but the narrator's voice is raw and compelling, his descriptions, evocative. At times I was reminded of Poe, Dostoevsky, Lovecraft, Huysmans, Tolstoy, and, of course, La Bohème.
Since the narrator is 20 years old, the over-the-top style of narration, while at times a bit irritating, did not seem out of character.

Interesting, to a point. Although Woodward offers brief judgments throughout and at the end, reading the meticulously transcribed evasions and prevarications Trump presents over and over again in their interviews, the book frequently feels more like an apologetic than insightful journalism.

Really more like 2 stars, but I gave it 3 for sentimental reasons. First started reading it when I checked it out from the library around 1960, but had to return it before I finished. Found it again in a used book store in the mid-1970s, bought it, finally finished it back then, and kind of disappointed but glad to have finished. Bought it again recently and reread it. Even less impressed this time.
The book was published just before Sputnik and the speculative science has not aged well. There is some nostalgic charm in that. But it is not especially well written. There are plot holes you could drive a story through, sideways. The cop out ending arrives before the world building really gets off the ground. Interesting only as a period curiosity.
As an aside, when I checked the book out from the library in the 6th grade, I'm sure the “Vanguard” in the title attracted me because I thought it referred to the Vanguard rocket that the U.S. used in some of its early satellite launches, and some spectacular launch failures. Wrong again 12-year old me! The Vanguard rocket was a rather small fragile beast: 3.5 feet in diameter and about 60 feet tall, it was never going to put anything much bigger than a football in orbit. Besides, in the book, it seems we're dealing with the British space program anyway.
Yeah. Never mind.

An all too concise survey of his work.
Would have liked more on his life.
Unfortunately, Robinson is remembered now, if at all, mainly for Richard Corey, which is heavily anthologized because of its shocking twist. This was just one of his many poems about fictional persons, reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
Can't say that this book helped me approach his poetry any better. It did confirm to me that it was difficult, but could be more or less understood on close reading, and that it might be a little depressing. But I think I'd figured that out already.

Of some historical importance I suppose, since it is in Volume II of the Harvard Classics.
Still, I found Epictetus to be an insufferable twit.
Oligarchs will love him because of his message that victims and slaves should meekly accept their lot. Some of us differ, but don't beg.

Some interesting ideas and a good introduction to the literature, but deeply flawed by specious reasoning throughout.
I originally tried listening to this as an audio book, but that was hopeless. It was an effective soporific, but following, analyzing, and picking apart specious philosophical writing is much more easily done by reading and annotating rather than listening, fuming, and falling asleep.
I've posted my annotations on Goodreads, so have a look at them for more specific criticisms. I'd just rant here.

Fairly lame overview of the subject. Marred by several things, including its insistence that the Gospel of Luke is history corroborated by other historians (a demonstrably false assertion), paucity of real content, and bad links at the end that attempt to open a Facebook page (presumably for the publisher's self promotion).

The first time I attempted to read this was when I was in high school over 50 years ago. Having seen many blurbs of books I was reading that called the writing Rabelaisian, I, of course, was intrigued and checked the book out from the library. I quickly skimmed some of the scatological humor near the beginning, then quickly got bogged down, bored, and returned the book to library having only read a small piece. However, I always meant to finish reading it sometime and even bought a copy in graduate school that sat on my bookshelves for over 30 years.
This year an enthusiastic Hungarian fan of Rabelais started a buddy read on Goodreads, so I signed up, figuring that if I committed to it and had somebody I might disappoint if I didn't keep up, I could get through it. The main problem reading it is that it's not all just scatology and humor. It is dense with allusions to history, Lucian, Erasmus, Roman historians, Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and Reformation inside baseball. When I was in high school, all this was completely over my head. I figured 50+ years later, being a lot more well read, it would be a lot easier. So I pulled down the Burton Raffel translation off my shelf, started in, and bounced right off. The problems were that (1) it was translated into an English that was so archaic that several words on every page broke most of the online dictionaries I could find and (2) there were not enough notes to untangle the many literary allusions in the text.
So, I finally broke down and spent the money to buy the Penguin Classics edition translated and annotated by M.A. Screech. That made all the difference. The notes allowed me to place all the allusions and track down the ones that were of interest. My reading buddy in Hungary also suggested the Mikhail Bakhtin's critical study Rabelais and His World. I still have barely gotten into Bakhtin's book, but I will probably finish it in the near future.
Overall, I was more impressed with the books than I had been in high school. They are quite complex. Much of Rabelais' humor would have been of more interest to 16th century audience. But a lot is quite universal. Parts of the books were a real slog, some because they just droned on and on beating the same dead horse, some because I felt the need to go read some story out of Lucian or the Bible for context. Other parts were delightful and poetic. Book V was the easiest to read, though it's not certain that it was even written by Rabelais, but Pantagruel's voyage seem to presage the latter parts of Gulliver's Travels.

