Ed Kay

This is a real 5* book. Makes me feel like I have to go back through all of my Goodreads reviews and knock everything else down a star just to make things fair! It's an epic tale told in incredible style and I highly recommend it. My only complaints would be about certain annoying characters, but that's just another facet of the genius of this book: because the characters are so well drawn they leap off the page and they can't help but be who they are and do what they do. July's moping - while utterly aggravating - is just a reflection of who he is, his inability to communicate, his fear of women. I was also pretty distraught at the death of little Janey who I'd hoped would be around for a long time. She was a shining light for the 30 pages she got. McMurtry - like the wild west itself - does not play favourites. Good people die horrible deaths, while evil ones get to live. That's just the way it is. Gus understands that, I wish I had even a small amount of this guy's tolerance and stoicism. What a legend. This book is going to stay with me for a long time.

I haven't read a Grisham since the early days of The Firm and The Client. I remember taut, sharply written thrillers that pulled you through with excitement and drama. So when my flatmate left this lying around - the sequel to another riveting page-turner A Time To Kill - I looked forward to reacquainting myself.

How disappointing. This was a tedious, badly written, overlong, predictable mess. What a shame! Next time I'm going to check a few reviews before casually assuming a classic author is still at the height of his powers.

I found this overlong and far too pleased with itself, but my primary annoyance with the whole thing was the weird and distracting authorial voice. It's all narrated first person - even the sections that are describing what the other characters are thinking. Perhaps among the amazing skills Pilgrim constantly alludes to though rarely demonstrates is telepathy? Not to mention the fact he also describes in perfect authorial detail exactly how the bad guy set up the crime despite repeatedly pointing out that he was so clever and hidden that no one knows anything about him and that he's a ghost... I found it SO JARRING.

The author - as is pointed out in the eager full page ‘summary' at the start, and at the end a nauseating 3 page acknowledgements, smug ‘note' AND sycophantic Richard and Judy ‘interview' - was a screenwriter, so presumably he's writing from the perspective of the camera. Where in a film the camera can cut to another scene with other characters, off he goes, describing everything, but not as a dispassionate authorial voice. No, he's still the main character! How about some third person Terry? Didn't they teach it at scriptwriting school? Or - gasp - more than one first-person narrator?

And what classic movies has he had a part in? Vertical Limit with Chris O'Donnell, one of the most awful and unrealistic films ever made.

That's not even to mention that the whole murder investigation in the middle of the novel is based on the knowledge of the time of death of the victim because “his cellphone was in his pocket and the clock stopped when he smashed onto the rocks.” Oh yeah, those modern cellphones with the ANALOGUE CLOCK FACES that stop when they get smashed.

This probably deserves 3* but the aggravation these factors caused (where were the editors?!) have driven me to dock one additional star as a stupid tax.

The verse was beautiful - never read any ‘alliterative' poetry before and really liked it. But the subject is so dull. Lots of swiping and swishing of swords and blasting and bleeding of mail and men, not much else besides. Started strong with the Ogre at St Michael's Mount but went downhill from there.

Solid thriller, not a bad candidate for my ongoing quest to find a Reacher replacement (Parker still my #1 in that regard).

However, they say imitation is a form of flattery, but I can totally understand why Lee Child is pissed at Baldacci.

Sure, create a new character - make him an Army policeman, maybe he's big and clever - but calling him John, making him also like coffee, and favour the headbutt in confrontations, and be a crack sniper, and have an ‘internal clock', and have a military father and brother, and calling him ‘Puller'... It moves beyond similar to an almost replica.

Puller isn't a drifter and seems to actually have a house and possessions - his focus is also more scientific (forensic training) and technical (he loves the guns) - but these unique traits seem to be overwhelmed by everything that's copied.

It also serves to point out more that Puller isn't Reacher, and made me miss Child's sparse, blunt style (which initially I found hilarious but now find quite nicely echoes Reacher's own methodical and no nonsense attitude) even more.

I guess I'll be waiting a while longer then (or at least until September when the new Reacher is out)...

