Rob
Very weird series that gets weirder and more difficult to read as it goes on. Does depart some from most fantasy – instead of standard “low status guy ends up high status,” this one starts with a high status character.
Some books are so powerfully affective that they instantly catapult themselves into one's list of favorites. This is one of those.
I've never read Irving before, so I don't know how typical this book is for him. (Now that I've corrected that oversight, I will be continuing to read him.) This is not a book with a complex, labyrinthine plot; it's principally about its characters, especially Owen itself, and it's difficult to write anything approaching a synopsis. Let me say instead that it deals with themes like faith, loss, war, and death, and hope that's enough. It's set largely in hindsight, of the late 1960s, from the perspective of the late 1980s.
The major events are few in number but great in impact. As a character study, it's an incredible one. Irving builds characters so vividly that they feel like real people.
I really liked this book, but it's hard to know what to say about it. There's little point in a plot summary, and I wouldn't want to cheapen it by revealing too much. Know going in that it's dense and reasonably lengthy, and that it's a serious work even if I laughed out loud on occasion while reading it. It handles itself well, avoiding cheapness that it could easily have wallowed in. Definitely worth reading.
Everyone likes this book but me, it seems. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly, but I liked it more when I read the same ideas by different authors years ago. This treatment of them is nothing special.
Fun, creative. Somewhat transitional – there's a lot of backstory being filled in but a lot still unknown.
First book of the Dark Tower series. It was... okay, I guess? Most of the book is spent in pursuit of explanations, and I'm not sure if I ever got one. Presumably the later books in the series will fix that, but I'm not sure how motivated I am to continue.
Kind of surprised how much I liked this! It came recommended by a friend with good taste. Set in a fictional country with fictional neighbors, but the main country at least is pretty clearly referential. There aren't a ton of good books about organized crime from perspectives inside the crime syndicates, so this is unusual. I could do without the sex scenes — men aren't the only ones writing bad ones, it turns out — but otherwise I really enjoyed this and I'm looking forward to the next one in the series.
I picked this up blind because I liked the author's first book. I was into it for a while, and it has the same distinctive, dreamlike prose style as The Night Circus, but unfortunately I didn't think it measured up. It presents a fascinating world, but it just kept getting more and more out there without adequately grounding itself, and feels too much like its rules were being made up as the author went along.
It's also got a bunch of... are video games mainstream enough yet to call them pop culture references? that are authentic, but don't really add anything. It's a small gripe, but I don't love author self-inserts like that, in the same way that I don't care for Jim Butcher's penchant for aikido references.
I came to Fever Pitch in a slightly roundabout way. I'm seeing someone with a couple of Nick Hornby books on her shelf, and feeling I had read some rather poor books recently – and that few of my ways to book recommendations were leading me to books I enjoyed of late – I had been thinking of giving Hornby a go. I still procrastinated it for a while, but I was thinking fondly, recently, of my experience with Jonathan Tropper and I happened to see something online comparing the two.
So I looked up Hornby on Amazon's Kindle store, and resolved to sort by highest customer rating and read whatever bubbled to the top. I didn't expect it to be Fever Pitch, at least not once I understood that it wasn't a novel and was therefore not quite what I was hoping for. But, I decided, what the hell. My own judgment wasn't leading me to good choices lately anyway.
The result was mixed. Fever Pitch isn't a complete autobiography of any sort. It's a memoir about being a soccer obsessive, and specifically an Arsenal obsessive. (If you're mentally upbraiding me for calling it “soccer” and not “football,” please don't bother. The English coined the term “soccer” in the first place, and sneering at it is an ugly, particularly tribal sort of anti-American derision. I use it here where I might use “football” elsewhere because it permits no confusion and because the bulk of my Goodreads friends are American.)
Hornby is not a soccer fan in the same way you might imagine if you aren't well acquainted with the game. He is a die-hard, the sort for whom soccer results are deadly serious and apt to overshadow any other news, good or bad. He comments early on that the book is therefore primarily for either obsessives like him or people on the outside who want to know what it's like to live with such an obsession. I am neither, really. I count myself a soccer fan, and support a couple of teams in different leagues. I appreciate a beautiful play as much as anyone, and a victory for my side does put me in a better mood. But I don't live and die by results and I don't have or want the sort of recall necessary to remember the squad from a decade ago or the particulars of a match from someone else's Cup final. I lack both the proximity and the distance he describes.
So here is where the trouble begins for me. The book is not long, some 270 pages or so, but it's consumed, as I now know Hornby to be as well, with details. It makes it a bit of a slog at times, lacking the obsession (particularly with Arsenal, who are not my team) to really care about minor details. Hornby has an essentially simple thesis – “I am a diehard Arsenal supporter and here is evidence of my obsession” – and he runs into a fundamental contradiction. I don't care enough to want to read all of these match details, but did he not feel compelled to include all of them it would undermine his own thesis. The result is that I enjoyed myself a fair bit for perhaps 50% of the book, and then I was ready to be done.
Another recurring issue for me, and I will have a caveat about this in a moment, is that Hornby is an unrelenting homer. He has to be for the book to make any sense, but it's aggravating nonetheless. Here comes the caveat: if I remember correctly, this book was written around 1991, long before I paid any attention to professional soccer. Hornby is convinced that Arsenal are universally hated and perennially cursed with terrible fortune. Perhaps it was true then; I really don't know, but I doubt it. But Arsenal have finished very near the top of the league for years now, manager Arsène Wenger is famous for doing very well with a more limited budget than his peers, and among the people I know they draw far less hatred than Manchester United, say, or Chelsea. Hornby endured years of failure and Arsenal have won the league only three times in his life. Cry me a fucking river. To this West Ham supporter, whose team has never, ever won the league despite its storied history and famous academy system, this seems like an awful lot of whining. Hornby names West Ham as a much-loved club even among fans of other teams; in my time supporting them we have been among the most universally-reviled sides in the English system. Perhaps my own homerism is clouding my judgment, but having seen them written up alongside a lot of generally neutral descriptions by thoroughly unaffiliated writers as “a bunch of cheating Cockney bastards nobody likes,” I really don't think so. Again, of course, a lot can and has changed since 1991. But the persecution complex wears a bit thin.