I first read this book in the summer of 1965. Saw it beside Howl in a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue, probably Shakespeare & Co. It was delightfully iconoclastic, with overtones of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Well over my head at the time with its dense literary allusions and references to locations I hadn't experienced yet. 55 years later, more widely read and more widely traveled, it makes more sense now. Of course not all of it make sense to anyone now; there are numerous obscure autobiographical and personal allusions we may never understand.
Corso was nothing if not a master of mixed metaphors ... or a mister of maxed metaphors. Some poems make Subterranean Homesick Blues look like MacArthur Park.
It starts in San Francisco (“O anti-verdurous phallic ... “) and ends in Paris (“ ... Dollhouse of Mama War.”) with, in Ginsberg's words, “a box of crazy toys” in between.

Mostly pretentious mystification. A series of vignettes exploring different visions of time. Almost none of them seem related to any scientific conception of time of any sort. Only a few seem related to any psychological perception of time. If not for those few glimmers I rate it as 1 star.
The crude framing story of a fictionalized Einstein seems there simply to exploit his name and fame and provide a turn of the century Swiss backdrop for the vignettes.
I think the author wanted to dazzle me with taurine ordure. I was not dazzled.

Very engaging at first. But it does tend to drone on and on. Finally all the time bending mystification gets to be a bit tedious.

I have come across references to Sappho many times in my recent reading. So I finally decided to read her works to fill this gap in my reading, knowing it would not take long because so little survives.
The Delphi Classics Edition contains a 2011 Greek / English dual text translation, by Peter Russell, of all her surviving work, about 650 lines total (out of an estimated 10,000 lines she may have produced over her lifetime). That took only about an hour to read.
A couple of odes survive, some shorter pieces which may or may not be complete, and over a hundred fragments of a few words to several lines. Russell's direct translation seems closest to Sappho's voice. And, a remarkable voice it is. Ancient commentators who had access to more of her work raved.
Some fragments remind me of haiku or Ezra Pound's famous little poem about the Paris Metro.

“The stars around the wide moon lose all their shining beauty, as she illuminates the whole earth with silver.”

There are two other “translations” in the volume:
A 1907 “translation” by Bliss Carman
A 1911 “translation” by John Myers O'hara

There is the following note about the Carman “translation”:

“Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing, but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. ... “

I class these “translations” more as poetic fan fiction mostly built on fragments of her original poems.

I rate Carman's work much superior to O'hara's. Carman seems closer to the original voice of Sappho shown in Russell's more direct translation. O'hara's verse is more stilted to my ear, redolent of Edwardian poetic pretense, obfuscation, and stereotypes.

This volume could really use a short scholarly article about Sappho explaining more of what we know about her, legends about her, her work, what we know about how her work was lost, her critical assessment in antiquity, and her importance in culture. Lacking that, I suggest you at least read the Wikipedia article on Sappho to fill in that lacuna.

Delightfully snarky

Not exactly as lyrical as Madeleine Miller, or even Pat Barker, it is a hoot.
Margaret Atwood's reimagining of Penelope's life from the point of view if her and the dozen of her maids that hung after mopping up the suitors' gore. It is recounted from Hades a few thousand years later, as a delightfully snarky feminist critique of a story from a decidedly non-feminist age.