Ploughed through about 40% of this before deciding to call it a day. The narration is all over the place. Paragraphs will start telling one story, then we're in the present, then back in the past at another story, and no clear connection as to why one thing led to another. We keep getting told we'll find things out, but don't. The narrator keeps insisting how consequential OWEN MEANY is, but it's asserted rather than evident in the story. OWEN MEANY IS MAINLY ANNOYING and everything is so tediously directionless. Maybe it's going somewhere (peeking at other reviews maybe something major will happen later in the book) but I just don't care enough to find out.

Having said that there were a few occasions where I laughed out loud, so there is humour in here. Plus I liked the character of Dan who just seemed like a very decent fellow.

I hate not finishing books but time is short and there has to be something more enjoyable out there, than this.

I enjoyed book one, started to lose interest by book two, but thought I should plough on with the final act just to find out what happens. Goodreads star ratings imply this is the best of the trilogy, but I was not impressed. I'm not sure it was necessarily any worse or better than any of the other books, I think I've just had enough of Diana and Matthew's fervent kissing and brooding glances, and all the secret keeping. I started it in a bad mood and was apoplectic by the end.

Spoiler laden ranting starts here.

STUPID MAGIC SYSTEM - It's made abundantly clear on multiple occasions that Diana is a very special witch and as such cannot do spells - and yet, every time she thinks about doing magic she says something dumb like "I still think magic would be faster – so long as I can figure out what spell to use" YOU CAN'T USE SPELLS DIANA! In these occasions, she ends up not doing any magic, when it would be useful. - The corollary of this is that the way she can do magic - again, which was made abundantly clear in book f***ing two - is to just 'wish' or 'want' or 'desire' something, and it happens. Of course, this happens for stupid and pointless things, like rearranging coats when she wants to go to sleep, or floating up the stairs when she's rushing to see Jack, or opening a locked door - but never when it would actually be useful or helpful i.e. all the times she's trying to think of spells, plus other times like when she wants to get off a boat in Venice and it's slippery and she can't "figure out a solution". How about you fly, like you did about 3 pages ago for no reason? I hate these kinds of badly thought out magic systems. They always do this - magical solutions mentioned in passing for utterly pointless things and then totally absent when problems arise. - For example, getting the Ashmolean book. At what point in the library did she think of - duuur - maybe just "wanting" to have the book in her hand?!! NEVER! Can't she just apparate it into her hand, from home? If not - perhaps the summoning magic only works at short distances - surely she could do it when she's actually in the library itself? No! Of course not. Here are the amazing plans that these apparent Yale professor geniuses and thousand year old vampires come up with: 1. Send a request in a vacuum tube - in the middle of the night, when no one is working, and therefore no one will be at the other end to open the vacuum tube and go find the book. This not only doesn't work, but they sit around for two f***ing hours waiting for it to work, before deciding that possibly it hasn't 2. Doing a little group spell with salt and hand holding and reciting words (reminder - you can't do spells, Diana!). After doing the ritual and it doesn't work they then decide to sit around for another hour, I don't know, to see if it beds in a bit?!! 3. Ask the firedrake to 'sniff it out', like a dog. - The end result of Diana only thinking about spells and then never doing magic is that we're reading a book about a super powerful witch who has been prophesied for generations - there are paintings of her in London, everyone knows her, she's the saviour of witchdom - but who does nothing magical. Nothing magical of interest from a story perspective, anyway. Surely one of the best things about supernatural books is enjoying watching characters with special skills doing something special. Three whole books - 1,000 pages - and she does nothing of any consequence except right at the end. What's the point? - Finally, for 95% of the books magic has no consequence, it's all free, who cares, magic this, magic that, there are no rules to how much can be done... Oh no, suddenly we need it to be difficult because after Diana has taken an age to 'build' a spell to kill Knox (again, can't she just "will" it rather than making up a stupid rhyme?) - slowly enough for him to have noticed, by the way, but rather than counteract it he just stands there goading her and getting increasingly worried - it's all too easy, we need her to be exhausted so that there is now peril when she goes to fight Benjamin, so now we get the whole "Magic, like any resource, is not infinite in its supply" and she's super tired. So now she doesn't float up the stairs, she just runs, and when she gets face to face with Benjamin... That's right, she magics him to death as well. LOL. So not that tired, after all, I guess? So the concept of restriction is introduced right at the end - and then totally ignored.OTHER RANDOM STUPID PLOTTING THAT DROVE ME CRAZY - The sudden description of Diana's