On a technical level, the book is executed well enough. Hornby strings together a sentence just fine, and he is candid about the many ways in which his behavior and thought processes are thoroughly ridiculous.
I feel okay about Fever Pitch, but I don't know that I can recommend it to a general audience. If you have an interest in soccer it's an interesting look at a true obsessive, and makes me feel better about my own interest in the game. It also tells me very little about whether I ought to read Hornby's other work, which comprises mainly novels. A mixed bag.
I've debated whether to give this two or three stars. I may still change my mind.
The story is pretty good. I like the idea of the Nine Houses, and their very different cultures and focuses on different aspects of a similar skill set. Plotwise, the book is basically all setup — it has an appropriate and self-contained plot arc and climax and finale, but the nature of the story is to be training wheels for what comes next.
The writing is absolutely atrocious. An editor has clearly fallen asleep on the job. It reads like mediocre fanfiction. It uses incongruous prose from the viewpoint of its protagonist, who speaks like no other character in the book's universe, because the author thinks it sounds cool, and leans heavily on expletives as crutches that they hope will make you think so too. It doesn't work. Every time I read another example of it, which is at least once every few pages, it pulls me out of the book. There is also an element introduced early, referenced often, and brought back in the climax like Chekhov's Gun, but to no great effect. It could have been omitted entirely at no loss.
There's a fairly complex mythology underpinning all of this, which the characters know well and you don't, and you're dropped in the middle of it and expected to work from context. That's fine, but I was never entirely sure that it wasn't being made up as it went along. New elements were introduced frequently right up until the end. The real test will be whether book two continues that pattern, or whether it works within the structures that book one has made.
That mythology is actually pretty neat, and the end of the climax into the denouement is really very daring. I can't say I saw it coming at all. I hated the writing an awful lot, but I might wind up reading the next book anyway. It almost has to be very different.
EDITED: Reduced to two stars. My god, I thought I was choosing between 1 and 2, can't believe I ever considered 3.
The rare “middle book” that stands on its own merits. Still excellent, tons of consequential action. Expands more on the geopolitical intrigue without losing the clan war aspect. Can't wait for the third book.
Solid technically-a-sequel to The Goblin Emperor. Didn't hit me quite as right as that one, but I enjoyed it a lot. Same world, not completely separate cast, but total change of focus. Ending is a bit abrupt and I'd have liked some more of the politics.
Fun, pretty pulp. Don't think this deserves the hype it gets. Its central conceit isn't especially interesting if you're well-read in science fiction.
Really great. I've meant to read this for a long time, but was prompted to finally start it by the release of the Hulu series and the associated press. It's very readable, fascinating, and utterly horrifying, not least because it isn't all that hard to see the seeds of such a future being sown, far more now than in 1985 when it was originally published. (Goodreads says 1998. Goodreads is wrong.)
Everything I can say about it is trite and has been said before. It is a classic and a warning and it is very much worth your time.
This is... fine? Weirdly simplistically written for Gaiman but a decent introduction. In some places it's written with the kind of self-awareness I'd expect from a Marvel Thor movie, and it's odd to see it here.
Re-read of a YA book I liked a lot as a kid. Not one that stands up great as an adult, but I was quite fond of it when I was 10; I took it out from the library several times. Some interesting ideas that presage Stephenson's Snow Crash, though not nearly as in-depth – protagonist is modern day and real world, but playing an unsupported, pirated version of an immersive VR fantasy game.
This was great! A murder mystery where you get to explore the world from all kinds of angles by repeating different parts of the story from different perspectives. Suitably complex story with twists and turns, and a satisfying ending.
As a book about self-improvement, this should really be reviewed on two axes: the writing/entertainment value and the advice.
The writing was a good time, at least as much as a book telling you you suck can be. Very readable, and in contrast to other reviewers, it's not especially long, weighing in at 192 pages. It did take me 3 weeks or so to finish, but that's really more about my reading habits getting worse as I get older and have less time.
The advice I have mixed feelings about. Others have said that they agree that “positivity culture,” for lack of a better term, is out of control. I think that's probably true. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut. The prescription, however, I think is a bit extreme.
I actually find myself more in agreement with Gale than I thought I would. I've had some major self-improvements driven by negative emotions, and until then I had bought pretty heavily into the idea that I was fine, everyone should be who they are, and so on. I don't think negative self-perception is necessarily a bad thing, and you need to acknowledge the parts of you you don't like before you can fix them. But to fully embrace Gale's approach, you will basically need to be miserable all the time as you constantly fault-find within yourself. That's no way to live.
I think negativity is a good start, even a good middle, to self-improvement, but I think at some point you have to move past it to be happy. (Or maybe not. I have gained a bunch of weight back lately.) I don't think there is a lot of point to doing all this work to improve yourself if you never allow yourself to enjoy the fruits of that labor. Gale seems to address this a bit in the very final chapter, with a couple of quotes from people he interviewed for the book, but it is given very short shrift compared to the rest of the book.
Solid, for its intended audience, if a bit predictable. Pretty dark for a book aimed at kids! Unfortunately I generally knew what was coming most of the time, but I'm also not 12.
