Rob
I liked the broad outlines of this one, but I have a number of gripes. Most immediately, it's overwritten, in that "trying too hard" way some authors have of trying to be too clever in their prose. It takes me out of the story, but either it got better as it went on, or I stopped caring as much about it. Probably more importantly, it was too predictable by half, and I anticipated basically every major story beat.
I think the book is at its best in its first act or two, when everything is pleasantly unsettling and before more details are revealed. Although I could still predict where we were going, the horror — like all horror — is much more effective when exactly what's happening isn't spelled out for you.
As advertised, pretty much. Batman gets his start – not an origin story, or about his training, but his start on the streets – as told by Frank Miller.
Just fine for what it is. It's well done. The most interesting part of Batman stories other than Wayne's personal demons has always been the larger-than-life villains, though – especially the Joker – and we don't have that here, really. The name is dropped late, but this is mostly about Batman's introduction, and reception by the city and a mostly corrupt police department. In fact, this is as much or more about Jim Gordon as Batman.
Not that Year One isn't well-made or worth reading, but it may or may not be what you're interested in when you decide “Hey, I want to read a Batman story.”
This was... fine? I'm not 100% sure I get the fuss.
It definitely isn't quite what I expected. Batman retired years ago, and Gotham has fallen into decay. His work is being systematically undone. So Batman suits up again, even at his age.
Didn't much care for the art. Writing was fine but not amazing, which surprised me because this is supposed to be one of Frank Miller's great contributions to the medium.
Addison is really great. This is a direct follow-up to the last book, Witness For The Dead, with the same protagonist. I liked this more than that one, but not as much as The Goblin Emperor. I think part of why I liked it more than Witness is that I had a better idea of what I was getting into, whereas I thought Witness would be closer than it was to Goblin Emperor. The story doesn't have a lot of twists and turns, though, it's pretty straightforward.
This is by far the most approachable book on formal ethics I've ever seen. While Schur's writing occasionally gets a little too cute, he does a really good job — I assume, not being a philosophy expert — laying out the major schools of thought and their key players and their strengths and weaknesses. Specifically, he covers virtue ethics, consequential ism, and deontology, and highlights a few related schools of thought like existentialism and contractualism and objectivism. (He doesn't like objectivism very much, which makes me think we'd get along okay.)
What I would have liked is a bit of advice on how to choose what to apply to what situations, but I guess a groundbreaking unified ethical theory might be asking a bit much.
Sometimes I think modern works like this, which to me are about privacy, civil liberties, corruption, freedom, and so forth are unimportant, because everyone knows about those things already. Other times I think they are they most important works of all, because so many people have clearly forgotten about all of those things, and so it's good to have someone raise them publicly.
As you've probably gathered, I'm a fan of this one. A note: Alan Moore hates the film adaptation. He hates adaptations of all of his works, so this is unsurprising. Personally I think the film does a fine job of capturing most of what the comic has to offer. It's missing a bit, so if you enjoyed the film and want to dig a little deeper, go ahead and pick up a copy. I rarely read graphic novels, for several reasons, not least of which is that the writing is so often garbage. Moore is one of the few who transcends the rest of the genre, and I think V For Vendetta is worth reading for that as well as for its treatment of the ideas it explores.
Novella, VERY short at only 112 pages. Good stuff, up to the standards of the mainline trilogy. I'd definitely read the mainline books first; there's a lot of culture that, while explained briefly, you'd be better off understanding from them. It's also a prequel to those books, so you'll see a handful of the same characters earlier in their lives.
Doesn't really hit any of the marks it's aiming for. Hyper-defensive about criticism, but doesn't really “defend” the genre; it's more of a history. Contains anecdotes the author should be embarrassed by, but instead brags about. Does touch a bit on the Mexican ska scene toward the end, which is neat, but even then it's pretty light. Might have been nice to explore other countries a little too.
Finally finished this. Good story, good systems, awful crude writing that put me off reading it, which is why it took me HALF A YEAR to get around to finishing it.
Books 1-5 are awesome. Books 6-10 are... less awesome. The series kind of goes off the rails after the first half.
I want to like this more than I do. It's not bad, but it's just not very focused. Parts are funny, and it gets points for honest introspection, but the model of loosely connected serious essays and listicles and humorous essays is never really terrible coherent, and this is no exception. A lot, though not all, of the humor is the kind you'll see coming from a mile away. It's perfectly fine, but not a standout.
Not good, although I got through it quickly, and I've read worse; I'm vacillating on one star versus two. I'm pretty disappointed in it on basically all levels. It feels like the author wanted to convey a very specific destination and gracelessly composed a simplistic path to get there. The basic premise — the main character exploring alternate versions of her life — is okay, but the specifics are uninspired and poorly thought out.
Nora, the main character, is good at everything. Not always in the same life, but in whatever life she's in, whatever she decided to do, she's world-class. It's not enough for her to be a good swimmer, she has to medal at the Olympics. It's not enough that she has a career in academic philosophy, she has to be a lecturer at Cambridge. It's not enough for her to be in a band, she has to be selling out arenas.