photographic memory that has never been mentioned in two and a half books - and when it is, she's complaining how her photographic memory is "failing" to work. Which doesn't really seem to be a facet of a photographic memory. You either look at something and remember it, or you don't. - Chris, the devilish but human best friend scientist dude, says at one point: "I'm a scientist. I'm trained to suspend disbelief and remain open-minded until something is disproved." THIS IS NOT THE WAY SCIENCE WORKS. In fact, it's the total opposite. You're supposed to not believe until the evidence is presented. Sounds like this 'genius' Chris probably also believes in the Loch Ness Monster, fairies at the bottom of his garden and Russell's teapot. - Not only does Chris not know how science works but this idiot's character USP is that he loves nicknames. There's one scene in the lab with him and his team and I was lost within 2 pages because 8 people are all introduced with their real names, and then given nicknames, and then I'm struggling to understand who the hell anyone is for 5 pages before I gave up caring and it really didn't make any difference because the whole 30 page chapter was a waste of time anyway. - Miriam calls Matthew - a vampire, who doesn't sleep - at 3am and Diana panics, knowing for sure it must be an emergency because it's so early. I'm sure Matthew makes and receives all sorts of calls throughout the night that Diana is unaware of, because she's sleeping and he is not! - Whilst trying to get the book, Diana has a totally weird and implausible reaction to the idea of releasing Corra in the library. The act of releasing her familiar is apparently some kind of 'heavy' magic that will mean "the last remaining links to my life as a scholar would dissolve". This just doesn't make any sense. She timewalked back to the 16th century FFS, she's a witch, she's been learning and coming to terms with being a witch for the best part of 3 books, but apparently this is a step too far. It's just ridiculous nonsense. - Also, this firedrake now apparently speaks, and is actually really mad about being enslaved to Diana... Hold on a minute, isn't Corra her 'familiar'? Aren't they bound together in magical harmony, or some kind of weird symbiotic relationship? No, apparently not, Diana seems to be holding her hostage, and Corra has really been wanting to leave this whole time. Does this apply to Granny Goggins's (or whatever she's called) 'shadow' from 16th century London? Is this 'shadow' also a disgruntled slave? - All the farting about in the library (waiting 2 hours for the vacuum tube to work, waiting another hour for the spell to work) is suddenly critical because when they get out they've been gone for over 5 hours and Gallowglass has been milling around outside for all that time waiting to tell them that Matthew is kidnapped! "hich is so urgent, and yet, then they travel to Sept Tours, and then to Venice, and Poland, and mill around - so maybe that 5 hours was not that important, after all? By the time they rescue him Matthew had been tortured for weeks. - After going to the Congregation and getting them to agree to Matthew's rescue, Diana sends a clever cryptic text message to Hamish with the code "QGA" in case anyone was monitoring their communications. But who would want to do that? Someone who shouldn't know that the rescue might go ahead, presumably, who is Benjamin. But... don't they suspect that Benjamin working with Gerbert and Domenico, so if they're doing military texts it can only to be hiding information from them... BUT THEY ARE IN THE CONGREGATION - THEY WERE PART OF THE VOTE! So they already know! So why have a whole clever message system in the first place? I suspect so that we could have a whole page of similarly dumb text messages all with allusions to chess pieces... Oh, hold on, sure enough 6 pages later here is Diana actually acknowledging that "Gerbert might already have warned Knox that I had won the vote" so even she knew it was stupid, but did it anyway. - Arriving at the place where Benjamin is holding Matthew, the vampires go off to find and kill the baddie vampires who are surrounding the compound. It takes them an hour to kill them all. We're racing against time, but this took an hour. Then they suggest there are just as many stationed inside but Baldwin doesn't seem worried. Cool, it'll just take another hour to kill them, I guess (and then they are never mentioned again, were they even there?) - These mega brains from Oxford and Harvard and Yale - plus the group of scientists they've wrangled in from Chris's class, one of whom is like a computer scientist or something (not a biologist) because it's specifically pointed out they want people who have unique and crazy ways of looking at the data - have all of the creature DNA but did not think at any point that it might be interesting to compare them with each other? Surely the most basic first step that anyone would ever think of? They're supposedly trying to work out what links daemons, vampires, witches and humans so wouldn't a comparison of the DNA be a good place to start? Like, surely anyone you asked who knew nothing about genetics would say that as their only idea. But no. These crazy nicknamed fools are too clever and have to wait for Diana to suggest it, so that the reveal occurs nicely at the end of the stupid book. - 500 pages in and we have to have 20 page description of the labour of the twins and the subsequent christening? Was this really necessary?!

