Rob
My second Chandler, after The Big Sleep. Not bad at all, pleasantly twisty and appropriately Marlowe.
I started reading this book to figure out how to deal with a problematic colleague. That situation has since resolved itself, so I'm unable to speak directly to the effectiveness of the advice. I like a lot of the ideas; some of them might be hard to get others to buy into.
One thing that did bother me a bit: they used example situations to demonstrate that their techniques work, but... those situations and conversations are made up wholesale. Sometimes they were persuasive, and you can see how a conversation might go that way, but other times, those conversations can seem unrealistic and overly pat.
Takes a while to get going, ends up quite good. I don't read a lot of harder sci-fi; it was a little hard to get past some of the made-up terminology since it's never really explained, but you learn to roll with it. Ended up enjoying it, but I did consider abandoning it once or twice. By the end there is some very cool stuff going on, plotwise.
Pretty fun. Dave doesn't really blaze any new comedic ground, but he has great timing.
Incredible in all the ways that lesser books promise and to which they never live up.
I would never have picked this up of my own accord. I vaguely recall reading The Bean Trees, also by Kingsolver in freshman English in high school, and I recall virtually nothing else about it and until now had not returned to the author. I asked on Goodreads for a recommendation and this is one of the ones I received. It turns out to have been a tremendous recommendation that occupies a rare five-star spot on my ratings list.
Written long after its setting, this is a fictional account of a missionary family in the Eisenhower era, on mission in a remote village in the Congo. The center of the family is preacher Nathan Price, who brings with him a take-no-prisoners brand of religion to a village that has little use for it. But the story is told from five perspectives, and Nathan is not among them – the voices are those of his wife, Orleanna, and his four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. Each has a distinct voice that reads very differently from the others. The book covers their time in the village, for which the family is woefully unprepared, and eventually traces the aftermath for each member of the family. Along the way the local politics of the time are covered from an inside perspective.
It's just under 600 pages, and every one of them is worth it. It took me a while to get through, but it was very much worth doing. I asked for a “book for consequence” with good prose and it delivered in spades. The writing floored me from the first pages. Can't recommend this one enough.
I read this a while ago. Realized I only had digital stuff on my Goodreads shelves.
Astro City is kind of a “what if superheroes, but day to day” comic. I'm not much of a comics guy and even less of a superhero guy, but this one hits me just right. Not every issue is about the superheroes; some are about the people who live in the same world as they do.
There are almost as many superhero genre deconstructions as there are superhero series these days, but this is one of the gems.
Not a bad read, exactly, but doesn't really answer its own central question, or even attempt to.
I've considered this book on two levels, and it's bad on both of them. Initially this book was recommended to me as a handbook for managing one's managers, at a time when I was dissatisfied with my boss. (Thankfully, I've changed jobs since then.) It doesn't seem to be that, containing virtually no actionable advice. So I recalibrated my expectations.
It seems to be meant as business humor. Unfortunately, the author is not very funny. Decent jokes are few and far between, and mostly the reader wades through smarmy little wisecracks about expense accounts and the like. It's bland pap by an author with nothing to say for middle managers to feel smug about themselves.
I'm not sure how the author has had several books published. Don't waste your time.
Volume 1 of Chew, a silly but very fun comic about a cop who can get all sorts of information from eating things. Often very unpleasant things.
This isn't going to change your life, but I had a lot of fun with it. Worth a read for kicks.
I've wanted to read David Foster Wallace for a while now, ever since I read a course syllabus he wrote in a set of famous authors' essays posted in... Slate? The Atlantic? Something like that. He's most famous for Infinite Jest, of course, but I'm a little intimidated by that. I finally found someone who's actually read him and asked how to get started. They recommended either Infinite Jest (if I wanted fiction) or this (if I didn't).
This is a collection of seven essays, widely varied in topic and tone. Included, among others, are some experiential travelogues, musings on David Lynch's film career, and literary metacriticism. The travelogues remind me a bit of a better-written David Sedaris not written by a fuckup; the others have more to do with exploring the point of other creative expressions. Consistent throughout is DFW's smart writing.
I enjoyed it quite a bit. DFW has a couple other essay collections, and I will probably seek them out. Nota bene: DFW has a penchant for, shall we say, uncommon word choices. I enjoyed it because (a) I rarely encounter words with which I'm not acquainted, and kind of like it when I do, because I am a dork; and (b) I was reading an ebook version and thus had a dictionary a highlight away. Not everyone will share both of these traits. Favorite new word: “otiose.”
Still thinking this over, not quite sure what I think of it. This rating and review might change.
Stylistically and thematically, pretty recognizable as Vonnegut despite being pretty early in his career. I don't quite know what else to say about it except that it's pretty bleak. I wasn't as into this as some of his later work.
Released as a seven-issue, self-contained comic book series, about a teenage girl in the modern day who claims to kill giants. Difficult to expand much on that without spoilers. This book will upset you.
Nothing about this is well-done on a technical level, but I still found it effective. The writing is... okay, but there's very little payoff until the end. The art is not great and sometimes make it hard to tell what's going on.
The creators have pre- and post-issue comic book conversations between each other. These are terrible in both their art and prose and will make you hate them both.
Pretty dark for YA. Not a fan of this one, for several reasons. Not a lot happening, for one thing; I know it's YA, and I know it's the first in a series, but there's just not much story in it. Poor characterization, oversimplistic writing; I'm conscious that YA isn't going to be the same as something aimed at a more adult audience, but I've seen it done better by the YA authors I loved growing up. I'm idly curious about the true nature of the Tripods – though I have my guesses after book 1 – but not enough to keep reading the series.
This is the second trade paperback for Atomic Robo, a wonderful comic about a robot designed and built by Nikola Tesla. I'm not much of a comics reader and even less of a comics buyer, but this series won me over with one of its Free Comic Book Day releases and I'm slowly working my way through the TPBs. This one is entirely stories set in World War II, with Robo working for the Allies, and is consequently a bit darker and less whimsical.
I enjoyed it, but the stories didnt seem to be as well-constructed, not that they were anything complicated in the first TPB. But it feels a bit slapdash – for example, you're introduced to characters as if you're supposed to already know who they are, and while you can put two and two together easily, it doesn't feel elegantly done at all. They're fun characters, though, especially the Scottish commando. Weirdly, Robo feels borderline incompetent in this installment, constantly getting himself into trouble.
There are some extra quickie stories in the back, but they're even more unplotted. A few moments of fun but those bits are otherwise forgettable.
Despite the problems, it's still Atomic Robo and I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Hopefully #3 will be a bit more cohesive.
A middling fun airships-and-piracy story, as written by a four year old with a box of crayons.
The broad outlines of the story are fine if utterly unremarkable. The details are handled with the finesse of a drunk Parkinson's patient – backstory is presented over 90% of the way through the book just in time to become critically important, which is about the level of craftsmanship you can expect from Wooding. People don't say things, they grin them, or bellow them, or some other verb picked from Bartlett's Familiar Fantasy Tropes. Everyone acts exactly as you'd expect them to, according to the designs on the cardboard from which they're cut.
Not the worst thing around. I've certainly read worse. But not particularly worth your time, attention, or money.