The central conceit doesn't really work as executed. The author makes an attempt at explaining why it's the way it is, but it's very flimsy and doesn't stand up.
All this is rendered in mediocre prose, and I guess the author wants to show off his bona fides; there's a Sylvia Plath quote before it gets started, because of course there is, and philosophers are not just named, but quoted directly.
The editor was asleep at the wheel, too. I'm pretty sure I found a place where the dialogue, in a back-and-forth where speakers aren't explicitly identified, doesn't actually make sense and the speaking order can't be right.
It has a nice moment here and there, but this ain't it, chief. I'm donating this one to the library.
EDIT: Screw it, I'm downgrading to one star. I just made myself mad remembering how the author made a whole big deal in Nora's penultimate life about how the really important thing is love, and then never revisited that concept in the wrapping-up whirlwind tour of Nora finally making good in her root life. This thing is a mess.
I am so disinterested in this book that it has taken me over five months to conclude that no, I really am not ever going to want to read more of it. It isn't offensively bad or anything, I just... don't care about it, and being stuck on it means I'm not reading anything else, so into the Abandoned pile it goes.
Mostly what I've learned from reading this one is that I don't like Charles Bukowski. The man himself, not his books, though if this one is anything to go by that's true too. I've rarely seen such a disagreeable protagonist. No idea what people saw in this book. I thought Henry Chinaski was unlikable, but I also didn't think he was believable.
Excellent conclusion to an excellent trilogy. Like the other books in the series, it really builds a culture that feels credible, even though it's based on fantastical abilities. Lots of politics, lots of violence. Very pleased that the final book upheld the quality of the first two.
I need to make a distinction between the story and the writing here.
The basic story is decent. It's also only half a story, if I understand correctly, because it was split in two after being deemed too long for a single volume. The story we got in this volume is fine, but it's not complete, and there are only a few major beats in it, though they're very major indeed. The splitting of the story has not, of course, affected the sale price, which is somewhat higher than average for most complete stories. Publishing realities are what they are, and I don't propose to value works based on their length, so I'm not making too big a fuss about that. But I feel compelled to mention it.
The writing is atrocious. I'm not sure if these have always been this badly written and I overlooked it, or if the prose has gone downhill, but it's not good. The narrative voice clearly wants to be clever, and it doesn't work — too cutesy by half. Harry's family focus also gets shoehorned in awkwardly at weird times; not that it shouldn't exist, but it's badly out of place. Butcher also delves far too much into the bad sexual focus that is the stock in trade of plenty of other, crappier urban fantasy. You have to expect a bit of that given the previous development of the White Court, but it's excessive.
This is apparently the 16th of these I've read. I always thoughy Butcher was on the better end of the urban fantasy spectrum, admittedly a cursed genre to begin with, but I'm wondering if I've been wrong about that. I'd like to know where this story is going, but I'll have to think hard about whether to read the follow-up when it hits later this year.
It's hard to rate this right after reading it. No way of knowing whether the advice given will improve one's interpersonal behavior until some time has passed. I may be coming back to adjust this rating. The hardest part of this is keeping the principles in mind day to day, when not reading the book.
An old YA favorite. I re-read this as something of a light palate cleanser after my previous book took me months to get through. It was out of print until recently, and I picked it up for the find memories when it became available again.
Diana Wynne Jones was one of my favorite authors growing up. Charming, richly imaginative book that defies description. It's modern-day, but centers on the machinations of a family of seven siblings who run the town in which it's set in secret, each responsible for – and gaining the bounty of – different aspects of the town. The main characters, however, are a mostly normal family suffering through the fallout from the doings of those seven siblings.
This book is written for a YA audience, of course, but it's very readable, and fun to revisit in a fit of nostalgia. Don't think I ever read a DWJ book I didn't enjoy, at any age.
Not all of the mechanics are ever truly explained. I think that used to bother me a bit. These days I kind of like it that way.
I was assigned many of the classics in high school, but never this one, and had never read it until now. I've been reading 600 to 900 page books lately, and at 150 pages or so, this went shockingly fast.
Mixed feelings on it. I liked it more in the last few pages than I did the rest of the time I spent reading it. The prose actively impeded my understanding at more than one point, either through the age of the language or Fitzgerald's personal style.
I decided to read it after all this time because of the praise for the writing in Defector's “Defector Reads A Book” feature. Mostly I felt the opposite in terms of the moment-to-moment prose, which I didn't think was anything to write home about.
But what Fitzgerald describes, he really captures. The sad hollowness underlying Gatsby's celebrated parties and, really, everything he does. The idealized past, always just out of reach.
The last page is by far the best in the entire book. No wonder it's the only one routinely quoted.
I liked this a lot. As others have noted, the premise is pretty conventional, but what makes it stand out is the culture Addison has created, which is well-realized and complex. Characters feel fleshed-out and authentic, and the plot has the lopsided shape of something organic; the major threads are wrapped up, but Addison never feels compelled to set everything neatly in its place. One can see the arc ahead for characters who have left the stage, but the camera isn't compelled to show us that arc explicitly.