Barry Cunningham

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.

Some of C. L. Moore's earliest stories, all but one from Weird Tales between 1933 and 1936. These hardly strike me as being science fiction anymore. We now know so much more about Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter as real places that these places in Northwest Smith's universe can seem no more that the stuff of dreams. That said, it does not really detract much from the stories, which are very much stories of dream states and epic battles fought in dreams.
I fell in love with C. L. Moore's writing years ago reading No Woman Born. The writing here is not in the same league with that, but is still engaging. In the earlier stories, I detected Lovecraftian elements: over-the-top, non-concrete descriptios of horror (and beauty); oblique hints about ancient gods and strange geometries recalling the Cthulhu Mythos. Doing a little research, I discover why. In 1935, Moore was one of a group of writers in the Weird Tales group that contributed to a round robin story in the Cthulhu Mythos titled The Challenge from Beyond, published in September, 1935 issue of Fantasy Magazine.
The stories tend to be formulaic: our anti-hero encounters one or more exquisite femme fatales in a mind-numbingly exotic locale, falls into an epic, sexually tinged dream state battle with the otherworldly being running the show, and either triumphs or escapes by dumb luck. This is not a spoiler. The end of the journey is not a suprise. There are other stories later on in the book. It is the journey that is important. We are in it for the ride. And, generally, the ride is pretty entertaining. Nothing is quite as it seems.

Another uneven collection of short stories; this one in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe.
The first couple, Great Wall of Mars and Glacial, feature characters from his later opus: Clavain, Galiana, and Felka. They provide some backstory mentioned in the later books.
Most of the rest of the tales, while set in the RS universe, are entirely peripheral to the later books. A Spy in Europa, Dilation Sleep, Grafenwalder's Beastiary, and Nightingale I found to be uncomfortably dark. Nightingale is longer, better developed, and more engrossing, but with a quite morbid twist at the end. Weather falls into the dark category too, but has the interesting feature of revealing a secret of the Conjoiner drives.
The story Galactic North itself starts not quite 200 years in the future, but finishes, leaving us hanging, somewhere near the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It recalls other of Reynolds's time numbing car chases across spacetime, but perhaps exceeds them all in scale.
The Afterword is refreshing. Reynolds is aware of and blunt about the flaws in his stories. He provides some interesting personal history of their writing and his influences.
Not a book for everybody. Had I not read most of the other Revelation Space books, thing probably would not have fit together as well and I might have rated it more like 2 stars.

It moves along at a breakneck pace, so it is engaging from that point of view. But, in the end, everybody gets killed off. Ultimately, it just seemed like a tremendous waste of time.
Started Master of Games, but gave it up about 20% of the way into it. It seemed like it was starting to head off into the weeds and I was starting not to care about the characters.

More modern fable than fairy story

Probably more than 50 years since I last read it. Clever and insightful, but much shorter than I had remembered. Still I think it probably would have lost its punch if it were longer because it would have been hard to maintain the conceit.

I've been currently reading this for nearly 50 years.
Stevens's poetry is frequently enigmatic. Hence, I keep coming back to poems over and over again, reading new meanings into it.
I still have not read it all, and when I have, it will still probably be on my Currently Reading list.

Was engaging. But maybe should have been only 3 stars. Kind of a Wizard of Oz ending where we learn the omniscient narrator was unreliable.

Enjoyed it a lot. The 4 stars is because it is really just half a book. [b:Stella Maris 60526802 Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2) Cormac McCarthy https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1658241766l/60526802.SX50.jpg 95478000] is the other half. The end is not the end. Lots of stuff unresolved. He just lifted his foot off the gas, pushed in the clutch, and is changing gears (books).McCarthy's writing style poses a few problems until you get used to it: lack of quotes (occasionally confusing, but no worse than Austen or Joyce), idiosyncratic apostrophization (contractions, foreign words), shifting stream of consciousness (a little confusing during when encountering first hallucinations, but you figure out the pattern), shifting timeline, large history of science and math info dumps (I rather enjoyed these actually since I was already familiar the subjects and there were no cringe worthy errors that I find all too common with other authors).Characters were weird but engaging. Language and view verging on poetic. There is a mystery involved, which is left hanging at the end of this volume. (Hence the “half a book” comment.) But I wonder if the mystery is not really the point, similar to the “mystery” in [b:The Brothers Karamazov 4934 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934.SX50.jpg 3393910].

Engaging and funny, but very shallow, it could be called Lifestyles of the Vain and Venal.
This is mostly a book about palace intrigue, undoubtedly spun by one of the Trump administration's spin masters for her own purposes. In her own words, The Apprentice: White House Edition. Rich in anecdotes about who said what about whom when and who elbowed their way in front of the cameras when; poor in any analysis of the policies she claims to have been vehemently defending.
There is some self-reflection, but the passages of self loathing in the book hardly seem adequate to atone for her role as an apologist for the many crimes and acts of cruelty perpetrated by the administration she represented.

