Eric
The third of Saunders' short story collections. With each new release, his critical social parody refracts even more; many of these stories dip into the seriously absurd. Still, a lot of power here too.
Not bad, but not his best. Some of these stories feel like (inferior, and wearier) variations of similar ideas already used in previous stories. I still feel like CivilWarLand and Pastoralia are his best overall collections – though “CommComm” remains, for me, the pinnacle “just read this one” story to see what a great Saunders story is: inventive and disorienting, wicked and sharply funny, but also deeply empathetic and ultimately profound.
I don't think any graphic novel will ever over-top my love for the beautiful, hilarious, lovable, life-affirming antics of Mr. Calvin and Mr. Hobbes.
A very satisfying novel about coming of age and male-female friendship, that adds enough nerdy details about video game design and fandom to make the story interesting and believable. I especially liked how grounded it is in its settings of Boston and LA. Some really lovely scenes, and I thought Marx was a beautifully drawn character.
Similar to Station Eleven, I enjoyed Sea of Tranquility's setup more than the full story. I really liked the first 3 parts, but as these various mysterious things started to be explained I was less impressed.
I love this. Have had it for years, and turn back to it again and again. Well-drawn, wild, all-over-the-place and yet cohesive in story and gloomy, you're-fucked mood.
Pretty good, real easy read, focusing on one little moment in an Ivy-League-dropout brother and sister's lives.
The beginning was very intriguing, some parts are very funny, and the “world” the author created for the book is great. But the story started dragging for me the longer it went on, and the “Deus ex machina” style ending was unsatisfying.
Contains spoilers
Read this during the pandemic but wanted to re-read it after watching the movie, to see if I remembered it right.
For anyone else who's going from movie to book, the movie is more literal than the book is about what the "bad thing" is that's going on. I'm not sure which is better: being clear (in the movie) that it's a multifaceted psychological warfare attack, or being a little unsure if the characters are simply letting their imaginations run wild about what's happening "out there." (The author does rarely allude to bad things happening elsewhere, but one could argue that the narrator is unreliable.)
It's definitely far-fetched, so prepare for things to not be fully explainable. The only explicit things that cause "bad things" to happen to the family are the very loud noises, which the author admits is just American war planes flying (huh?), and the tick bite, which -- is the author telling us that an enemy state released enough poison ticks across Long Island that both Archie and Danny's wife would both be bit and have their teeth fall out?
Really the book is about how unprepared most first-world people are for any broad disruption to their ways of life, and how pathetic they are in the face of it. At this, the author is both effective and proven correct by the COVID years.
"Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that."
"Some people started to realize they'd had a naive faith in the system."
Such a new reading experience for me. If you forego (or have missed) the hype, and are just beginning to jump into “real life”-mode, this might address a lot of issues you've been confused or hurt by – and that confirmation is important.
The book that makes you happy to have gone to college.
It's been a number of years since this book was first published, and I still think it is excellent. Just as relevant now as ever (if not more so), and a very straightforward, sharply written, illuminating (and even very entertaining) first-person essay on trying to live like most Americans do: as unskilled laborers in the lower rungs of America's service industries. A decent amount of research footnotes the story to better inform readers. Most pleasing is that the author avoided writing this book as an anthem or a guilt-trip: she's never self-righteous about her assignment and she claims up front that she's not going “all the way” – in other words, she knows that temporarily acting like she has to live on minimum wage is a far cry from truly having to your whole life. Overall there's a lot to like here, and at about 200 pages, it's a quick, satisfying read.
Technically children's lit but every bit as engaging and meaningful as much adult fiction. Wonderful, memorable stories with a grand sweep of anti-church sentiment (the institution more than the belief). Good stuff.
It's okay. Tend to give the guy a break because he's not by trade “an author.” But kind of tortuous story paralleling the advertising world with the Stanley Milgram punishment-experiments of the mid-20th c.
I appreciate that, despite the hacky title, this book is quite literally the opposite of a “get rich quick” scheme. Gives very specific practical advice about all the aspects of personal finance: picking good checking and savings accounts, good credit cards and the importance of paying them off every month, taking full advantage of your company's 401(k), setting up a personal Roth IRA and contributing a hundred or 2 to it every month so later in life its compounded interest will be huge, and how (and why) to diversify your investments and minimize fees, taxes and penalties on them. Definitely recommend to all 20-somethings.
I remember this from junior high school being very good. I reread it early in college actually and still really liked it.
The system is good, this book is okay.
Part I “The Preparation” is your standard throw-away lead-in stuff about why anyone should track/journal and Ryder's origin story.
Part II “The System” is where all the good stuff is, about how to actually bullet journal.
Part III “The Practice” gets pretty life-coachy about goal setting, stoicism, wabi sabi, finding meaning, acknowledging mortality, etc.
Part IV “The Art” offers some tips to non-beginners about how to optimize things.
Overall I'd say if you just want to get a solid grasp on HOW to bullet journal, you don't need this book. Just read a blog post on how to make Tasks, Events, and Notes and use the Daily, Monthly, and Future Logs, and Index. I actually think Rachel Miller's book “Dot Journaling” does a better job explaining it than Ryder himself does here.
If instead you want to read a self-help book that tells you a bunch different ways how starting a bullet journal is the key to a better life, then you'll like this book.
Love this. Rather than diffuse his opinions into his trademark absurdist fiction, here Saunders collects a series of straight-up essays critiquing today's society in the U.S. and around the world. Seriously, seriously recommended!
A pretty good novel, but this doesn't justify the mega-love people my age seem to have for Mr. Chabon. Maybe I started with the wrong book, but he didn't wow me like I was expecting.
Did not finish. It was okay, but I got up to chapter 7 (of 10) and realized that each successive story was barely different from every story that preceded it (“Stardew Valley” was the only outlier).
The book is more like a collection of unrelated articles, which makes sense since the author was a journalist for Kotaku at the time.
Epic. The pinnacle of graphic novel achievement thus far. Hundreds of pages of crisp, beautiful, innovative graphics telling a simple story of a loser's life damn near second-by-second. Visually stunning.
Pretty good, considering I honestly thought it was about hunting and fishing before I read it. Another book about love, from a female perspective.
Great primer on the basics of how to write in PHP. This author has released other books that go beyond what's covered in this book, so non-beginners could probably skip this one and go for those. For beginners, this book explains the concepts and applications of PHP in a way that is very clear and well-paced; I came away fully equipped to build basic PHP/MySQL-powered websites.
I would say an almost must-read for high schoolers and college kids just starting to wonder if society isn't worth dropping out of. Very thoughtful while remaining very accessible and easy-reading. A landmark.