FINAL SCORE

I gave this 2* originally but writing all of this down has infuriated me further so now I give it 1*

As an English Lit graduate should have read this well before now. Of course heard amazing things but still expected to be unmoved by it. Well, I wasn't. I laughed, I cried, and what more is there?

I don't doubt that those critics hailing the author as “essential” and “authentic” are right, because I can recognise his unique and bold storytelling voice. However, that doesn't mean I like it. I can look at a beautifully rendered painting and not feel moved by it.

And many of these stories left me baffled, or just disinterested in the squalid lives he was describing. “Time and Again” stands out with a clever narrative, but the rest are unmemorable.

Perhaps most damning is the fact it took me 5 months to get through the book, as I could never manage more than two stories at a time, and never felt inclined to pick it up for a while afterwards....

So. Boring. Unlike the first book which constantly unfolds with new characters and revelations, this one takes 200 pages for something to happen and another 200 for people to start making progress understanding it. In the meantime we read, and reread, that the characters involved in three separate investigations have so many questions and just don't get it. “Blomkvist puzzled over these questions and then made himself coffee and a sandwich”. Ugh.

Having heard so many great things about Sophie's World, I thought I'd ease myself into Gaardner's work with A Christmas Mystery. However, this tactic almost backfired as in the more miserable moments of trawling through this trite and tedious tale I considered never purchasing any of his books again!

I do feel slightly churlish and something of a scrooge being so unforgiving about a book that seeks to reinvigorate the Christmas story with passion, wonder and joy, but the sad truth is that it is as hollow and repetitive as baubles on a Christmas tree.

This is a mystery in the loosest sense of the word, lacking in any suspense or tension. The characters are one-dimensional, capable only of repeating the same lines again and again (and again!); the story is equally repetitive, conveying just as little. The whole package resembles an empty box wrapped in pretty paper - arousing hope and excitement but leaving you with a hollow feeling of disappointment.

I am not even sure if it would work as a children's story, to be read as an advent book, since the vague efforts Gaardner makes to link the tale in with ancient geography and religion are likely to confuse.

The story is redeemed only by the few aphorisms of real wisdom which make rare appearances in the otherwise rattly text - and of course the insistence that the true message of Christmas is peace. Even a Grich like me cannot argue with that.

Obviously any account of the horrors of the holocaust is so tragic and moving as to demand nothing short of 5* which I certainly give the first half of this book. This account is all the more humbling and astonishing due to the matter-of-fact narration. It's almost impossible to imagine living in conditions like this, let alone surviving it. Perhaps our minds just don't want to imagine it, and resist. I suppose every survivor story is a mixture of luck and tenacity and Frankl's is no different. There is certainly a lot to learn from these account, if nothing more than giving one gratitude for how easy and wonderful our lives are, in comparison to how bad they could be.

This edition had two further parts which went into greater detail about Frankl's resulting psychotherapeutic methods called ‘logotherapy'. I was not particularly interested in any of this and it was quite a demanding read, and it's only because of this that the whole book gets marked down to an average of 3*.

