Rob
Short and sweet. Just a superhero book, basicsally, but a pretty good one. You'll enjoy it if you like the Joker and crazy people, otherwise give it a miss.
Kind of bizarrely priced at $10, short as it is. It's got Alan Moore's name on it, sure, and he does a good job, but it isn't his best work.
For my money, the highlight is the illustrations. Not of everything, really, though it's all perfectly fine – just of the Joker. Some really good work there.
I enjoyed this a lot but it is a very, very strange book. It's based conceptually on a novel that Vonnegut started and didn't like, but that story is mixed in with an introspective sort-of memoir. It's a rambling sort of book, and you should not go in expecting a tightly plotted story.
Read this to see a bunch of Vonnegut's disjointed thoughts on life and hear his anecdotes and perspectives.
Actually started this a couple days ago, but just finished it. My fourth Vonnegut, after Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night is a fictional memoir of a sort-of Nazi propagandist. Definitely an interesting read; a far cry from Cat's Cradle and only very occasionally tongue-in-cheek, which I suppose suits a subject like this one. Liked it more than S5 and Breakfast, not as much as Cat's Cradle.
A decent read. Comedians' books are frequently lackluster, and this one won't usher in a new era for them, but this was more competent than most and showcases Fey's good comedic sense.
Really enjoyed this, which I suppose isn't surprising since it was apparently very well-received upon release. I hadn't heard any of the good press, and hadn't heard of the book itself until a few days ago. I'm going to apologize in advance for sounding like I'm whoring for blurbs on the book jacket.
The prose is, for lack of a better word, dreamlike. Which I know is vague and generally unhelpful, but I'm not sure how else to describe it. For me it created distinct visualizations, which not all that many books do well. The story scratches my Alice-In-Wonderland itch, but is not the same kind of story, maybe since the protagonists know full well what is going on. Mostly the ones in the dark about the general setup, if not the details, are the extras, but the titular Circus is wondrous all the same. The story is concerned principally with the students of two magicians engaged in a contest, but the venue was front and center for me.
The main criticism I've seen is about the characterization of the protagonists. I can understand the complaint, but I can't say it bothered me. The Circus was the main attraction for me and I just didn't mind so much. What the two main characters lack in depth is more than made up for, to my mind, by the broad and colorful main cast.
Definitely recommended.
Ridiculous, clever, fun, and the perfect length. Much longer and it would have worn out its welcome, but it's just right as-is.
Shirley Jackson's final novel. Surreal and... Let's call it Northern gothic? Brief but haunting. Plot turns mostly predictable.
Enjoyed the read, prose could be better. Strangely, a whole bunch of typographical errors; not sure if they are exclusive to the Kindle version I read or not. Good worldbuilding, not crazy about the ending.
Pretty solid start to a sci-fi series under the name S.A. Corey, which is a pseudonym for collaboration between Daniel Abraham (The Long Price Quartet, Dagger and Coin) and Ty Jenks (George R.R. Martin's assistant). If you require “hard” sci-fi in the sense that the science is accurate, look elsewhere – that's not what they're aiming for. Personally I don't care about that.
Enjoyed this a good bit. A little slow to get started – at 50 pages it takes off.
One generally knows what to expect from a Discworld novel, and Snuff is no exception: fantasy, humor, a smattering of social commentary. This is a Vimes book, generally my favorite type of Discworld read, and I enjoyed this one a lot. Recommended, as usual, for Discworld fans.
Mostly just okay. The premise is annoyingly cliché. Unexpected ending. More books are expected to follow, I believe.
Still a bit of fun pulp, but with more problems.
Problem 1: Authors have always liked to dot their work with references to things they like. Jim Butcher likes aikido, for example, so he made a secondary character an expert. Good, fine. Aaronovitch lacks self-restraint, however, and he's not so much dotted his work as upended the entire bucket on it. His preference is jazz, and its role is both more prominent and more ridiculous. It's a central part of the plot in ways it has no business being. Jazz featured a bit in the previous installment, and if a bit heavy-handed was fine as character background. He's gone far overboard this time, though. He also likes to show off – not just his knowledge of jazz standards, but of particular versions of them. It's downright masturbatory and it takes me out of the story.