Good Basic Intro

Provides enough basic information and how-to steps to get you to break the ice and start a YouTube channel. So it is good for that.
All the tip boxes and sidebars framed in red did get to be annoying.
As well, some of the ideas for what would be cool content I found to be borderline cringeworthy. You mileage may vary.

Unexpectedly thoughtful

The author, whoever it is, is certainly well read and articulate. Not a partisan screed, the author self-identifies as a Trump apologist, albeit one with regrets.
Worth reading.

Fairly simpleminded

Despite the title.
This book does a few things well. It provides an introduction to the literature so that one can get into the subject further. It also provides some hands-on examples on the IBM Q-experience website, along with some supporting videos.
Unfortunately, it also does some things very poorly. The intended audience has not been well thought out. Several explanations, especially those involving complex dimensions and complex projective space, have been so dumbed down that even though I had the mathematical background and familiarity with the concepts I found it hard to identify what was being talked about. I can't imagine someone without a strong math background being able to make any sense out of them. The second major problem is that the hands-on material will be outdated fairly quickly. The user interface on the Q-experience website has changed enough since the book was written just over a year ago that the illustrations and videos are noticeably different from what one sees today. I expect the pace of change on the IBM website to be fairly rapid.

Imaginative

And, well written, I suppose. I found most of the stories to be too dark and unsettling for my taste.

Delightful

I fell into Mo and Meggie's world (or should I say worlds). Sort of a Harry Potter series for bibliovores.

Pleasantly enough written I suppose and mostly the characters are drawn OK.
But the main conflict in the book that the characters are fighting to overcome is that the premise is stupid. They never overcome this.
The plot comes off as a mixture of the movie Groundhog Day, Philip José Farmer's Riverworld, and John Wood Campbell's Invaders from the Infinite (probably the worst science fiction book ever written, though I have no desire to read other contenders to evaluate that claim).
Having a plot that is too twisted to be resolved, the ambiguous Capriccio-style ending strikes me as more of a simple cop-out than a bit of profundity.

Meh.
A well written page turner with plenty of action I suppose.
I had two main problems with the book.
First, I didn't find the world very convincing. A social organization into five factions as premised I find totally unbelievable. In my observation, most people want to be different in some way. Young adults especially want to rebel. Not a very stable social organization. And, what's happening in the rest of the world? The world was more interconnected even in paleolithic times.
Second, I guess I'm just too old for most YA. I just don't embarrass that easily any more and don't have the same anxieties I did 50 years ago. I don't find superficial portrayals of teen angst very engaging.

Important, but tedious

His main surviving works, “Theogony” and “Works and Days”, are unrelieved by any semblance of plot. Nevertheless, the “Theogony” is particularly important historically for its genealogy of the Greek gods around the time of Homer.

Just saw the movie.
Let's just say the comic book was not a spoiler for the movie.
While similarly themed and containing some of the same characters, the movie is not just retconned, it's wholly reimagined. It had to be to keep it to a reasonable budget.

Excellent supplement to the Lattimore translation.
Gave just 4 stars just because of the nature of the book: it is basically a set of notes that could appear as endnotes or footnotes in the book, which makes reading a bit fiddly at best.
There was some higher-level summary notes for the beginning of each Book of The Iliad, which was helpful and more engaging. Would have enjoyed a bit more of these.
For me, it was easiest to use this book if I read all the notes for each Book or section of a Book before reading in The Iliad proper to minimize the juggling of two books. Of course, I went back and looked again if questions occured to me during my reading The Iliad, but generally I found that going back and forth on a line by line basis was not necessary or more helpful.

A hilarious read. An angel falls to earth, but the story is more prosaic and more riotous than anything Milton could have imagined. It turns out that Victorian England is a special kind of hell for real fallen angels.

Trump apologetic and auto hagiography written by one of the top spin doctors formerly in Trump's Ministry of Truth. Sims makes it sound like the West Wing was a Disneyland, albeit with some palace intrigue, before his fall from grace. More slickly written than Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, it exhibits the same blend of myth and history. And, the characters are just about as nice too.
Puts Omarosa to shame.