I picked this up in a store and glanced at a couple of pages which looked interesting and useful, so bought this for my Kindle. Unfortunately, within the first couple of pages the author made clear that this was a ‘spiritual' (aka woo-woo) book, and that I'd have to get on board with connecting to the Source Energy (i.e. God) in order to fully appreciate the advice and direction she was about to impart. There was some sneering about how she used to be such a hateful atheist and how changing her life has given her belief in the all powerful - at which point I felt my hackles rise, and I read the rest of the book with rolling eyes.

Although you'd have to be pretty far gone to read a lot of Sincero's assertions without scepticism. For example:

When you learn to consciously master the energetic realm, believe in the not yet seen, and stay in your highest frequency, you harness your innate power to create the reality you desire.

Conversely, when you show up disappointed or angry or guilty or oblivious instead of being grateful, you're at a lower frequency and thereby less connected to Source Energy and in a less powerful state to manifest good feeling things and experiences into your life. So that's all fabulous and great, but here's where the whole gratitude thing gets really cool. There are lots of ways to feel good and raise your frequency and get closer to Source Energy, but with gratitude, you're actually expending positive energy by sending out thanks, which makes positive energy reflect back to you—every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This makes the manifesting process even more powerful.

Money is currency and currency is energy. As we've discussed, we live in a Universe that is vibrating with energy. Our Universe is abundant, and everything you desire is here, in this moment, waiting for you to shift your perception and your energy and receive it. Money included... Money is energy like anything else, and when you're operating at a high frequency with no resistance to it, and take right action, you can manifest the money you desire.

As British philosophical writer and self-help pioneer, James Allen, states in the quote that opens this chapter, “Mind is the master power that moulds and makes, -and Man is Mind. . . .”—we are the very thinking substance that was used to create us. Hello?! How major is that?!

Meanwhile, even though arrogance and conceit (which are different from self-love and confidence, BTW) are part of the Ego, they're not, as I later learned, the whole dealio.

This display of astonishing brilliance didn't just splat down into being-ness by random, dumb luck, it was thought up.

And whoever you are, puhleeze, stop saying how pathetic you are at making decisions.

‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.' – Eleanor Roosevelt; activist, feminist, superhero, longest-serving First Lady of the United States evah

Meditation, otherwise known as sitting still and thinking about nothing...

...when we meditate, we practice getting into The Vortex and connecting to Source Energy

[meditation] raises our frequency [and] ... opens us up to receive unlimited information and ideas

Meditating is about receiving information from The Universe

Finished in one short sitting and sobbing my eyes out. Clever, heartfelt, poignant. Patrick Ness perfectly expresses the voices of young adults and their struggles with the “big questions” of life without being too simplistic or cliche or patronising. The characters are always slightly flawed and don't always do the right thing, which is what makes them so heart-wrenchingly real. These observations also allude to the Chaos Walking trilogy, which I loved, and which made me pick this up as I know there's a movie in the works. I can understand why: big themes, powerful scenes, allegorical fairy tales, magic and monsters all in perfect balance. Brilliant.

Ugh. I read The Da Vinci Code years ago and enjoyed it immensely: the fast pace, tight plotting and clever marriage of the thriller genre with conspiracy theory made it a compelling read. Of course, the characterisation and dialogue and writing were awful, but it was a great page-turner.

This one was just dreadful. The writing was worse than I remember. Every single noun comes with a primary school adjective (for example - not actually from the book! - “the pretty lady watched the tall man walk down the dark corridor”) until you're going tum-te-tum-te-tum in your head and start losing your mind. Buildings are “massive”, cliffs are always “sheer” and there are no libraries or houses or shelves that contain books, just “tomes”.

I probably noticed this more because the plot is a lot thinner, there is very little symbology for Langdon (and his “eidetic memory”) to interpret and I worked out the ‘twist' quite early on.