An infuriating book in some ways.
A collection of early, mostly not-so-good short stories, as Pynchon makes clear in his Introduction.
A Small Rain just kind of lies there. I found it hard to give a damn about the characters.
Low-lands is really a kind of fantasy: sort of like a Behind-the-Looking-Glass view of a favorite Leonard Cohen song.
I just didn't get Entropy.
As Pynchon mentions in his Introduction, Under the Rose was lifted largely from an 1899 Baedeker's guide to Egypt for a writing seminar he was taking at Cornell. It reads like an Baedeker-obfuscated parody of John Buchan, who Pynchon also mentions in his Introduction. Anyway, it inspired me to start The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is infinitely better written, better paced, clearer, and engrossing.
But, finally, at the end, The Secret Integration was a sort of gem, a redeeming feature of this book for me. A surprise ending in more ways than one.

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.

Eye-witnesses are unreliable.
Marcus Chesney set up a test to demonstrate this where nothing was as it seemed.
But, alas, things were not as they seemed to Marcus Chesney either, and it cost him his life.
It takes Gideon Fell to unravel this web of delusion and illusion upon illusion.
Another classic John Dickson Carr puzzler.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing really new about Trump that hadn't made the news long before I made it through the wait list for this book at the library.
Omarosa may be an unreliable narrator, but even taking what she had to say at face value I was most struck by how tone deaf she was, taking so much time to tumble to what a jerk the Donald was and is. I was reminded of Upton Sinclair's famous quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Trump's show made her a celebrity and rich, so I suppose the quote would have to be modified appropriately.
Her jumping from Democrat to Trump's inner circle during the 2016 campaign, which I suppose she is trying to portray as political naivete, seems more like calculated self promotion with little in the way of moral or political compass. Her claim that she was about to quit because she was finally realizing that Trump was a jerk is most probably just her attempt to spin the fact that she was voted off the island of the White House yet again.
Reasonably well written and readable, but assessing her truthfulness would take more effort than I was willing to invest. Under the most charitable assumptions, I was not favorably impressed. Fact checking would be likely to send my already low opinion down through the floor.
Read it if you're sufficiently interested. But it could be profitably skipped otherwise.

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.

A remarkably timeless analysis of our notions of individual freedom and our obligations to each other.

Some examples are topically 19th century of course, but these are not major distractions. The analysis tends to fall apart for a modern reader though because it does not address second order effects our behavior has on others that have become critical in our time. Pollution, global warming, overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, and the power of nongovernmental organizations radically affect the lives and limit the freedom of all people, ourselves and our children.

I think that had John Stuart Mill lived in our time, he would have addressed these issues as a major part of his analysis. As it is, this book is a milestone in our human thought on liberty, and a good start on framing a discussion, but it is only a start.

Valerie Boyd's was complemented Hurston's memoir Dust Tracks on a Road well. The memoir gives Hurston's voice and vision, but maintains certain fictions about her life (e.g., her age) and has some notable lacunae, results of its time of writing, what Hurston wanted to reveal, and her publisher's ham-handed editing of an outspoken black author to make her palatable for Jim Crow America. Boyd does a good job reconciling Hurston's memoir to her real life.
The scope of Boyd's biography necessarily far exceeds that of Dust Tracks, covering Hurston's family history, her marriages, background on her friends, the Harlem Renaissance, and her later life.
A sensitive examination of the life of this unique and important American voice.

Fell in love with Ibsen when I first read this sometime during my freshman year, in 1966-67. A couple of years later in the Yale Art Museum, some friends and I came across a large portrait of Ibsen – with his large, muttonchop sideburns, he seemed impossibly cool and hip for 1969.
In the first two acts, it almost reads like a sitcom, straight out of I Love Lucy or I Married Joan. (You'll have be of a certain age to get both those references.)
But, in the end, Nora turns any comfortable expectations we had on their heads. I, for one, have to love her.
Reads just as well from my view now as it did in the 1960s foothills of the women's liberation movement.

It's not really about Trump

It is a memoir about Comey's life, education, and events that shaped him. It condenses his lifetime of thoughtful analysis of what means and takes to be an ethical leader.
Trump is the last and most egregious of several counterexamples who demonstrate how not to be an ethical leader. Others included Rudy Giuliani, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, and the Clintons.

Currently reading the Essays portion of this edition of her Complete Works. It's about 1,206 pages and I'm currently about 244 pages along.

Weird, engaging read

More of a novella than a novel really.
A well written page turner.
I'm supposing that even with all of the magic it is supposed to be a political morality tale. Not sure that it works on that level.
But the first person narrator Danielle's voice is compelling enough to make it enjoyable as simply a bizarro morsel.

Fascinating, curious, topically outdated (from the 1920s), infuriating, exasperating, insightful, and just plain stupid.