Problem 2: Sex scenes. There are quite a lot, and they're simultaneously overly explicit and profoundly unsexy. If you must have them, you should probably avoid taking the worst of all worlds. Every time he started one, I'd think “oh god, he's trying this again.” It also appears to be important to Aaronovitch that his protagonist be a sexual Superman. It reeks of insecurity and, again, takes me out of the story.
Problem 3: Implausibility. At least once I was utterly unable to suspend my disbelief that characters would act as they did, and – you guessed it – boom, out of the story again.
It's fun enough if you're willing to overlook all these issues, but a literary award winner this is not. I've not decided whether to continue with the series.
Pulp, but really fun pulp. Aaronovitch will inevitably draw comparisons to Butcher's Dresden Files series, and for good reason as their premises and style are pretty similar. This is set in London instead of Chicago and things are both less structured and less established, as Aaronovitch's protagonist is a neophyte and an actual cop, rather than an experienced wizard with a history. Definitely doesn't go the trashier route a la Kim Harrison, but is not an especially brave or groundbreaking work.
This is a book with a pretty specific audience. It's nonfiction, about punctuation – not grammar, not usage generally, but punctuation. It's basically an ode to the stickler. It's pretty short, at a hair over 200 pages, which is for the best. If it went on much longer you wouldn't want to continue.
Each chapter is about a specific punctuation mark, or occasionally two (colon and semicolon), covering the rules about when and how to use each mark. But it's presented mostly in the form of funny essays, so it's not like reading a textbook. (You'd never try to read Strunk and White cover to cover... would you?) You'll also get little asides like the etymology of “O'” in Irish names.
Worth noting that the author is British and writes based on British English, with the occasional note about how it's done in American English, so you'll want to make sure you don't observe the wrong lessons for your side of the pond.
Liked this a lot, I'm almost surprised how much. It's the (fictional) memoir of a (fictional) Presbyterian minister who claims to have fallen down a chasm in Scotland down to a river, and to have been rescued by the Devil himself. That's the book jacket pitch, and of course it's the main event, but I was a bit surprised at what a small portion of the book it is. Well-drawn characters and of course the question asked by Mack's fictional contemporaries is the question posed to the reader: Is Mack mad, lying, or somehow telling the truth?
Quite readable and oddly compelling.
This book was originally published as The Psychology, rather than Design, of Everyday Things. It's pretty heavy on the psychology side, and I was hoping for more on the design side.
Where the author does talk about design principles, it does a good job of abstracting the details into principles, and it does a good job of stripping away the things that don't matter. It's just not really the book I thought and hoped it would be.
The only Stephenson worth reading, and even so its desperate attempts to be hip will irritate you the whole way through. Some good stuff buried underneath it, though.
Exceptional. I had forgotten how good the Dresden Files could be, and didn't start this for a few days after its release. That was a mistake.
Recommended very effusively by a college friend. I read it and I think it's... fine! I liked it well enough, I'm not sure I see what got him so excited about the series. I like that the heroine is just a smart lady, and not secretly a princess or a sorceress or anything like that.
Much like all the other Vorkosigan books, which is to say fun sci-fi pulp. Bujold is, as always, great at throwing out an insane amount of chaos upfront and managing to wrap it all up by the end. Didn't care for the beginning so much; it felt sloppily done as-is, and I'd have preferred to see the events leading up to it rather than beginning in medias res. It matters little for the remainder of the book, which was satisfying.
Minor annoyance: a lot of authors seem to feel obliged to implement faux-Japan at some point in their careers and this is Bujold's turn. Fortunately it's limited to modes of address (-san, -sama, -sensei) and doesn't attempt to mimic Japanese culture and so the annoyance remains minor, although one wonders why the author bothers as it has no bearing whatsoever on anything else including the planet's culture.