I did enjoy the fact that the book is very up to date, referencing some modern cultural debates (Catholic crimes, the rise of the New Atheists, creationism vs evolution, existential threats, AI), but since these were represented without any kind of nuance - more storybook simplifications - this wasn't enough to drag my review beyond 2 stars.

It's amazing that so many people have given this book 5 stars and can describe it with gushing abandon. While it is in no way a turkey, neither does it deserve to be given such unrestricted praise.

Some reviewers have suggested that if you find this boring then you just don't ‘get it' or that you should stick with Dan Brown, but this implies that Strange & Norrell is a difficult read, or has hidden depths, or has something to ‘get'... and none of these are true. Unfortunately, while I can recognise Clarke's great achievement in producing such a hefty manuscript and her obvious gift for writing uncomplicated prose, sadly, there is little else to praise. Somewhere in amongst all the incidental events and happenings there is a really good story struggling to assert itself. Clarke really deserved some brave editors to give the book a plot and strong characterisation to bring her vision and imagination to life.

But there are too many inconsistencies - Strange creates torrents of rain to hinder the French army but then is completely perplexed as to how to put out a fire at a farmhouse; the books in the library at Hurtfew are scattered and two magicians proceed with a long, manual search in the dark to find one volume, and don't consider using a spell to locate it. Equally, there are too many pages describing situations and events that go nowhere and achieve nothing.

Many reviewers have complained of the footnotes detracting from reading the main text. I found that they gave away the main plot line within the first few pages (which characters would side with others, how relationships would progress) and, given that this is all the plot consisted of, left very little to be surprised by.

In some ways, these footnotes are far more entertaining and contain glimpses of Clarke's wonderful fairy-tale story-telling abilities: when she restricts her word count!

There are things to admire about this work, but ultimately I was uninterested, disconnected, frustrated and bored. Characters are one-dimensional, plot is wafer thin, comparisons to Dickens are misguided and Harry Potter has far more craft. Clarke and her publishers have pulled off an astounding magic trick to conceal something so weightless and insubstantial in such a bulging tome... and to persuade so many people to believe it is a tautly written and engaging masterpiece!

I feel slightly churlish giving such an incredibly intricate and well written book so few stars, but unfortunately, I just didn't enjoy it all that much. There were too many characters introduced so slowly and in such detail I had forgotten who many of them were by the time they reappeared, and I spent a lot of time hoping for some kind of recap so I could once again get back on track with what was going on.

Having started this while in New Zealand, it was fun trying to imagine the modern town of Hokitika reduced to such squalor and frenetic activity, like the antipodean version of the wild west. Catton certainly has a brilliant command of psychology and behaviour, imbuing all of her characters with unique and complex motivations. But the only one I really cared about was Staines, and the love story with him and Anna is certainly the highlight of the book.

There are many good reviews elsewhere on Goodreads which elaborate on all the clever structural and astrological tricks that are employed throughout the novel, but most of them went over my head. It's not a great mystery, it's certainly not a page turner, and it's at least 300 pages too long. But I was still mightily impressed by it, while remaining mostly bored.

So many names, to go with all the races and peoples and legends and languages and countries and cities and histories, that they all start to blur into one random character string and you forget who everyone is supposed to be. And sooooo loooooong. But I guess that comes with the territory.

Thought I was a fantasy fan, but perhaps not the sweeping epics. I was bored by LOTR, I was bored by this for much of the time. Horrified to discover that this is part one of a trilogy - and that trilogy is only one of a set of NINE sequences about the Riftwars. You're very welcome to it.

Having said all that, I can't deny I was swept up at times, and despite the tedium I found I did care and even though most of it was entirely formulaic and predictable, I was still happy when “things turned out alright in the end”.

I love this book. One one level it's a simple - and simply written - story of a young magician battling against an evil force, but this is no wishy washy Harry Potter cartoon. Instead, we also get profound commentary on pride, ambition and self knowledge. The hero, Ged, is complicated, and flawed. His fight is not only external, but internal, and he is changed by his adventures.

Le Guin's world is beautifully drawn and cleverly imagined. There is an integrity to the magic here that is absent from many other fantasy novels. I find it incredibly frustrating reading about characters who use magic in certain circumstances but not others, with no real explanation as to why (Potter, Strange & Norrel), other than it suits the plot. There is none of that here. Magic is powerful, and consequential, and should not be deployed at a whim. This not only drives the plot but also provides a philosophical underpinning to the novel, akin to Spiderman's edict that with great power comes great responsibility.

Orwell's writing is just astounding. Deceptively simple, and beautiful.

His descriptions are so evocative. For example, describing the character of the street (the Rue du Coq d'Or) where his Paris lodgings were located:

Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street. It was a very narrow street - a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.

plongeur

Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered - a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man's body.

Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum wall.

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? ...From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,' he thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and - in the shape of rich men - is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart' hotels.

1984

A tragic story filled with weak, horrible people, but Updike's prose is so beautiful, hypnotic and insightful, I couldn't help but love it.

Brilliant, loved it. Totally fits the descriptions I'd read that this was a gothic thriller in the vein of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights - except it's not half as melodramatic as either of those two. No gnashing of teeth or inexplicable maladies. Superb.

Difficult to rate because while it was well written and engaging, the story is utterly horrific and brutal, so not a particularly enjoyable experience.

Great little volume wherein a master craftsman explains why and how he writes.

We begin with a “CV”: a series of vignettes from the writer's life. Snippets of memory, anecdotes and seemingly random reminiscences that offer a fascinating insight into what made Stephen King Stephen King. Plus a great deal of huffing and puffing about why writing about writing is a pain in the ass, and that just because he can do it well doesn't necessarily mean he can or wants to explain to others how to do it.

Then he goes on to do exactly that, simply and carefully, but thoroughly.

First up, the “Toolbox”: a brief primer on grammar, vocabulary and style. Then to the meat of the matter, “On Writing” itself. How you put your toolbox to use and craft a story that people want to read. Suffice it to say, he makes it sound very simple.

One thing that stood out, and amused me a little, was his discussion of plotting. He proudly expounds on how his stories evolve organically according to wherever the characters take him. To me, this is the only wishy washy part of the whole book, and since I HATE his endings (despite, or because of, loving 99.9% of the rest of his lengthy novels) it explained quite a lot.

Finally he ends with a short and brutal story of near death and horrific recovery - except this isn't a fiction, it's his real life. During the writing of this book he was run down while out for his daily constitutional, and this chapter reveals how writing brought him back to life.

Finishing with a neat example of how to edit a first draft, as well as a reading list that would take you a lifetime to get through, it's a perfect, neat and brilliant summary of a writer's life and motivations.

Inspiring.

This is where the annoying stuff has started to override the enchantment. It was fun for a while but by halfway through I was pretty sick of these two aimless main characters who start off with plans and then do anything else other than execute their plan, all the while having stupid arguments and then making up with kisses and fervent “I love you”s. These books could have been waaaay shorter.

Specifically I hate non-consequential magic systems (i.e. magic is ‘free' and therefore can be used to do anything, at any time) since every book I've ever read that has them (Strange and Norrell, Harry Potter etc) has the problem of lots of pointless magic being done for fun and then all of a sudden there's no magic whenever a problem arises. There's no consistency, other than that which is demanded by the plot. It's dumb. This series suffers from the same problem.

Meanwhile we have time travel that seems to work concurrently, it doesn't make any sense. If you can go anywhere in the past or future, then surely when you come back, you can go back to the moment you left, as if you hadn't gone at all? No, in this world, when you go back in the past, for every day you spend there a day passes in “your” time. So when Diana's father visits Elizabethan England for 2 weeks he can't stay longer because his wife is expecting him - he is going to arrive 2 weeks after he left! Huh? When Diana and Matthew return they have been gone 7 months. Meanwhile the things they do only affect history on the same day in their “real” time that they did it in the past? What? None of it makes sense.

No doubt I'll wade through the third book to see how it all ends but I can't say I'm looking forward to it.